Study Group

The Study Group is for homoeopathic practitioners and students. Meetings are led by Tony Conway, and the aim is to provide information and inspiration in Homoeopathic philosophy, materia medica, case taking, case analysis, and case management.

Please contact Tony or Lizzie for more info.

The Unprejudiced Observer

The Unprejudiced Observer is the essence of the healer or physician; it means to perceive without projection.  But in life we are surrounded by our projections – which is why the practice is so important. In the practice we can develop freedom from the limitations of our everyday self. The practice can be a vehicle for our own transformation. 
In classical mythological, Mercury or Hermes was the deity that governed medicine.  Mercury had the special task to carry messages between the humans and the gods  – that means from the unconscious to the conscious realms. But it also refers to something else – to make the connection between the temporary realm, the everyday world we live in, and the eternal realm, which is the soul journey. Because we don’t have access to that part, we need another, who might for a moment be such a clear mirror that they can help us catch a glimpse of our true selves, and we can begin to remember again.

The Practice
The practice requires being centred, i.e. being still, being open in your heart, and working from silence. When the patient speaks, we listen to what is offered into the space, then we listen to the echo that remains afterwards, and then we listen to the silence.  We don’t fill the space with noise, chatter, comments, or even thoughts. The ruminations about which remedy the patient needs are noisy; they too can contaminate the silence. We should be empty, so that the patient experiences the space as an invitation. It is a held space, not a vacuum, in which the patient is witnessed and acknowledged, and experiences empathy. The role of the witness is an important aspect of the Unprejudiced Observer.
  As in any spiritual practice, the essence is the deepening of our connection with our Self. The commitment to becoming free of prejudice or attachment is the focus, and the drive that advances the physician or the healer.  The empty, focused attention, in which the patient enters with her story, is maintained through practice. The patients help us strengthen our practice, and it becomes deeper. So the cycle continues.
When you are centred in yourself, you perceive others with clarity. For example, if a patient makes a gesture, you can experience the energy that lies behind the gesture. It has a charge. We have to differentiate between a giveaway comment that has no energy behind it, and one that could open a door to the heart of the patient’s reality.  The art is to know which words to mirror back, where to take the person back to in the story, when to intervene and when to hold your peace. When you are witnessing the charge, you can feel it in the room. It affects your body. Sometimes you feel emotion, perhaps emotion that you have never felt before – you have to discern whether it is your own or if it belongs to the patient. These subtle nuances, that guide you in taking the case, are inaccessible if you are too busy in your mind, full of your own concerns, as we all naturally are, when we are not in our practice.

Archetypes
The Unprejudiced Observer is not you, it is what happens when you slip away, and allow the Healer to enter. The patient also evokes the archetypal dimension of a healing exchange. There is a symbiotic polarized relationship between patient and healer. The physician requires the patient. You can’t be a healer without a patient. The Unprejudiced Observer emerges in the specific conversation, in the contract, in a given place and time. It is not a truth in yourself at all times – you’d be a very peculiar, one-sided person if you lived your life like that. In my every-day life, I don’t aspire to being an Unprejudiced Observer.
We cannot step completely out of the process of our own personal unfoldment, and that also means dealing with our own suffering. The guide is also the seeker. But just as one can aspire through art or music towards an expression of the universal, so the physician through the practice of healing can gain a universal perspective. But however clever you are at analysing the case, or in classifying the remedies – the essence of the practice is in your ability to perceive and witness another, in humility, in truth, without prejudice; this is the true art of the healer. The correct analysis, and choice of the medicine flows from this point.
In homoeopathic medicine, the patient is given an opportunity to reveal, to express, to enact, and to elucidate what it is that ails them (What needs to be cured). The tradition from which the homeopathic physician has emerged is the archaic role of the herbalist or witch doctor. The medicine woman or man perhaps lived at the edge of the village or away in the forest. The patient would come in order to understand a dream, or to be cured of a problem. Maybe the healer was pleasant, generous or good-hearted, but maybe she wasn’t. Those were not the key issues. The key issue was the healer’s power to perceive honestly and deeply, and to create an individual medicine.

