When potential clients call me, they sometimes ask how long I’ve been in practice.
“Just now.”
Alternately:
“Always.”
I rarely write about homeopathy as the focus of my substack. That is partly because it’s in everything I do. My work is a spiritual endeavor that heals me, and heals through me; it’s one form of rainbow bridge across the span from cosmic creative energy to the material substance of the body. I am always dying and being reborn in my practice; something is always falling away as something else is revealed. There are times when I have stopped writing because it felt so false to put into print words which then slide into the past and become a part of the something I no longer am.
However, when I am asked what homeopathy is, I find that I am drowning in words. If I try to be succinct, too much is missing, and if I try to be comprehensive, too much is said. So I’ve set, for myself, a challenge, because until I feel clear about the answer to this question, what am I doing in my office all day?
Thus, I am going to endeavor to answer a question that never seems to have a satisfactory answer:
What is homeopathy?
In answering it, I will likely provide a response that will not be satisfying for anyone who is frustrated by the lack of satisfactory answers!
Satisfaction Guaranteed.
.
Now we begin.
An aphorism has been taking shape in my mind:
“When the doctor brings medicine, the patient is sick.
When the doctor brings no medicine, the patient is healed.”
Homeopathy is the medicine of the empty circle.
There is, quite literally, no thing in it. Sometimes there are nanoparticles, but the work of Iris Bell and others has revealed that preparations at very high potencies, where none of the original substance remains, react to reagents and affect DNA in vitro. This doesn’t tell us anything about how homeopathic remedies work, or what they do, but it does tell us they are doing something. Or, as I have come to believe, no thing.
I sat with a group of people a few weeks ago, and listened as everyone attempted to put a few words to the question, “what is true health?” Words and phrases that arose were in the realm of trusting the self, recognizing the internal “yes” and “no,” freedom, awareness of the divine, knowledge of one’s innate capacity to heal, harmony, love, spiritual awakening, the temple of the body, purification rather than suppression or masking, letting go of the known, telling the truth, etc.
In looking at this list, you may have observed that no one said anything about the nuts and bolts of physical function; not heart rate, not digestion, not pain. Probably the closest was part of what I said, which is that I consider health to be ease and adaptability. But what that means is so much more than the physical, and does not even require physical functioning at what we consider an “optimal” level.
So what I said was that, in listening to all these comments, I think about how language is a tool of analogy and metaphor that allows us to point towards the thing we wish to represent, but it is not the thing itself. And so it is with true medicine; it is the empty circle.
What a homeopathic remedy is is the imprint of the dynamic energetic pattern of the substance, clarified and purified and distilled down to its healing qualities through dilution and succussion, which is a type of high-impact agitation. Just as we can look at a drawing of a tree and know that it represents a tree but is not the tree itself, we can listen to someone describe their experience of themselves and the world and discern a template of their pattern of responses. This is not them, but represents their state of being at that point in time. In homeopathy, we are concerned with any divergence from the intrinsic place of health and well-being. We are looking for any “stuckness” in the dynamic that creates a susceptibility to dis-ease. But the “what” of it tells us very little. The “why” we know: “to bring the sick to health,” in the words of the founder of the field. The question remains: “how?”
What a homeopathic remedy does is act as a witness for the vital force. Using the unspoken language of vibration and frequency, the remedy reflects back to the vital force its own misalignment. As the vital force is seen and honored by a remedy that holds the imprint of the disease state, the innate and unknowable animating presence can turn on deeper healing resources. In this way the individual can achieve greater integration and health.
All of the healing is already within, and all the light of true health shines forth from this place. A remedy is like a koan; by being nothing and something at once, it can be a catalyst for the vital force to shed the constraints that get imprinted through the days and years and generations as trauma and dis-ease.
What is the empty circle? It is nothing, and yet has boundaries. It is infinite, and yet begins and ends. It is the Ouroboros, and the center of the Chakana.
Words can point us towards the light, but the revelation happens when the material and substantial recede. It is only in the no-thing, in the space between, that the way appears. That’s where I find homeopathy.
I’m satisfied with that.