Reflections on
Homeopathic Education and Practice
Ian
Watson in Conversation with Katherine Armitage, March
2000
KA: You recently
brought out a revised copy of your book,
A Guide to
the Methodologies of Homoeopathy. The first edition sold ten
thousand copies - did you think it was going to be so
popular?
IW: No I didn't,
but then I didn't think it wouldn't be either, so I
suppose it's a pleasant surprise, and having said that,
people tell me it is a good book. Also, people have told
me that there isn't an equivalent book still. I think it
just found a niche. It is interesting to me to that it
has become required reading at quite a few places, that's
nice.
KA: It's a philosophy book in a sense isn't it?
IW: It is, but I
would like to think it is a practical philosophy book. It
is a philosophy book, but it's a way of applying that
philosophy in practice. It is meant to stimulate the idea
that there is no limit to how many ways we can apply the
principles in practice.
KA: You have moved into other areas, different ways of
looking at cases?
IW: Very much so.
To the extent that when I was revising the book recently
for the new edition, it was quite a challenge for me to
get myself back into the space that I was in eleven years
ago when I wrote the first edition, because I realised
that is not who I am any more. It is not what I do
anymore, and I suppose it is like any skill - there is a
time when you do it consciously and you are pretty much
working it out on the job. I am less inclined to think in
terms of strategy and analysis these days. I am more
inclined to work with whatever presents in a very
immediate way.
KA: Do you think that you might write another book based
on the work you are doing now, or are you still exploring
those ideas?
IW: I am still
exploring, but then I was exploring when I wrote that
book, so I would say that is possible. One thing that I
see that is a possibility, a kind of fancy I entertain,
would be to write a book which is not just for homeopaths
but which demonstrates how the principles of homeopathy
could be seen as principles for life, principles for
living. I could reach a wider audience that way. I
haven't found a way yet to communicate that effectively,
but maybe I will.
KA: It sounds a bit Taoist.
IW: Yes..a bit
Taoist! I am a bit Taoist.
KA: That is something that is influencing your work now
or has been for a long time?
IW: Has been for
a long time. Not only Taoism. I like Taoism and I always
go back to it because it is a philosophy based on
observation of nature, as I believe is any true healing
system. To me, it has to be rooted in phenomena that
naturally occur if you allow them to, but it makes
homeopathy seem like the new kid on the block. I see that
Taoism is a cosmology rather than a methodology.
Homeopathy is more in the realm of a methodology, an
application of a basic understanding of natural law,
whereas Taoism is much, much broader than that. I could
leave homeopathy behind, but I always go back to Taosim!
KA: What do you think about the classical homeopaths who
are interested in finding the 'core dilemma' or
disturbance in the patient, what Misha Norland calls the
'Holy Grail' of Homoeopathy or what Linda Johnson calls
their 'point of pain'. Do you think this is an ideal form
of homeopathy to aspire to or do you think it is just
another form of intent?
IW: I suspect it
is more idealistic than ideal, in the sense that it is
not that attainable all of the time or even most of the
time. I have heard people like Sankaran say, and even I
believe Linda in her interview says, that it is something
one aspires towards without ever really expecting that it
is going to be obtainable even in the majority of cases.
First of all, my interest has been in looking for those
things that can be simply taught to a large number of
people - that which will be effective for a majority,
rather than that which is specific to a few. The other
answer is my interest increasingly these days is that I
am looking more for the 'point of joy' than the 'point of
pain'. That is a fairly recent insight I have had into
the bias that homeopathy has towards suffering and
towards disease, and recognising that that is only one
side of the coin. My own interest as a healer, as an
educator now, is to see whether we can actually go beyond
that in homeopathy. Whether we can connect people
directly with their point of pleasure, with their point
of love.
KA: Do you think that we will all get the results that we
intend using our own individual methods?
IW: I think only
to some extent that is true. I have heard it said that we
all get the homoeopath we deserve! Maybe it is true, I
don't know. I think it is important for homoeopaths to
recognise what is behind
their practice.
What I mean by that is: what do they bring of themselves?
This is an area of personal self-exploration worth going
into. I feel that what makes a powerful healer is someone
who has a powerful healing intention in general. What I
mean by in general, is that they don't claim to know
necessarily what that person needs, and this is an area
where I think homoeopaths get into trouble - that we
think we know what kind of healing a person may need at
that particular time. I know that I have done that and
come unstuck many times. But I think we can have a
general desire to bring about the highest outcome. In the
same way that we can have a genuine desire to be of
service and to give of our best. I think this certainly
colours, in a positive way, the interactions we have.
