Homeopathic Healing

I woke up this morning feeling quite ill; achy muscles, stuffy nose, exhausted. Of course, these symptoms are not unfamiliar to me. They are the feelings of a cold or a flu coming on, something that happens quite often to me back home in the states. If I were there, I would react by skipping class that day to either buy some over the counter drugs or to stop by the health clinic to visit a doctor who would inevitably hand me over a prescription. I have grown quite accustomed to allopathic health solutions, for the most part finding them efficient enough.

But in the past year or so my mind has been shifting and I have wondered what exactly I am doing to my body every time I find a problem and “fix it” with some drug, some prescription pill. I have begun to consider America’s health system and found many flaws there. Coming to Auroville, I have had the opportunity to further consider health systems. I have been rethinking the way that I treat my body and come into new ideas that might be more beneficial than the mindset adapted from working within American healthcare systems.

I signed up for the “Pease Verses Pills” workshop with very little intention; I had seen a signed posted and figured it would be good for me to participate in an Auroville class. But spending the day at this workshop I came to so many realizations; it really opened my mind to think about my health in different terms. Homeopathy is a type of healing that considers both the mind and the body. According to Nandita, the intelligent woman who led the workshop, homeopathy believes that health is being in the moment both physically and mentally. This means that one can adjust to their environment (i.e.: sweating when its hot, shivering when its cold, smiling when you feel happy, etc.). In order to be healthy, one must be very considerate of oneself. Instead of relying on someone or something else to take care of you (going to a doctor, popping a couple pills), one must be aware of how they are feeling and think about what could be causing the problem. Each individual is responsible for their illness and is capable of healing themselves.

As opposed to conventional medicine which seeks out the individual problem and goes to the source (fixing the headache or the sore stomach with a drug that will react directly to that point) homeopathy tries to understand the whole picture. Conventional medicine sees the body as a machine; an illness is a broken piece that can be tinkered with and fixed. Nandita preached a more holistic version of healing where one tries to understand why a patient is weak so that they can recover and become strong again. As opposed to seeing sickness as something that is broken, consider what the body is trying to tell you.

Sickness is an act of self preservation. The body has many ways of translating how its doing to you: symptoms, sensations, feelings, alterations in functions, and intuition. Each individual must therefore be awake to what their body is trying to tell them. When something goes wrong, you as an individual must not be treating yourself right. How is your body feeling? What has brought your body to feel this way? Besides the concentrated area of infection, is anything else in you feeling off? These are some of the questions an individual can ask themselves in order to start processing their illness homeopathically.

These are therefore the questions I ask myself today as I am forced to lay sick in bed. Sure, I could take some fever-reducing pills, some sinus medicine and perhaps I’d feel much better. But that would be ignoring the signals that my body is trying to send me. Maybe it is because I have been moving so much, between traveling and adventuring through Hampi these last couple of days. Maybe its because I have been feeling sad and anxious about the end of the program, about leaving friends, India, Alex, yet have been pulling on a happy face because I don’t want to think about it. There are many reasons that I could have fallen ill today. Though I have not trained myself well enough to understand what my body is trying to tell me, I am at least starting to think more homeopathically.