Happy New Year

I hope 2025 is a wonderful year for you, full of fulfilled dreams and memorable, happy moments!

I'll be going into year two of Dynamis School with Jeremy Sherr, learning more and more about how to be an effective "homœopathist," as Dr. John Epps called the profession.

Dr. John Epps was a homeopath in the mid-nineteenth century and I love how he describes homeopathy in "The Rejected Cases." The book contains several cases that he sent to the editor of the Lancet, Mr. Wakley, in the mid-1800s. It also contains the letter he wrote to Mr. Wakley as a result of the rejection of those cases. The editor refused to publish the additional homeopathic cases after publishing a previous one caused "an avalanche of letters from all parts of the country, couched in such terms as to make it next to impossible for us to insert any further communication of the kind."

Yes, homeopathy has always caused a stink in the standard medical community, but we (the homeopathic community) are feeling a shift—a good shift. I highly recommend that you give a listen to The Homeopathy Health Show sometime in 2025. Atiq Ahmad Bhatti, a 4th generation homeopath, hosts the podcast and interviews many homeopaths. He has a burgeoning audience and his more recent shows give hope about the future of homeopathy. I've linked to him on YouTube but you can find his podcast on Spotify and other channels.

Now back to Dr. John Epps' words to Mr. Wakley:

Homeopathy presents certainty, in presenting a law.

It teaches that a law regulates the action of medicines on diseased bodies: this law being, DISEASES ARE CURED MOST QUICKLY, SAFELY, AND EFFECTUALLY, BY MEDICINES WHICH ARE CAPABLE OF PRODUCING SYMPTOMS SIMILAR TO THOSE EXISTING IN THE PATIENT, AND WHICH CHARACTERIZE HIS DISORDER.

It maintains that this law is universal; that all medicines acting curatively, have acted, do act, and will forever act, in accordance with the principle embodied in this law; in fact, that all medicines are specifics—each one being specific to the given disease, of which, if taken by a healthy person, it produces the resemblance.

This clear, well-defined law gives certainty, and presents simplicity. It affords the foundation on which the homœopathist builds. It affords the mariner's compass, which enables him to steer clear of all the quicksands which the misdirected ability of Cullen, Boerrhave, Brown, Clutterbuck, Broussais, Armstrong, and others, have thrown up, to the destruction of medical navigators, and of the crews with which they were entrusted.

The homœopathist ensconces himself in this one point. He cannot be charged with beating about the bush. He stands upon a unity. He has no loophole of retreat. He gives his opponent the knowledge of his vital part. Disprove the law, and homœopathy is undone.

But in thus propounding his principle he feels his strength to be, that his foundation is in a law of the Creator—a law, the discovery of which arose from careful deduction, resulting from a happy coincidence which affected the mind of Hahnemann; even as a happy coincidence affected the mind of Newton, and led to the discovery, by deduction, of the law of gravitation.

Having this law, we need not be troubled, in our curative proceedings, by the contending opinions and never-ending inquiries respecting counteraction, revulsion, stimulation, depletion, palliation, and hoc genus omne.

We have one rule.

We have certainty; we have more, we have simplicity.

---

In the Castlewood Trilogy, Fiona's confidence in homeopathy grows throughout. In book one, Love on the Vine, she learns about homeopathy for the first time and by book three, Love from the Past, she understands homeopathic law fully. If you haven't read the series, you can find it on Amazon!

Warm regards, Lucille

Happy Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving! It’s a day to think about gratitude, and one of the things I’m grateful for is homeopathy. Here are a few reasons why:

 

T - Totality: Homeopaths look at the whole person, not just one organ or body part.  Disease is the whole body’s response to a disturbance in the vital force.

 

H – Hahnemann, the father of homeopathy: It’s thanks to him that the world has this beautiful healing method. Thank goodness for his persistence and genius.

 

A – Arnica: That wonderful healer of bruises that everyone seems to know about. Its miracle cures have helped to turn homeopathic skeptics into believers.

 

N – National Center for Homeopathy: Gives information about homeopathy to online surfers, and hosts a fantastic annual conference.

 

K – Keynotes: That visible “elephant trunk” that sometimes reveals the correct remedy. For instance, a keynote of Camphor is that a person feels cold yet wants to remain uncovered.

 

S – Succussion: The energetic level of the remedies is achieved by shaking (succussing) the substance in water.

 

G – Greatest gift of God: Hahnemann’s description of homeopathy—"given to us to enable us infinitely to surpass (old methods) in salutary help to suffering humanity.”

 

I – Improvement: I’m thankful for the improvements I have experienced through homeopathy.

 

V – Vitality: The goal of homeopathy is to recover a good state of vitality.

 

I – Ignatia: A remedy that can support one through the stages of grief.

 

N – Nature: Remedies come from nature and are consistent in their medicinal effects. As Emerson said, “Truth is simple, and will not be antique.”

 

G – Great joy: Homeopathy has inspired great hope and joy in the world.

 

In Praise of the Mimosa Tree

by Lucille Locklin

I hope everyone has had a wonderful summer! It must come to an end, and some people are happy about the shift to cooller weather and others mourn the warmth. I'm in the latter category and decided to sing the praises of one of my favorites, the Mimosa tree, to help send off the season in style. I'm also memorializing the beautiful tree pictured below on the left; it was chopped down a few years ago.

I love the Mimosa tree and always have. To me, it represents summer since its lovely pink flowers come out in June. With the right sort of attention this tree can thrive, contributing beauty and a delicious light scent to the early summer months. [The lovely smell inspired me to try my hand at making essential oil this year. I didn't succeed, but will probably try again next year.] The leaves of the Mimosa are fern-like and very sensitive, so perhaps I love this tree so much because I'm very sensitive too. Perhaps I love it because I love an underdog, and one finds more bad than good about the Mimosa tree on the internet. Proof (if it's needed) that you cannot trust everything you read there!

Beauty aside, the Mimosa has also been made into a homeopathic remedy, first proven in the 1960s. [By the way, the catchy term "proving," in relation to homeopathic remedies, comes from the German word for "experiment," Prüfung; homeopaths experiment with substances in order to understand their curative properties.] In Murphy's Natures Materia Medica, Robin Murphy lists numerous conditions that can be helped by the Mimosa plant (and, as always, the symptom totality must fit):

Allergies. Backache. Blepharitis. Colic. Conjunctivitis. Coryza. Cough. Diarrhea. Enterocolitis. Fistulae. Headache. Hemorrhoids. Hydrocele. Hypersensitivity. Influenza. Otitis. Photophobia. Salivation. Scorpion, bites. Sinusitis.

Scorpion bites? Interesting! And so many other conditions ... clearly, the Mimosa has helped many people in the sixty-odd years it has been a homeopathic remedy.

People nowadays speak of inclusiveness, and this needs to extend to plants as well as people. There is no need to exclude such a beautiful tree as the Mimosa from our local landscapes and I, for one, would miss it dreadfully if I never saw it again. Like anything else, the Mimosa tree needs love or it suffers. If growing under the wrong conditions, it can look lanky and scruffy, its adolescent, too-thin trunk bent over, and it won't produce flowers unless allowed to mature. In more favorable circumstances, it grows into the beautiful trees you see pictured here. To end on a happy note, the Mimosa tree pictured on the right is still thriving.

In Love on the Vine, Fiona helps Lord Featherstone gather new plants to conduct experiments—provings—that will determine their medicinal value. If you haven't read the series yet and you want to learn a little more about homeopathy, I hope you'll give Love on the Vine a try!