Beyond that, I think we have to recognise that healing is
not within our hands, just as life and death is not
within our hands. The moment that we start to think it is
- that's what I see causes problems, and that is when the
fears come in. If we think that we are responsible for
whether someone not only gets well or doesn't, but if we
think that we are personally responsible for whether they
live or die, then we don't sleep so well at night. Then
we feel we have to be insured in case something 'bad'
happens that we hadn't intended. Then we need to protect
ourselves against possible horrible outcomes. At that
moment I feel we cease to be good healers. We have ceased
to be active healers, because we are now operating from a
place of fear. We are allowing our own fears to get in
the way of being of true service. So for me it is
important that we operate from a place of trust, that is
more important than what we intend, that we trust that
ultimately life heals itself and that we are all on a
self-healing journey, and also we trust that death is
part of life.
We see a very small snapshot of a person's life and
sometimes we draw a big conclusion on the basis of that.
I feel that we have to learn increasingly to be humble
enough to say, well, actually we don't know the truth of
this. The fact that the person went to hospital doesn't
necessarily mean what we think it means. Maybe they
needed to take some time out in hospital!
KA: That goes back to what you were saying about process,
knowing where you are with the person you are working
with.
IW: Yes, and
knowing the limits and boundaries of what you can do at
any time. Of course, you don't know what they are until
you reach them, its paradoxical. If you find yourself in
a situation that brings up a lot of fear then it is
showing you, in some ways, the area for your own healing,
it's like your own growth potential is being revealed in
that interaction. That is one of the beauties of working
with other people, that we get to self-heal at the same
time.
KA: Do you see homeopathy then as being a holistic form
of medicine which it is traditionally thought of?
IW: No I don't. I
believe that it aspires to be, but I don't believe that
it is in its present form. Because a system of healing
has to embrace all of life to be holistic, and it needs
to include things like an awareness of what kind of diet
is healthy, what kind of lifestyle is healthy, and
although Hahnemann alluded to these things in the
Organon, very few practitioners I know embrace that
within their practice to what I would see as its fullest
potential. We should have appropriate exercise
programmes, and perhaps spiritual disciplines sometimes
when it is needed, counselling may be needed. I am not
saying that the homeopath needs to provide all these
things, but we should have a broad enough vision to
recognise that they are a part of healing too. I think
sometimes I, as a homeopath, have fallen into being more
of a pill-pusher.
One of the things
that worries me about the Holy Grail approach to
homeopathy is that sometimes it gives too much emphasis
to finding the remedy, as if finding the remedy is
everything. I actually believe it is one small piece of a
big jigsaw that is that person's life. There is also the
interaction that happens between the practitioner and
patient, there is also the life that the person leads
when they are not in that one hour consultation once a
month or whenever it is. To me, a holistic therapy has to
embrace all of those things.
KA: Perhaps the homeopath is a pointer to other things?
IW: Hopefully. I
think for a lot of people homeopathy is a doorway and
it's a doorway into the world of energy and energy
healing, and it can be a doorway into the world of
increased self-responsibility for your own health and
that of your family. So I think that homeopathy is
tremendously needed right now. Because people reach the
limits of what allopathic medicine can do, they need a
doorway, they need to be able to go somewhere else.
Sometimes we go into the room called 'homeopathy' and we
think that is it. For me that hasn't been it. It has been
a stepping stone to other things, and I recognise it as
that for people that I have worked with as patients. It
has been true of them too. Homeopathy was something that
they needed for a while to get them to a certain point,
then they needed to be able to let go of that also. I
think that is part of the development of homeopathy as a
healing art, to recognise its part in the larger scheme
of healing. I think sometimes homeopaths are a bit too
attached to the idea that homeopathy has a monopoly on
healing, which I simply don't believe. There are so many
diverse ways of healing and I don't see the evidence that
homeopathy does it all the time for everyone.
KA: Do you think that the Lakeland College is like a
stepping stone for people to go in their own
direction?
IW: It has as one
of its aims the idea that if we allow the space and give
the support and encouragement, then people will find
their own way. To me one of the cornerstones of
homeopathy is individualisation. I feel, in some ways,
that it is even more important than the law of similars.
