This is part one of a three part article discussing mine and others' experiences with homeopathy and why it is a viable alternative (and often complementary modality) for traditional health care.
When I started on my journey to become a Homeopath I didn’t really know what homeopathy was. I knew all the words they use to describe it… natural medicine… herbs… minerals…. Similia Similibus Curentur - “like cures like”… and I knew that it would be a great complement to my energy healing practice… but I had not understoood what it was all about until I started studying it and I have to say I was blown away by the concepts that come up in homeopathy. It’s an enigmatic blend of quantum physics, energy medicine, modern science and artistic skill. Some of the ideas in homeopathy are provable and some we are still working on proving but the effects are real and those who experience a successful homeopathic prescription are the testament to that.
As I work with people, I realize many people, like me when I first got into it, have no idea what homeopathy is or how effective it is. Most people don’t even know it’s available as an alternative to the traditional medical approach. It’s hard to find Homeopaths and that’s one of the reasons I became one. When my clients would ask me for referrals I knew no-one to refer them to, except my son, a Naturopathic Doctor and classically trained Homeopath, who lived out of state. And in my homeopathy classes I realized that more and more people are learning homeopathy, many of them doctors and vets disillusioned with a system they paid thousands of dollars to learn. Students of homeopathy are not usually young, although some are. Most of them are older and have experience with other modalities and somehow have been drawn to homeopathy after trying many other things. Others learn homeopathy because they have experienced the healing effects and have been impressed to the point of wanting to learn it themselves in order to bring this kind of healing to others. The Homeopathic literature is littered with stories of people who set out to debunk Homeopathy and ended up becoming Homeopaths themselves.
One of my clients came to me because she felt stuck and stagnant. She wanted to feel re-energized and so I prescribed on that basis. Little did we know, as we continued treatments over the course of about nine months, that her thyroid condition would resolve and her doctor took her off her thyroid medication. She had this to say in her Google Review:
“I did not realize that homeopathy could resolve the health challenges that I've struggled with for years. I assumed homeopathy may be helpful as an addition to my reiki healing journey, but I was absolutely clueless that this type of healing was even possible. I am now off of thyroid medication and have seen improvement in ALL aspects of my health.”
Homeopathy is a system of medicine that was developed in the early 1800s by Samuel Hahnemann, a German medical doctor who had several sickly children. The medical approaches he had learned were not working for him or his children so he left the medical establishment in disillusionment and became a translator. Hahnemann was a gifted linguist and knew several ancient languages. It was by doing this work that he stumbled across ancient medical texts and the ancient notion of “like cures like” (simila similibus curentur in Latin).
He started to mess around with quinine and somehow hit on the idea of dilution and succussion. Succussion is a form of aggressive shaking. In the early 1980s, without the support of modern technologies, Dr. Hahnemann would literally thump a test tube on a bible because it had a nice thick leather cover and provided just the right amount of resistance. Today the Helios Homeopathic Pharmacy in the UK, to name just one, still uses this method of succussion for lower potencies because it is the proven classical method for creating homeopathic remedies.
Succussion releases the kinetic energy of the substance into the water. We can think of this as the dynamic action of the substance. Everything on earth has energy. This is no longer in dispute in the mainstream scientific community. The water then, carrying the essential energy of a substance, can be used to create medicines. By diluting it and succussing a remedy many times, thousands and thousands of times in some cases, the actual substance is diluted to the point of not being present any more but the energy of the substance remains because water has memory. We call this process of diluting and succussing potentization. The higher the potency of the remedy, the less of the actual remedy is in there and the greater the energetic signature of the substance.
I believe that the secret of homeopathy is in how the water retains and propagates the memory of the substance so that you can use the healing energy of all substances including those that would otherwise be poisonous. Masaru Emoto, a Japanese Writer and Scientist, has a large body of work concerning water and its properties and in particular how water retains certain energies through the work he has done with water crystals. But more than than, I believe the substances themselves resonate to healing effects that become stronger the more we use them. Rupert Sheldrake, an English Biochemist and Researcher, developed the theory of the morphic field of resonance in which he posits that everything in nature develops a memory or a habit that is passed from one cell to another whether in plants, animals or something else. Perhaps this is the secret behind the great “polycrests” of Homeopathy; traditional remedies that have been used over and over for healing many different conditions. Remedies such as Sulphur (a mineral), Lachesis (an animal) and Belladonna (a plant),
So the science is all out there somewhere and we are still connecting all the dots, and even though modern science cannot explain homeopathy completely, we know the results are there because we witness them every day with our clients. And we know that the full scientific explanation is out there somewhere to be coordinated by someone much smarter than me in the future as the fields of quantum physics and quantum medicine continue to evolve.
When I first got into homeopathy I had no idea how connected it was to energy healing - the cornerstone of my healing practice. I thought, like most people, it was using herbs “and other stuff” to make medicines. Not that there is anything wrong with herbal medicine. But homeopathy takes herbalism to a different level. It's energy medicine for the new age. There is phenomenal work being done by the world renowned Homeopath George Vithoulkas about the theory of disease. He is exploring how the spin of the electrons in the atoms that make up our bodies is reversed when we are in a diseased state - and how homeopathy reverses that spin so that they spin in the right direction again. Homeopaths have never claimed that a certain remedy heals, only that it provides the right stimulus for the body to heal itself - which is how the body always heals, despite appearances when you use drugs. Suppose you have a headache and you take some ibuprofen. Your headache goes away. But when the medicine wears off, if the stress that caused your headache is still there, the headache comes back. The headache doesn’t really "come back" - the masking substance that dulls your nerves simply wears off - the headache was always there. It only really goes away when the stress factor causing the headache has gone away. Compare this to a broken bone. While a surgeon may reset the bone so that it heals cleanly, only the body can heal the bone. There is no medicine that will make the bone re-knit back together. Your body just knows how to do this. So it is with all healing in the body. With some exceptions, the body actually heals itself despite interference from drugs and medications and not because of them. We know this because often drugs do not heal at all but just cause side effects. If the original disorder were cured, then we would no longer need the medicine but many of our modern medicines are prescribed for life.
When you use the right homeopathic remedy in response to a headache, the body responds to the energy signal of the medicine and changes its response to the stress factor. Thus the headache goes away and doesn’t come back. Because the remedy has to be individually prescribed according to the whole person, there is no one size fits all when it comes to homeopathic remedies. This can make prescribing difficult.
Which leads me to the phenomenal work of Dr. Rajan Sankaran, an Indian Homeopath, who has developed the idea of finding “the other song” within someone. When someone is in a diseased state there is a resonance - a frequency - within them that ripples through their physical, mental and emotional state. Dr. Sankaran teaches Homeopaths throughout the world how to find the “other song” using a technique he calls the ”WISE process" Dr. Sankaran’s method makes it much easier to find the right remedy. I have had the pleasure of taking live classes with both Dr. Rajan Sankaran and George Vithoulkas, world renowned Homeopaths.
In part two of this article I talk more about how I fell into homeopathy, another amazing case of healing that baffled doctors and how homeopathy works.