As I wrote yesterday, the public school system is not designed to help foster this path, and in fact, generally hinders it greatly. Our curiosity, natural desires, and talents are usually so buried by the time we graduate, that it can often be quite an archeological endeavour to raise these artefacts back up into the daylight at the surface of our consciousness. Such a retrieval project generally involves slogging through many layers of suppressed emotion and conflict, which can often be a pain seemingly easier to avoid than confront. So many patients, on discussing the topic of their true desires, simply draw a big blank, and truly have no clue what it is they’d like to do with their creative energy.

A related issue to this, is that the process of re-awakening this side of themselves may also create a threat to whatever the current status quo is in their life, in terms of work, marital, or other relationships which are dependent on them acting out of their suppressed state. It can often come to a choice between the pain of keeping the true desire suppressed versus the pain of going through the profound upheavals to one or many parts of their life.

Every life is unique, and such a process of healing and discovery won’t always imply such a drama in terms of the radical changes to the outer forms of our life, but in one way, or another, our desire function, guided through resonance, always involves a process of growth, change, and continually shedding of something from the past to make space to take in a new element.

To return back to the topic of the education system for today’s conclusion, a child who is brought in for Heilkunst treatment (for ADHD, as per yesterday’s example), may not have an unrestricted opportunity for reaching their full creative and academic potential in a case where the parents are not also undergoing their own Heilkunst treatment. The status quo created by the parents’ own suppressed desire function is a very concrete barrier to the type of treatment solutions which the child may successfully engage in themselves. All this to say, that one’s current situation, including relationships and responsibilities, is a very real starting point on the quest for resonance, which cannot be leapt to as some sort of abstract ideal. The clearer the overall map is, however, the easier it is to keep taking steps in the right direction.

So, what are the benefits of journaling, if examined through a Heilkunst lens?

• Growing and unfolding your inner world, in contrast to the highly outer-oriented consciousness we tend to have during this “cancer” stage of human consciousness.
• It is a parallel activity to what happens inside the consult room, which provides the same degree of confidentiality, and space within which to discharge one’s emotions in a safe way.
• As a tool in healing from specific shocks or traumas, in parallel with your current Heilkunst time line remedy. The inner content of such events often begs to be expressed before it is fully healed.
• To sort out the deeper questions and mysteries about yourself, such as clarifying what your desire function is, and what might be the practical steps you can take to get to connect to more of it.
• As a forum in which to play out some of your more significant life conflicts, where the other party is either not available to participate in the conflict (if they are deceased, for example), or it is not necessary or appropriate to play out the conflict “in the flesh” with them. The proverbial “letter” written, but not actually sent can be done in a journal.
• To track daily and weekly ups and downs, in order to keep track of the cycles of healing reactions provoked by the remedies in Heilkunst treatment, in order to better assist in raising your self-knowledge, as well as to help the practitioner to understand what sort of changes may be applicable moving forward.
• Noticing re-emergent themes over time, which may represent deeper issues that wouldn’t have been noticed in the normal day-to-day flow of life and experiences.
• To clarify, and bring much more precision to how you understand yourself and your core issues, and your ability to express them.
• As a means for turning the flow of life’s mundane events and experiences into an object of meditation. Likewise, this can help in the development of a greater objectivity, applied to increasingly heated degrees if inner content, which then may carry forward into real-time scenarios. Ultimately, this tool of self-reflection can increase the objectivity that you may have about your self.
• As a place to develop your imagination, as you may wish to apply towards forming the qualities and parameters of your desired future, or to go back in time and “revise” previous events to turn out with better endings.
• To help you disentangle your three distinct streams of thinking, feeling, and willing.

Forget your perfect offering

There is a crack in everything

That’s how the light gets in.

~Leonard Cohen, ‘Anthem’

Nothing that is complete breathes.

~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

These two quotations keep popping back into my mind lately, as they imply some very important concepts around health, disease, and the goals of treatment.

At a micro level, these quotes can be interpreted in terms of the cancer miasm, which I wrote about recently. Interestingly, the above quote about breathing has a profound meaning in terms of cancer, which completely inverts the healthy function of the cell to be anerobic instead of aerobic. In my recent blog on the cancer miasm, I mentioned the psychological characteristic of perfectionism, which can be likened to a false form of trying to being “complete”, and therefore not breathing.

A meditation on the macro questions of health, illness, disease, and the purpose of treatment can also follow from these quotations. The concept of resonance, which I’m always making reference to in these blogs, functions in both positive and negative ways. The “crack” through which disease enters us is this very resonance — no disease can be contracted which we do not have a resonance for. This points to one of the absurdities of the Pasteurian germ theory, which posits that a mere proximity to a germ is sufficient for contracting the disease. The best immunity, in this sense, is to ensure that we do not have resonance with the state of mind of the disease which is going around.

