imming about. She is also enjoying the garden, on our rare sunny daysHomeopathy is burdened by magical expectations. Patients, students and practitioners often find themselves expecting miracles from the ingestion of a single dose of a remedy. Surely, they hope, this medicine transfused with the essence of a substance could heal the deepest and most troubled aspects of their souls. But what is truly possible? What can we hope for, or expect, from homeopathic medicine?
I have little doubt that in most cases of physical complaints-–eczema, asthma and irritable bowel, for example--homeopathy does quite well. I have seen ‘‘miracles’’ - in the sense that something that was so troubling to a patient, often unmitigated by other treatments for years and years, responds beautifully, and effortlessly, to a homeopathic remedy. These are daily occurrences in my practice.
More serious illness such as cancers, diabetes insipidus or Parkinsons do respond to homeopathic medicine, although the treatment requires more time, patience and skill on the part of the practitioner. The most important contribution of homeopathic medicine is to improve the quality of life, especially in these serious pathologies. This is one of the greatest gifts that homeopathy can provide.
How quickly the body heals is often dependent upon how long the patient has had the complaint, how much suppressive therapy has been given in the past and how strong the patient’s vital force is. Typically, a patient with eczema of 30 years will take longer to heal than the patient whose skin eruption began just 5 years earlier. And the patient who has received years of cortico-steroids will heal less quickly than the one who has had none. Furthermore, the patient who is 20 will generally heal quicker than the patient who is 80. Of course, there are many other factors to be considered, but these are generalities that hold true, in my experience.
But what of the deeper, emotional symptoms that can plague us? Depression, or chronic bitterness and anger, shyness or wild impulsiveness, loneliness and feelings of isolation, or the state of dependency and anxiety. These complaints are usually manifestations of character structure, expressions of the personality, with roots reaching back to earliest childhood. I explain to my patients that there are certain ‘‘symptoms’’ that homeopathy will not change, nor should. We do not want to change the essence of the inner nature of the person; rather we want to help them be their best selves.
For example, I will always be an introvert. That I can become a healthier, freer, and more joyful introvert is a result of some combination of many things: living more consciously and thoughtfully, seeking psychotherapy, and being loved and received. Can a homeopathic remedy change an introvert into an extrovert? I do not think so. Instead, it may free some of the associated impediments, opening a door to greater comfort. But an introvert I will always be, if it is my true nature.
I often see patients with symptoms of depression. Some are a result of family circumstances where there has been serious neglect or abandonment. Others are due to unfortunate life setbacks with work or divorce. Those patients who have a healthy relationship with Eros, and whose depression is more circumstantial do quite well with a homeopathic remedy, which can lift them out of their unhappiness. Those who suffered early from an absence of love, and who feel life offers little pleasure, will not be ‘lifted’ per se, but expanded to embrace Eros and life. But to what extent does a remedy play a part in the patient’s healing-- versus the therapeutic relationship with the homeopath?
I feel these passages or transformations occur in relationship-- not only through the influence of a homeopathic remedy. An eczema or asthma may respond quite well outside of this dyadic influence but these deeper, emotional states require more help. I can easily imagine giving a patient a good remedy for eczema and placing them on a deserted island fully expecting them to get better. But I do not imagine this to be true of the patient who is suffering from depression or from a compulsive disorder. These patients need to be in relationship; they need the relational field to heal.
Let us consider another example. I have treated patients whose relationship to the world is one of irritation and anger-- a feeling that they are ill-treated by the world. I do not expect them to become excessively cheerful or optimistic people with a remedy, but I do expect that through their healing, both from remedy and relationship, that they will understand their responsibility to themselves and others to create changes in their lives. That by loving themselves and loving others, by forgiving themselves and forgiving others, they begin to experience the world as brighter and richer. This occurs because of both influences of the remedy and the relationship.
In addition to these changes I also see a rebalancing as they heal. The angry patient may become more depressed, for a short time, as they realize the pain and suffering they have caused others. The depressed patient may become angry as they shift their self-destructive tendencies towards assertiveness and away from timidity. While the anxious patient may find that depression lies beneath the surface of their distracting worries and fears, these are all temporary swings of the pendulum as the patient rebalances--embracing a healthier tonal quality.