I see that a lot of times in homeopathy we adhere to
individualisation in our case work but we don't look at
that possibility in terms of our education. We tend to
train people in very much standardised ways. I feel
everybody has some inherent gift and that the task, as
educators or as a college, is not to just impart a
specific body of knowledge, which is then passed on from
one generation to the next. The task is to make the
knowledge available and at the same time facilitate the
internal development of the practitioner, such that they
get in touch with what I would call their own 'inner
healer', then they can tap the knowledge in their own
way. The aim is to be non-dogmatic and to allow people
the freedom to practice in the way that actually suits
them, that fits them.
I know from my own experience that I learned from some
great teachers, but after a while I realised some of the
things that I learned were like a badly fitting jacket,
they did not actually fit me, they fitted the person who
taught me. Then I had to cast that off and find a way
that suited me. Some people say, well, that is a
necessary part of the process of becoming a practitioner,
but I question that. Maybe it wasn't necessary to take it
all on in the first place. I am not convinced that the
way I was trained and my trainers were trained is
therefore the best way.
KA: You have different opinions from Hahnemann on certain
points of homeopathic philosophy, which parts of the
philosophy do you question?
IW: First of all
there is very little in Hahnemann I disagree with, very
little, hardly any in fact. I'll give an analogy. I have
studied a lot of the new physics, this interests me
greatly, quantum mechanics, relativity theory. What the
physicists came to recognise from the 1920s and 30s was
not that Newton was wrong, but that Newton's world view
was limited and that what he did within that worldview
was fantastic, but it was still a limited worldview that
only allowed for certain possibilities and did not hold
true in every circumstance. I suppose that is how I feel
about Hahnemann's teaching now. What he did, within the
times that he was born and grew up and lived and
practiced was fantastic, and was limited. I aim to
extend, I suppose, without throwing out any of what
Hahnemann said, I believe we can build on it and we can
extend it into areas where he couldn't have taken it,
simply because he is not around now, he was around then.
I feel, as consciousness evolves, homeopathy needs to
evolve also, so to give some examples, concrete examples:
Hahnemann, it seems to me, emphasised the side of
homeopathy that involves gathering data, clinical
observation, making careful notes of symptomotology,
matching that to a remedy picture. Now we know that
works, just as we know what Newton described in terms of
the movement of the planets works but, nonetheless, I
feel there are other ways of working which we have
developed through, for example, areas like psychology,
from the contributions of Jung and Freud and people like
this. We recognise the value of the interaction now
between practitioner and patient in ways that Hahnemann,
I don't think, could have known about. I look to
emphasise this as well without detracting from what
Hahnemann said. This to me is an area we could be
emphasising more now, and a lot of homeopaths are.
Similarly, he emphasises the removal of suffering which,
yes, it is a fantastic thing, there is plenty of
suffering in the world, but I also see that if you stop
at the removal of suffering in some ways it leaves a
void, and I feel there is also an opportunity for helping
people to develop their potential. That is an area that I
found, using only with the tools of homeopathy, I lacked
the ability to work in. He also advocated similars. This
might be a controversial example, but he seemed to have
the idea that he had found 'the' law of healing, but
according to Taoism every coin has two sides. So if there
is a law of healing that is based on similars there must
also be a law of healing based on opposites. Hahnemann
chose to look at the paths which he called antipathic
medicine and allopathic medicine, which he said were
detrimental, but there are other systems based on
opposites which are very gentle and work very well, like
flower essences for example. I do not feel it is any
discredit to Hahnemann if we take what he gave us and try
and extend it.
KA: What do you think about getting the balance between
the intuitive and academic in homoeopathic education?
Homeopaths, especially ones who had a very academic
training, it seems, want other people to have to go
through what they went through.
IW: Yes, I think
to some extent that is true. Although it is interesting
how many people in homeopathic education now actually had
trainings which were probably apprentice style, for want
of a better term. Many people who are in the key
positions did not actually go through that kind of
training. I certainly wonder about it. I know from my own
experience that for me the most potent healers I have met
have not been academics, so I start from that point. What
makes someone a good healer? What makes someone an
effective healer is actually being true to who they are.
They are centred in who they are and in what they do. I
have met some very interesting healers working in diverse
ways and, whether or not they use a therapy like
homeopathy, to me the ones who were the most potent, were
the ones who had a clear sense of self, first of all.
