Learning to Fish

by Heidi Schor CCH

Massimo Magialavori opened his first seminar of the first four-year postgraduate program I attended by telling us that he was done feeding his students fish. Yes, students were happy as they gorged at the sumptuous meal he lavishly presented, and for some time afterwards basked in their satiety. However, soon the pangs of hunger returned and there were no more fish; Massimo had long gone home. So Massimo embarked on teaching his students to fish, so that when hunger arose students would have the necessary skills to feed themselves.  

I am becoming an expert fisher under the tutelage of Massimo.  He is skilled teacher that seems to honor the adage that the master is nothing if someday his pupils do not surpass him, and his experience as a homeopath is awe-inspiring.  More important maybe than even his skill as a teacher and a homeopath is his desire for and ability to make meaningful connections that weave together the many facets of life including the study of nature and its substances - flora and fauna, human development and psyche, mythology, alchemy and the esoteric, as well as shamanism. I feel that while many homeopaths are able teachers of materia medica, Massimo is a true teacher of homeopathy as a philosophy and way of perceiving the world, as well as an efficacious medical healing art.  

It was not until my thirties that I realized that my learning style follows a whole system view.  I took the following quote from a whole systems approach website “A whole system view would include all the factors involved and examine how they relate to each other and how they work as a whole. To deal with a whole system we can't leave anything out as irrelevant. Intuition is as important as rationality, we must address both scientific and artistic approaches, both material and spiritual needs, the small as well as the big, what we feel as well as what we think, what we perceive as well as what we imagine.”  What this means for me is this:  I learn best when as many aspects as possible are taken into account as being fundamental to the system that is being investigated and studied.  The more senses that are involved in the process of discovery, the more ground the process covers, the more view points that are examined, the easier it is for me to comprehend and integrate the material into my schema of life, and then be able to apply it.

Massimo eloquently speaks in terms of whole systems as he is constantly relating our homeopathic remedies -substances from our environment- to the human condition as he paints broad strokes that depict the fundamental themes that run through large groups of remedies that he calls homeopathic families. These remedy groupings may or may not be botanical families, but they hang together due to connections gleaned from scope and sphere of action.  Massimo illustrates these connections by deftly weaving in again and again the common threads he has amassed from an impressive array of cured cases. But studying with Massimo is also a journey for the senses as he incorporates his knowledge of universal life principles, archetypes, mythology, ecology, and history as he teaches us the multi-faceted art of fishing.  He is not satisfied knowing the medical propensities of a substance, he also integrates his knowledge of the substances’ role and function in our natural world. And he is not satisfied that we settle for only knowing the Homeopathic Materia Medica as a list of symptoms.

In our very first class we found ourselves outside contemplating the nature of the majestic and graceful grandmother willow tree that once adorned The Abbey grounds.  Our instructions were to sit with the tree, be with our selves and learn through experience of our own knowing.  We could take a bit in our hand, touch the velvety leaves, smell the bark, listen to its leaves as they rustled in the wind, or simply sit. This was a taste of how Massimo’s curiosity and confidence have shaped him as a practitioner and as a teacher.  His ceaseless desire to make connections and to understand life at many levels is an inspiration for me to do the same.  And his generosity to share his learning tools and processes make it possible to follow where he gently leads.  

As students we are consistently active learners: whether when participating in small study-group discussions or larger class discussions, all of which I value enormously.  We are challenged to understand the case presented, the conditions within which the patient operates, the physical and emotional influences that have shaped the patient from perhaps even before the womb, or when seeking to understand thoroughly and appreciate the substances that we use to heal.   Whether by triturating a new substance in preparation for a proving, or participating in a proving itself, or delving into the natural history of the substance, or whether we are studying remedies in the family approach, or entering remedy information into Tesi files, a convenient study card format that Massimo created, or whether contributing cases to the data base he has set up so that colleagues and students may learn from each other, we are all on the journey together and as equally responsible for the outcome as helping each other along the way.   

Since studying with Massimo, particularly the homeopathic family groupings of remedies according to fundamental themes (which are ideas that he feels must be present in both the patient and the remedy), I am more able to apprehend the universal and fundamental ideas that can be applied to large numbers of remedies and substances and then compare remedy groups to a patient’s story to see where these themes match up.  A huge amount of information in the form of themes is now at my fingertips to be compared from one family to another, from one remedy to another. The scope of my vision has broadened, and I now perceive far more information via multiple channels and trust in my perceptions: I see the patterns and archetypes which inform the character, I hear the patient’s sounds which harken to those associated with the remedy, I trust in the vibrations I feel while with the patient and which resonate with the healing substances’ own frequencies, I seek to understand the habitat and qualities of the substance and can make correlations to those of the patient’s own circumstances, and ultimately I can recognize far more remedy choices before even repertorizing, which now serves more as a narrowing down and fine-tuning process.  Yes, some of this is the natural progression of time and experience, but there is nothing like getting a map of the best fishing holes from an expert fisherman who has just revealed his best techniques.