Homeopathy is a magnificent tool for healing - a gentle process that can offer profound relief and that can create a field of support that encircles both the patient and practitioner. When this occurs we do find magic. The magic of restored health.
So many of you have asked about how my friend is, the one mentioned in the blog entry Stepping Into Life. David passed September 9, 2010 and has had several memorials and tributes written for him. I thought I would share mine, published in Homeopathy Today, the newsletter of the National Center for Homeopathy and in the Simillimum, the journal of the Homeopathic Academy of naturopathic Physicians.
Many will write of David’s software contribution, revolutionizing the face of homeopathy so significantly. Others will speak of David’s openness to myriad methods and authors and how this fair-minded and unbiased trait helped to build collaboration in the homeopathic community. And someone else will write of his great love of poetry, rafting and kayaking.
But what I want to pay tribute to is the beautiful way he died. I believe we die as we live and I was deeply touched by the gift of David’s transparency particularly during his first weeks of illness. He would write daily, describing how it felt to be watching death approach. Having been told he may have two weeks to live he felt enlivened by the preciousness of life, and curious about his journey towards death.
David wrote, “I can feel that I am different. …There's space for something new… I just am… filled with light and transparence. This whole process is very strange. Loss of many simple things and a glimpse of vastness. It seems so full of deep tragedy. And magnificence. … I have this time, every day, to see it, [to] keep the door open… appreciate… revel… [and] collapse in it.”
Facing death can uproot all our previous ideas that were safely sheltered by an imagined long life. David continued to examine who he was, finding wonder in life, and marveling at the unknown, as he did through all the years I knew him: “Then I say, seemingly out of the blue, "Am I dying?" and start sobbing - too much mucus, saliva, tongue, incoordination to breathe… am I going to die? … the story to look at now is this one - more than my easier resistance to letting love come close.” I love this admission by him. David wondered many times if he had loved well, if what he had done in this life was valued, which baffled many of us—how surprising, yet poignantly human, that he was uncertain of his gifts we admired and loved so deeply.
One of his last emails posed a question that I now keep close to my own heart:
I am alive and not alive, awake and not awake.
Bright, sudden sparking and dull, gray, isolated, constructed, homogenous, controlled.
Ah, I haven't come alive yet.
Ah
And it is clear these - how many days? - are the end days.
Can I risk coming alive, really alive?
A dear friend of mine walked into the emergency room July 2 with a headache and within hours was told he probably had a dozen or so brain tumors. Over the course of the next week those close to him watched in shock and sadness that a once vibrant life was told he may only have a fraction of time left. It is in these moments that we realize how precious life is as it becomes more fragile: the sweetness of a breeze or the brilliant green of an insect seem much more than they did before.
And time has changed as well. Time and opportunity felt endless just the other day and now, suddenly, it feels meteoric. Before I felt I had unbounded time to repair, to do that thing I have been meaning to, to be with those I love, but now I realize I do not know if I will have that time. Everything becomes clear that everything is uncertain. And, for my friend, he wondered if he wasted one of his last days, one of 14, or 30, or... To watch the clock tick so closely could be quite painful.
I waste so many days. I forget how precious they are; sometimes I just want the day to be over. I forget that it may be only one of a few remaining.
We don’t seem able to live in this acute state for long. I have witnessed this increased intensity and fervor many times, most recently with my own diagnosis of breast cancer in October, 2008. Then, as now, everything took on an ardent brilliance. But as the months passed after my own diagnosis, some of that luminosity faded. Not all, but some.
Certainly that moment changed my life, for the better I am lucky to say, but then I had a simple and easy solution. My friend does not. Or maybe it is as easy: do what seems right and best at this moment. I have watched his life open as did mine. He has been vulnerable, transparent, and has received and given love freely. And he has said he is changing; becoming something new.
