Hello,

I’m Valerie. I’m launching this fundraiser on behalf of my beloved life and soul partner, Fred. He is at a stage of kidney failure that is becoming concerning and I need help to help him heal.

Let me explain…

Fred and I don’t trust the medical system and establishment anymore. Most people in it are helplessly clueless about how to get people back to health because they don’t understand what is truly ailing people.

My claim is that Fred’s story, and other stories I’ve witnessed, are illustrations to back up that statement.

Finding ourselves in this situation has been a real shock for us both. It has surfaced many insecurities in the face of the daunting question: what do we do?

It feels so profoundly wrong to rely on a system that you distrust with all your being. But rather than succumb to anxiety and hopelessness, we both chose to commit ourselves to finding an alternative for ourselves and share with others what we are learning about human health. Our hope is that what we share will convince some (at least) that each human being has in potential within themselves everything they need to take care of their own health without having to rely on an external authority to declare whether they are in good health or not. That judgment affects our whole perception of how we are and our life, and we seriously underestimate the conditioning power of that internalised judgment.

So back to what Fred and I want to do. We reflect a lot on that question on an ongoing basis…

This is what we have decided:

Rather than run back to the security of someone else telling Fred whether he’s healthy or not and what he needs to heal, we want to trust our understanding and intuitions to heal him. Whilst he rests and takes care of repairing his body, I’m doing a lot of work to identify a holistic protocol around his medical condition. I have lots of ideas based on my holistic understanding of the human psyche, developed over more than 20 years of independent research, study and reflection. For me, the human psyche is the grossly neglected element in modern healthcare.

Based on the holistic understanding I have developed, in all the changes that we have already made to help Fred to heal, a significant one is still missing and that’s physical environment. Environment has a determining impact on the physical, emotional, mental and spiritual health of the individual (most people don’t even think about that).

Right now, we are living in an environment (in the south of France) that is not conducive to Fred’s healing. We have in front of us a wonderful opportunity to move to a welcoming environment (in Belgium) that I’m convinced will help Fred enormously.

We need money to pay for our removal. We don’t currently have that money. Our options to earn it for when we need it (between 25 and 31 August) are limited because of the circumstances created by Fred’s ill health and, it’s true, the life choices we have made. We have to find alternatives to what we would normally have done, which is to try to do it all by ourselves, without help. It’s a question of life and death now, literally.

To help him heal, Fred is not working at the moment. We are both self-employed. I am a vocational life coach who has chosen to turn down the corporate opportunities I had because I have decided (for now) to stop giving my energy to a system and environment that I see as part of the health problem by being one of its root causes. I have a few clients, but not many, which is a good thing because, now, I also have to take responsibility for all the daily house chores by myself because Fred cannot heal his foot (he also has gout) without rest. You can imagine difficult it makes it for me practically to give my professional activities the attention they require to flourish. There are only 24 hours in a day!

What I would really love right now is to have the resources (psychological and material) to be in a position to devote 100% of my love, time, energy and attention to helping Fred heal and to document a holistic health protocol I’ve been thinking about.

This protocol is focused on daily social organisation on the small scale (families and groups of 2 to 16 people) that could become a replicable model if it proved to work in practice. (That is one of the main reasons we are moving to Belgium: because we’ll be putting ourselves in that situation to observe what is conducive to human health and healing.)

Bringing it back to the practical, because he and I have very little money right now, we’re trying to do everything ourselves in the cheapest way possible, whilst finding a healthy balance with the pressures time and money to not create unnecessary stress, which would only be deleterious to his (our) health.

Here’s our plan:

I will drive our car from where we are in the south of France to my parents’ home near Paris, where we will borrow a friend’s van, which I will drive back down to the south of France to move all our stuff back to my parents! The cost of the removal is €450 for petrol and tolls and €220 to compensate our friend for the use of his van. There will be an additional cost of €61 to get to our friends in Belgium, but that we can probably cover from the state benefits we currently receive (full disclosure below).

If you too are concerned about the state of your healthcare systems and are curious about the approach I’m prototyping, would you consider supporting us financially? Money is such a huge and constant source of stress. Psychological fear/anxiety is an obstacle to healing and we pay too little attention to it. I would love to see how it changes us to not have to worry about having enough money to get him better.

Full disclosure: Fred and I (gratefully) receive benefits from the French state at around €800 per month for two to cover rent and bills (personal and professional). Thanks to the generosity of our family and friends we manage to make ends meet, but we want to do so much more than just make ends meet! We have so many ideas for what we want to live and it includes actively spreading health and well-being around us in new ways!

Bless you. Be well. Health is such a fundamental thing in our lives. We easily forget its importance until we’ve lost it. I want to do everything I can to never make that mistake again.