I was working with a young lass that I’ve seen periodically in our clinic since her birth fourteen and a half years ago. She is tall, beautiful, very healthy and comes only a couple of times a year when chronic or acute issues require homeopathic treatment. On this occasion, she had recurring inflammation in her left knee that was not responding to other physical modalities of treatment. As a competitive hunter-jumper and dressage rider, she can occasionally have musculoskeletal issues requiring support and attention.
At this time, nothing was working and so she graced my office with her presence, issuing forth her chief complaint. As I thumbed through the repertory, identifying the type of pain, and narrowing down whether the inflammation was located more in the patella or popliteal fossa, I started narrowing down potential remedies. I noted some likely candidates, like Staphysagria and Colocynthis, that may fit her symptom profile.
I then asked her about her state of mind. Adrienne offered that she’d been doing well in school, her grades high, that her friends were close and she was having great fun hanging out with them and that her family life was harmonious. I was looking for grist on this level as I find that, like Rajan Sankaran, if I can identify the state of mind of the remedy picture in conjunction with the physical symptoms it can take the usual 15-20% of point and shoot prescribing and raise the efficacy substantially. In Adrienne’s case, this was not proving easy, as she seemed a rare, happy teenager.
She continued by letting me know how she’d successfully won a number of red ribbons at a provincial competition with her horse. As she went on, I was feeling more and more mystified and confused as to the etiology of her pain and suffering. I scratched my head. What is it she’s not saying, I wondered?
At the Hahnemann College for Homeopathy and Heilkunst, where I was trained, we were taught to question what is not obvious. Our maxim, as with all homeopaths, is to use your supersensible organs to try to apperceive the unspoken. Sometimes you will hear a change in tone or timbre in the way the patient broaches a subject. Sometimes, as in this case, you’re dousing only with your gut instinct. I bided my time, waiting for my opening to chase the cause of her discomfort down its causal rabbit hole.
I knew that Adrienne had completed her sequential timeline of emotional shocks and traumas as per Dr. Elmiger, and completed a couple of rounds of chronic miasms as per Dr. Hahnmann, Rudi Verspoor and Steven Decker. At this juncture in Heilkunst Medicine, usually the patient has some Chthonic (Greek for fear and ignorance) Disease as per Dr. Paul Herscu or Ideogenic (spiritual) belief, as per Jeremy Sherr and Rajan Sankaran, that she’s working on. I’d been taught that this realm is what kick-starts the whole nature of one’s karmic themes and inherited diseases, flavoring the individual’s timeline occurrences.
As I went back to my training, dynamically piecing what was known together, some of the phenomenon began to crystallize in my mind. First of all, the Chronic Miasm Syphilis corresponds to the summer solstice we’re entering now in June (at the time of this writing). It did not feel like the resigned state of mind of May’s Carcinosin for sure and it definitely wasn’t Lyme, where the individual is more walled off from humanity. No, she feels happy, sweet and self-assured. Admittedly, her good health was making the case more difficult, as there was no lusty picture of a kaleidoscope of physical or mental issues pointing to the etiology. At that juncture, I wasn’t able to wholly apprehend the feeling through her functions and sensations. The elusive rabbit was definitely sneering at me.
I know that with Syphilis, there can be musculoskeletal issues. Bone pains at night, for example, are frequent with Syph. As per Narayan Singh’s Messages From the Body, knee issues are about an inability to bend down in supplication to the will of the almighty. I find that modern women have more and more difficulty harnessing their feminine wisdom, their “women’s intuition” as it used to be called. I find we’ve mostly lost our capacity to trust, discerning the messages of our inner guiding system, or even know through faith what outcome we’re projecting. The left side of the body represents the feminine so I knew that it had to do with with a lack of faith and wisdom in some aspect of herself.
The right side of the body seems to hold more issues around the will, or masculine side, and the left is related more to the feminine or wisdom. Negative karmic issues, related to unresolved issues with one’s mother and father, will be found in the soft tissue in these quadrants. My research has taken me into Wilhelm Reich’s Medical Orgonomy for releasing withheld emotions in the segments of the body from pre-verbal stages of life, when they were engendered. In essence, I’ve had to learn the nature of the body’s emotional code for harboring its issues subconsciously and what each of those segments signifies.
As I further considered Adrienne’s plight, I asked her if there was any recent event or trauma that had precipitated the inflammation in her knee. There was none, so I had to assume that this was an emotional issue. The Hahnemann College taught me that the tonic disease, Syphilis, does have a couple of pathic offshoots, including Staphysagria and Colocynthis, given the state of mind of anger, blame, criticism, and a general feeling of an insidious self-destructive tendency.
As the watch was ticking, I decided to test my intuitive feeling with our young Adrienne to see if I could catch light of that rascally rabbit. Our Materia Medicas remind us that suppressed anger is not always projected toward anyone or anything. Staphysagria patients can be quite sweet and demure, especially young women of a Pulsatilla constitution, which our Adrienne was. However, Staphysagria disease can be pretty volatile if suddenly provoked, but on the surface they’re quite loving, with a deeper hidden agenda of harbored hysterical rage, which is often well below the surface. Given that Colocynthis and Staphysagria were both possible candidates for our patient’s knee inflammation, I went after the state of mind that I suspected was hidden.