They had a sense of who they were, they had a love for
humanity, they were open-hearted, they had a desire to be
of service, they had a compassionate heart and a loving
presence, a healing presence, which was something they
had cultivated through their own life experience, not
usually through an academic training.
So whilst I can see that homeopathy requires that we take
on board a certain body of knowledge, I feel that if the
cost of that is that we don't also develop as human
beings and as healers in a deeper sense, then I feel that
the cost is too high, that something is also lost. I see
the evidence of this in the fact that a lot of people do
a very thorough training and yet, at the end of four or
five years hard study, they are still left with the
feeling of not-quite-readiness. That says to me that the
training is unbalanced. It is not that the academic
should not be there, but it needs to be balanced with
something else, with internal work as well.
Just a couple of weeks ago I had the experience of a
student who I didn't know from another college talking to
me. She was in her third year I think, and she thought
her college was great and the tutors were great, but she
expressed how difficult homeopathy was. I said 'really,
what's so difficult about it?' She said that even the
tutors who were good at it, who were teaching it, told
you that the four years training will get you to a point
were you are ready to start, but really it takes at least
30 years to be any good at it! I kind of raised my
eyebrows at this and said 'do you believe that is true?'
She said 'well, I don't have anything else to go on, so I
suppose I have to believe it, if that is what my teachers
are telling me.' This I think is a popular idea in
homeopathy. It has become associated with a long and
arduous struggle, with extended periods of poverty and
deprivation, loss of your friends, and so on and so on!
The fact that it has become that way doesn't necessarily
mean it has to be that way.
I think that if I could make a comparison with what
happened in the psychotherapy world when NLP came along,
it wasn't unusual for someone to go into therapy for five
years, or analysis for ten years, that became the norm,
so everybody says that is how it has to be. Then when
people developed NLP techniques, they realised that what
some people were spending three years to do, they could
do in five minutes, effectively. So I say if that is
possible in one area, then it is possible in another, so
I question that. To me, something that takes as long as
thirty years to get any good at - basically, if we adhere
to that idea, we have built in our own obsolescence.
Homeopathy as a system of healing is probably not going
to offer much to the majority of the world's population
on that basis. I feel it needs to be much more accessible
than that, and it could be much easier.
KA: You place quite a lot of emphasis on the internal
work. How do you think that is best acquired or
learned?
IW: Again, I
don't know. It is work in progress, so I really wouldn't
claim to have found anything like the best way. I feel
like we are fumbling beginners at that. It is kind of a
novel idea within homeopathic education but, I suppose, I
am becoming aware that what needs to be built into any
training is a recognition of the need for development of
self-awareness on the part of the students. It needs to
be gentle, and it needs to be supportive. I feel in many
ways it mirrors what a good healer will do in practice,
which is to do with creating a safe environment; creating
a supportive relationship with the patient they are
working with; encouraging increased self-responsibility
and self-reflection; being as non-judgmental as possible;
not imposing any particular agenda. These are things we
have to do with our patients and I feel that as educators
these are the things that we should be modelling to our
students.
Another of the problems I see with the academic approach
is that it emphasises the content over the process. I
feel that needs to be balanced. Healing essentially is a
process, and I think there is no amount of 'content' that
can necessarily get you to a place where you become a
process facilitator. You become effective as a
facilitator through going through your own process, and
then sharing that process with other people. So this is
an area where I would like to see more of a balance. If
we take out some of the content, make it less rigorous
academically but the students' process, their
self-discovery journey is given more emphasis and more
space - if you do that, it seems to speed things up.
KA: That makes sense. In a time when things are being
seen to be speeding up generally, when we are told that
24 hours in the day now is equivalent to 16.
IW: We are on
internet time now, everything is 7 times faster or
something!
KA: Going on from there to your idea of intuition and
that it is a fast way of accessing information which
years of book study may not match up to?
IW: They may or
may not get you to that place. I agree, and again I would
like to see a balance, because I don't think we need to
throw out the analytical side of homeopathy. But it
concerns me when I see and hear well-respected homeopaths
saying, and I think I could quote Peter Chappell from a
recent article - although I have plenty of respect for
the work Peter is doing - he says he can't see how any
homeopath can function effectively in the future who
doesn't use a computer. He is not alone in that opinion,
but that concerns me because to me that is like saying
that no-one is going to be able to communicate in the
future who doesn't have internet access. That is not
true. It is a tool only, and if we mistake the tool for
the process of healing then I think that is a
misperception.
