Review of a comrehensive First Aid kit (by Ildiko in Homeopathy Today)

Genus epidemicus

In the throws of the world-wide awareness of epidemics I do not want to let the homeopathic view go unmentioned here.
The kind of homeopathy I mostly cherish and trust is the so called constitutional approach, where a person receives one homeopathic remedy that addresses the underlying pattern in their mental, emotional, and physical symptomatology. This remedy has the capacity to bring the organism back to balance, consequently bringing health to the person, letting the vital force take care of removing the disease along with the symptoms.
Nevertheless homeopathy can be used in a variety of other ways. It can be used without covering all the symptoms one has. The remedy does have to cover some major symptoms in order to be effective but not necessarily all. An example for this is an acute illness, where the acute ill has overpowered the person's regular tendencies and thus a remedy that matches the symptoms of the acute illness (but not the rest of the chronic ailments of the person) can be curative. The bigger the impact of the "assault" or "trauma", the less person-specific the reaction will be. To give a first aid example, if five people get hit on the head by a stick, most probably all five of them will have the same reaction: a bump will grow at the spot, it will be tender and painful. This looser need for person specificity (which is a trademark of homeopathy) is a characteristic of homeopathic first aid and acute prescribing. The fact that it is not essential to match the remedy to all of one's underlying patterns is the reason that people can use homeopathic remedies on their own in these acute and first aid situations. No need to study the case in its all complexities.
What happens in an epidemic?
An epidemic is a very virulent acute ailment that attacks a great majority of people. In a powerful flu epidemic more people get sick than in a regular seasonal flu and the symptoms they get sick with are less varied. Usually a distinctive set of potent symptoms develops in all people afflicted. If you are familiar with homeopathy, you know that we use remedies to address a specific set of symptoms. In an epidemic this set of symptoms will be that well-identified small group of dominant symptoms that people get sick with. Because of these well-identifiable features one will not need to study carefully the specific subset of symptom each person gets sick with and give a different, person-specific remedy but rather, with great certainty can recommend the one remedy that fits the characteristic symptoms. This one remedy is called the "genus epidemicus".
In the current flu epidemic many homeopaths have been working on identifying the genus epidemicus and tracing the success rate of this remedy. One of the useful tools is http://www.hersculaboratoryflu.org/research/swineFlu_1.html
On this site you can read more about the flu and the specific remedy, Nux vomica, that was identified as the genus epidemicus.

Acute care with the Sensation Method

This summer I treated a person with acute back ache. I think this case is a beautiful illustration of using the Sensation Method in acute cases without the goal of treating the whole history nevertheless addressing the underlying bodily felt sensation as the meeting point for body and mind. Here is the case:
Client (50 year-old woman) was gardening when she strained her back. When I saw her two days later she was in pain and greatly limited in her functioning.
Earlier remedy, Bryonia, recommended over the phone for the pain that was worse for the slightest motion, failed to act.
When she comes in she tells me: The only position that is helpful is lying on my back: I feel stretched and open in all directions. My body is afraid to hurt. I am tensed (here she shows a hand gesture tightening her fists) and hold myself. The pain gets much worse when I turn (again the same hand gesture): suddenly I feel sharp pain and feel like I am collapsing. Even breathing is scary. (This is the reason I recommended Bryonia in the first place, but now that I see her in person I notice that “scary” is accompanied by the same tight fist-like hand gesture as “tensed” and “turn”). I am tired all over. I cannot hold my body, it feels like I am gonna fall onto the floor. It is really scary, I am afraid of the pain. It shoots everywhere, it radiates from this one center. It is worse for deep breathing and it shuts down my control over my muscles. I ask her to describe, as if in slow motion, every detail of the pain as it suddenly comes up and radiates to other areas. She says: as I move out of balance, the muscles involuntarily try to come back to their original position. So I stretch, then the muscles can contract in order to pull me back. This contraction hurts. I catch myself on the way as I am collapsing and try to support myself in a different position. But I cannot contract the muscles, so I keep falling. When I find a good position I move to check if I am alive.. Or maybe it does not hurt anymore?… Even laughing and sneezing hurts. I also had diarrhea today, I think it is related. I am so tensed! My upper body is really tired because I am holding it constantly. When I was walking, my posture felt better than usual – straight, relaxed, elegant. I encourage her to describe it: It is an effortless sensation, like floating, weightless, lightness, like jumping, kicking. The pain is better for relaxing. While I feel this way, something suddenly relaxes in my neck that was tense before. My body can move without me being conscious of it and directing each and every movement. What is the opposite of this sensation? I am holding it. I am responsible for my body. I have to move it. I am in charge, but need to be careful because it hurts.
Describe the need of having to hold it?
I abandon my body as I am lying down on the floor. When I decide to move it I am afraid it is gonna hurt. With the momentum, in the middle of movement, it suddenly hurts. But the inertia still moves it so I cannot stop it. Once there is any goal or direction (like placing my body in a certain position) there is fear, tension and pain. If there is any purpose, I need to move my body in a direction. It scares me that if I move it will hurt. For example, the simple motion of turning my head brings on this fear that contracting my muscles will cause pain and when I want to relax it, i.e. stop contracting, my head will fall and I collapse. But as long as I do not relax it hurts. So even though it hurts I have to hold it.

