One of the most central principles to Heilkunst is that of resonance, which is what is behind the way medicines are applied, as well as lifestyle and diet suggestions. We resonate to certain things based on typological factors (eg. everyone who is a ‘thyroid body type’ will resonate with the same balancing diet), but the healthier we become, the more we resonate to things based on our unique individuality. Art and music are good vehicles for identifying where our resonance lights up the most, and are good points of exploration for therapeutic purposes.

My favourite personal discovery over the past few months is in the recently implemented business models of music subscription services, which work very differently from the long-standing music business model of purchasing songs or albums to own and keep indefinitely. Subscription models, on the other hand, work more like a ‘rental’ model, where a low monthly subscription fee gives the subscriber full access to enormous libraries of music to stream ‘on demand’, but which are not ‘owned’ in the traditional sense of a copy of the file remaining on one’s computer or music device.

Although I’m a long time fan of enjoying music which I have bought and collected in my own personal library of CDs, albums, and cassettes, my experience with this new subscription model has opened up my relationship to music in ways that have been completely surprising to me.

With increasingly popular services such as Spotify, or Rdio for Canadians, it’s not only the old business model of buying and selling music that has been reinvented, but the special relationship of the consumer to the music is completely turned on its head now — speaking from my own experience, the spirit of exploring music has been entirely re-kindled within myself, and the joy of discovery is now unhindered by any of the old barriers and limitations implicit in the model of ownership and permanence. I can choose to sample anything once, and quickly discard all that is not resonant to my current taste.

I go back now to listen to some of my old playlists from my permanent personal collection, and they feel so old and “museum-ified” in an eternally frozen state. Such old points of reference seem to serve to reinforce old habits of ego-identification with what has been, rather than what is becoming within me. With this new subscription model, I can let go of these old ego-identifications, and instead participate everything in the moment through resonance, and an open scientific attitude of making fresh observations about the music, and about my inner responses to it.

Also, there is a powerful therapeutic potential in terms of the time line work that we do with patients, in terms of re-creating the “soundtrack” of our lives with the music that we listened to in a certain era of our lives, in order to re-capture the feeling from that time to be processed and healed. Likewise, if a patient is talking about their favourite music (now, or in the past), I can instantly call it up to understand its feeling for myself, and to understand the patient better.

There are many powerful aspects to creating or consuming music, and now we are being given an opportunity to access as much of its potential as possible. Which playlist would you create first?

The inherited aspect of disease is key to Heilkunst treatment, through the systematic elimination of the diseases we call “the chronic miasms”. Each miasm will be related to a particular aspect of the family health history, such as to heart disease, cancer, or allergies, and so on. Each miasm will be related to a range of these physical symptoms in the family health history, as well as to a fundamental feeling and state of mind unique to each one. In fact, the true method of “preventative” medicine relates to treating these diseases while they are primarily still in the form of a state of mind and feeling, and long before it may have devolved into physical symptoms.

The acute phase of each miasm will also have a certain seasonal aspect, related to a certain segment of the calendar year. The ringworm miasm starts to become more prominent around this time of year, roughly starting on Feb. 2^nd, or “Groundhog Day”. By the nature of artistic genius and expression, it so happens that the feeling and state of mind portrayed in the Bill Murray film of the same name precisely captures the feeling and theme of the Ringworm miasm (but with humorous overtones laid on top).

If you have not seen this movie yet, it is certainly worth treating yourself to a viewing of this classic romantic comedy. Or, as with all rich works of art, subsequent viewings often continue to pay off with meaning and perspectives you hadn’t yet seen. Reflecting on the state of mind of Ringworm will add a whole new dimension to it.

Without giving too much of the movie away, its central idea is set in an alternate reality, where the main character discovers himself trapped in a small town re-living the exact same day over and over and over (and over and over and over). He is the only one in the town who realizes this predicament, and therefore the only one who feels trapped, and desperately so.

He alternates between scenes of having greater hope, and attempting to find a way out, and other times of completely giving up hope and wallowing in his own misery and depression, even to the point of suicide (which does not even release him, as he keeps waking up the next morning to relive the same day yet again).