The case below hopefully illustrates my evolution and integration of Massimo’s approach.  I had been treating a very fragile looking thin-skinned girl named Alice since the age of 5.  From the beginning Alice had a hard time connecting with me due to shyness.  She comes from a well-off family that is absolutely devoted to her and her siblings. Both parents are stay at home parents and enjoy traveling and a very nice lifestyle. Her tendency to catch colds and frequent infections had been greatly improved since beginning treatment and the mother was quite happy with homeopathic treatment.  I however was growing ever more discontent with the case four years later as the remedy Silica was now not always working for acutes, and her insecurity in this world seemed to be increasing.  Alice was a pleaser, but more so she was unable to assert her own being; I found it hard to know who she was as she mostly relied on the mother to do the talking and when asked directly would say “I don’t know”. Characteristic symptoms were almost non-existent.

Having just begun studying with Massimo I recalled that he spoke of Pulsatilla-like remedies as coming from an over-supportive environment, which did not recognize or support them as an individual:  “These remedies feel they are very weak and have a severe lack of confidence. They are very childish. They feel their environment is very nice so there is no reason to leave. They don’t want to fail their parent’s expectations because they have been so nice to them. They fear the time when they will be without their support. They seek to reproduce that overprotection in others close to them. They want to be the best child, a capable child that can produce and perform but still remain a child. They have irresolution.”  I tried Pulsatilla with my basic understanding of the family approach and nothing happened.  I think that for this to be Pulsatilla there had to be a true forsaken feeling in Alice, and though she is incredibly fearful of separation and afraid to be alone she has never described a forsakenness.  

Then, because I have been very thoroughly trained in miasmatic theory I gave what I thought to be the correct miasmatic prescription of Thuja (she had warts) and later Carcinosin (she is submissive, a pleaser and family history of cancer), and then returned to Silica, which worked again for some time but I had to give it in higher and higher potencies until I had to admit that this was close, and certainly fit many aspects of the case, but was not the similimum.  I then left the well-trodden trail as I tried remedies that addressed her childishness, irresolution and difficulty learning, and her anxious and fearful state.  First I gave Alice Baryta-carb. According to Massimo the Bariums salts have a severe and dramatic lack of self-confidence.  Similar to silica-salts they cannot trust in anybody else (true for Alice with the exception of her parents).  Silica’s are able to invest their energies into small things and achieve high results (which was not the case for Alice who was not really able to invest much energy in anything at this point).  Baryta’s have to close the self and then it is hard to confront anything that does not fit their way of thinking (which seemed to match Alice’s inability to be with other people besides her parents).  Social relationships are usually very basic. Their narrow-minded view makes them look obstinate because it is so important for them to defend their space, it would be critical to enlarge their space into something they cannot process (which mirrored her learning disabilities). We do not see the same fusional state as in Alumina. Baryta helped Alice with her confidence but did not act deeply to alleviate the growing fears and insecurities. This might have been the moment to try Baryta silicatum, but I did not.

Next I prescribed Opium, remembering that during pregnancy Alice’s mother suffered a traumatic fall and feared for the life of her child.  She had suffered an earlier miscarriage and during her pregnancy with Alice she was fearful that she might not make it.  I matched this up to the frightened and anxious state of Alice and her fear to be separated, an ailments from fright type analysis. I had not yet studied Massimo’s Fundamental Themes of Drug-like remedies: isolation / avoidance, omnipotence / nullipotence, no frame identity, and altered perceptions. I certainly found the isolation/avoidance theme, and could see the nullipotence and no frame identity, but the altered perceptions were a stretch with the exception of her fear.  Never the less Opium helped for a while, bringing much more confidence and alleviating her fears, but it would not hold and higher potencies did not help.   Finally I prescribed Arsenicum for the anxiety and fears (of robbers) while completely dismissing Massimo’s fundamental theme of being suspicious of those closest to you, because in fact Alice’s trust was implicitly in her family.  Arsenicum did nothing.

