Review for Happy Healing by Dominique Bourlet

Not many people are strangers to pain, and nobody really welcomes it. Saint Augustine once said “the greatest evil is physical pain.” However, Dominique Bourlet is trying to change that perspective in Happy Healing. You should not necessarily enjoy pain, but you should understand it is merely an alert being sent by a part of your body.

The author argues that systemic pain can lead to negative emotions toward not only the feeling of hurt itself, but also the body part or parts it is originating from. These negative emotions can cause a feedback loop that results in more pain and more anger, increasing the hurt every cycle. In eight “magic” steps, Bourlet outlines what he calls the “Happy Healing Protocol”. This process includes identifying the painful body part in question and personifying this body part as a whole, separate being. Viewing that body part as a human being can then lead to improving a person’s relationship with that body part and hopefully reduce the pain stemming from it to near zero.

Happy Healing does not explicitly state when the protocol should be used, but it does acknowledge the fact that it might not work for every person in every situation. The initial section of the book makes the conjecture that ongoing pain is largely mental or emotional and not just physical. I took this to mean the emphasis was more on helping with psychosomatic pain than other kinds of pain.

Based on the description provided by this site and the blurb provided by Amazon, I had thought the protocol would be focused on taking steps to reduce mental stress and relieve pain. What I had not expected was that the word “magic” in the subtitle for Happy Healing was intended more literally than figuratively. I was not very prepared for mentions of “astral clapping” and “auric eggs.” In addition, some steps required “praying to the Cosmos,” or “body magnetization.” I would probably not have chosen to read and review this book if I had known that so much focus would be placed on an astral version of faith healing. Because of this, my rating is based more on the presentation of the information in this book and not the content itself.

To avoid using a long phrase every time, Bourlet chose to use the rather unique acronym “BOP” to represent the “BO.dy P.art in pain.” The use of the acronym is inconsistent as is the author’s decision to hyphenate the phrase or what words to capitalize. In addition, the acronym sometimes includes an article within it and sometimes doesn’t, even from sentence to sentence. Both of the following sentences appear toward the end of the book where the author reiterated what his acronym stood for, as he did more than once per chapter.

All these spots are also called “BOPs.” BOP stands for “BOdy Part in pain or discomfort.”

BOP, the Body-part-in-pain, is our suffering partner when physical pain and discomfort are showing up. I thank BOP, all the BOPs, suffering from pain.

Early on in Happy Healing, Dominique Bourlet states that for the sake of convenience, a gender will be assigned to both a patient (female) and a “BOP” (male). I understand this may have been done to simplify writing in a language such as the author’s native French where direct and indirect articles are gendered. However, this led to some personally uncomfortable sentences like the following:

He will remain fit longer if you care for him. Do a little more than say hello: have a lifestyle which makes him happy!

The patient realizes that the troublemaker is not him, but herself! Full of humility, the patient looks up at BOP who is now in the upper and superior position.

Some awkward phrasing and a number of errors lead me to believe that this book was not professionally edited. There are numerous missing commas along with misspelled words, misplaced words, missing words, and a handful of subject-verb disagreements. Almost every few pages, there were also line breaks in the middle of sentences. Because of this, I don’t recommend Happy Healing to most readers. If you are interested in being “one with the Cosmos” and learning more information about alternative healing methods, this book could still be insightful. If you are uncomfortable praying to the universe at large or individual body parts with their own separate mantras, you will not likely enjoy this one.

Happy Healing: 8 Magic Steps to Relieve Physical Pain and Discomfort by Dominique Bourlet is available to buy on Amazon.