That is what I learnt from her during her visit. Notice the detail of the interview and the return to the same sensations again and again. I edited the interview for brevity but you can still see the thoroughness of describing the sensations in the movements, pains and associated images. While we stay with the chief complaint she has the space to describe it in detail. The pattern that emerges from her recount is that it is not easy to hold up herself. She needs to tense in order to avoid collapse. When she can find a position to support herself (mostly the floor) she can let go, relax without holding and there is no tension. Supporting herself causes pain. Bringing back to balance from stretched position. Inertia moves, she needs to purposefully hold. Holding avoids collapse and falling. It is her responsibility to hold. Even though it hurts she needs to hold onto it.

This is the story behind the story. She keeps repeating these words but they are so well disguised in her story of the body reacting to an injury that it is easy to miss! If you write down the words of a person and then look at the emerging picture, you will be able to identify the story of a remedy (which you know from your Materia Medica or other homeopathic literature). The story of this client fits the story of Aurum. Aurum is in the sixth row of the periodic table, the row of development of responsibility. Aurum is in the 11th column, just one over the midline, which stand for success. By the next column, the 11th, the person is concerned with maintaining her position of successful responsibility. Being on the right hand side of the row, the issues are of maintaining one’s position (as opposed to reaching it, on the left hand side). The higher position you are in, the bigger chance of falling there is, thus the holding on and the fear of falling, collapsing is great. In classical cases we see Aurum befitting people of high power in financial loss and sudden falling from their responsible positions. If you translate that into the language of the body you get the story of the injured muscle that needs to hold on to avoid collapse and the fear of pain is the fear of collapse.
Aurum 200c resulted in a shift of relaxation in my client’s back ten minutes after taking it. Her pain returned later in a milder form and throughout the next 24 hours she needed another four doses of the remedy, which was followed by full recovery without any further assistance.