Without having this “crack”, or capacity to take things in through resonance, we would not breathe or be living at all. Furthermore, this continual taking in through resonance prompts change, transformation, and growth. When our “crack” is covered over by chronic disease and armoring, our capacity to have these growth experiences through resonance is limited. I think you’ve met people like that, who have such a thick wall around them, that their capacity to take in anything new is virtually non-existent. This is also why, when a new patient tells me that they “never get sick”, a red flag goes up in my mind, wondering if they are sufficiently armored that nothing appears to move on the surface, while a much more serious chronic illness is brewing at the depths.

The book The Healing Power of Illness does a brilliant job at expanding on this concept, and illustrating how the goal of healing is to raise our resonance quotient, so that we can experience and discharge all of our negative resonance at the least consequential level possible. “Bumping” into someone as we walk down the sidewalk is a much more safe form of discharging a particular resonance, than “crashing” into them in our car at 100 km/h. The purpose of Heilkunst treatment is to raise the level of our negative resonance discharge as much as possible, in order that we “get” the meaning of our lessons as gently as possible.

First of all, we need to distinguish between a person’s “ambient”, and their “environment”. If you and I are sitting together in the same room, we co-exist within the same environment. Each one of us, however, has a unique ambient, which is the subset of the environment which is composed of our individual resonance, both positive and negative. Everything in the environment which has some relationship to your desire function, is “lit up” before you. Two people walking into the same room will likely notice entirely different details for this reason.

It’s akin to the type of experience where you have just bought a new car of a particular make and model, and suddenly everywhere you go you see that same model.

As I mentioned, our ambient is composed of both positive and negative resonance, meaning that not only will our ambient display things which we desire, but also objects or events which are mirrors of where our desire function is suppressed or blocked. This is the meaning of all forms of “accidents”, which are aspects of our negative resonance coming at us in progressively increasing intensities until we “get” their intended lesson. A complete case-taking of a patient’s state of disease must include this whole picture of occurents (all of the things which “happen to” the patient), accidents, as well as the positive events which come into their life.

Likewise, as a patient walks through their time line treament, the healing and release from the remedies will often be accompanied by specific events or “chance” meetings with significant people (or archetypal representatives of those people), as the patient finally integrates and then lets go of the original meaning of the trauma in question.

An aspect of Hollywood films which is often criticized, is how unrealistic certain plots or turn of events unfold on the screen. The fact is, that these “only in Hollywood” scenarios are usually only slightly exaggerated versions of real-life occurents, “accidents”, and other strokes of luck which are not based on a rational logic, but on the force field which draws a person to confront whatever they need to within their ambient.

It becomes a sobering thought on the path to greater health that everything which unfolds in our life is a function of a part of our mind and consciousness, whether or not we have fully realized the source of any given part of our ambient. A definition of healing, from this perspective then, would be an increasing level of consciousness, and command of both the waking conscious mind, as well as all aspects of the sub- and un-conscious parts of the mind.

One of the areas of nutrition that I advise patients in is in the “Eat Right 4 Your Type” blood type diet. This app includes some general information about each blood type, as well as very detailed food lists of “Highly beneficial”, “Neutral”, and “Avoid” foods. It also integrates into a grocery list, which is very useful for quickly cross-referencing which foods are suitable for different family members, all together in one app. The only thing it doesn’t do is tell you what your blood type is.

For couples who use natural family planning methods, there are a number of apps to help track all of the important variables indicating high and low points of fertility. There are many apps that offer much of the same functionality, including this one. Knowledge of the method, of course, is a prerequisite to effectively using the app, which is simply offering a quicker way to track than pen and paper.

For many reasons, journalling can be a very useful adjunct to your Heilkunst treatment — from tracking the cycles of remedies and their healing reactions, to getting more in touch with your true desire function, to simply having an outlet to express emotions which don’t fit into the 9 ? 5 workday world. There are numerous journalling apps available for the iphone, but “Day One” is an app which is particularly pleasing aesthetically. It also syncs with a Mac desktop companion app, which makes it much easier to journal wherever you are, whether with your Mac, or just your iPhone. This is the electronic version of the leather-bound paper journal, with a fountain pen.

Sunrise Sunset! — The inclusion of this app has a bit of an unexpected reason to it — in working on restoring your vision with natural methods, one of the techniques involves “sun gazing”, which means to stare directly at the sun for a certain number of minutes each day. Before you panic, there are actually safe times to stare at the sun, namely the first hour after sunrise, and the last hour before sunset. Not only is staring at the sun for small intervals during these times safe, but very nourishing for your eyes, as well as your hormonal and immune systems.