I believe we die as we live, and so those same fears and inhibitions that troubled our life may haunt our death. I so want my friend to have a good death, to let his own fears fall away so that he can move into his passing with freedom. And for those of us living that we can move into life with that same deliverance.
What is this freedom? As homeopaths we speak of it as a definition of health: to be free from physical pain replaced with a sense of well-being, a freedom from passions replaced with dynamic calmness, and a freedom from selfishness replaced with empathy. For each of us this freedom takes on unique challenges based on who and how we are in the world. And, I think, our life’s work is to face these challenges in order to become more whole and more wholly ourselves.
One of the blessings in my life that resulted from my diagnosis was that I realized I was deeply loved. In part, because this same friend created the first of many healing circles where my friends and colleagues came to tell me they loved me. During one ceremony this friend sang the heart sutra to me: Gate gate, paragate, parasamgate, bodhi svaha. Gone, gone, gone beyond, gone utterly beyond, o what an enlightenment! David created an opportunity to heal a part of myself that needed healing. It was a true gift. I now sing this to him in his last hours.
Death is sitting on his bed, as it is for all of us, but most of us roll over believing we can ignore this patient guest. But I think there is something quite beautiful in holding death’s hand, just as we hold the hand of birth and beginnings. We can turn towards each and say, “I am fully in life now.”
Buddha says, "There are only two mistakes one can make along the road to truth; not going all the way and not starting." How do we start? How do we step into truth, honesty, beauty, suffering, loss, love and ourselves fully? Most of the time we are living life forgotten, perhaps all we need to do is try to set aside fear, or laziness, or all the other states that paralyze and prevent us from living completely, and take one step further on that road.
Patients often say how much the homeopathic consultation, or first constitutional interview, is like therapy. I believe what they mean is that they did not expect to reveal, nor had they ever done so in a doctor’s office before, parts of themselves or their life story so completely. That their telling was more similar to what they share with their therapist or counselor then a physician.
And my psychotherapist colleagues, who I share patients with, often marvel at the depth and breadth of what the patient reveals in their first hour with the homeopath. One therapist said it took her months to get the same body of information from a mutual patient obtained after an hour and a half in the homeopath’s office; and it is true, the skills of the homeopath are particularly masterful at uncovering and discovering the patient’s inner world.
Homeopaths have learned how to create a space where the patient narrates their story and symptom picture in such a way that creates texture, dimension and connections. In some ways it doesn’t matter what the story is, it can be in the telling that much is revealed. How the patient experiences their asthma is more important than that they have this complaint. To help the patient tell their story and to use this information well is the artistry of the homeopath.
One significant difference between the therapist and homeopath is what we do with the narrative offered by the patient. The homeopath serves as witness to and translator of the patient’s story. We find a thread in this tapestry of seemingly unrelated symptoms. We see this strand, hear this note, repeated in different ways but all conveying the same theme. Not just one theme, but two or three, that create a three dimensional image and portrait of the patient.
We then translate the patient’s words and experience into a meaningful pattern that is evocative of a homeopathic remedy’s pattern of symptoms and expression. This matching and corresponding with a substance, a substance that is a dilute but potent medicine, is one of the primary challenges for the homeopath.
The therapist, on the other hand, works directly with the patient to move through their story and experience of the story to heal. They use the story and their relationship with the patient to this end. We also, undeniably, are in relationship with our patients and this, too, is hugely influential in our patient’s healing. I do not think a patient would heal as deeply or as quickly without the relationship. I believe we all need connection, to be understood, to be guided at times, and to feel we have a companion in the walk towards better health. It is not just a remedy that is the healing agent, but a remedy, a relationship and a dynamic confluence of concurrent life experiences. It is true that a bee sting or a sprained ankle may not require this, but a life long affliction of depression or eczema requires more, from both the patient and the doctor.
One of the pleasures for me as a homeopath is this relationship. I enjoy caring for my patients, I enjoy the trust of their lives, story and health. I also enjoy the analytic aspect where my skills in pattern recognition are honed. As homeopaths we are doctor, anthropologist, sociologist, psychologist and scientist, all in one.