Quote from Gendlin

"In many fields there are constructive organizations that aim to create beneficial change in people. Such change usually happens only at a deeper level of inward attention. Most organizations don't know how to contact that level in people. Their main aim is often defeated because of this lack. Focusing reaches "there" in people, where what each field aims at can actually happen. That is why Focusing is a crucial addition in so many fields". (Gendlin, The Folio: Tribute Issue, 2008)
Gendlin encourages practitioners of various disciplines to incorporate Focusing into their specific field. He says Focusing in itself is not a fruitful approach; it needs to be used in combination with other disciplines.
I find Focusing especially helpful for many clients who otherwise would struggle reaching the level of sensation that we, homeopaths need in order to come to a curative remedy.
If you are a practitioner of the Sensation method, I would love to hear your memorable stories with clients who find it hard to access their bodily felt sensations. What are the ways you have found useful to reach a shift with them, to make the leap from the level they are comfortable with?
For those who do not necessarily understand what I mean, please read on. These are two short excerpts from my book Sensations that explain the level of sensations:
Levels of Experience
The key to the Sensation Method lies in the structure of the initial interview. When we conduct a homeopathic interview we take the client by the hand and walk them through their inner reality step by step, guiding them deeper into the levels of experience. The first level people usually start telling their story at is by naming their ailment. The next step is when they describe the symptoms in detail: conditions, how their ailment appears or improves, the location, the severity of those and other descriptions. One level deeper, people talk about feelings - the emotions these symptoms evoke or are born into. At this level people tend to take a broader route and relate their experience in more general terms from the emotional perspective. Most people have strong emotional reactions and are quite aware of them, so this is a level of experience people can talk freely about. One step beyond this is the level of images - the situations the person relates to. This is the first level that we do not tend to go to easily in casual conversation. It can be a stretch for many people to realize that underneath our emotional reactions there are fixed images that we unconsciously believe in. This is the layer people draw from when describing their situation in metaphors.
Once this level is well described, we go further into the realm of sensations. At this level people relate to the physical sensation a certain image, dream or situation brings forth. This level correlates to the local sensations and brings out the global sensation that manifests everywhere in the person. Without reaching this level we cannot be sure of the core sensation that feeds the images, the emotions, the symptoms and the ailment the person is suffering from.

Flow of Interview
There is no fixed pattern of case-taking, no set questions we need to ask our clients. Nevertheless, we want to touch upon all the Levels of Experience as discussed earlier. There is a natural flow that takes people through their story. In the beginning of the interview we ask about the nature of the complaint. Once that is described, we further question specific aspects of it. Nowadays, health care consumers are very well informed. With the widespread use of the Internet, information is just a click away. Consequently, people tend to know a great deal about their condition. However, this does not replace the actual symptoms one experiences. These symptoms are more personal than the average, general description of an illness. People can go into minute details about their pains and discomforts. This is important terrain for the homeopath, who can then dive deeper into even more personal experience of these symptoms. This is the starting points from which people then usually describe their emotional circumstances of their complaints. Once they are talking about the emotions it is just one step further to understand their beliefs that those emotions are based on.
This is a depth which typical conversation seldom reaches. It’s the level at which we need to encourage our patients to go ahead and describe their inner reality, however absurd or unreasonable it might sound. For some, it is as senseless as dreams. It has vague relation to reality but they are not sure what the connection is. They do not act as predictably as they usually do in their waking life. Indeed, at this level people talk about their dreams, pictures, images of their daydreams, the goals they want to achieve, hobbies they enjoy, favorite movies, books, stories and heroes. Once a person is talking about these things they experience certain sensations. There is a reason we feel good at the sight of an awe-inspiring piece of art or scenery. There is a reason we engage in a particular sport or activity. Once we can tackle that sensation the activity brings up, we are in a very different realm than describing symptoms of a disease. In this realm we can navigate through with ease; there are no norms we have to comply with. At this level it is also easy to name the sensation and the opposite of it, which brings on unpleasant associations. Often two polarities can be elicited here, and that can secure our understanding of the vital sensation. We arrive at the root of the problem, the key to healing.