This is the feeling in the Ringworm miasm — phases of hope and attempting to move forward, but always to come against the same old issues again and again, and ultimately to give up. It matches with the folklore around Groundhog Day, where the long winter days of cold and darkness can go either way — 6 more weeks of drudgery, or an early Spring possibly right around the corner, if the groundhog doesn’t retreat from the sight of his own shadow.

It is very rewarding to be able to witness patients “break out” of any number of long-standing issues which they have felt trapped in for a long time, and to discover new life and a fresh path forward for themselves.

Which way will your Groundhog Day point you this year?

The multi-billion dollar profits of the pharmaceutical industry are one of the main forces which keeps this old diagnostic system alive — without such officially recognized diagnostic labels, the pharmaceutical companies would have no legal justification to develop or market any drugs, as they can only be approved in relationship to a recognized condition label. This is why, for example, there has been such a strong lobbying effort by the pharmaceutical industry to have a new diagnostic label created for “female sexual dysfunction”, so that they can tap into a new profit centre, and not necessarily because they have a viable treatment in the works.

The problem with such generic diagnostic labels, is that they have, at best, a superficial relationship to the underlying disease process which is causing such symptoms in the first place. Generic labels can only lead to generic solutions, and therefore only produce inferior results. On a case by case basis, going beyond these generic labels into the true causes of the disease is what leads to a more true and certain treatment plan for each individual patient.

The education process for each patient usually has to include a re-visiting of these concepts, as they almost always bring with them an Allopathic disease label which they are seeking alternative treatments for. “Do you have a remedy for <fill in the blank with a generic label>?” can almost always be answered with “yes and no”. “Yes”, in the sense that we can determine what the unique causes are for you to have that condition, and systematically address those. “No”, in the sense that such labels are generic, superficial, and abstract, and any true form of medicine can only deal with something that is real.

There are two especially unfortunate consequences to these false disease labels : The first, is that many patient’s with complex health issues may be sent home from their doctor being told that there is no diagnosis for their condition, or worse, that it is “all in their heads”. The second, is that they are given a false disease label, but told that “there is no cure for that, you just have to learn to live with it.”. The good news for both of these scenarios is that there is a path to true diagnosis for every disease, and there is a definitive remedy which is curative in every case of disease.

So, here’s to better diagnosis, and better treatment options with Heilkunst!

Hand-in-hand with this concept comes the idea that there is no such thing as ‘localized’ disease — in other words, if someone says they have a “liver disease”, or a “kidney disease”, this is, strictly speaking, not correct. What they have, instead, is one or more diseases which are manifesting in symptoms in the liver or kidney. This is why the surgical removal of a supposed “diseased” organ does not actually remove the disease which caused the symptoms in that organ, and now the manifestation of that disease has no choice but to show itself through a different organ or bodily system. As one homeopath once said, you can prune the apple tree, but this won’t prevent it from growing more apples.

The exact same concept is true in the treatment of cancer — while it may be necessary in a given case to remove a cancerous tumour or affected organ, such a removal of the physical manifestation of the cancer does NOT cure the underlying cancer process, which is systemic. This is why the unfortunate story in so many cancer cases after the supposed “cure” (through a combination of surgery, radiation, or chemotherapy), is that sooner or later, the cancer usually returns — either in the exact same place, or in a new location. While any number of physical therapies are necessary and helpful in treating cancer, they cannot succeed on their own without also employing a treatment protocol which is working to address the underlying disease itself — the non-material root of the disease.

So, if disease is not material, then what is it? This is such a difficult concept for anyone in the Western world to grasp, where our implicit worldview for a number of centuries has presumed that the only thing real and knowable in the universe is matter — atoms and molecules, or even smaller building blocks which make up everything that there is. All diseases, within this worldview, are necessarily defined by a physical set of symptoms, and their causes by a material imbalance. Think of all the mental-emotional conditions, such as depression, which are now defined as imbalances in the brain chemistry.

At its root, what Dr. Hahnemann’s system of Heilkunst teaches, is that disease is an altered state of mind. Each disease originates in a uniquely altered state of mind, and is therefore cured by a remedy which contains that particular state of mind. Rather than using a generic remedy for “headaches”, each patient with headache is diagnosed based on their unique state of mind, and that remedy (which matches their state of mind) is the one which will be curative for their headaches.

