Walkabout

A walkabout is a rite of passage, in which the person will go out into the wilderness to discover his or her identity and purpose, and then return home. The walkabout, in this context, is a journey of healing and rediscovering the link between mind, body, and spirit. It is a journey that can help us to reclaim our health and well being. One of the most powerful tools to aid in this transformation is homeopathy.

Homeopathy is a two hundred year old science based on the work of Dr. Samuel Hahnemann who said, "The highest ideal of therapy is to restore health rapidly, gently, permanently: to remove and destroy the whole disease in the shortest, surest, least harmful way according to clearly comprehensible principles." A homeopathic remedy is a specially prepared, minute, quantity from the mineral, animal or plant realm. A well-chosen remedy can help the individual to resolve the illness completely and permanently.

A man came to my office with a severe panic attack and he felt like he was going to die (literally). Though I empathized with his plight, I "welcomed" this so-called panic attack. If I was a traditional provider, I would have written him a prescription for a tranquilizer and had him admitted as an inpatient. What was really happening was a spiritual emergence, his "walkabout." All the suppressed feelings and emotions he had been bottling up, suddenly came to the surface. This was a dying of the past and a birth. I gave him a homeopathic remedy, checked in with him frequently over the next 72 hours, and his family cared for him around the clock. At the end of this initial process, he realized that he had been traumatized years ago, and was only now beginning to recognize this. Oddly enough, over a six month period, many of his chronic illnesses (chronic constipation, irritable bowel syndrome, sinusitis) "miraculously" vanished. Though all of us would like transformation and true healing to be painless and predictable, it rarely is. But the outcome, if we’re lucky, is one beautiful and lovely creation - the return journey to our true self and wellness.

As a medical provider one is inclined to respond to the physical pathology, the boo-boo, but what genuinely ails many is the spiritual and emotional affliction in the disguise of an ailment. It does not mean that the physical problem should be ignored, but that our attention needs to focus on healing the complete person: mind, body, and spirit. A young man came to my office recently for a second opinion, he had "terrible pains in his mid-section and was feeling despondent." He also had a prescription for Zoloft and Pepcid that another provider gave him after a twelve-minute office visit. Unfortunately, the provider hadn’t done any kind of real work-up to determine why he had the pain, or probed into why he was depressed. After I spoke with him for an hour and did a physical, the real answer was apparent: he was very homesick, had spent $18,000.00 to go to a school program that he didn’t want to be in, and wanted to do something else in life. I gave him a single homeopathic remedy that helped to balance him, reduced his distress, and eliminated the "terrible pains." He was able to see the heart of the problem: he needed to follow his own path and not that of his family. The problem wasn’t the stomach pain or the depression, they were symptoms, and the key of it is; that he didn’t believe that he could be his own person and have a destiny apart from his family. What he really needed was a walkabout, a journey of personal discovery, and fortunately the homeopathic remedy helped him enormously on that road.

The walkabout, the journey to healing, can begin now, without ever leaving home. It is as complex and as simple as breathing. Genuine complete healing - looks at the body, mind, and spirit as a seamless interconnected web, and the illness (condition or dis-ease) is interwoven through each strand of that web. The walkabout and the homeopathic therapy, is an opportunity to heal completely and to reclaim our health and well-being.

T. Namaya FNP is a homeopath who has a wholistic medical practice in Brattleboro, Vt. He writes for a number of leading health magazines in the US.