A significant part of health is education, and for those of you who regularly follow health websites (such as Arcanum Wholistic Clinic’s), a good RSS reader is invaluable for organizing the incoming feeds of all new articles from your favourite sites. Reeder overlays on top of your Google Reader account, and has a pleasing and efficient interface to work through your feeds on your iPhone, or Mac Desktop.

Which other smartphone, tablet, or desktop apps do you use to keep your health on track?

So, why am I bringing this up? As a means of introducing a bit of an unusual idea, which I haven’t generally heard in other areas of healthcare. Of course, every serious modality of healthcare will have some form of education and certification as I mentioned above — in other words, we collectively recognize that it is important that healthcare providers are properly qualified. But by an interesting turn of perspective, in Heilkunst we also assert that the patient needs to be qualified to be treated.

Let me explain — I’m not talking about turning people away, because they fail some sort of entrance exam in my waiting room, on the basis that they have failed to spend thousands of hours educating themselves about the topic of healthcare. I mean that the patient needs to be qualified in a couple of different ways, which I’ll outline below.

The first sense of this term I have previously touched on in my blog series about the three jurisdictions of Heilkunst (Regimen, Medicine, and Education), where each jurisdiction, in a sense, becomes a “qualifying” threshold the patient needs to go through before being able to fully benefit from the next jurisdiction of treatment. A simple example of this is the threshold between regimen and medicine — the effectiveness and speed of action of the homeopathic remedies is greatly slowed down in a case where someone’s regimen (diet and lifestyle) is a complete mess — the bulk of therapeutic energy and focus in such a case needs to start with cleaning up the patient’s regimen, in order to properly qualify them for homeopathic medicine. There’s a germ of truth to the saying “Let food be your medicine”, which partly applies to the idea of being able to cross this threshold. There is also a threshold of qualification to pass from the jurisdiction of medicine into the ultimate jursidiction of treatment, which is what we call Therapeutic Education.

Beyond these specific meanings of the term ‘qualified’, to pass from one jurisdiction of treatment to the next, there is a much more general sense of this term which is implied. That is, that for a patient to be fully qualified to benefit from Heilkunst, there needs to be a certain type of willingness to participate in the process of treatment, as well as in their life as a whole. The conventional medical system has unfortunately done a good job at training patients to expect to be treated like cars at the mechanic, who are the passive recipients of medicine or other therapeutics. While the therapeutic modalities of Heilkunst are powerful in themselves, their potential is most fully realized through such well qualified patients, whereas a limit or glass ceiling of efficacy is reached in patients who are passively waiting to be “fixed”. The meeting of the qualified Heilkunst practitioner with the properly qualified patient is truly a match made in heaven, as are all activities driven by resonance (self-love).

This same logic is also true for our own health – inflammation has a positive purpose for our health and development. Fever, for example, is not only a powerful part of our immune response, but it is also a trigger for the stages of childhood development. It has been widely observed that a child will go through a growth spurt after resolving a childhood illness, such as measles or chicken pox. If fever is suppressed with drugs or herbs, then the toxins and microbes are stored in the cells, rather than burned off. Also, a lack of fevers in childhood sets the stage for cancer later in life, as the unexpressed energy of the fever needs to manifest in another form. Nature balances the equation here as well.
The question of what to do for a child in the face of infection and fever puts many parents into a dilemma. On the one hand, the impulse to protect the child from the assumed dangers of fever is unfortunately translated into a suppressive medical approach, which takes its toll on long-term health. Oh the other hand, sitting back and doing nothing can also raise a great deal of anxiety – letting nature take its course may be a risk in certain cases. So the question shouldn’t be to intervene or not, but how to do so in accordance with nature and without risking unnecessary damage. Like the forestry example above, Homeopathy imitates nature, and “fights fire with fire”, with speedy results, and no side-effects.
Childhood fevers can be safely and easily treated with homeopathic remedies, which act to resolve the fever process more quickly, rather than suppress it. The Law of Similars, or “like cures like”, means that the correct homeopathic remedy will move the fever forward in the direction it is already going, rather than stall it. The result is a quicker resolution of the fever, with less pain and suffering, and without the toxic by-products of the fever being stored in the cellular memory. A number of parents are also choosing to use equivalent Homeopathic remedies in place of the standard vaccine program.
Fever is only one example of a healthy life function that can be suppressed. Certain physical traumas and emotional shocks can also create a blockage in the life force. These become the kindling which eventually ignites the latent diseases that have been passed down through the family tree, such as cancer and heart disease, which first start to manifest in “minor” symptoms, such as migraines, or chronic infections. By systematically removing these blockages, any symptoms or tendency towards illness will no longer find anywhere to root, and the life force will be able to function in full radiant health.

