FINDING ENERGY AT THE DEEPEST LEVELS: A Journey to India By Douglas Brown, CCH, FNP, RSHom (NA)
Summary: Homeopaths from around the world gathered in Bombay in
January 2004 to improve understanding and technique in gaining access
to the deepest core of patient experience.
A huge auditorium is packed with over a thousand homeopaths, most
of them young physicians. There is a buzz of excitement as members
of the audience find themselves greeting colleagues from every continent.
The proceedings begin with an address to the crowd by a prominent
allopathic pediatrician, who is also the father of a leading homeopath,
Sunil Anand. He urges the assembled crowd to "hold your heads
high, as homeopathy has unique gifts to bring to the world of suffering
humanity".
I am in Bombay (Mumbai), India, on a sultry January day. The warm
wind of the Arabian Sea spreads the scents of cumin and coriander
through the dusty streets, filled with shoeless children, street-corner
vendors, and countless hungry faces with outstretched hands and
offers of some kind of trade. The taxi ride to the hospital conference
room seemed tame compared to the midnight ride from the airport
the previous night, when I was treated to a stomach-raising display
of the post-Newtonian idea that two particles of matter can indeed
seem to occupy the same space at the same time. And I relish the
incredible non-Western reality of a crowded auditorium holding over
a thousand committed homeopaths, although my enthusiasm is dampened
a bit when the line for tea at morning break reminded me of my childhood
sardine can commutes to high school in the New York City subways!
What brought me to India? Why do homeopaths from all over the world
travel to Bombay yearly to learn from Rajan Sankaran, Divya Chhabra,
and their colleagues?
Once you have tasted the success of a good homeopathic prescription,
your appetite is whetted. We all want to improve our success rate,
to share with every patient who walks into our consulting room the
joy of a successful treatment. We need to achieve greater consistency
in our work, so that every patient is helped deeply, gently, and
permanently. The discoveries and ideas of the "Bombay Group"
have helped many of us achieve greater consistency and accuracy
in our prescribing.
Last year Sankaran emphasized the multiplicity of levels of experience.
He delineates seven levels, each one deeper than the one before.
When we become aware of what level the patient is describing her
experience, we can more consciously direct our inquiry towards a
deeper level, which will lead to a more accurate perception of the
issues and a more curative prescription.
What are the seven levels? The first level refers to "Name",
as in the name of the disease. A patient may say they suffer from
asthma, from fibromyalgia, from adenocarcinoma, or from depression.
This is the most superficial level, and of course the level at which
allopathy bases its prescriptions.
The second level is "fact". This refers to particular
modifiers such as modalities and concomitants. When a patient says
his headache is worse upon waking in the morning, or that she experiences
vertigo when she looks up, or that she experiences diarrhea with
a skin eruption, we know we have begun our homeopathic journey of
individualizing the case.
The third level is "feeling". Because of the predominance
of emotional disease in Western societies, popular interest in psychology,
and the appeal of the idea of remedy "essences", many
homeopaths have become very focused on the emotional make-up of
their patients. The drawback of this approach is that one can get
drawn into the human story of the patient's
life, and miss what is both peculiar and related to the chief complaint
of the patient. More on this later; first we must discover the deeper
levels!
Beneath feelings there is a world of imagination, a world "as
if". Sankaran and colleagues use the term "delusion",
but we must remember that this word does not carry the psychiatric
connotations in India that it has in the West. In India, steeped
in Hindu cosmology. it is understood that we all live in a world
of Maya, or delusion. Divya Chabbra has gone furthest in illustrating
that each of our illnesses is accompanied by an associated delusional
world, which can be elicited through techniques of free association.
This, in turn, can help us make far more precise choices in remedy
selection.
But, Sankaran asserts, we must travel even further to achieve consistently
accurate results. Beneath delusion, at level 5, there exists a realm
of sensation. This level is the realm of pure sensory experience.
It is a realm where physical and mental symptoms can be expressed
in the same language. An example might be "shock", "trauma",
or "heavy". Sensation is "deeper" than both
the emotional and physical symptoms that share it as a source, and
is difficult to express in words. This is because, as we shall discuss
later, sensation derives from a nonhuman source, a realm that does
not naturally make itself known through human language.
Let's back up to level 3, the dimension of feeling and emotion.
