AV: Can you please help me find answers to my most pressing questions?
G: You can have a conversation with me whenever you want: I’m always everywhere and in all places.
AV: I would like to talk about homeopathy, about the fact that after more than 35 years I still haven’t been able to get to the heart of the matter. I have worked hard, read a lot, written a lot, done a lot of consultations, taught a lot and although my vision and understanding have evolved over the years, I still feel that the essence escapes me. I therefore urgently need your help.
G: Fine, let’s be systematic. How did you get started with homeopathy?
AV: Do I have to start at the very beginning?
H: I think that’s the best thing to do.
AV: When I started, I thought it was a kind of herbal medicine, a healing method that worked with non-toxic remedies for certain ailments. As many of our patients think about homeopathy to this day.
G: May I remind you that at some point you felt faced with the choice of choosing between bioenergetic conversation analysis and body work, and homeopathy as a future study. You chose the latter because you thought it would be ‘easier’, with more guidance and fewer responsibilities.
AV: It was indeed a choice out of cowardice; I was afraid that I would not be able to bear the responsibility for people in a bioenergetic process.
G: Don’t judge so harshly. You knew from your own experience how deep suffering and despair can be when someone goes through such a process and how the therapist can be the last straw.
AV: I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to handle that. That’s why I chose the ‘safer and more medically oriented’ homeopathy. That soon turned out not to be the case.
G: A mistake for the sake of it. Which we have had a hand in.
AV: Ah so. That doesn’t really surprise me. In any case, my erroneous assumption was soon corrected by the study of philosophy, theory, and the Materia Medica. Homeopathy turned out to be much, much more interesting than I had thought. From the onset, I was fascinated by the revolutionary theses about diseases, symptoms and healing processes, and that fascination has only increased over time.
G: You’ve always been searching, exploring, discovering.
AV: There was always more to discover, always more to learn. Homeopathy takes you on a journey to the limits of reality….
G: (smiles amusedly)
AV: … to digging into the essential issues, it became my excuse to occupy myself full-time with the big questions of life. The answers to the first two questions for anyone who claims to be or want to be a healer, namely: what is illness and what is health, shifted each time.
G: What would your answers sound like for the moment?
AV: I would say that illness is the experience of feeling unwell on all levels: physically due to pain or loss of function but also on a subtle level due to lack of energy or restlessness, and on a mental-emotional level due to sadness, fear, anger, depression, and on a spiritual level due to a sense of separateness and all the consequences that result from it.
G: A comprehensive definition, of which perhaps the last part is the most important.
AV: That’s quite possible. Finally, we try to treat the spiritual level with our similima, believing that then all symptoms that are an expression of a disturbance or imbalance at that level will disappear. Once the cause has been resolved, the effects will disappear on their own. But we do not say in so many words that we are dealing with the spiritual level, one homeopathic school of thought will speak of the sensation level, the other of the vital level, but they both indicate a level beyond body and mind.
G: If we want to formulate the definition of health, what does it sound like?
AV: I would say: an experience of connectedness, harmony and coherence, of being OK with oneself and the world.
G: That’s very close to realizing who you really are; God in action, or an expression of God’s glory.
AV: Not many people would define themselves that way, I think, and I wish it was my personal experience, rather than a concept that I consider “true.” But being OK with oneself, being free from worry and pain is good enough for most people.
H: One is a consequence of the other. What exactly was the question?
AV: Actually, just about everything about homeopathy is a mystery to me. Through my years of working, practicing, learning and teaching, I have mainly found out what homeopathy is not.
G: Fine! Let us start with that.