This is also the basis for a true system of preventive medicine, as it is possible to identify and remove such a diseased state of mind before it has caused the formation of any symptoms. This is the reason that health is not simply defined as an absence of symptoms (which is a negative definition), but involves the unfolding of a positive state of mind involving multiple dimensions of our being.

So, here’s to your health, and not just to an absence of symptoms!

Take any single aspect of music (such as a particular piece of music, or a certain performer, or a certain genre, for example), and further study will always reveal depths of its uniqueness and character not immediately visible from casual observation. Not only at the musical level itself, but also the entire historical and social context from which the music came from. A well-trained musical ear will hear a piece at multiple levels at once.

These musical skills which I honed now find their way translated into new forms inside the consult room, when I am observing the tone of the patient as part of the diagnosis. So often, the real content of the case is not contained in any of the words the patient says, but rather in the tone in which they say it. So many people repeat the same scripts and narratives about themselves  and their lives which seem to portray a certain story, yet which is incongruent with the tone that they use to deliver it.

From one month to the next, when I am discerning the effect that the latest remedy has had on the patient, they are often repeating their same old story to me, yet the tone has shifted. The tone, and the underlying state of mind are always the first to be shifted by the remedy, which is then followed by a shift in the physical symptoms. This is the reason that I am able to be as effective through a phone consult as I am in person. Most patients do not at first feel their own shift in tone, while they remain focussed and stuck on the apparent lack of change in their physical condition. My well-tuned ears, however, are acutely sensitive to these small yet significant shifts, and I can often bring them into focus enough for the patient to see this within themselves.

It’s no accident that Dr. Hahnemann referred to disease as being a “mistunement” of the living power!

For those that do overcome these inner impediments, their health and treatment in general gets a major boost forward once they start to expand their breathing capacity through singing lessons, as well as start to activate their own range of emotional expression. These are very powerful ‘non-medical’ approaches to the de-armoring process, which gets to the heart of either preventing or reversing and uprooting chronic illness.

As Janet Kidd (who is a voice coach) recently wrote in her blog, the “stultification of energy is obvious in the bodies of most people in our culture”, and “I’ve often seen and heard wonderful singers who are very convincing, from the neck up” [emphasis added]. This is a clear image of the armoring process which most people are encased in to varying degrees. We are constantly dealing with patients who are “stuck in their heads”, and have little to no awareness of what sensations they have in their bodies or in their emotional minds. “How do you feel?” is a question that can often be answered only after a few moments of deliberation (and even more so in our male patients). It feels like some patients could use a sturdy shake to try to dislodge their awareness from inside their own head!

Janet Kidd in the blog post linked to above also says that singers need to “inhabit the lyrics and emotion of  a song…”, or we could say that the aim of Heilkunst treatment is to lead patients to the point of fully inhabiting the lyric and emotion of their whole life, fully embodied, and fully resonant. It’s no coincidence that both Heilkunst and music aim for a deep resonance in their respective activities.

There are many avenues to get at this fundamental disease of “stuck in the head”, and you can have a look at the interesting exercise which Janet suggested for re-connecting to your sensations of body awareness. Regular singing lessons are a great way to establish this at deeper and deeper levels, and assist in the great goal of retraining the dysfunctional breathing pattern that most adults take on. Shallow breathing functions to block off our own body awareness, and keep us stuck in our heads, and learning to sing forces us to break through this destructive habit, and progressively expand all of our life functions, as they are all dependent on proper expansion and oxygenation. I certainly notice the difference in myself between when I’ve been singing regularly and when I have not.

No more shallow breathing — I want to see you breathing all the way down to your toes!

The CoRe is quite a unique device, and as adaptable to different cases as the creativity of the practitioner might allow for. It is the only device in its class which can re-focus on all of the dimensions of the human being. The CoRe provides objective feedback to the physician about what is going on at this moment, as well as what the most significant long-term patterns are in terms of the patient’s broader emotional themes and archetypal patterns. The CoRe absolutely does not replace the participatory diagnosis of the physician, but acts more in the role of providing confirmation and clarification of the physician’s view of the case. Also, in terms of the specific emotional shocks or traumas on the patient’s time line, the CoRe is invaluable for confirming whether a particular trauma has been fully cleared with the remedies, or if a deeper-acting remedy is still required to complete the job.

