4-STAGE APPROACH TO ALCOHOL HEALING
What are the 4 milestones that Harry looks for regarding healing and transformation in my clients, while teaching the 3 Principles of Mind, Consciousness and Thought, as uncovered by his teacher, Sydney Banks?
Please note that the healing journey is not simply about stopping alcohol use. It is about rediscovering the “inside self” of hope, peace, wisdom, and the spiritual strength already within every human being. As understanding grows, clients begin to see themselves differently. They no longer see themselves as victims of addiction, but as human beings created with dignity, wisdom, and the ability to change.
Milestone 1 – Hope
Most clients begin by describing the reasons they drink in terms of their outside world — no job, no money, too much idle time, painful past experiences, broken relationships, loneliness, or trauma. They often believe their circumstances are the cause of their suffering. Living only in the outside world can feel hopeless.
Yet without hope, there can be no real movement toward healing.
True healing begins when people start discovering the wisdom within themselves rather than trying to fix every outside problem first. Hope opens the mind to the possibility that life can change. It allows people to glimpse that they are far more than their past mistakes, urges, or painful experiences.
Every human being possesses unlimited spiritual potential. Hope awakens that possibility.
Hope is the lubricant to optimism. Syd Banks stated,:
“Optimism is a spiritual quality
and a guiding light that will lead you to your happiness.”
As hope begins to grow, clients often experience a doorway to something deeper — Faith. Not blind faith, but the fact that Faith in one’s self is the same as faith in God. It cannot fail because Faith is the pathway to inner wisdom. It is a fact that Faith heals and is spiritual.
Milestone 2 – Good Feelings
Many people struggling with addiction arrive for their healing session feeling heavy, discouraged, ashamed, or defeated. They often carry guilt and believe they are powerless over their urges. Many drink simply to quiet an exhausted and overactive mind or that they do not know any other life.
Over time, they begin to feel trapped in a painful cycle — repeating unhealthy habits while losing confidence in themselves. Some experience arrests, broken relationships, financial struggles, or the loss of dignity and self-respect. Their self-esteem becomes deeply wounded.
This is compounded by the outside world’s version of help and support. Outside help is weak with low results. Parents, friends, pastors and just about everyone feels they are weak. Sadly, they also sense that many people around them see them as weak. Yet most individuals caught in addiction never chose this life. Many would gladly leave it behind if they knew how.
Within the spiritual understanding of the 3 Principles, good feelings often arise naturally and surprisingly quickly.
Dr. Dicken Bettinger stated: “I always start with hope, then sharing a good feeling in the now, in rapport, and then deepening one’s understanding until the client becomes an eternal student.”
We are teaching the client to let go of negative thinking. When clients begin to recognize the wisdom, beauty, and humanity still alive within them, something shifts. A smile appears. Sometimes laughter follows. They begin to feel lighter. This is the essence of 3P teaching—3P is a high mood therapy, where the lifting positive feelings fuel healings. Humor, warmth, and genuine human connection can never be underestimated in the healing process.
Good feelings matter because they reconnect people to their true nature.
Coming home = Good feelings.
Good feelings are essential to the healing process, as they are the door opener. For many, these positive feelings are the first experience of inner peace they have had in years. Sometimes that feeling alone is enough to guide a person inward (back home) and complete the healing, where they value peace of mind more than the temporary escape of alcohol or drugs.
However, generally step 3 is required. Please note that all answers lie in spiritual or positive feelings rather than fear, shame, or pressure.
Milestone 3 – Understanding
During many 3 Principles discussions on healing, clients arrive burdened with troubling thoughts and painful emotions. Yet once their minds quiet down and they experience a genuine feeling of peace, they often look noticeably lighter — sometimes even years younger.
For a moment, they reconnect with the spiritual energy of healing.
But something interesting often happens afterward. Within minutes of leaving the session, they begin retelling the same painful stories and reliving the same negative feelings. In doing so, they unintentionally reignite the mental patterns that brought them suffering in the first place.