Two cases of Helleborus
By Krista Heron, ND, DHANP
I have long been touched by the simple wane-like appearance of the Hellebores. My mother had planted a hillside of them underneath the shadow of a dozen Douglas Firs. They would bloom at the beginning of winter and look pale and ghostly through the season’s rain and snow. Little else bloomed at this time of year in our garden, but the flowers of the Hellebores were hardly cheery, unlike the Snowdrops that valiantly rose out of the frosty ground near them or the eventual Crocus that would beckon Spring. Instead it was their lack of vibrancy that distinguished the Hellebores. Their subdued hues ranged from pale green to a muted purple. These are not bright vivacious colors but instead reflect the sensorial depression and dullness that is characteristic of these remedies.
The Hellebores belong to the Ranunculaceae family, which are divided into the subgroups Anemonean (Adonis, Hepatica, Hydrastis, Pulsatilla), Clematideae (Clematis Erecta), Helleboreae (Aconitums, Acteas, Aquilegia, Caltha, Helleborus, Staphysagria), Paeoneae (Paeonia) and the Ranunculeae (R. acris, R. bulbosus, R.ficaria, R. flammula, R. glacialis, R. repens, R. sceleratus).
The patients who need these remedies in the Ranunculaceae family have very sensitive temperaments. They feel a lack of inner strength; a kind of delicacy or an impressionable quality that allows them to feel slighted, fearful or timid. It is not only that they are passive and soft, but that they can be excitable, hysterical and touchy as well. It is this changeable nature that we are so familiar with in Pulsatilla, but that we see in the others as well. This malleability or capriciousness is characteristic of this family. They are sensitive to others and what others think of them. In their great sensitivity they can suppress their own emotions in order to find the comfort they are seeking.
Helleborus doesn’t just seem to suppress their emotions; they become dulled as a means to overcome the tremendous terror they feel. It seems that they can not process the sensory world. They may see and hear but they are befuddled and benumbed by the meaning of it. They experience apathy or a state of suspension. It is as if they are cut off from the world and themselves in this essential way, not being able to interpret or comprehend their own experience, thoughts or feelings.
Diane came to see me in 1994 when she was 44 years old. She had just finished her doctorate in Biology. Prior to Helleborus she had received Lycopodium and Opium, and experienced only minor improvement in her symptoms.
“The last 7 years I have healed a lot from a sexual assault and childhood fears. But I still feel vulnerable and helpless and I am not able to think clearly.”
Here we have the first clue that she is in the Ranunculeae family: she tells us she is vulnerable and helpless. Her first hint of Helleborus is revealed when she says she can not think clearly.
“I feel estranged from work. My last year at school I found comfort in the academics. I felt as if I was crawling into a hole. Now I feel a lack of motivation and self-esteem despite having more support and stimulation. I feel apathetic.”
“I can also be very sensitive and will at some point run into something or someone in my environment that will frighten and affect me deeply. It’s as if I was assaulted and it will burst the bubble. I can feel exquisite and delightful and then will be filled with doubts. I feel foolish, I don’t know how to lead my life and I have made so many mistakes. I feel fragile, frightened and vulnerable.”
“I feel anxious and hurried and I can no longer choose what to do, that I’ve lost the ability to choose. [I went home for a visit and I had all these] feelings about my father; he had attempted to sexually molest me as a child. I would stop breathing like I was trying to die and escape by killing myself.”
We can see in Diane’s symptoms the Helleborus state. She is vulnerable and sensitive yet she has become numb after a frightful childhood. She feels as if she was crawling into a hole, or that a protective bubble has been burst. Both of these exemplify the sensory withdrawal she uses as her strategy to survive. She doubts herself and feels she has made many mistakes. Helleborus too feels they have done some wrong. She feels hurried and irresolute and it is similar to the befuddled state of Helleborus where they feel confused, hurried and indecisive. But it is that they have a slowed-down mind, an inability to process, not their intellect that is affected. Diane has a feeling of being assaulted and this too is replicated in the remedy’s delusion of being pursued by enemies. We also see the alternating state of this family: the delight and then the doubts. And again she describes herself as fragile and vulnerable; a classic feeling of many of the flower remedies.