While I usually feel a great synergy between my own thought process with the type of content that is coming up in the CoRe scan, I do regularly get results which seem to be coming from ‘left field’, and force me to stretch my paradigm of the case. Here, I often very tentatively ask the patient of there is anything in their life at the moment which is related to this (seemingly erroneous) content, and most of the time they confirm that it is very significantly related to what they are currently going through. I’ve learned to be less tentative and more trusting about these apparant anomalies, which usually point instead to an expanded and deepened understanding of the case.

As a mini-case example, I’ll illustrate part of the CoRe results that came up with one patient at one of their sessions. We we’re at a point where we were “in the thick of things”, as we were in the process of working through some of the more emotionally difficult aspects of their childhood, when this group of remedies came up together:

• Dagger Hakea > negative: resentment / bitterness towards close family, friends, lovers // positive: forgiveness / open expression of feelings
• Illawarra Flame Tree > negative: overwhelming sense of rejection / fear of responsibility // positive: confidence / commitment / self reliance / self approval
• Round-headed Leek >For unknown difficulties stemming from childhood, particularly when other essences have been ineffective.
• Unification>This helps to unify the mind-body-spirit, helping us to break free of previous restricting beliefs and patterns.
• Spotted Orchid>To help us to overcome difficulties and blocks on our path of personal growth.
• Gentian>For feelings of discouragement and doubt which may be caused by even small obstacles. The cause of depression is always known. Teaches confidence about the ability to overcome problems.
• Hura : MIND; DELUSIONS, imaginations; confidence in him, his friends have lost all
• Nitrogen- I feel trapped. I need to get out somehow.

I like this down-to-earth approach to changing habits, by taking on finite “30 day challenges”. Matt Cutts, who is the unoffical spokesperson for Google, illuminates some very useful points in this 3 minute video.

One of the biggest challenges with patients is to get them to make a diet or lifestyle change which will inevitably bring up a resistance either small or large. The idea of simply “trying” something for a brief period of time can sometimes be enough to get them over the hurdle from resistance to actually engaging, as the commitment doesn’t seem so monumental. As Matt pointed out, 30 days seems to be just about the right amount of time to make or break a habit, and the likelihood is high that the new habit will continue afterwards. And it’s so much better than the typical “…I know I should” resigned attitude.

I first saw this video a few months ago, and I was inspired to try a few of my own 30 day challenges. My most recent one has been to give up grains, which I’ve done before, but never on a permanent basis. The first couple of weeks of this challenge brought up all kinds of suppressed emotional content within myself, but since I’ve passed through it, it has been quite smooth sailing, and the cravings as well as the emotional attachments are gone at this point.

As we always advise patients, the best way to make changes that stick is to make progressively small, incremental changes over time, rather than cramming a huge life transformation into a short time (which always blows up on itself). These small, steady changes build self-confidence, and each new challenge becomes a little bit easier than the previous ones.

As Matt says — the next 30 days are going to pass, whether you engage in a 30 day challenge, or not, so why not give it a try?

Just one more thing……

The great truths of life are contained within all forms of art, including pop culture and television. Rather than taking them in as a mindless diversion to pass the time, well chosen entertainment can be a highly nutritious “food” for the mind. Whenever an aspect of Heilkunst, or even an expression of healthy life principles are illustrated in a TV show, I take note of it for my inner catalogue of living images.

In the classic 70s program ‘Columbo’, the main character is a homicide detective and cracks his cases using his seemingly natural talent for sourcing information through his emotional mind (what we call the ‘gemüt’ in German). This is very different from most of the current detective shows which illustrate an increasing dependence on methods favoured by the rational mind, such as forensics and various types of computer analysis techniques.

Let’s start with Columbo’s appearance: the suspects and witnesses who Columbo interviews are usually surprised to find out that he is a detective, as he does not at all look the part. He drives around in an old beat-up car, is always wearing a ruffled trench coat and usually smoking a cigar. His appearance is frequently compared to the look of “an unmade bed”. Nothing about his appearance is neat or tidy, as the rational mind would expect for someone in his position. This is a great way to artistically portray the fact that he is operating through a strongly dominant emotional mind, or through his gut instincts.

