Understanding Holistic Health & Homeopathy: the Tree Analogy
Understanding the healing art of homeopathy requires a shift in our understanding of health and holistic health. A basic definition of health is freedom from any physical, mental or emotional limitations. To understand health, we must also understand holistic health. Most of us are aware of a mind-body connection and that ‘everything is connected’, but what does that really mean? In this post, I’ll be sharing my view of holistic health and how it is achieved with homeopathy.
The tree analogy
Everything about a human being is part of a whole – the physical body, emotions, sensations, personality, thoughts, mind and hopes. Let’s pretend that all these parts of you make up a tree. A tree with roots in the ground that we cannot see, a trunk, branches and leaves, all taking in nourishment from your environment. When we are sick, we tend to think of our symptoms as the disease. (i.e. ‘dis-ease’, or something that is out of balance.) The symptoms are actually signs or little red flags that something is already out of tune on a deeper level. Your being is creating an outward manifestation of an internal imbalance – the symptoms are saying ‘helloooo pay attention to me!’ We should be grateful to our symptoms for this reason.
Symptoms are the leaves and branches
Imagine that symptoms are the leaves and the branches of the tree. Say someone is suffering from migraines, high blood pressure and insomnia; one branch represents the migraines, a second branch represents the blood pressure and a third branch, the insomnia.
In conventional medicine, we would see this as three separate issues. This person would likely see a specialist for migraines, a family doctor for the blood pressure and a sleep expert for insomnia. Furthermore, this person would likely receive three separate therapies or drugs for each individual complaint. Conventional medicine is great at taking a magnifying glass to certain things, but often misses the fact that these branches are all connected to the same trunk. The same water and nutrients flow up from the roots to nourish the leaves. The same sun and air also impact those leaves. Naturopathy is more holistic in its approach. It recognizes that there is a trunk of the tree, but the natural treatments also tend to target ailments separately (e.g. supplements for the liver, for the gut, for hormones, etc.)
The core of the person is the trunk
Homeopathy is different in that it recognizes each leaf and branch as important aspects of the tree and, it also focuses on finding how they are all connected. In other words, homeopathy’s goal is to find the trunk of tree. A homeopath studies everything about a person, their physical pain, emotions, dreams, fears, childhood and aspirations in order to find the common thread running through that person’s life. This leads to understanding the core of the person. This ‘core’ is a state of being that needs to be healed. It is where the person is stuck in life, where they are unable to move forward and grow. The task of a homeopath is to find this core, the trunk of the tree, and match it with a remedy. A remedy to gently nudge the being out of its stuck state. Beautiful.
There are many tools to find the trunk of the tree. Homeopaths can follow one branch (e.g. one physical symptom) very deeply until it leads to the trunk and they can also study multiple branches (e.g. a physical symptoms, fears, and emotional state), to find the pattern between them that leads to the trunk. A homeopath can also practice in a more superficial way (staying in the branches). For example, to treat acute ailments or to treat many patients in a short amount of time (e.g. in India, homeopaths are MD’s and see dozens of patients each day). In North America, we deal primarily with chronic disease; this requires a lot more time in consultation and generally more time for healing.
Ancestry is the roots
The roots of the tree are also extremely important, and often overlooked. They represent what is inherited from each parent. We all know that we inherit our parent’s DNA, and more recently, scientists are researching whether epigenetic markers are also inherited (these are markers that change genes in DNA). There is a lot that we don’t know. In homeopathy, we do know that the state of the parents usually tells us something about the state of the child. That child often carries this state until adulthood. Other layers can be formed on top, so to speak, due to life experiences, traumas, etc. Homeopathy allows us to shed light on this and to let go of a ‘stuckness’ that was never truly ours in the first place.
A tree comes from a seed, from one cell, and slowly grows and differentiates into a large organism with branches and leaves. The essence of that single cell is carried forward into each cell of the tree. A human being is the same. We must look at each part of the person with the understanding that we are looking at one totality. This changes how many of us look at disease – our symptoms are not separate from us, they don’t happen to us. They are part of us, of our internal state. This does not imply that we are to blame, it just is. We can however take responsibility and, with awareness and deep understanding of holistic health, we are capable of moving towards true healing. Are you ready to start your healing journey?
For more information on this topic, reach out!