“I went to a meeting and felt emotionally weak. I drew a line as to what I thought I could do and was attacked by an individual. I felt upset, angry and I cried. I felt like hiding. I felt like I had been smashed, I felt unprotected, so hurt, and I lost perspective. I felt shame that I fell so far into this weak state.”
“Recently my roommate turned on me and I was blown away. I became terrified, afraid she would yell at me. I felt poisoned and blocked. This was just like how my mother terrorized me. I felt cut to the bone, like a beaten dog that is skittish. Now I am numb. My mother would have violent rages when I was young and would spit and curse. I was terrorized and would almost stop breathing and try to hide. I would tighten into a ball. Later I would drop out of life by getting sick. I feel I have no defense against others, I feel terrified and it turns into numbness.”
Here we have a further clarification of the Helleborus picture. She is terrified and as a result she becomes numb. She has no other defense but to “drop out of life”, to “stop breathing” and “to hide”.
“In January I hit my head on a metal bar. I didn’t pass out but a few days later I couldn’t walk very well, not because of my legs but because of my eyes. I couldn’t process very well. I also felt a pressure in my head. I didn’t accurately judge how bad I was. It was a distinct feeling of being disconnected from my lower body as if it was someone else. It was so strange to stand or walk. I would pass stool and it felt far away, without any sensation. My whole pelvis was some other place. I had to do everything not to succumb to fear. It was like drowning. It was a huge challenge to breathe. I feel confused, I don’t care about anything, and I don’t even know where I am now. No one will ever know what I’ve come through. I feel sad that I’ve isolated myself. I have no circle of friends or partner. How did I paint myself into this corner?”
Head injuries are one of the etiologies for the instigation of the Helleborus state. Here, however, we see it exacerbating this state. She becomes numb to her body; there are no sensations and poor perceptions. She “couldn’t process” the information her senses and mind were taking in.
“Right after the accident I had horrible nightmares with creatures screaming and wailing in agony. I felt like I’ve completely revisited my early experiences when I was violently raped 30 years ago. I felt that raw terror. I had been raped in 1968 after the Martin Luther King riots in Washington, DC. It was a very violent time. I didn’t know if we would live through it. Then I had a second trauma of an abortion after the rape.”
It is the terror, the frightful experiences that have time and again pushed her deeper into the Helleborus state.
“I feel like I’m in molasses or glue. Not only my body but my thinking too. It’s less nimble and it’s heavy. I speak so much more slowly. In the morning I just want to go back asleep. I don’t want to talk to anyone, I feel like hiding. They don’t care. I’m suicidal but what’s the point? What do I have to look forward to?”
Everything is slowed down, and Helleborus exists somewhere on this continuum of feeling hurried and moving and talking slowly.
“I like sweets. I sigh a lot. I have a slump around or before 4:00 p.m. and feel blank. It may start as early as 1:00. I tend towards right-sided complaints. I have problems with gas and constipation and take psyllium husks before bed nightly. I don’t drink enough water and I am chilly.”
The general symptoms of Helleborus are very similar to Lycopodium: both are right-sided remedies, worse at 4:00 pm, constipated, not very thirsty and chilly. I gave Diane Helleborus 200. She wrote and called six weeks later.
“Since taking the last remedy I have felt a marked shift in my sense of myself and my environment. I never would have believed it possible to have my life and aura restored in such a way.”
“Before, I lived in fear and now I experience everything differently. A shadow was revealed in me, something very ugly. It was a violence within myself, someone hard, uncaring, cruel, harsh and unfeeling. And that was what I experienced from my mother.”