I would like to see homeopathy available to anyone who
wants to learn it whether or not they are computer
literate or even want to be. We should be able to teach
it in ways that simple people can pick up and understand.
They learn it today and they use it tomorrow. That to me
is the potential that homeopathy has, that it could
really reach the grassroots of humanity en masse, not
just a few well-off people working in offices with
electricity supplies.
KA: How do you see that happening, how could that be
organised, to bring it to so many people?
IW: Ironically
enough, Peter is someone who is doing good work in that
area. He is taking homeopathy through his projects to
places like Venezuela and Eastern Europe and so on, and I
support what he is doing. I feel that first of all we
have to let go of the idea that it is an expert-dependent
system of healing. I think there is still an idea, that
is widely believed within the homeopathic profession,
that we somehow need to hold on to the knowledge and that
people will harm themselves or each other using the tools
of homoeopathy, and I really don't believe that is true.
There is a long tradition in homeopathy of home
prescribing, many people have kits that they use in their
homes with very scanty indications. That is how I
started. My experience was that it wasn't damaging, it
wasn't harmful, on the contrary it was helpful. That is
the area I would like to promote.
I remember Robin Murphy saying that the highest form of
homeopathy is first-aid. It took me a long time to
understand that, and now I understand it I see the wisdom
in that. It is not only the highest because it is the
easiest to learn and reproduce, it is also the most
prophylactic. How many times do we hear of a chronic
ailment that dates back to a first-aid acute situation.
If only those people had known about Ignatia
in their home,
they would never have had to consult that professional
later.
I would like to
see Arnica
on ambulances.
Local to me we have mountain rescue teams, one or two of
which are using remedies now, and they all should be
using remedies. Homeopathy is economical enough that we
could do this. The potencies we have already are so cheap
to reproduce, we could even teach people how to reproduce
it themselves, but I think the desire to hold on to it
and to be experts is a tempting thing. I think we need to
be willing to give it away more, otherwise it works
against our bigger aims. Our bigger aim is for homeopathy
to be accessible to everyone, yet we are setting it up in
such a way that this is going to become impossible,
because we make it computer-dependent, and we make it
long and arduous and difficult.
KA: You were
interested in healing from a young age, what
circumstances brought that out in you, what early
formative experiences led you to this work?
IW: I suppose a
combination of my own life traumas as a teenage
adolescent which led me on a path trying to find some
deeper meaning to my life, and a simple interest in that
area. It is very hard for me to say where that came from
because I didn't grow up in a family of healers or
doctors particularly. I had a grandmother who had an
interest in things herbal and so on, but from age 15 - 16
onwards I was reading books on alternative healing. I had
a set of Bach Flower remedies when I was 16 and I was
exploring herbal remedies before I got into homeopathy.
The interest was there and I suppose I gave myself the
freedom to follow it. I was pretty bored with what was
happening at school and so I spent my time reading the
things that interested me. My parents gave me something
special - what they gave me was the freedom to do
that. They didn't push me down a career path or something
that didn't really fit me, and for that I am really
grateful. I was left to find my own way and I am very
happy with that.
KA: You are a very reassuring and encouraging teacher,
and your students gain a great confidence to practice -
is this an important part of the training at The Lakeland
College?
IW: I suppose the
Lakeland college does reflect that to a large extent, but
like any other place some students are more confident
than others, just as some people are more confident than
others. There is a certain level of confidence that we
get from knowledge and skills and this is the level that
is available from any homeopathic training. You learn how
to take a case, how to analyse, how to find a remedy.
There is a level of confidence that comes just through
familiarity of doing that enough times, but I feel that
it only takes you so far. When you are challenged with
difficult life situations, potentially death situations
as well, that doesn't always carry you through. Sometimes
you open the book and what you want to find isn't there,
that wonderful keynote symptom - it's not there! These
things can shatter confidence quite quickly, that gap
between how you thought it was going to be and how you
found it. So I have learned there is a deeper kind of
self-confidence that comes from another place.