I sent in my homeopathic dowsing rod with the statement, “Adrienne, out of curiosity, can you make the statement for me ‘I am angry’.” As I watched her carefully as she processed my request, her eyes spontaneously flared widely and then gazed again at me normally. That clue let me know that there was fear in her ocular block and that the emotion was harbored down deeper in her nether man, as per Rudolf Steiner. Most folks are terrified of their own anger response and will avoid it at almost any cost. Often it is buried below a layer of grief and fear which lies closer to the solar plexus.
Silence hung in the air between us, which felt like a good sign. The calm before the storm. I repeated the question, “Even if you don’t feel anger, I’d like you to try the statement on anyway. Think of it like an experiment, if you will.” Adrienne looked quickly at me with utter disdain and then hid the revealing look with her intellect’s moral fibre, sending it back down into its nether reaches. She responded, “Ok, but I’m not angry.” She was stalling and I watched her brace herself, “I am angry?” she asked meekly. We both smiled as she realized that she’d softened the potential homeopathic statement, the similar suffering, by avoiding the intent of the exercise. I felt like Sherlock Holmes as I knew we had our man, or rather rabbit, and Adrienne did too. Her gestures spoke volumes in the spaces between the words. Both of us could feel, in our intuitive guts, what lay below the surface.
She looked at me, pulling herself up, mustering her courage this time, stating with vigor, “I am angry!” The air in my office felt as if cut with a knife. I watched her eyes close and then her face crumpled like a young child’s and the tears tore forth from her core as the emotion took her from the inside like a resonant lover. I stood by to give her comfort if needed, as a hug from a loving mother figure can help provoke the release. I watched her breathing to ensure that the strong, buried emotion wasn’t going to produce an anxiety attack or any hyperventilation of sorts.
This will happen on rare occasions if the system is too armored and the proper elasticity in the diaphragm will not allow for the content to surface easily from the gut where it is stored. Symptoms such as hiccups, headaches and hot flashes are indicative of nether content from the sexual realm being caught, and remaining improperly un-discharged in the web of the organism’s armor of beliefs.
After about 30 seconds of a great volley of tears, Adrienne did what a lot of my other patients will do during an emotional release of this nature. She began to laugh uproariously! This is what we Heilkunst Orgonomists refer to as the facial orgasm. She was laughing so hard, spurting forth between convulsive gasps of hilarity, “I’m so angry! Yup I’m pissed beyond belief! I could kill the bastard!” This is when my eyes widened in surprise and we gazed at our rabbit full frontal. I immediately wondered why she said that and waited for her to catch her breath and explain.
She looked at me, “How did you know?” she asked. I replied, “Just a bit of womanly intuition.” Admittedly, it isn’t always easy to explain the reasoned realm of feminine intuition coupled with male instinct, unless of course you do this all the time and can discern the clinical patterns. It is also easy to assume this stance when the rabbit is caught and now lying lifeless on the clinic floor! Adrienne continued, “I know what this is all about. I was dating a boy, Danny, for a few months. I broke up with him last month … actually right when my knee started to pain.” She paused, “Do you think there is a relationship?” I shrugged, seemingly non-committal, as she used the grist of the orgonotic release to sort out her gnostic bearings for herself, “There likely is.”
“Anyway,” she went on, “Danny was kind of weak-willed and although generous with presents, there was never much for me to connect to, but I kept going out with him anyway. We didn’t see each other much as I ride so much, with it being show season and all, and he has his busy schedule too. One day, I overheard him say something to his friend at his locker. Do you know what it was?” Adrienne lowered her head in shame, “He said that he hated that there are so many Koreans going to this school, now.”
As she looked to me for validation of her newly revealed feelings I admitted that that must have been upsetting. Adrienne remarked, “You bet it was. My best friend is from Korea. I didn’t know what to do as you know how much I hate fights. I just like it when everyone gets along. The next day he came up to me in the hall, stating that it might be better if we started to see other people. I was so relieved, but I hadn’t yet had the time to think about how angry I was that I never saw this coming. Seriously, I dated a racist?! I’m not proud. I should have seen it coming. I felt stupid for having missed this. I was scammed. What do you think this says about me? How embarrassing.”
Ah, so there was the Lachesis which we often see married to the Staphysagria state. Anger turned in on oneself as guilt and shame is also something I see in liberal spades when working with folks. I then asked Adrienne to move her knee, now that the wisdom had been restored and the anger discharged. As she started to apply pressure on it with her hand to provoke the old discomfort and then stand up and move around, she stared back at me amazed, “Oh my God, the pain is completely gone. How did you do that?” I replied that I didn’t do anything at all, it was all her hard work and that I just followed her life force, guiding her to where the issue was lying in her subconscious. I asked her if she’d like me to make up the homeopathic remedies for her knee. Adrienne looked at me, straight on, “Nope, no need, the pain is gone. I’ll call you though if anything changes.” I suggested that she sip on her emotional support dropper, which contained both Staphysagria and Lachesis, in case any vestiges showed up as she allowed for the healing and rumination to complete its action.
Adrienne’s bright, luminous eyes cast forth a brief shadow, “I want to be sure that I make better, more wise decisions about boyfriends in the future. Can you help me with that?” I let her know that I’d be happy to help her address this as it is my area of speciality and that I’d just finished writing a second book on the subject. She let me know that she’d speak to her mother about it and see about making another appointment for the following week.