This is often true with addiction. The spiritual feeling is experienced, but because they did not SEE what happened, they did not appreciate the impersonal nature of healing or gain a deeper understanding of what Mind (Spirit) is or its connection to the role of Thought.
They felt the healing, but they were not conscious of what happened. They did not yet SEE or understand what they experienced. Many of them believe the good feeling came from the teacher, the session, or the conversation itself. They may give all the credit to Harry or to the teaching. Yet in reality, the feeling arose from within them. The conversation simply helped quiet the noise long enough for their own wisdom and spiritual nature to emerge.
As all the Pastors realize, “Only God heals,” and yet the healing experience comes from within the individual.”
This understanding becomes transformational. Clients may have seen that their suffering is not being created by life itself, but by the way they are experiencing their thinking in the moment. Or they may have experienced a deep insight to their human connection to God. This oneness experience demonstrates to the addicted that the only thing wrong was not the substance, but simply their own feelings.
When people clearly SEE this truth for themselves — not merely as an idea, but as a living fact — something profound changes. They begin living more from their own wisdom and less from fear, insecurity, or compulsive thinking.
This lack of wisdom created the illusion of alcohol holding clients’ prisoners. Now, clients begin to realize that the true problem was never simply the substance itself. Beneath the addiction was a search to escape painful feelings and troubled thinking.
Whether a person struggles with addiction, anxiety, anger, depression, or relationship conflict, the principle remains the same: Unwise thoughts create painful feelings. Painful feelings often lead to unhealthy behaviors and stressful consequences. The healing begins when people reconnect to the deeper feeling of love, peace, and spiritual clarity already within them. Some would call this God.
One of the most interesting aspects of the above approach is for my readers to ascertain to what am I looking for in my clients? I am not evaluating the person’s inability to not relapse, overcome immature ideas or to have nightmarish thoughts when they are sleeping. I simply evaluate how the client is growing in happiness and contentment. This positive feeling opens up the portal of “being home.”
Harry sees that as clients grow in consciousness, they naturally begin speaking from their own wisdom. Optimism returns. Smiles become genuine again. Their understanding deepens.
True, the parents, friends, members of the community and other addicts to alcohol may not see it, but that is part of the journey because the client will SEE it, and that is the fact that leads to true healing and leaving the addiction far behind.
Milestone 4 – Inside-Out Commitment
Strange as it may seem, God requires a sincere inner commitment from the client to fully realize that they are a part of the healing process. The client reaches a stage where they fully understand, from an inside-out perspective, where the healing starts and where the experience comes from. They fully recognize, via Insight, that they do not want the ugly feeling anymore. They accept this as part of their history of who they are. At this stage forgiveness is intuitive. They take a step towards God, into the healing of spiritual forgiveness.
Now a new chapter begins.
The client reaches a point where they genuinely desire to live free from the domination of the habit.
They discover the freedom of choice. This step is not about harsh willpower, fear, or self-punishment. It is about intention.
It is a wholehearted movement toward sanity, peace, wisdom, and spiritual alignment. The person quietly realizes:
“I am fully committed to a new direction in life.
I now see that healing is possible.
I have been given another chance.”
This commitment comes from the inside out.
It is not forced. It is the natural result of deeper understanding.
The client begins using free will to align with wisdom, love, and spiritual truth. In that alignment, their thinking becomes calmer, clearer, and more grounded in peace.
And from that space, genuine transformation becomes a FACT.
“Every day is a second chance.”
A frequently shared passage connected to the spirit of Second Chance is:
“You are always one thought away from a new experience of life.”
These reflect the spirit behind Sydney Banks’ book Second Chance — that insight and understanding can open the door to renewal, hope, and transformation.
Book 4 of the Zahara Series
2 chapters
Part 2
ZAHARA’S JOURNEY INTO ALCOHOL HEALING
Alcohol—a struggle that has reached epidemic proportions across Africa. Zahara does not merely offer a method of recovery—she brings a message of healing and hope. She reveals a healing grounded in timeless wisdom and the purity of the Three Principles, a path that has guided countless people back to inner peace and a renewed sense of possibility. She honours the unique nature of alcohol’s grip, while also illuminating how the same insights can lift the burdens of mental illness and other forms of human imbalance.
