Homeopath, Heal Thyself
by
Ian Watson
Anyone who has
practiced homeopathy for a while will notice that there
is often a discrepancy between the initial presenting
problem that brings a person for treatment, and the
eventual outcome, which turns out to be something
altogether different. Frequently there is, it seems, a
‘bigger reason’ why a person embarks on a self-healing
journey, which only reveals itself once they have taken
the first steps and begun the treatment.
Interestingly, I’ve noticed that a similar process takes
place when a person decides to train as a homeopath. Each
of us has an initial impulse which provides the catalyst
to get us started, and we begin our journey with perhaps
only the slightest notion of what we have let ourselves
in for. Assuming that our booster rockets of enthusiasm
and zeal-to-heal are able to sustain us for the duration
of the training, which is by no means guaranteed, it is a
distinct possibility that they will eventually fall away
and need to be replaced by something more enduring. At
which point we will be required, just like our clients,
to go deeper within ourselves and find a ‘bigger reason’
to continue to pursue the joys and perils of being a
practicing homeopath.
I can recall quite vividly the moment when it became
clear to me that I was facing a seismic shift in my work
as a practitioner. All of my original aspirations had
been fulfilled and I had, by any normal standards, become
a successful homeopath. I was running a busy group
clinic, with reception staff, public education programmes
and training opportunities for students. We had built up
an excellent local reputation and had enough ‘satisfied’
customers to keep us busy with referrals. I was earning
my living practicing and teaching homeopathy, which is
all I had ever wanted to do since beginning my training.
One day, the window-cleaner paid his monthly visit to my
office, and a strange and completely unexpected thing
happened. As I watched him cleaning the windows I found
myself fantasizing about swapping jobs with him! I
imagined what it must be like to just turn up someplace,
complete a piece of work to your own satisfaction, get
paid and, presumably, go home and spend the proceeds. No
responsibility. No phone calls. No demands. No working on
cases until the early hours. It suddenly struck me that I
was craving something - some kind of freedom and
simplicity in my work that I hadn’t even noticed had gone
missing until that moment.
Thus began a long and difficult process of making
conscious what were, and had been, the driving forces
behind my work. What was really motivating me to want to
heal other people, and why was that no longer sufficient?
What did I no longer love about my work, and what was it
that I still cherished? I was amazed to discover that
there were many things that I had taken on board without
question, assuming them to be part and parcel of practice
life: the sense of responsibility for others’ well-being;
the need to ‘get it right’ more often than not, or else
risk feeling that I hadn’t done a good enough job; the
endless phone calls; the struggle to repertorize symptoms
that didn’t seem to want to be repertorized. The list
grew longer and longer, and I began to see that the whole
way in which I was practicing didn’t suit me any more. It
had become burdensome, and tiring, and I felt trapped by
the demands it placed upon me.
Working my way through this inner maze taught me a great
deal about the healing process itself, which I hadn’t
really grasped up until then. First of all, I saw very
clearly that learning and absorbing, which I had done a
great deal of during my training, had to be
counterbalanced by releasing and letting go, which was a
fairly new concept to me at that point. Secondly, I
learnt that there are distinct growth phases to which we
are subject, and that the demands and requirements of one
stage of life are irrelevant to another stage. To put it
another way, we outgrow our old identity as we develop
ourselves, and we must be willing to shed who we thought
we were in order to grow into who we are now becoming.
Which is a scary business! I had seen many of my clients
undergo just such a transformation, and now it appeared
to be my turn.
It also began to dawn on me that individualisation is
such a cornerstone of homeopathic philosophy, and yet in
practice we often cling to the standard practices and
procedures that belonged to our teachers, and probably to
their teachers. I longed to find a way of working that I
knew was intrinsically ‘right’ for me, but I had no idea
how or where to find it, because there didn’t seem to be
any model or template I could adopt that wasn’t just
someone else’s way of doing things. All I knew for sure
was that being true to oneself was a key component of
health and wholeness, and that the only way I could
authentically facilitate this for my clients was by
applying it to my own life.
At the risk of losing everything I had built up thus far,
I set about identifying and relinquishing every aspect of
my practice that didn’t fully ‘belong’ to me. If it
didn’t feel right, I gave it up, piece by piece, in order
to uncover what was truly mine. I gave up asking all of
the ‘standard’ questions that I had asked a thousand
times before, and asked only what seemed appropriate to
the individual concerned. I stopped writing down
everything that clients said, and gave more of my
attention to really listening. I let go of the need to
repertorise anything and everything, and fairly soon I
realized that my insistence on finding remedies for
everyone was on shaky ground as well.
Conventional homeopathic wisdom states that less is more,
and yet every year we are bombarded with hundreds of new
remedies, such that the repertories are out of date
before they even make it to the printers. Well, the
argument goes, we have computer programmes now that can
handle tens of thousands of remedies, so there’s nothing
to worry about. And yet...... I had this niggling feeling
that something important was in danger of being lost, and
it had to do with simplicity and trust and the
relationship between practitioner and client.
Was it possible to work effectively with
fewer
remedies, rather
than more? Were clients capable of finding their
own
remedies,
homeopathic or otherwise, given the right encouragement
and support? In being the homeopathic ‘expert’, was I
unwittingly creating dependancy relationships with my
clients, helping and yet disempowering them at the same
time? These were the kind of questions I found myself
grappling with. I don’t have any definitive answers, but
I knew that I had to explore these possibilities, at
least to my own satisfaction.
And this I have done, and am still in the process of
doing. My once-busy practice is much quieter these days,
but I like to think that there are certain qualities
present in my work now that have replaced the quantities
of clients I used to see. I spend more time with people,
yet I see them much less frequently. I try to help my
clients find what is meaningful in their suffering,
rather than to simply take it away. I use remedies
to support
the healing
process rather than to bring it about, and in that way I
have relinquished the need to ‘get it right’. I endeavour
to be responsive to my clients, but I know now that I am
not responsible for
them. It feels so
different to the way I used to work that I don’t know
whether I can still call myself a homeopath. But I do
know one thing: I feel better in myself.
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This
article first appeared in
Similia,
the Journal of the Australian Homeopathic Association in
December 2005.
For more information on the A.H.A., click
here.