What is medicine?
The medicine is a mediator between the outer (tree) and the inner (seed). It forms a link between the temporary and the eternal realms. In the temporary reality, we are caught in the cycles of experience, and subject to the illusion of separation. We feel disconnected from Creation. Everything in this realm is changing. Nothing persists.
The eternal realm is the seed that connects us to the source. By strengthening the connection between the inner and the outer, we can understand and accept change more freely. When we recognize that The tree is in the seed, and the seed is in the tree, the soul’s purpose can be more willingly integrated into our everyday life. Understanding of our suffering frees us from the continued repetition of patterns. The direction of cure, or the movement towards health is the re-establishment of this relationship. Through the medicine, the patient is enabled to remember the healthy state that she has lost.

The role of intuition
There is much uncertainty in our profession about the role of instinct and intuition.  How do homeopaths prescribe remedies they have never studied, or have not even been proved?  Or discover a patient’s remedy in a dream? We often distrust that dimension, unless it has been confirmed rationally.  Yet there seems to be a yearning for an instinctive, or inspirational approach. In the art and science of homeopathy, we straddle these two worlds. But how do we know when we are inspired? 
What appears like an inspiration may be a wish or an illusion. For example, the patient may dream repeatedly of the ocean, and the practitioner decides it has to be an underwater remedy – but the totality leads to Medorhinum or Natrum Muriaticum.  Yet on occasion, you may receive a very powerful insight:
A patient told me about how she often felt in childhood. She described a forlorn feeling, thought herself ugly, and felt belittled and put down by people around her, especially her father.  I asked her to say more about the ugly, forlorn feeling, and she came up with an image of being like a duck. Afterwards, when I reflected on this, my mind was drawn to the story of the ugly duckling, and how she discovered, after a long winter, hiding from the world, that she was not a duckling, but a swan. But at that time, no duck or swan provings had been published.  About two years later, this patient had a broken relationship, which affected her profoundly. She went into a period of recluse, in which she didn’t want to see anyone, or for them to see the state she was in. She felt that same forlorn feeling, very isolated and frightened. At that time, she had a dream:
 I was at the racecourse, and I knew which horse was about to win the race. My father used to take me to the racecourse as a child.  To find the winning horse, I had to divine it with a divining rod. The divining rod was very strange. It was made of two long white feathers. Like swan feathers.
I was at once reminded of the Ugly duckling from years before, but in the interim period, the provings of Cygnus had been published. With this confirmation, I prescribed Cygnus Columbiana LM1. This remedy has helped her rejoin the world, and heal her confidence, damaged since childhood.

Studying Materia Medica
When we study remedies, the subject of our study is not the information on the page in the book. We are studying a living, organic energy in nature. What we seek to understand is the dynamic pattern, the heart of the matter, the essence that infuses every aspect, and makes it what it is. To penetrate to understand in this way, we have to look beyond the written texts about the remedy, to the materials themselves. The medicines exist within the context of their eco-system, the Earth, with her cycles and rhythms, and the Cosmos. To establish a relationship with a medicine, we must be firmly in connection with the Earth. And when we study a medicine with the aim of perceiving the core principles, just as with the patient, we must approach it as the unprejudiced observer. The practice of being centred, working from stillness, emptiness and silence, applies to the study of Materia Medica as well as to the taking of a case. We use our own mind and body as the vehicle to perceive the remedy. We can bring the medicine to life within ourselves – not only in the mind, but in our eyes, our nose, the throat, stomach, intestines, into our limbs, and our circulation, to discover how it thinks, how it feels, how it breathes.  When we embrace a remedy in this way, we can recognize how it feels to be the person who needs this medicine.

Be yourself
To understand what needs to be cured in the patient, or what is the curative power of a medicine, we have the most wonderful instrument at our disposal, which is our self. We can move our centre, to resonate with the other, and if we do this consciously, we can then recognize the characteristics of the altered state. But then we must know how to return to our self once more. It is an important part of the practice to develop a strong sense of one’s own self.
When you are centred, energy can flow freely. This state of peace, and being present is a simple and wonderful gift. It is not derived from ‘knowing yourself’ as mental information. Think of it more as BEING YOURSELF. Your feet firmly on the Earth, connected with the heavens, heart open, balanced left and right, being in the centre of your self, silent and still within, alert and attentive.  That is the Unprejudiced Observer. 

Please send comments or feedback to:

tony@remedycentre.org