A year and a half have gone by since the forced closure of the homeopathic practice in Leuven and it has been quiet all that time on the blog. There are several reasons for this. First I was off to San Francisco to give a seminar and in June I was one of the speakers in Dubrovnik on ‘Le Petit festival du Thêatre’ , a very original art festival whose theme of the year was The Art of Healing.
After this wonderful experience with lovely people, reality hit me back in the face. Not only was the practice closed; earlier that same year the CKH, confronted with declining numbers of students and income, decided to no longer rent offices and classrooms in my house. As a result of this painful cutting of the umbilical cord with the CKH, the books from the library had to be sold or given away, a collections of more than 20 years of notes, seminar reports, journals, information of all kind had to go… It felt like breaking down singlehandedly the whole edifice I built up the last 25 years.
A substantial amount of money disappeared and I had to move houses because the rent was too high for a house with all these unused spaces. I decided to turn the page of 35 years in Leuven and move cities. My relationship shook under the pressure….
After moving in the fall it was as if the carpet was pulled from under my entire life: profession, income, money, relationship, house, all at the same time. Even when one holds the firm conviction that everything has a meaning and it all happens to help us, it wasn’t easy to process the loss and to reorient myself.
Because of a (secret) change in the legislation, there appeared a possibility for lay homeopaths to apply for registration where before this road was completely blocked. A special commission, which needed being established, would give the chance to each individually to defend his or her case. The application was to be submitted by November 2014 and within one year maximum the answer of the commission should come. Because I wanted to be well prepared when I received an invitation, I compiled all proves of seminars I followed and gave, teachings I did, articles and books I wrote, workshops, training programs, online courses I created, etc, etc, which in itself by the sheer bulk of it was an impressive ego-boost. I also wanted to give visual proof of the ‘Walk for Homeopathy’, and because I didn’t expect the members to look at the YouTube clips or blogs, I thought it’ll be a good idea to make an oldfashioned photo album. While pasting pictures I relived the Walk, delved with it into winter, contemplating over my live, my believe systems and convictions and started to write the story of the Walk for Homeopathy.
Basically I found myself, instead of having found the Next Step to take, what I prematurely and proudly announced, emptyhanded, stripped of work, responsibilities, direction, plan…. waiting for the next chapter to begin as the previous seemed to have come to a rather abrupt end.
I kept teaching and seeing patients on Skype but I felt myself without future prospect.
Was it then the coming of spring or the result of Martin Sandbrooks’ intervention in the training ‘Sustainability in Healthcare’, I don’t know. There the teachers team of the CKH learned to tackle problems by using Systems Thinking methods and was invited to undertake an Action Experiment.
Mine was to offer my notes on the Walk for review and then compose the book I wanted it to become. By June my first version was ready: a multilayered novel with the story of the Walk, a personal quest through the dark night of the soul and many anecdotes on the inexhaustible topic that homeopathy is.
Zest came back.
I started making plans to start a new a practice in my new home town Gent and not to wait for the reply of the commission, of which to this date nobody has heard.
The new format for my practice I call ‘Homeo-noetics’.
Noetic Science (like the Institute of Noetic Science in California) investigates the power of the human mind. Other definitions of Noetic are ‘higher knowledge’ or ‘knowledge combined with intuition’. This is precisely what I’m doing in practice, not only receiving the similimum for the patients intuitively but lately also the potencies, Bach flower remedies and other healing modalities. It is a bold statement, I know but it probably is the future of homeopathy altogether. In the article in Homeopathic Links 3/2015 (http://www.thewhiteroom.be/Books.html article Exploring New Territories) I argue that the world has changed and the patients have changed; only the homeopaths are still practicing 20th Century homeopathy. Therefore the needs of the patients often are not met and we urgently have to catch up as we are 15 years in the 21st century already.
Most likely it means pioneering again, an overestimated position by the way, but somebody has to do it
Due to Dan Browns main character, a noetic scientist, in this bestseller ‘The Lost Symbol’ and the many references to noetics in Lynne Mc Taggarts’ bestseller ‘The Intention Experiment’, the concept of noetics is introduced in different domains and has –surprisingly- a more scientific aura than homeopathy, though dealing with effects of focused attention, prayer, lucid dreaming, remote viewing and the like.
For me ‘Homeo-Noetics’ combine the advantages of not being mentioned in legal texts and granting me the freedom of practicing homeopathy supplemented with intuitive healing modalities.
What exactly these imply, I keep for next post!
