The most profound and permanent cure to an individual’s suffering, be it mental, emotional, or physical, is his or her thorough investigation and understanding of the unique, but completely illogical, irrational and peculiar nature of that suffering.
That is to say, that every individual has a distinctly unique orientation to the world, discernible through their personal preferences, aversions, perceptions, behaviours, fears, dreams, stressors and reactions, and to come to know this orientation through self-observation is, in and of itself, healing.
Early History
The most curative approach to the homeopathic case-taking process goes beyond the obvious facts and particulars, and reaches into the subconscious depths of a person to reveal a unique story or pattern of energy that gives rise to their dreams, habits, thoughts, aversions, cravings and symptoms of “dis-ease”. It is an exciting and transformative exploratory process that brings one’s awareness to their “other song”, a unique pattern or sensation that lives within each person, side by side with their human song, that is also seen in the life of an animal, plant or mineral found within our world. While every person strives to amplify their human song to live their highest potential, this “other song” arises in response to stress in our lives, and reveals a repetitive pattern of thoughts, emotions, and behaviours that we can’t seem to shake with the rational mind. We see the irrational pattern, and yet we feel helpless to change it. Bringing awareness to this other song is the beginning of transformative healing of the whole person.
Based on the principles set forth by Samuel Hahnemann in The Organon of the Medical Art in the early 19th century, homeopathy is a therapeutic and artful system of medicine in which a patient exhibiting a set of symptoms is treated with a substance that creates the same set of symptoms in a healthy person, when given in significant doses. In addition to this principle that “like cures like”, homeopathy also employs several other principles including dilution and succussion as a means of potentising the remedy (the more dilute, the stronger the medicine), individuality, meaning that every person is unique and must be treated individually, and holism, the philosophy that the whole person, and not just the symptoms, must be healed at the level of mind, body and spirit.
What is Homeopathy?
No two people will experience having the same illness in the same way, and it is the task of the homeopath to understand the unique experience of his or her patient, both in the illness and in general. Therefore, the role of the homeopath is to understand the total, unique nature of the person being treated. While that may seem simple, the truth is, most of what needs to be discovered lies within the subconscious mind. Case-taking is a highly developed art of listening and discerning the pattern that needs to be cured within a person. We call this unique but peculiar pattern within a person, the “other song”. It requires a completely unbiased mind to hear the “other song” within the individual’s account of their life. Many factors are considered such as unique symptoms, onset, pacing of the illness, emotional factors leading up to illness, past history of illness, and how the illness affects the person’s life, as well as the personal cravings, aversions, dreams, fears, hobbies, and body language.
Each Person Is Unique
In addition to, and even prior to, the administration of a homeopathic remedy, a process of deep inquiry and self-observation may also lead to profound and holistic relief from the root cause of a person’s symptoms. The individual simply needs to be directed to bring mindful awareness to their unique “other song” - the disturbances among the contours of their subconscious experience. This is the same distinct pattern of being that the skilled practitioner matches to the source of the person’s curative remedy. By bringing awareness to the “other song” and allowing it to be fully felt, it can find resolution, and the person begins to disentangle with it. Therefore, it is the practitioner’s role, through “deep listening”, to facilitate the emergence of the subconscious “other song”, paving the way to extraordinary self-healing.
The Meditative Process
Homeopathy is a system of medicine discovered and developed by Dr. Samuel Hahnemann in Germany in the early 19th century. Attempting to understand the curative powers of cinchona bark, Hahnemann began to take regular doses himself and discovered that he began to experience the symptoms of malaria but without the intensity of the actual disease. This led him to postulating the most important principle of homeopathy - the law of similars or “like cures like”. He not only observed that a substance would cure the same symptoms of an illness that it could produce when given to a healthy person, but that the more dilute the substance or the more serially “potentised”, the stronger its curative effect. This is antithetical to allopathic medicine in which cure is attempted by suppressing symptoms through an opposing mechanism and stronger doses mean more, not less, of a substance.
Hahnemann soon began testing other substances on himself and volunteers, known as “provers” to ascertain the “picture” of symptoms they could create in healthy individuals. By diligently recording the symptoms produced by each substance he tested, he began to develop what is known as the Materia Medica. In order to cure a person with an illness, his or her symptoms are closely matched to the homeopathic “picture” of a proven substance within the Materia Medica and the minimal dose required to cure is given. Today, we have over 3000 homeopathic drug pictures of substances that have been proven, and more are being discovered through unique patient cases. Homeopathic remedies are being derived from every existing plant, animal and mineral source, including diseased tissue, pharmaceutical compounds and even imponderables like magnetism or radiation. For example, Homeopathic doctors in India are successfully shrinking malignant tumours using potentised (highly diluted) chemotherapy drugs, without requiring patients to undergo actual chemotherapy.
One of the most pivotal observations that Hahnemann and other renowned homeopaths made was that disease is not localised to a distinct area of the body, but rather, that it is generalised, affecting a person at a holistic level. He postulated further that disease is a dynamic, and not a material state, and that there is a dynamic life force within each living being, which when disturbed, leads to dis-ease. Therefore, only by considering the totality of a person’s symptoms - physical, mental, and emotional - can one accurately select a suitable “similimum” - a substance with the most similar homeopathic picture. He also observed that cure was directional and took place from the inside out and from top to bottom, while symptoms disappeared from the newest to the oldest. As he came to understand the art of cure, he gathered his insights into what is now the foundational study of homeopathic principles and practice, the Organon of Medicine.
Early History
Homeopathic remedies work with the principle of “like cures like” by stimulating the body’s normal defence mechanisms, also known as "symptoms", to help the body in its self-healing capacity when the stressors become too much for the body to fight.
In allopathic medicine, superficial symptoms (inflammation, cough, fever, high blood pressure, etc.) of a deeper problem are suppressed, pushing the disease further into the body and organs and eventually into the mental and emotional sphere of the patient. Rather than simply making the symptom go away, which doesn’t cure the root of the problem and leads to deeper pathology, homeopathy strives to find the mental-emotional root cause of the disturbance that gave rise to the symptoms, and then administer a potentised substance in the proper dose that is known to be a simillimum to that root cause. This alleviates not only the symptoms, but the root of the problem, leading to the optimal level of health for the mind, body and spirit.
How does Homeopathy work?
After filling out an extensive questionnaire about your health, you will meet with me for a 2-3 hour session in which we will explore your history and timeline of physical, mental and emotional symptoms. I will focus on the exact nature of your chronic and acute symptoms, but also on areas of your life such as food aversions and cravings, childhood fears, dreams, and hobbies, where important information about who you are is more easily revealed. During the experiential segment of your session, we will sensorially examine the themes that come up as unique patterns in your life through guided meditation and then discuss relevant curative techniques.