The simplest way I can relate it is to say that it comes
from being yourself. There is a time when you can take on
other peoples ways of doing things, and there is also a
time when you need to let go of that. Your deeper
confidence comes from your willingness to let go of what
you learned and just be yourself. It goes back to
individualisation. If I am encouraging, what I hope to
encourage is not that people become clones of what I do,
it is that they become more of who they are. Then they do
what they would do naturally. I am not invested in what
they might be. Occasionally it appears to people that I
am doing things that might be risky or strange or
esoteric, but I am just doing what comes naturally. If
you follow your interest then you have the enthusiasm for
the subject, you will always be willing to learn, it is
not an effort. You will also have the passion to share it
with other people and encourage them.
KA: You have brought many ideas across into homeopathy
from other traditions such as traditional Chinese
medicine, yoga, astrology, and the Yacqui Indian
tradition. Does this make your practice and teaching of
homeopathy more colourful, does it keep you
inspired?
IW: Yes. It is certainly more interesting to me than
anatomy, physiology and pathology! Again, I suppose what
intrigues me is how much energy people put into studying
things that fundamentally don't interest them, and I
wonder why they do that. That doesn't make much sense to
me, and not only does it make it more colourful it makes
it more real for me, because homeopathy as a system of
energy healing, I feel, needs to root itself in an
understanding of energy. Which means an understanding of
the basis of all of life. So the places where I look to
understand homeopathy are the traditions that have
developed an understanding of all of life. To me,
homeopathic philosophy really starts with understanding
things like the energetic basis of matter, the
inter-connectedness of all things, the sacredness and
divinity of all things, the fact that nothing is apart in
nature, that everything is part of a greater whole. This,
to me, is real philosophy. It is a philosophy that is
shared by every ancient and mystical tradition on the
planet, and I feel that in order to root homeopathy in
something really solid we have to dig much deeper than
what we traditionally call 'homeopathic philosophy'.
KA: You like
collecting maps of consciousness, are there any you are
working on at the moment?
IW: Well, no! I
am going over familiar ground. There is nothing
particularly new I am studying. I am still studying what
the ancient Chinese wrote about healing, I am still
looking at traditions like Taoism, in particular. I also
like the Zen tradition. I think Zen has a lot in common
with homeopathy. I like the minimalism of Zen, how it has
the ability to condense a lot into very little.
KA: Can you give some examples?
IW: One of the
things I like in the Zen philosophy is the idea that
everything is okay as it is. Everything remains okay as
long as we don't add
anything to that
okayness. What I have noticed is that at homeopathy
school we learn lots of things, but we also
add
lots of things.
To me, the power of homeopathic philosophy is that it is
very simple. We add things that then make it complex, and
one of the things I learnt from the Zen tradition is that
they teach very little, what they do is
take
away.
You get rapped on the knuckles every time you have added
something that should not be there. Which means that the
training is a training of letting go. It is a training of
getting rid of the excess baggage so that you are free,
free to be awake to the moment and to spontaneously
respond to whatever presents itself. For some of the Zen
masters this was a matter of life or death - the Samurai,
they based their whole life on that. For us it is a
little bit more mundane but the principle is the same. If
we want to be free as practitioners, then we have to be
free of the limited ideas that come from the past that we
now impose on the present.
KA: Do you think
in that case the setting of the classroom is not
necessarily appropriate, perhaps a walk around the park
would be better?
IW: Yes, very
much so, and similarly the setting of a consulting room
is also something of a false construct, and to me it
always feels like a compromise going into a classroom
setting. Often it does not feel like the place that is an
ideal environment for learning.
KA: You do a lot of travelling and teaching. Do you see
these as opportunities for a different kind of healing to
running a private practice?
IW: Yes, and a
lot of the healing I do these days is healing homeopaths.
I have the privilege of being often invited to work with
a group of homeopaths, maybe for a day or maybe for a
weekend - something like that. In that space I feel that
the work I am doing is not that different from the work I
would do in a consultation. I go into a situation, I meet
a new group or sometimes it is a group I have met before
- in which case it is a follow up - and I assess where
the group is at that time, and I respond accordingly. I
don't tend to go with a set agenda as to what I am going
to teach, so I am very much responding to whatever comes
up. My hope is that we can explore, go into something
together that results in an expansion, an increased sense
of awareness and potentially some healing.