Chapter 22
A DEEPER TRUTH INTO HEALING
Zahara sat beneath the shade of an old baobab tree, watching the wind dance gently across the grass. In her lap lay a worn notebook filled with sketches and scribbled thoughts—reflections from her years spent listening, observing, and teaching. She was preparing for a new project dear to her heart, one in which she hoped to challenge the deeply rooted belief that addiction was a disease beyond one’s control.
She often wondered why the world seemed so lost in its approaches to healing—especially when it came to alcohol. Many of the approaches she had examined insisted that alcoholism was a lifelong disease. But Zahara knew, deep in her soul, that this wasn’t true.
It simply didn’t align with what she had seen or felt. She understood how human beings naturally fall into negative patterns of thought when they lose their balance—when the harmony between their spiritual and psychological lives is disturbed. And yet, time and again, Zahara had witnessed something extraordinary — African people naturally rebounding with quiet resilience the moment they caught an insight.
She remembered a young man named Juma, who had once introduced himself to her as “an addict for life.” He had repeated what he'd been told in countless recovery programs—that he was powerless, that his brain was broken, and that relapse was always waiting just around the corner. But after only a few weeks of exploring the 3 Principles with Zahara, something in him had shifted.
“It was never the alcohol,” he had said, his voice filled with a mix of awe and relief. “It was the thinking I believed.”
That was the moment Zahara lived for. Not the applause of others, not even the satisfaction of being “right”—but witnessing the divine spark in someone re-ignite. She knew that when people reconnected with their true nature—quiet, whole, and filled with wisdom—the need for escape faded on its own.
To Zahara, addiction was not a disease but a spiritual misunderstanding. A misunderstanding of thought, of identity, of where peace truly came from. It wasn’t that people were broken—it was that they believed they were.
In her classes, she spoke plainly. “You are not your personal thoughts,” she would say. “And you are not your habits or ego. You are something far deeper—unchangeable and whole, no matter what you’ve been through.”
Some people resisted at first. They had invested years into the identity of being “in recovery.” But over time and many times immediately, many softened. Not because Zahara convinced them, but because the truth rang louder than fear.
Now, as she prepared her new project, Zahara wrote one simple sentence across the top of her page:
“Alcohol is a belief system that numbs pain.
Healing begins when we stop chasing symptoms
and remember our spiritual nature."
She knew that one insight into our true nature, deeply felt, could dissolve years of pain. She had seen it happen. And she would see it again.
Zahara would continue to teach, guided by the wisdom she once read in Sydney Banks’ book Second Chance:
“I see God in you and you see God in me. We are one family.” To Zahara, this was Ubuntu.2 It was more than a phrase—it guided her every step. Her heart ached for those who still believed they were broken, who carried labels that clouded their innate wholeness. She longed to show them the light within themselves, not through force or fixing, but through love, understanding, and the quiet power of insight.
As the wind whispered through the branches above, Zahara closed her notebook gently. Her eyes scanned the horizon, not with urgency, but with peace. The work ahead was big. But so was the passion that fueled it. And that, she knew, would always be enough.
Chapter 24
SEEING THROUGH THE ILLUSION
Zahara wondered what the second class would unfold into. A few days before it began, Akello handed each student a printed excerpt from Sydney Banks—offered in either English or Swahili.
Extracts from Sydney Banks’s last talk just before he passed on in 2009
The 3 Principles are a mental healing. They are an evolution. Whatever your teachers were taught and what you were taught was in absolute good faith and innocence, but now we are coming beyond that evolution to a brand-new way of looking at human behaviour.
Mind – Divine Mind is the intelligence of all things, whether in form or formless
Consciousness – is the Principle that allows us to see creation and all it entails
Thought – is the Divine Gift that we use to go through life as thinking creatures
Anything that you add to that is what we do with our personal consciousness, and that will take you away from the truth.