The Power of Silent Listening

Since publishing the book Sensations I have been introduced to Dr Eugene Gendlin's approach called Focusing (see an earlier post about some aspects of Focusing). In Focusing we are looking for a bodily felt sense that is in the background of emotions and behaviors. If you are listening quietly to your body or maybe even have the good fortune someone guiding you into it, you will explore this whole world of bodily felt inner experiencing. Dr Gendlin's work operates on this level. I believe there are many connections between the Sensation Method's vital sensation and Focusing's felt sense.
An interesting point I want to bring up now is regarding hand gestures. If you read my book, you know that working with the Sensation Method we pay special attention to one's hand gestures. As Dr Sankaran noted, often, during the interview, when we encourage someone to enter the sensation level, they pause. They are silent for a while. Then.... as they want to tell us what they found there... they motion with their hands. No sound is leaving their lips - unpronounced words hover there without being born into a voiced utterance. This is the moment that is the birth of the implicit into explicit. The inner sensation, the bodily felt sense is being formed into an uttarable unit. In his book Focusing (on page 97) Gendlin gives an example of a golfer to describe what the felt sense is like. He says that when golfers sense that they are ready to swing is not something they ask consciously; they feel it in their body. It is a whole body experience that translates into the swing. Right before the swing it is a felt sense. A something that is an implicit unit within the person's inner experience, waiting to be expressed. In homeopathic inquiry we are always looking for the inner experience. We are waiting to hear from our clients reference to something important in their experience that can be explored to a deeper degree. We are at the "edge" of the known, the expressed, the discussed and the lived experience where it meets the unknown, the unexpressed, the un-discussed, the not-yet-lived aspects of the same. The "edge" is also an expression used by Gendlin. It describes very well the place of inquiry that is so familiar to us in Sensation Method inquiry. We do not have much use for the explored, the understood aspects of one's inner experience, we can only find meaningful and helpful hints for our growth and better understanding of ourselves in the unexplored territories. And the pivot point in finding that edge is in those few seconds and moments when the implicit is forming into an utterance. This is the quiet zone, the time for silent listening inward. If we further stretch these moments, we find those precious moments of bringing up the implicit is followed by the bodily expressions, in most instances of the therapeutic setting when clients are sittin down, these form hand gestures. They show us the energy of the implicit meaning. In the Sensation Method we view this level of "energy" as the level that is feeding the sensations, their expression is not yet formed but only having shape, color, direction... The body is capable of expressing it with gestures, while the mind, the words still cannot formulate. Once the body has expressed the energy of the implicit, the language, the mind catches up ... and after that hand gesture the words come.
The process does not stop here, we have a lot to do with those words... but that is another story.

Ask Questions

While this is a good place to give your comments and ask questions and I enjoy the blogging atmosphere, I would like to encourage you to visit the Forum on the website of Minimum Price Homeopathic Bookstore. I am among the authors there that have their Q&A sections. On one hand I would like to populate my forum there but also it might be interesting for you to visit other homeopathic authors' Q&A sections.
The link is: http://www.minimum.com/bb/viewforum.php?f=70
Enjoy your exploration!
Ildiko

Processing the Vital Sensation

This is a continuation of some thoughts from my previous "client-centered" post
Vital Process is when we process the Vital Sensation
The Vital Sensation is the core bodily felt sense that is at the root of our innermost processes. My recent observations show me that clients need to be part of the exploration of these processes instead of being the source of information for the homeopath. Instead of offering a remedy based on the underlying story I discover as the main source of disease in the client, I want to offer this process of exploration as a source of inspiration and self-discovery for my clients.
This is why I place emphasis on the process as opposed to the remedy.
Following my previous post inspired by Carl Rogers, I am adding now this idea of the process called exploring the vital sensation. This process is born out of the vital sensation and followed through as a map to one's inner world.
Moreover among other benefits of client-centered therapy Rogers describes an "incorporation of previously denied experience into the self-structure" (On Becoming a Person, p. 75). I believe that when we explore the Vital Sensation and its manifestations, clients are able to bring it to their awareness, and as a positive effect of this exploration they will be able to include this experience into their "self structure", creating a richer experience of life, a more vital and individual immersion in it. This way we can use the Sensation method not only to find the disturbance in one's health but to enhance our experience in ways that we are prone to. We can turn our weakness into strength. Through the remedy we can achieve healing from the exaggeration of what Sankaran calls the "Other Song" but through conscious use of our familiarity with this Song to use it to enhancing our inner experience.