The intimacy which develops in a real life case is difficult to reproduce in text, particularly with the principle of confidentiality in place, however, my aim is to deliver enough of these images so that you, the reader, can start to recreate that feeling of intimacy inside the consult room of your own mind’s eye.

Participation is something we’re all familiar with in our personal life, in terms of our close or intimate relationships, where we literally “take part” in the living flow of life energy of the other. This is in stark contrast to the “objective”, cold, detached form of observation we reserve either for business transactions, or the Western mode of science. As in our romantic love relationships, we stretch ourselves to empathetically see and feel the world as our beloved does, from their point of view.

Women traditionally do this more than men, who often feel at a loss as to how to find this way of relating, as they are more deeply incarnated into the physical realm, and by definition, more identified with the reality of separation than inter-connection.

Once, after a few minutes upon meeting a new patient, she remarked that my mode of “participating” her (this wasn’t exactly the word she used) was very different than other practitioners she’d previously been to, who were more in a Naturopathic or Allopathic mode of “observation”. It was notable that she did notice this, as most patients don’t necessarily realize that something different from the usual mode of interaction they are used to in healthcare is taking place (at least not intially).

All of this makes sense, once it is realized from a true understanding of disease that its diagnosis and treatment ultimately has to work at the depths, which can only be attained through participation, rather than the mere information at the surface available through normal observation.

The practitioner must be sufficiently healthy to be in contact with their own inner contact, in order to fully resonate with the patient’s, and to be able to diagnose at this level. The graduation requirement of the HCH to complete up to a certain point in treatment aids in this goal of allowing the practitioner to begin to see at this level, and then the continuing requirement of the CIHA (professional association of Heilkünstlers) for ongoing treatment and education further expands this capacity.

This was a point in my Heilkunst practice when I hadn’t been focussing much on the Bach Flower Remedies, but in this case, in this moment, they came flooding back to me as the right modality for this patient. I started to talk to her about the emotions that she had at this point, to identify which Flower Remedies would be most useful to her.

There were a few that we identified and used over the next while, but the one that was the most memorable was Sweet Chestnut. The state of Sweet Chestnut is one of utter emotional desolation and inner chaos. It comes at the point when all endurance has been worn down, and it seems as if there’s nothing left. A state that demands nothing but complete surrender, as their seems to be no other way out.

This remedy helped her very profoundly as she started to take it. She reported that “…it feels like I’m being held in the arms of a loving mother, being suckled gently back to health.” This phase of using the Bach Remedies not only helped her out of the dark space that she had come to, but also helped her to completely integrate the healing lessons that she had learned during this recent round of chronic miasms in her treatment, and she then felt ready to go ahead with the next steps in her homeopathic treatment.

[Note : in the years since this incident, the science of Heilkunst has developed to the point of being able to better manage the healing reactions from the deep treatment of the chronic miasms, through augmenting with gentler homeopathic potencies, such as in the LM scale. Between the LM homeopathics, flower essences, and other regimenal support, intense healing reactions are kept to much more of a minimum.]

Dr. Edward Bach developed his system of the Flower Essences in the 1930s, arising out of his highly intuitive connection to nature, and to flowers in particular. He had previously trained as a homeopath, and developed the Bowel Nosodes, which are still a part of the practice of Heilkunst today. To develop the flower remedies, he mapped out specific states of emotional imbalance, and then used his intuition to go out into nature and find a flower which contained the specific positive quality to counter-balance it. He primarily used a sun potentizing method for extracting the essence of each flower, which involved laying the fresh petals in a bowl of spring water which was set out in the sun for a number of hours. For some plants, he used an alternative boiling method to release its essence.

Before my studies in Heilkunst, I had no clue about the role of Bach’s remedies in an overall context of healthcare, but simply used them at face value. Without understanding the greater context of Heilkunst, I didn’t understand why the flower essences clearly worked when they did, yet had no effect other times. It is perfectly clear to me now that they work on the law of opposites, in terms of correcting an imbalance, yet have no power to affect a disease, which needs to be addressed by the law of similars.

In terms of my own personal healing, this was an example of using a technique or modality to great initial effect, but which sooner or later hit an invisible limit when the need for another jurisdiction was called for, but of which I was ignorant. This is so often the story of many of my patients, who seek out treatment with me after hitting a similar limit in their own health, when their regimenal practices peter out in face of the underlying diseases, which cannot be reversed through the law of opposites alone.

Today I am using the BFR with my patients within the context of their Heilkunst treatment, as a means to support and re-balance their emotions as they go through the deeper transformations of their underlying disease matrix being annihilated. Overall, this is a much better use of the BFR, where they can shine with their true capacity, and not made to try to address something they are not able to. The difference between disease and imbalance is extremely important to understand within a complete system of healthcare.