As 3P therapists, you are telling people not to forget the past, but let them see that the past is an “illusion in time.” The second you see that, you are free. There is no more garbage. Then you can look back in the past and laugh at it no matter what it was.
Following the first class, the trainees’ curiosity had grown. One trainee asked, “I try to talk to someone who’s drinking, but they say they’ll die if they stop.” Another said, “They just don’t listen.”
Zahara responded gently, “It’s more important to show them love than to try to fix them or offer advice. You cannot change another person’s mind—that’s between them and God. But you can make sure they feel your love and forgiveness from your heart. When they’re ready, they’ll come to you.”
She paused, then added, “Trying to fix someone with seriousness often closes the door. It’s the same with children—when a parent is harsh or demanding, the message rarely gets through.”
For healing to take place, Zahara reminded them that those who drink too much must recover their heart of a warrior. Their greatest battle is not with alcohol but with the noise in their own minds—the relentless stream of negative thinking.
“To fight that noise with anger and disappointment won’t help,” she said. “Believing the stories that the noise of your mind tells you won’t help either. But letting it go—that will. Negative thoughts create negative feeling; those feelings lead to stress and worry, and often drives people back to alcohol. But when thought changes, feelings change! And from that shift, healing begins and is experienced.”
Zahara showed everyone a picture:
“In the image, the crocodile is not real—yet the warrior must still face his fear of the crocodile, believing it to be so. Healing and relief begins the moment he sees through the illusion. Fear, craving, and even the pull toward alcohol are not the true enemy, just as the crocodile is not; they are mirages or phantoms born of Thought. When the warrior awakens to this fact, the illusion dissolves, and the truth reveals itself—the warrior is relieved and even laughs at himself.”
Zahara then turned her gaze gently toward the students and brought the teaching back to the 3 Principles. “For me,” she said softly, “one of the keys is to recognize Unity of Spirit or Oneness—that God’s Mind and your mind are One Mind; God’s Consciousness and your awareness are One Consciousness; and God’s Thought and your power to think freely are also One. When you truly see that oneness, healing is not something you strive for—it unfolds naturally, as surely as dawn follows night. Purer thought raises the level of consciousness of the human, and miraculously begins the healing process”.
David, a thoughtful student in his early fifties, spoke up. “If healing unfolds naturally once we see this oneness,” he asked, “how do we actually recognize or live from it in our everyday lives—especially when we’re still feeling pain or confusion?”
Zahara smiled softly and nodded. “That is a beautiful question. We don’t recognize this oneness by trying harder or fixing ourselves,” she said. “When painful thinking shows up, it does not mean oneness is lost. It only means you are innocently caught in negative moment. And as that thinking settles—just as muddy water clears when left alone—you naturally feel more peace. That peace is not something new you create; it is what was always there beneath the noise.
So healing is not a job you must do. It happens as understanding deepens and the mind grows quiet. In that quiet, we remember who we really are, and life begins to guide us again. We have solved part of the puzzle—we have learned to follow positive feelings.”
She paused, then gently shifted the conversation toward the soul. “To awaken the spirit within,” Zahara continued, “is to touch your soul. Through this connection, your true essence shines, and the answer to suffering reveals itself.” And then she said, “Yes, there is an ultimate answer to all suffering, as spoken by my teacher Sydney Banks.””
As she spoke, a quiet stillness spread through the room, touching David in particular. He, along with the other adult trainees, seemed to glimpse something beyond words—perhaps realizing that alcohol was never the true problem, but part of a greater unfolding, even a doorway to awakening.
When the gathering came to an end and Zahara and Akello waved their goodbyes, a quiet hope rose within her. She wished that these students might feel the same deep wonder that always stirred her heart when speaking on this subject. For although it was among the most difficult topics to teach—woven with pain, longing, and relapse—it was also among the most profound.
It was there, in those moments of surrender, that Zahara witnessed the miracle—the soul remembering its origin, the mind returning to stillness, and the heart awakening once more to the eternal rhythm of Coming Home.