Dear friends of homeopathy,
What is a time in your life, or an event, that transformed you?
Transformation implies a change — a big change, a fundamental change. When we are transformed, we experience a fundamental shift in our relationship to ourselves and the world. We see things differently, and we even feel that we ARE different.
Last week, in Part I, we talked about illness. (You can read that post here if you’d like.)
We talked about the idea that, perhaps, illness is an intelligent response of the body to a stress — rather than a malfunctioning of the body.
When we view illness as a harmful process, we are inviting fear and aversion.
And, as I pointed out last week, fear and aversion are states which require a lot of energy to maintain and contain. Shifting into acceptance of illness as a natural process which often, even mostly, will resolve itself with minimal intervention, we can relax, which creates an internal environment where more energy is available for our healing work.
However, accepting illness as a natural process is one thing when the illness is a little cold that resolves itself easily with lemon tea, Vitamin C and rest.
But what if you have a major illness? What if you have a debilitating illness? What if you have an illness that significantly changes how you are able to live your life, on a long-term basis?
With illness, we can never be sure of the outcome. As much as we would like to be able to control results with our efforts, there is no certainty. We have very limited control over our external experiences. But what we can control is what kind of relationship we will have with our experience.
The cocoon of illness
When I was 23 years old, all of my hair fell out, as a result of the autoimmune disorder alopecia. For many years, even as I was experimenting with various supplements, lifestyle changes and alternative therapies, my mindset remained firmly entrenched in the idea that there was something to overcome — if my body was attacking my hair follicles, something was malfunctioning, and I needed to stop the malfunctioning.
Sometimes something seemed to work, for a little while. My hair would grow back. But then, inexplicably, it would fall out again.
Unlike my experience with pregnancy and birth, where my efforts resulted in the outcome I wanted, with my alopecia, my efforts had little relationship to the outcome.
When we are dealing with autoimmunity and other complex, chronic disease, this is often the case.
I want to be really honest here. I have taken homeopathy. And I do feel better in many ways. I feel better in measurable, significant ways. I have taken remedies that I know worked on a deep level, because I know how to track symptoms. And yet, still, after 30 years of trying many different therapies, including homeopathy, the symptom that started this whole journey is still there.
I could give you lots of theories about why this is so, but at the end of the day, the truth is, I don’t know why. No one does.
Sometimes we know why a symptom is not resolving — and sometimes we don’t.
Homeopathy cannot cure everything.
There is no system of medicine that can cure everything.
In fact, the word cure is supremely problematic — because it somehow implies that we have reached a state in which we will never be troubled with illness again.
And this is unrealistic.
Our bodies are constantly responding to external stimuli, and thus we are constantly in a dynamic process of falling out of balance, and coming back into balance.
And so, if we are really going to transform our relationship with illness — we will have to change our idea about what is to be cured.
In fact, the shift in mindset, which will initiate the shift in your relationship to your illness and yourself, is a shift away from the idea of cure all together, and into the idea of healing.
We could say, that cure is about what is happening externally.
Whereas, healing is about what is happening internally.
Healing is a process, not an outcome. Healing has nothing to do with exorcising all the things we don’t like or want from ourselves. In fact, healing has everything to do with integrating everything that is present for us into our being, so that we become wholly, completely ourselves.
A caterpillar goes through a transformation to become a butterfly, for instance. It shifts how it moves, what it eats, even how it sees. Its entire relationship to its environment is fundamentally different as a butterfly than as a caterpillar.
And yet, it is still the same being. It is functioning out of the same DNA, it has rebuilt itself from the material substance of the caterpillar.
Illness is the cocoon in the process of transformation, if we let it be. It is the container that allows us to completely fall apart, so that we can discover what it is that we are really about.
The portal of transformation
A portal of transformation is simply an invitation.
Birth is an invitation.
Illness is an invitation.
Any significant event in your life, including illness, is an invitation to enter the portal of transformation, and observe how you relate to yourself and the world around you. Who are you, right now? Who were you, before you became ill? Who will you have to become, in order to live with your illness?
Notice, I’m not asking, who will you have to become to overcome your illness — because that is back in the us-vs-them mentality of health and disease.
This is not about bargaining with yourself, so that if you just accept your illness, if you are just loving yourself enough, or in the right way, that you will be magically cured.
You might be, and you might not be.
As we were saying, cure is about externals — and external results are dependent on many factors, some of which are out of our control. There is some chaos. There is some uncertainty. There is some mystery.
There are literal saints who eat well and exercise, and die of cancer. And there are nasty, mean people who smoke and drink and die peacefully in their sleep at age 85.
When we focus on externals, we are missing the point. We are missing the opportunity. We are missing the invitation.
Your illness is not about whether you are good enough, and you getting better is also not dependent on whether you are good enough.
There are things you can do that will most likely make you feel better, and I recommend that you do them. Homeopathy can help with a lot of things, and of course, I recommend that you try it.
But this invitation is not about the external process. It is about the internal process.
It is not about the material results. It is about relationships.
I have learned many things about my material body in the process of living with alopecia. I have learned how to take care of myself, how to nourish myself with quality food and water, how to exercise so that I push myself enough but not too much. I have learned about targeted supplementation, sleep, and setting boundaries with myself and others. But the biggest gift of my alopecia has not been the external, material healing — it has been the healing of my relationship to myself and my body.
Over the past 10 years, I have shifted from thinking of my illness as a malfunction, to accepting it as a natural variation of the vast, mysterious journey that we call the human experience. This shift has allowed me to develop a relationship of greater trust in and understanding of my mind, body and spirit.
At a certain point, I realized that what I wanted was to heal. I wanted to heal, far more than I wanted all my hair to grow back. And that has meant letting go of my own, personal idea of what healing means, and allowing a bigger process to unfold.
The portal of transformation is fundamentally an invitation to shift our mindset away from a focus on outcomes, and into a focus on relationships. Once we understand that what we are healing is relationships — to ourselves, to our illness, to each other — we transform how we spend our time and energy, and what we look for as evidence of progress.
If we want to really change the world — our world — this is the necessary shift, y’all.
We have to be willing to step out of our material view of health and healing, and enter into a relational view.
We have to be willing to dissolve ourselves, to transform ourselves, to trust that the butterfly is not the perfect resolution of our symptoms — but rather the complete transformation of our way of relating.
And the beauty is — this process is available to everyone, right now. We don’t have to wait for the next breakthrough in medical science to start healing ourselves — because the deepest, most profound healing, the true healing — is an inside job.
What is your cocoon?
What is your butterfly?
What are you ready to step into?
It’s an open invitation.
All my love,
Chelsea
PS — Would you do me a favor? If you made it this far, (and you liked what you read), would you click the little “like” heart below? That will help me reach more people on Substack — and also, it just feels good to know you are there :-) THANK YOU for being here with me.
PPS — my online class, Homeopathy for Cold and Flu, is open for registration! It officially started yesterday, but you can still join if you’d like to!
It’s a series of videos which you can watch at your leisure, then we’ll have a live Q + A on February 17.
The class has three parts: fundamentals of homeopathy, how to use homeopathy for cold and flu, and descriptions of 10 remedies. You can read more about it, and watch two of the remedy videos here to get a sense of what the class will be like.
my illness pissed me off!