Client-centered therapy

As I start looking into combining psychotherapy and homeopathy I have been reading texts of various authors, watching interviews with key figures of psychology and thinking about the relevance of the vast work, research and ideas that have gone into the practice of psychology to the work I am doing. I find deeply rooted connection between my work as a homeopathic practitioner and some of the thinkers of psychology. I would like to quote here from Carl Rogers’ book On Becoming a Person: A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy. Rogers' so called client-centered approach is definitely very close to what I experience as the authentic relationship between therapist and client. As Rogers points it out it can be any relationship between two humans, where at least one of them has the goal of growing towards self-actualization, in simple terms becoming a person he/she seeks to be. I am taking this quote from him because his words remind me of the multi-layered work we do with our clients. Establishing a healing relationship is the heart of what we do. Therefore we can look for the results of our work at the same place: in this relationship. This is the fertile soil homeopathic inquiry will sow its seeds.
Here is Rogers:
"If I can create a relationship characterized on my part:
by a genuineness and transparency, in which I am my real feelings;
by a warm acceptance of and prizing of the other person as a separate individual;
by a sensitive ability to see his world and himself as he sees them;
Then the other individual in the relationship:
will experience and understand aspects of himself which previously he has repressed;
will find himself become better integrated, more able to function effectively;
will become more similar to the person he would like to be;
will be more self-directing and self-confident;
will become more of a person, more unique and more self-expressive;
will be more understanding, more acceptant of others;
will be able to cope with the problems of life more adequately and more comfortably". (Rogers, 1961, p. 37)
I find it intriguing that Rogers’ statements regarding what “will” happen are very close to what I expect to happen as a result of homeopathic treatment. I understand that the style of inquiry and the spread of issues we address are very different, but nevertheless it is interesting to consider the similarities and learn from the other.
By giving a special kind of attention, Rogers becomes the source of healing. The relationship is what is the central point to healing, the pivot point where clients finds the energy for and direction to healing. In the Sensation Method I (the homeopath) identify the issue, the “aspects the person repressed” without the conscious participation of the client. Recently I have been leaning towards moving the process of self-discovery and subsequent self-actualization to become the conscious endeavor of client as well as the practitioner. I think it is more humanistic, more approachable and therapeutic, and helps to fill the gap where the limitations of homeopathy would stop us. If we share the responsibility of the process and outcome with the client, we will not lose the case because of outside circumstances. We will have the ability to keep the healing going even without a remedy, while still progressing in the direction the homeopathic inquiry brings us.

Mirroring

In a preface to a book on the homeopathic treatment of Lyme disease I was faced with an expression that resonated with me and the work I have been doing recently:
"May each one of us in this brief lifetime encounter our mirror-like simillimum". (Douglas Smith)
When I am working with a client with the Sensation Method, I ask them to describe certain elements in their story. These are exact repetitions of the utterances of the person. It is similar to techniques that some psychotherapists use, where they repeat the exact phrase of their clients. In Focusing oriented psychotherapy the client talks about their inner experience, usually a physically felt sense. They locate a sensation in their body and with the help of the therapist they explore it. The cornerstone of the technique is repeating the words of the client, where the trained practitioner hears the relation to the felt sense. The felt sense is a term, coined by Gene Gendlin, PhD, founder of Focusing oriented psychotherapy. It describes a vague inner, bodily-felt sense that the person recognizes as a pivot point in their general sense of the issue they are talking about. This is the so called felt sense that one explores by simply following the very words of the client and as the therapist repeats those words to the client, it encourages further description of the vague sensations, thus crystallizing them further and further until a definite felt sense is established and named. When people are faced with this felt sense, a unique opportunity arises: they are mirrored to their own inner image, their inner self. It is but a small aspect of their simillimum, the vital sensation we are looking for during our homeopathic case taking. The search for the vital sensation and the felt sense is an intriguing journey: the thread you can follow it by is your very own words. These words are mirrored and reflected onto you at each step of the journey. The reflection and mirroring makes sure you do not get lost, you don't wander off from the path: you are following your own tracks towards your deepest, most true inner self. This is a process that brings about healing from the very core. Your cleanest mirror-like image appears in front of your eyes and you wonder why you had not seen this image before. It is so familiar, so crystal-clear.