“The world looks and feels different; I can hardly believe it; I feel I have “awoke” in some fundamental way. Now when I begin to slip into a depressed feeling, or have a thought of discouragement or helplessness, or feel like a victim, at the same moment I have awareness, a kind of simple witnessing as in meditation. I don’t need to spend a lot of time floundering or being lost in the murky confusion of doubt, fear or withdrawal. It’s as though I had learned some deep habit of contraction away from life for survival. And now a miracle has occurred and I have a chance to come to life, no longer crouching in remote corners of my soul. I feel so alive now.”
This was a wonderful beginning for the healing that I observed over the next few years. This remedy was repeated in March and September of 1995 and in September 1996. At last report the patient was still doing well.
A second case of Helleborus further illustrates the image of this remedy. Sally came to see me because she had been diagnosed with an aggressive breast cancer and had completed traditional treatment including surgery, radiation and chemotherapy. But the cancer was only part of her concern. She was back in school and wasn’t able to focus. This was not a new problem, but one that she had struggled with her whole life.
”I am very distractible, even small sounds draw my attention. I don’t have an ability to concentrate. My mind races and I am always on guard against all the dragons. I become immobilized with fear. I feel very unsafe. I struggle to not be afraid of people. I am afraid they would torture me or make me take poison. I feel a lack of safety, no defenses, invaded. [When I was a child] my mother threatened to drop me on the railroad tracks. I lived in absolute terror. There was no sense of comfort. I had no defenses. I would tell myself not to sleep.”
Again we see the vulnerability and the sensitivity with the underlying etiology of terror. It is also interesting to me that both women felt or feared being poisoned. Helleborus is a poisonous plant and in our repertories the twelve remedies listed under various rubrics mentioning poisons eleven are poisonous as well.
“In my dreams I would try very hard to do something right, but someone was always saying I did it wrong.”
Again we see this idea of doing some wrong in Sally’s case as well as Diane’s.
“I am having a hard time being in my body. I feel lightheaded, my eyes don’t focus. I have a lot of feeling in my head, but it is hard to think, so much processing going on inside but I can’t think clearly. I want to sleep a lot; I feel I am losing my connection with life. I am losing my ability to be in the world, like I am dying, like I am leaving my life. I am afraid to go out into the world. I feel defenseless, porous and separate. I haven’t wanted to grow up, to make my way in the world, to go out into the world. I want to connect with someone who has joy.”
Sally describes her dullness as “so much processing...but I can’t think clearly.” She too is becoming numb. She states she is “losing her connection with life” and her “ability to be in the world.” The childishness that we see in this family of remedies is seen in her desire to not “grow up.” Helleborus, Aconite, Epiphegus and Pulsatilla are all mentioned in this rubric Childish behavior.
“It is hard to think, hard to pull my thoughts together. Something is missing, it is an effort to explain, to pull it together to explain. I work so hard to think, I can’t access who I really am. This dullness is taking away who I am; there is nothing. There is no enthusiasm for life, an inability to go forward, to materialize my dreams, to live the depths of myself. I just feel like an old person. I could sleep until my life is over.
I have a slump between 2:30 and 4:00. I am chilly. I have a dry mouth so am thirsty.”
Sally can’t “pull her thoughts together,” the dullness is making her numb, “taking away who [she] is.” And we see the familiar generalities of feeling worse in the afternoon, and in Sally’s case, we see the dry mouth, also a symptom of Helleborus.
I gave Sally Helleborus 200 and she came back in six weeks.
“The very next day I felt different. Then two weeks later I realized how very good I had been feeling. I had a dream that I felt meant I was reclaiming my power, and another where a salmon was suspended in space and I thought ‘when it thaws out it will be okay’. It was like how I have been frozen my whole life. I don’t feel any dullness at all. I don’t feel tired anymore. I feel alert all day.”
These two cases illustrate the primary strategy that the Helleborus patient employs. These women experienced frightful and abusive childhoods as well as a continuation of traumas in their adult lives. In order to survive these difficulties; their vital force chose these strategies to help survive by becoming numb and dull to their sensory world. The pain they had suffered was too great to feel any longer so dullness set in. Both of these women are now living much fuller lives, they feel as if they have awakened from a kind of frozen state and are alive again.