What is the problem with basing a prescription on the human story
of the patient? After all, haven't we had success in prescribing
Ignatia for disappointed love? Or with Lycopodium for Ailments from
deception?
Prescriptions don't work when we base them on the human story —
with all of its emotions — because remedies come from a nonhuman
realm. "Hardly a tree will give a history of disappointed love;
hardly a giraffe will be interested in Superman movies," quipped
Sankaran. "But plants have to be sensitive; animals have to
fight for survival, and minerals have to keep their structure."
Perhaps the most beautiful part of Sankaran's talks concerned this
description of the two songs that each of us is singing: a human
song, and the nonhuman song of the remedy-source which shapes the
way we experience our lives.
What is beneath sensation? Level 6 is pure energy, which can be
represented by movement, sound, or color. The energy of the case
is often given by the hand gestures of the patient. Built upon this
foundation of energy is a world of sensation, and upon this is built
the edifice of delusion, feeling, fact, and name. When we take the
case to the deepest levels we will perceive the nonhuman song of
the patient, trace it to its nonhuman source in the realm of minerals,
plants, or animals. Then, when we treat the patient, we will allow
the patient's human voice to sing out loudly: it will no longer
be drowned out by the nonhuman state which has taken our patient
as its vehicle for expression.
It's difficult to summarize the depth, complexity, and subtlety
of the praxis of this understanding, but I'd like to give as an
example a case of mine that I would never have solved without this
approach.
Betty is a 57 year-old woman whose chief complaint was hyperacusis
(painfully sensitive hearing) and tinnitus (ringing in the ears)
(Level I: Name). It's worse with noises that go "on and on,
like the refrigerator" (Level II: Fact). It makes her very
irritable (Level 3: Emotion). She experiences the sounds as "noises
penetrating my consciousness...They get in on you" (Level 4-5:
Delusion and Sensation). At this point she makes a hand gesture
indicating a tightening, constricting, and asks "How do you
block it out?" This points to the energy of the case (Level
6). She says she is weary, weighed down, from noise, and goes on
to describe noises as "intrusions that want your attention.
I don't want to give it to them. I want to concentrate without that
bother, the distraction."
Betty related the following dream: "I'm in a war zone, in a
house with a big picture window. Somebody came to the door, and
asked me to spell a certain word. I'm a terrible speller. If I didn't
spell it right they would shoot me; they could shoot me right through
the window."
Betty's problem has to do with a specific kind of sensitivity, pointing
towards the plant kingdom. It is clear a plant remedy was needed
because without her sensitivity to noise she would be completely
fine: her sensitivity was the entire problem. Her dream gives us
a graphic picture of her delusion (level 4), which is that her walls
are incomplete. Her sensation is one of tightening, constriction,
precipitated by an intrusion into her space. It is the experience
at the level of sensation which guides us to the indicated plant
family, Cactacea, which has running throughout all the remedies
within it the sensation of trapped, constricted, and contracted.
Her particular remedy, Opuntia vulgaris, was found after a careful
miasmatic analysis of her case (beyond the scope of this article),
and the discovery of the following symptom from the proving of Opuntia
by Allen:
"Omits the first letter of a word in writing, transposes the
fist and second letters, writing the second first and the first
second"
She first received Opuntia in early March 2004, and has had a steady
decrease in her symptoms. She says, "I just feel better. I
don't hurt, and feel lighter." She no longer feels like she
needs a wall around her. She related a dream: Three people embracing.
When asked for the feeling in the dream she flashed a big smile,
and replied, "Joy".
In the past year I have enjoyed integrating my learning from India
into my practice, and my patients have continued to be my greatest
teachers. But I think that every January I will remember the scent
of coriander, the taste of dhosas, and the sensation of being one
homeopath in an audience of over a thousand....
Doug Brown, CCH, FNP, RSHom is a graduate of Yale University School
of Nursing and the Hahnemann College of Homeopathy. He became a homeopath
when after 11 years of working with conventional medicine as a Family
Nurse Practitioner he remained dissatisfied with its failure to cure
chronic disease and with its fragmentation of care. He treats children
and adults in Portland, OR, and Walla Walla, WA, and can be reached
at (503) 253-6334, or by email at remedyman@comcast.net.
