On doing research to update this newsletter from November 2004, I was very saddened to discover that Candace Pert passed away in 2013. The world has lost an amazing woman, scientist and author. She was only 67 years old…way too young.
Candice Pert wrote the book Molecules of Emotion: The Scientific Basis Behind Mind-Body Medicine (Scribner, 1997), and I first saw her work visually in the film What the Bleep Do We Know!? From the biography on her webpage, I learned that the Peptide T that is mentioned in the 2013 Oscar winning movie, The Dallas Buyers Club, (saw that this weekend past – great movie, and boy did Matthew McConaughey lose a LOT of weight!) was her work. What an amazing legacy she has left behind.
In the movie What the Bleep, the viewer gets to see an animated version of what goes on in the body when our feelings literally flood the system with peptides…protein segments…that find receptors on the outer edges of our cells. What we experience at the thinking/emotional level finds a way to our cellular structure. Stated a little more strongly, we are what we think and feel! At least, our bodies respond in an exquisitely sensitive way to what we think and feel…we are connected…body and mind. And after watching the movie, they leave you with the thought that we actually create our own reality.
Homeopathy has always known that there is a connection between the mind and the body and the physical symptoms we manifest. In homeopathic philosophy, we can only know that there is something out of balance because we have symptoms. There is no other way for the vital force (energy) to communicate an imbalance. There is no good or bad, just an opportunity to pay attention to what the body is asking us to pay attention to…like our gripey guts!
When a homeopath first sees someone, usually there is an in-depth inquiry into the physical complaint and/or emotional concern. Being a holistic science and art, it is very important for a homeopath to understand all levels—the physical, mental and emotional.
Everything is connected. A homeopath is always working to understand this deepest connection in a person…how does a person respond at their very deepest level to their reality…the world around them? What are the person’s thoughts and emotions, and how are they connected? How are they connected to their physical complaints? Not why…but how is this connected to that. A homeopathic remedy is simply a mirror, if you will, of what the person’s experience is, and that is what makes it a simillimum…like curing like.
With infants we call gripey guts colic. Check out my guest blog on the Modern Alternative Mama later this week where I write about the infant version of indigestion.
Check out this week’s remedy pictures and see for yourself how the mind/body connection works.
In health and healing,
Donna
Image source: GRIPE25 on Flickr
