You know how I feature guest bloggers every once in awhile? Everyone brings a different perspective on health, healing, and sickness and this week I am asking to hear from you, especially if you have kids, grandkids, nieces, nephews, or kids in your care. We all have stories, even our own of being a kid — and being a sick kid.
You might be saying, ‘Eek! I’m not a writer!’ No worries. You don’t have to be. You have opinions, though. Thoughts. Reflections. Hard times. Grateful times. What do you remember about the times when you were sick as a kid? When your kids are sick, what is it like for you? Just send me a quick note by posting a comment below or on our Facebook page.
If you have a story where homeopathy helped, even better. How my mom managed without homeopathy, I will never know! With five kids, there was opportunity for a lot of sickness! Homeopathy wasn’t on my radar when my kids were small — all those long nights of croup, a bout with chicken pox for both, sore throats, coughs, stomach upsets, exam nerves…I wish I had known about homeopathy.
From Vicks vaporizers and children’s aspirin to prescription drugs and over-the-counter fever medications, we use what we know and what gives comfort! And it’s the moms who learn to care for the sick.
This is the point of my request. You are the ones who will make homeopathy a part of every household. You are the ones who will make a difference in the health of our future. You can use homeopathy safely for acute illnesses. Acute illnesses have a beginning, middle, and an end. Like chicken pox…yes, it is infectious and is passed easily from one child to the next, but it is self-limiting. Asthma is a chronic illness. Eczema is chronic. Children diagnosed on the spectrum are dealing with many chronic conditions. When an illness is chronic, you need a health team of homeopath, naturopath, nutritionist, and medical doctor.
You Make a Difference: You Keep Homeopathy Alive
This quote says it all:
“Dorothy Shepherd always felt that much of the future of Homoeopathy lay in the hands of the ordinary man – in – the – street. By his demand for safer alternative medication in his time of need, when hope was well nigh lost, the homoeopathic art would be kept alive by those doctors and intelligent lay practitioners who truly sought to heal the sick.”
– Gweneth E. Robinson and Devon N. Thornbury, introduction to the book Shepard’s More Magic of the Minimum Dose
(Dr. Dorothy Shepherd also has another great little book called Homoeopathy in Epidemic Diseases that I use in the Vaccine Free: Now What? course.)
My Stories: Your Stories
Being sick as a child meant that life slowed down. My mom was present. She would often just sit with us, cool hand on a warm head. Those are the memories I have as a child.
When my kids were sick, everything stopped. Appointments were cancelled, commitments postponed, and we spent time just being together. We probably watched more movies than is recommended for the quiet needed during healing, but my memories are of fuzzy blankets, pajamas, and a day that slowed down to the basics only.
Slow Medicine
“Like so many of my experiences at Laguna Honda, that sitting with Ms. Gilroy in her dark and cool room as she tossed and turned changed me and stayed with me. I thought about it a lot. I’d done so little for her, even less than I’d done for Steve. I hadn’t looked into her eyes, held her hand, or reviewed all her records. I’d done nothing at all. Except sit. Bout how effective that had been! The diagnosis had appeared without me sending her to the emergency room, without additional tests, scans, or biopsies. Somehow, just by sitting with her, I’d understood what was wrong.
I began to try it with my other patients. Just sitting.
…This being Laguna Honda, however, I had the times to wait and see-for family and friends to show up and fill me in on the details…In short, for Slow Medicine to do its job.”
– God’s Hotel: A Doctor, A Hospital, and a Pilgrimage to the Heart of Medicine by Victoria Sweet
The Spiritual Part?
I am leaving you with another quote. Hopefully, one of the quotes or the simple request to share your story will stir something within you.
When I look back at the sick days and the parenting days, only now do I understand that those days were my spiritual pilgrimage, leading me to where I am today. I hope you find that for yourself as well. This perhaps is the deeper meaning of sickness, health, and slow medicine…we have an opportunity to nurture a spiritual understanding that will help us make sense of our world.
Next newsletter will follow up on these ideas, but here is one more inspiration:
“The baby is dirty all the time. We are constantly changing his diapers and wiping his bottom. Yet it’s easy to see that he is pure. His mess has nothing to do with him; he doesn’t even know about it. And his ignorance of the mess he makes has nothing to do with him either; he will learn/ we are not deceived by the mess into thinking that he is either impure or stupid. We have never seen such purity! No matter what he does to sheets, diapers, clothes or our laps, purity remains to us an obvious characteristic of the child’s true self.
…It is fairly easy with diapers because we more or less know what we have to do. But crying? Staying awake later? Hitting? Demanding? Whining? Being sick? It seems so much harder as we become more and more concerned with what to do instead of what we need to know. But just as we can see purity right in the middle of the diapers mess, so also must we learn to see gentleness in the middle of the violence, innocence in the face of guile, health where there seems to be sickness, perfection where imperfection seems to be, intelligence where there appears to be stupidity, goodness and the desire to be good right where there seems to be willful badness.”
– Whole Child/Whole Parent: A Spiritual & Practical Guide to Parenthood by Polly Berrien Berends
This kind of spiritual journey is neither for the faint of heart nor for the weak. Parents, especially moms, seem to come with an innate source of this kind of toughness to persevere…to love oneself and the child even in the darkest of times.
We need each other. We need to hear the stories. Is this hard for you? Me too.
So please, share your stories — all of your stories…the successes, the failures, what you learn, what you forgot that you learned (that happens a lot raising kids and helping kids heal).
We will continue this series next week.
Yours in health and healing,
Donna