Some of the feedback I get suggests that happens. People
write to me or ring me up occasionally and say, you know
there is something you said on that day, that we did two
years ago, and since then I haven't worried about that in
my practice. That is healing as far as I can see, some
healing happened in that moment. The person was able to
let go of a fear that had limited them. So that is one of
the ways I am doing healing in disguise, I like to think
in terms of the ripples that come from that. If I have
enabled one practitioner to be a little more effective
and a little less anxious, less limited in what they
allow themselves to do with their patients, I have no
idea how busy their practice is, but think how many
people that has reached potentially. So I have learned
not to worry about the numbers side. Again, as long as I
do what I feel is right for me then healing results will
come from that.
KA: You produce many tapes for homeopathic students and
homeopaths. Can you talk a little bit about these?
IW: Yes. I
suppose the tapes are simply a way of putting out some of
the things that I am exploring to a wider number of
people that I would not otherwise reach. What is nice
about the tapes is that it allows me to move on fast
without feeling I have to keep on saying the same thing
over and over again.
KA: You have developed a number of diagnostic tools for
homoeopaths, which of these do you most like working
with?
IW:
Self-awareness. I feel it is the key to case taking and
working with patients. What I mean by that is simply
noticing what happens in my own energy body, and where it
happens, when I am interacting with someone else, and
becoming conscious of that to the point where it becomes
useful information. I feel that on one level it is the
simplest thing I have learned, but there is also no end
to the depth of it. There are levels of subtlety in that,
and I feel that everybody has that inherently - the
capacity for increased sensitivity and self-awareness
which enables us to go deeper with our clients.
KA: Something that you have said is that you are just
teaching people what they already know.
IW: Sometimes
just to uncover - that is, to let go of the things you
have learned and to uncover what was naturally there - is
often all that is needed. I have seen so many people come
into homoeopathy and they have a natural flair for it and
a natural sense of what was going on, and after three
years of training they have lost that and they don't
trust it anymore. That distresses me greatly and so my
goal then is not to teach that person anything new, but
just to encourage them to a place where they are willing
to let go of those things that they have taken on so that
they can restore what was already there, and they can
trust it again.
KA: In a seminar you gave entitled The Inner Game of
Homoeopathy you talk about ideas popping
into your mind and about knowing something bodily just at
the point when you need it in a consultation.
IW: Yes, and I
think that is a product of simply being in tune with the
moment. If you are in tune with the moment, what you need
will come to you. I choose to believe that. I can't prove
it to anyone other than to say try it for yourself, just
try it and trust. I feel that if you trust what comes, a
cycle develops - the more you trust it the more it comes.
The problem I see is that a lot of people have the gut
feeling and then they override it, often because they
feel they have to justify it to somebody. To me, the only
justification is, does it help you in your work with your
clients? If it does, then it doesn't matter if you can
explain it to me or not.
KA: I think that you have said that you do not need to
work out how you are going to get somewhere - you should
just trust.
IW: Yes. I
learned a lot from studying R.D. Laing's work, the
Scottish psychiatrist. He had the therapeutic idea that
if someone has been in prison for twenty years and the
door happens to be open, it is not necessarily that
effective to spend a lot of time working out how they got
in there. I see a lot of that in homeopathic case taking,
a lot of time is spent dwelling on how you got to this
point in your life - as opposed to - you are here
now, where would you like to
go? That is the difference
between the point of pain and the point of joy. So where
do you want to put that emphasis? I would rather say,
where do you want to go from today? All things are
possible, and what is done is done, but you are here now.
Where shall we go together today? And it may not take
that long.
KA: How do your spiritual ideas fit in with your practice
of homoeopathy?
IW: I suppose I
am working on it. I am healing the split in my own life
such that I don't believe that there is any separation
between what I believe to be true about the nature of
life and the universe and how that reflects in my work as
a healer - to me it is the same. Ultimately, all healing
is spiritual healing because nothing is not spiritual. I
agree with, I think it was Wayne Dyer who said, that we
are spiritual beings having a human experience, not the
other way round.
KA: So in a sense spirit-centred work is the focus more
than person-centred work?
IW: Rather than ego-centred, yes. If we focus on the ego
then we focus again on the pain and we focus on the
suffering and we focus on what is wrong - the problems.
If we focus on the spirit,
then we focus on what is okay, so we can move towards
that place within us that already knows that we are
healed. That we are healed already.
KA: Thank you.
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This
interview first appeared in
The Homeopath,
journal of the Society of Homeopaths, in 2000.
Information on the SOH can be found
here.
Ian was co-founder of The Lakeland College in 1993, and a
director until 2003. More information on The Lakeland
College can be found
here.