Today is one of the longer newsletters, so grab a favorite drink, get comfy, and read on! Or save for later when the house is quiet. My best guess is that this is about a 5-minute read!
“Dorothy Shepherd always felt that much of the future of Homoeopathy lay in the hands of the ordinary (wo)man – in – the – street. By his/her demand for safer alternative medication in his/her time of need, when hope was well nigh lost, the homeopathic art would be kept alive by those doctors and intelligent lay practitioners who truly sought to heal the sick.”
~ Gweneth E. Robinson, introduction to Shepherd’s book, More Magic of the Minimum Dose
You the Keeper – You the Storyteller
Homeopathy is going through yet another transition in the 21st century…a crisis and an opportunity for a birth/rebirth. This is nothing new in homeopathic history. In Hahnemann’s day, the 19th century, he himself faced ridicule and isolation. He was ostracized for introducing a medicine that was safe, logical (he set out the principles of health, disease, cure and medicines in the Organon of Medicine: The Art and Cure by Homeopathy…principles that remain unchanged to this day, 250 years later), and sustainable…and…homeopathy worked! Regular folk ‘got’ it!
In North America, at the turn of the 20th century, the doctors were vocal about their conflict with homeopaths, and they wanted to put homeopaths out of business.
“Perhaps the most important reason that conventional physicians disliked homeopathy and homeopaths was well expressed at an A.M.A. meeting by one of the more respected orthodox physicians who said, ‘We must admit that we never fought the homeopath on matters of principles; we fought him because he came into the community and got the business.’ (17) Although most physicians, past or present, won’t as easily admit it, economic issues play a major role in what is practiced and what is allowed to be practiced.”
~ Dana Ullman (great article on history of homeopathy)
But regular folk ‘got’ homeopathy, and when homeopaths were threatened with practicing medicine without a license, lay practitioners continued to use homeopathy.
The Crisis Today – Chronic Disease and Despite Vaccination – Infectious Disease
There is a crisis of chronic ill health that is affecting humanity at a younger and younger age. We have children now – 1 in 50 (boys) or 1 in 68 – with a diagnosis of autism! Diabetes, allergies, asthma, eczema, autoimmune diseases like Multiple Sclerosis, Rheumatoid Arthritis to name but a few, are in epidemic numbers!
There is also a crisis of acute infectious childhood illnesses…in children and now in the adult population too. Flu vaccines that do not cover the strains for the season, parents who have had to stop vaccinations because of vaccine injury, immunity that is ‘waning’ in the vaccinated population, repeated and high vaccination rates that are not preventing outbreaks of infectious illness…are all contributing to more sickness than I can recall since my own childhood. In the 1960’s we had all the vaccinated-for infectious childhood illnesses. I had thought to avoid that with my kids in the 1980’s by making sure they had their vaccines. Now, as 30-something adults, they are as susceptible now to these illnesses as they might have been in childhood without vaccination.
So what to do?
Parents, families, and individuals today understand that homeopathy works. Like those folk in Hahnemann’s day, they ‘get’ it. As a homeopath, I am privileged to observe children and adults with chronic illness heal themselves when the vitality is supported with a well-selected homeopathic remedy. They safely heal without the damaging side effects of drug therapy. (There is a place for conventional medicine. If you have a broken bone, a brain injury, breathing problem or a bleeding problem, the hospital is the best place to be. Give a homeopathic remedy and you are on your way to heroic medicine.)
So how has homeopathy survived these last three centuries?
Because people, just like you, figured out that you can use homeopathic remedies for everyday accidents, injuries, and acute illnesses. You have learned that it is safe to use homeopathic remedies in acute illnesses because there is a beginning, middle, and end to the illness. There is usually a fever to start, the fever leaves and the discharges happen. Within 1-3 weeks, depending on the illness (whooping cough can take longer), your health has returned and your immune system is stronger for the experience.
The Storyteller Part?
Moms in particular have this part figured out! Your baby was sick with teething? What did you use? Chamomilla? Your toddler fell and got a bump? Arnica? Your whole family got Norwalk virus? Is everyone OK? Oh yeah…Arsenic got us through it. We just couldn’t go to the nursing home. Fever? Belladonna worked for you? Aconite was the remedy that helped when my kid woke up with a barking cough.
Moms tell stories…pregnancy, childbirth, teething kids, sick kids. We all ‘get it’. When I learned about homeopathy my first thought was, ‘Oh…there is a name to what I figured was out there but just didn’t know it!’
We all just want our kids to get better…without having to use prescription drugs, especially antibiotics. We now know how there are so many bacterial infections that are antibiotic resistant. Over the counter drugs like Tylenol and Advil? Just do a quick check on the net to learn just how many children’s admissions are for overdosing with fever medications. Unless you are checking labels, you will find Tylenol and Advil in the cough medication AND if you are also giving the medications for fever, you have a prescription for an unintentional overdose.
In my day, it was the coffee get togethers and play dates where we shared ‘what made our kids better’ in the latest illness making the rounds. Today, parents and individuals are sharing information at the speed of the internet!