His method of questioning his chief suspect (who he always visits repeatedly to the point of their frazzled annoyance) always cycles through the various details of the murder, until the point where the intricately constructed “perfect crime” falls apart due to one or more details which don’t “add up”. It is Columbo’s emotional mind which brings these “hunches” back to his mind over and over, until he finally cracks the code of the criminal’s cover-up and is finally able to arrest them.

In each episode, Columbo seems to zero in on the prime suspect early on, but then spends the remainder of the episode trying to put all the pieces together to make a conclusive conviction. You can palpably feel his struggle to work his intuitive knowing up into his rational mind.

As in the science of heilkunst, correct diagnosis is dependent on the healthy emotional mind of the practitioner, who is also able to take that knowledge and then translate into terms of the rational mind. This is one of the most important part of Heilkunst diagnosis, which is aimed at getting inside the “living content” of the case which can not be revealed by the abstract label that most patients import from conventional medicine to describe their illness. Such empty and abstract diagnostic labels (which are the product of an intellect that is disconnected from an emotional mind) have no power to lead to a true cure, but at best shift symptoms around at the surface.

Oh, and just one more thing……

Whether in the classroom, the family, or the workplace, the radial force of the sulphur constitution is very difficult not to notice. A sulphur lives directly in the “here and now”, which usually makes them very charming, or occasionally annoying to those around. A healthy sulphur is full of life, and are usually always in motion. The parents of sulphur children are usually asking for my help for developing coping strategies, and an unhealthy parent with a weak ego structure is easily buried by their vivacious child. For sulphur children, it is imperative that the parent constantly and consistently enforces appropriate boundaries around the sulphur’s world, in line with their age and stage of development. The radial force of the sulphur drives them to constantly seek out and touch all 4 corners of the world, and beyond, and will be constantly testing their parents and their limits. Slacking off on the boundaries is a grave error for the parent of a sulphur child to make.

While we’ve seen all sorts of conflicts and health challenges arise in children of every constitutional type as they engage with the “mass education” system, it is often the sulphur children that are the biggest cogs in the wheel of the system. These days, the proposed solution is usually an ADHD drug, or something similar, however this does not address the real disconnect between the needs of the student as a unique individual and the standardized curriculum. The sulphur child just happens to be the “canary in the coal mine” in this particular battle. All children have the same inner plea as do sulphurs, which is to be treated as an individual, and allowed to pursue their own interests. The sulphur child is just much more vocal about it, and the least willing to conform to external expectations.

In marriages, we have observed that each of the 6 constitutions naturally pair up in a pattern that repeats a majority of the time. Each constitutional pair is a set of a matching ‘radial’ and ‘spherical’ personality types which provide an excellent mutual point of balance. The radial sulphur constitution most frequently marries the spherical calcarea type, who are usually best suited for containing and organizing their energy and charge into more productive avenues. In return, the sulphur keeps calcarea away from their tendency towards inertia. Being a calcarea type myself, and married to a sulphur, I know this dynamic quite intimately!

As is true for every constitutional type, the knowledge that your spouse or child is a sulphur is extremely useful for understanding how to participate the relationship in a healthy way, rather than in a more reactive way to behaviours that otherwise don’t make sense.

As I mentioned, sulphurs live life in the moment, which means they live in their own sense of time rather than clock or schedule time. I used to be very frustrated by a friend of mine, before I learned about the homeopathic constitutions, and realized that he is a sulphur. Until then, I had always been so frustrated that he would always turn up late when we were meeting, as he was running on the inner time of his own world and experience. I learned that I needed to structure social meetings so that the meeting place was somewhere that I would have something to do while I waited for him to arrive.

Also, it may be good news for you to know that the healthier that a sulphur becomes through the process of Heilkunst treatment, the less “edgy” and difficult they become to deal with. Every constitutional type is actually quite a joy in a state of health, and there are no “good” or “bad” constitutions. A truer understanding of the essence of each type goes a long way in understand our self and others, and how to interact most harmoniously.