You’re half way up a mountain and the walk is taking much longer than you had envisaged.
After a while you are forced to admit to yourself that you are no longer sure where you are.
The path forks and you choose the right-hand fork. The path becomes increasingly difficult and poorly trod, and after 15 minutes you realise you have lost a lot of height, and you know that means you can’t be on the right track. It’s now getting dark and starting to rain and you cannot see the path back well enough to be sure of following it.
At this stage you just don’t know which way to go, so you stop.
It’s not looking good.
In fact, you are lost.
You need a map reading genius with a head torch (as well as probably a hip flask with some good whisky in it).
Why I am telling you this?
Well, because there are a lot of parallels between this and what happens when we are just not getting better.
Most of the time our bodies are simply amazing at keeping us going and maintaining in balance the hugely complex and delicate inter-related mechanisms and actions that keep us on the road.
That is, they have an excellent map and an outstanding ability to follow it.
Your body can fix an incredible amount of what goes wrong as life throws up problems. But it does sometimes get a bit lost and need a nudge to help it move forwards in the right direction.
- Sometimes the problem is physical – maybe you get eczema, especially when you are stressed, when it really flares. Your life has felt very stressful over the last few months and the eczema is getting worse and worse and it’s starting to dominate your life. So how do you get rid of the eczema?
- Other times the problem is mental – your mind feels as if it has somehow become hazy. You can’t remember what you have read and what people have said. Quite frankly it’s making life really rather difficult, plus it’s very embarrassing. You worry that you’re losing your marbles because your memory always used to be pretty good. Is it always going to be this way? Is this a one-way street you’re on and it’s just going to get worse?
- And very often the problem can be emotional. Something happens that causes a huge surge of emotion – maybe anger, grief or despair – and you just can’t move out of it. It feels like being a rat in a trap or a hamster on a wheel: you go round and round the same emotions and you can’t find the way out. And like the hamster on the wheel, it’s consuming a huge amount of energy and getting you nowhere.
In each of these cases your body’s own healing system can’t see which way is the right way forwards. It NEEDS that map-reading genius with the head torch to give it an idea of where to go next.
If I was good at drawing, I would draw some kind of super-hero at this point, brandishing a head torch. Because that is really how homeopathy seems to me.
All of the examples of stuckness above are from clients, and all of them were successfully resolved with homeopathy.
I listened carefully in each situation and asked more about other symptoms to build up a complete picture.
This is where the genius of homeopathy comes in.
30 different people with eczema might well each need a different remedy, because each person’s system is on their own individual version of that mountainside, so each needs a different map to show them the best way back to the path of good health.
If you are stuck on the side of one of the foothills of the Pyrenees in the north of Spain, it’s not much good being shown a map of the lower levels of Ben Nevis in Scotland. And let’s face it, close is still not good enough. You could be on one side of Pico de Aneto (the highest mountain in the Pyrenees) and a map of another side will be of no use to you at all. Neither will a map of the foothills help you find your way across the top – or vice versa.
It has to be a map of exactly where you are if you’re going to find your way home.
So it is with homeopathy.
I listen to your symptoms and how you are feeling. This is a little like hearing a description of the terrain and what the most recent bit of the path was like. Details are important – as any map-reader will tell you.
Then I match what you have told me with a remedy that has the same symptom picture. This is a process that requires training, careful analysis and experience. We train for four years in the UK to become licensed homeopaths, and I have also followed another two years of on-line training with the International Academy of Classical Homeopathy in Greece, run by Professor George Vithoulkas. As well as learning about homeopathy, we also observe and analyse hundreds of hours of cases, including many of our own, before we qualify.
Matching your symptoms with a remedy is a little like finding the right map for where you are. Identifying the right remedy is not always easy: sometimes different terrains can seem very similar, and so it is with remedies too. But with patience, persistence and attention to detail, you get there.
If we’ve got it right between us (you telling me your symptoms and me with questions and analysis), taking the right remedy is like shining a torch on that map so your body can see the way to get going again.
All of a sudden, from being a bit lost and going nowhere, your system has been given a nudge and shown how to move forwards. Sometimes the progress is little by little over a periods of days and weeks, and sometimes amazing shifts happen in hours or even minutes.
Even now, after seeing so many cases, it still bowls me over what a difference homeopathy can make. It is like that superhero with the torch and the map – but this is real life and it’s actually happening.
Occasionally it even feels as if they brought that hipflask of whisky too!
Here’s what the clients in the examples above said:
- I have taken the remedy for a week and bad patch of eczema on my leg looks so different – it’s still dry but much less irritated and much smaller. It’s amazing! (Josie, 21, eczema. Homeopathic Psorinum)
- I’m so much better I don’t recognise myself! I started feeling better last week, a few days after I took the remedy. Instead of having constant head fog, I was much less tired and I had a clearer head … This week I actually feel … NORMAL ! ! ! (Belinda, 23, brain fog. Homeopathic Gelsemium)
- I could stop crying all the time, the desperation and the anguish started to die down a little and I could go back to my work and think more clearly about everything I had to do. (Rosemary, 63, grief. Homeopathic Ignatia)
So whatever hillside you are stuck on, you don’t have to feel there’s no way forwards from here.
Get homeopathy on the job and get your feet on the path towards where you want to be.