Master Mantak Chia in London

I don’t know if you were thinking of seeing Mantak Chia this year – he’s doing six exciting new workshops on Taoist Shamanism – but I do know that in past years more than half the tickets were sold in the last week before the event.  That’s why I’m writing to you now (my apologies if you have already registered) to make sure you get the chance to sign up before we fill up.  As you read through the workshop information below I’d like you to think about combining workshops for a sense of grounded continuity to take away with you, as well as making sense of how to use these time-proven former secrets to smooth away the bumps of everyday life, to become a more effective human being.

The brain is only what we think we think with

A MAN transplanted with one of his wife’s kidneys claims to have taken on her personality.

Ian Gammons, married to wife Lynda for 31 years, says he was always the rugby-loving man of the house who hated cooking, shopping and gardening.

Now the 51-year-old Briton is never happier than when baking scones or “wandering round the shops and looking for bargains”, he says.

He has even begun to share his wife’s love of dogs, an animal he despised before receiving the kidney a year ago.

“It sounds absolutely ridiculous but I’ve started to enjoy cooking quite a lot, particularly baking,” said Gammons, of Weston, Lincolnshire.

“I love making scones and cakes. My daughters tell me they are very good. I’ve also become more intuitive. Now I go with my gut feeling.

Lynda said: “I noticed it after a few months. He said something and it just struck me, that he said exactly what I would have said.

“When you live with somebody for 30 years you know the responses. We talked it over and he said ‘You’re right. I’d never have said that before’.

“I love it. It’s wonderful that we are so close and seem to be getting closer.”

This year, American William Sheridan, 63, claims he was blessed with the ability to paint after receiving the heart of an artistic 24-year-old stockbroker killed in a car crash.

The increasingly popular theory of “cellular memory” claims that living cells “memorise” and recall characteristics of the previous body.