“Through extended media, especially the Internet, we are becoming one interacting, intercommunicating living system, in which each human has access to the intelligence of the whole system and can place his or her own intelligence into the whole without gatekeepers. The capacity of computers is increasing so rapidly as to suggest the possibility of a new form of silicon-based life. We can either guide these powers to enhance life, or they can dominate and dehumanize us all.”
~ Barbara Marx Hubbard, Emergence: The Shift from Ego to Essence
In the midst of the current health crises facing our world, we can consciously make a choice to birth or co-create something new. You can choose homeopathy. You can use homeopathy at home, when you travel. You can study, take courses, and you can become a homeopath. Heaven knows…there is a tremendous amount of healing that needs to take place!
The best resource I know right now where thinking moms are making it happen and changing the world is at The Thinking Moms’ Revolution. When I first read their book I was delighted that in sharing their stories of recovering their kids from a diagnosis of autism, they also shared their many successes with homeopathy. Yay!
Dorothy Shepherd wrote in the 1960’s:
“In a world that appears to be increasingly materialistic, the symptoms of ill health are correspondingly complex. The need for medicines that will deal with the mental and emotional states of life and safely restore the disturbed balances, recreating a sense of harmony and well being, becomes more and more an urgent necessity. Homoeopathy can and does fill this need.”
~ Gweneth E. Robinson, introduction to Shepherd’s book, More Magic of the Minimum Dose
True even today!
Be a Shaman, A Storyteller, A Keeper of Homeopathic Wisdom
I like to consider Dorothy Shepherd one of the great grandmother homeopaths who is watching from ‘the other side’, guiding us still with her small books and her wisdom. Here are words from her introduction to More Magic of the Minimum Dose. In the book, she keeps alive the tradition of sharing cured cases with homeopathic remedies. We can take hope.
“The title More Magic of the Minimum Dose was chosen with deliberate intent, not only to allure and attract in this age of advertisement, but to open the door to the inner meaning of the mysteries of the art of true healing. Not magic as standing for wizardry or witchcraft, to which this ancient word has degenerated in our times, but as expounding the higher wisdom of the Magis or Masters of the mystery schools; wisdom as opposed to knowledge, which means something learned, a concrete fact; wisdom is higher knowledge, a step higher and further upward towards the abstract and inner knowledge, the esoteric meaning of knowledge, if you like.”
~ Dorothy Shepherd, Magic of the Minimum Dose
“The earliest storytellers were magi, seers, bards, griots, shamans. They were, it would seem, old as time, and as terrifying to gaze upon as the mysteries with which they wrestled… (they) helped the community live though one more darkness, with eyes wide open, and with hearts set alight.”
~ Ben Okri in “Way of Being Free”
“When you tell a story, you tell it to all creation. It’s cosmic. It never goes away.”
How Can We Change the Health System?
Again, storytellers give us a hint as to what it will take when we feel quite powerless and small in the face of a medical system that is all too quickly creating a crisis of antibiotic resistance, iatrogenic disease (death and complications from prescription drugs), chronic disease and toxic, poisoned children. Just check out the chat boards and you can hear the fear…”How will I talk about being vaccine-free with my doctor?”
Here is a story from Alice Kane:
“Alice Kane, a storyteller from the Northwest, describes preparing for a storytelling workshop:
‘I picked up a morning paper and over orange juice coffee, and toast, read about the state of the world. There was a pleasant review of a new children’s book, but apart from that, the usual desperate story of mankind — war and death in the near east, battered women, weary refugees. I was faced with the world as it is — Someone should do something about it! Indeed, someone should!But who? In the fairy tales that I have loved all my life, that someone is always the most unlikely person.
All right, I said to myself, you can do it if Billy Beg could and Aschenputtel could, but they had charms of some kind, a talisman, a little twisted stick, a sword of power, a dead Mother’s blessing. These things made all the difference. They convinced weak and inferior beings that they could accomplish great things in spite of their size and their shortcomings.
On the way to the meeting, I kept thinking about it. The world, in spite of its beauty of sea, sky and blossom, has always been prey to greed and war and disaster, deserved and undeserved. Where have human beings found the means to face it all? Doggedly I said, ‘The fairy tale is true: if you accept the situation, you conquer it.’ At the end of her story at the conference she found the answer, ‘If we have myth, we have our shining talisman. We are not alone, for behind us are those who told tales and waiting are the generations to come. And we carry, each one of us, a Sword of Power and a Mother’s Blessing.’”
These words give me hope for a new future in health and healing.
Very very soon, the Homeopathy First Magazine website will launch. I am over the moon excited!
And within the next couple of months, the first issue will be on the Apple Newsstand shelf…we’ll keep you updated!
The main reason for me telling you this is that Homeopathy First is for you, me…for all of us. The magazine will be a place to tell stories, share stories of healing and of homeopathy.
We are not alone…quite the opposite. We are here to help each other…in health and healing.
With deep gratitude and love,
Donna
