Who James is — the lived authority and its limit

James Roberts. Fifty. Sober since June 2020 after a four-week residential at a UK clinic. Tenerife — the chair I work from. Six years of daily practice on water, electrolytes, sleep, food, movement, sun, breath, and the slow soft-tissue work. Two doctor's appointments a year, with bloods at one of them, since discharge. Zero alcohol, daily, for six years as of writing.

The lived authority is one person's body, in one place, with one history. That is real, and it is also a limit:

• I am a man, in my fifties, white, English-speaking, of broadly European ancestry. The body of a woman, of a person of colour, of a person from a different climate or a different diet, will not respond identically to the same practice.
• I came out of detox without a co-occurring serious mental illness, without a complex polysubstance picture, without a pre-existing chronic disease that constrains exercise or diet. Any of those changes the picture materially. The page says so where it matters.
• I live in a sub-tropical climate with year-round sun. The sun part of the page generalises with effort and qualifies for any reader north of about fifty degrees latitude. This page names the alternatives where it can.
• I have the means, the time, and the schedule to do a daily session of body work. Not everyone does. The page names where the practice scales down honestly and where it does not.
• I am not a clinician. The lived authority earns the page where it earns it, and stops where it stops. The clinician is the partner for the body. The desk is a companion for the practice.

The bias is named. The lived authority earns its space. The page steps back where the clinician steps in.

The rest of the history, because it is the reason for the caution

Born in Manchester in 1976. Twenty-seven years of daily drinking before residential treatment at Delamere in Cheshire in June 2020. Nearly twenty years headhunting travel and hospitality executives before that, and several years afterwards in Tenerife running Casa Salvia, a guest house where a good many of the guests were in recovery, from several countries and several treatment systems. I was not their clinician and not their sponsor; I was the man making the breakfast, and the range of bodies that passed through is where the caution on these pages comes from. Casa Salvia is sold and no longer operating, so nothing here is an offer of a room.

I am a declared past paying patient of a British clinic. I take no referral fee from anybody, and endorse no clinic, no fellowship, no physiotherapist, no dietitian and no supplement brand. I never have. The editorial standards page carries that in full.