At almost 12 years old Alice’s chief compliant was extreme anxiety with any change in environment and separation from her parents, fear of going to bed unless a parent sat by the door, and she now had language retrieval disorder diagnosed and slowness of learning. Then, during another ever-increasing sore throat episode she made a peculiar comment that led me on a search: She said to her mother “I want to go home”.  Her mother was quite surprised because they were indeed at home, and to clarify what she meant Alice pointed to her mother’s belly. I could have got caught up and gone acute-chasing at this point because Bryonia has the wonderful symptom in our books of desires to go home, but I stayed with the big picture, ignoring the latest spate of unremarkable throat symptoms and stomach pains, and contemplated what that statement truly meant.

I had often mulled over the mother and father daughter relationships in this case.  The parents were almost smothering their children, providing such a nest-like environment. Alice seemed to remain psychologically frozen in time; almost embryo-like and her relationship with her mother did not seem to be progressing, nor nearing pre-teen dynamic in any way.  This impression was reinforced when Alice would assume a fetal position in her mother’s lap in my office. I had used the rubric childish to cover this in the past.  In addition Alice often had no answers to my questions and sat as if stunned or paralyzed. Her most common response was to say “I don’t know” and then intimate for her mother to reply, even if it was about her own dreams or the pain she felt.  I thought about Massimo’s talks about developmental stages: what does this mean, that an eleven year old girl wants to climb back into her mothers belly, that she still suffers severe separation anxiety and that in fact she has no desire to do things that would require her to leave her mother and fathers side, and her little world.  The word “fusion” occurred to me: she is fused to her parents; she has not yet differentiated.   And then the words of Massimo resounded as he described the Alumina salts as being fusional and undifferentiated.

Alumina:
“When we are dealing with the concept of identity, we are not dealing with a theme - everyone has to deal with their identity – but in certain kinds of remedies this is a dominant concept. In Alumina we have an extreme, unresolved state – she is merged with her mother/family. They carry them with them on their back. To rid themselves of this would be to die. Their mother is a parasite who has my heart, my lungs – like Siamese twins – if you cut one from the other one must die. My mother was so overwhelming to me that it was impossible to come out and say who I am. They can have this fear of knives because they would like to cut off this parasite in order to be themselves. But the fear is that if I cut off my mother I cannot stand on my own and I will die. So I must keep her there. If I move I will die.

The mud of Alumina – clay – quicksand – it is like this for Alumina  – if I try to move I cannot move. There is no solution. The mental constipation of Alumina is that thinking is useless. There is no solution for Alumina –there is no escape. To solve this problem will kill me so I must stay with them (my parents).”

Massimo has seen very old Alumina patients who still have a fear of knives, and a fear of cutting off something that is suffocating them. He made the interpretation that these two ideas are in tandem – that the knife could serve to sever this relationship that is suffocating them.

He has also seen in Alumina cases that they were not able to detach from their relationship with their mother. One recent case was a man who was so happy to have his mother die as a way to free him from this relationship.

“Aluminum and barium salts are some of the most insecure, with extreme lack of self confidence and lack of identity (Alum).  It is hard for them to define “who am I”, and who is someone else.  For every mammal it is normal as a stage to be totally dependant on her mother’s maternal functions.  Without this person you cannot exist.”  But in Alice’s case she had stopped development and remained fused with her mother.  

So now I did the fine-tuning part, because in fact Silica had been close enough to help in some ways I wanted to stay with Silica and the theme of Unreliable Support.  The Silica-like themes present were restricting the environment in order to feel safe and to be able to cope with the world; weak system that has memory issues and difficulty elaborating strategies; insecurity and timidity which makes them appear as a person without will and very irresolute; poor and basic reactions (no fantasy); and a defensive strategy of enclosing in small space protected from things they do not know or feel comfortable with.

I have made a few observations pertaining to Alumia silicata in Alice’s case.  While Silica, according to Massimo, does not like to be pushed down by others- perhaps accounting for their obstinacy- Alice has the absolute dependence on her mother. Usually Silica builds their own support because they cannot rely on the environment, thus the shrinking down to a manageable size. Massimo says “In most Silica cases you have a bad relationship with the mother – rejecting their mother’s milk. The possibility of understanding the mother is missing in Silica.” It appears that the Alumina completely tempered this aspect of Silica in Alice.  This it seems created the tension in Alice and the Alumina silicata state in her. She herself in the end was her own unreliable support, because she had remained fused to her mother, who in turn seemed to smother her.  

Alumina silicata worked like a charm.  Two months after the remedy Alice said she had no problems going to sleep now without a parent present, which she rationalized as being due to living in a new house (whereas before she could not even go to their long-time family cabin without fear). It seemed totally age appropriate (12) to be assertive that before it was just the house that caused me problems and it demonstrated a typical pre- teen response of lack of accountability and confidence.  Alice dramatically improved in schoolwork, to the astonishment of her teachers; was able to finally make it through her first sleepover (which she had tried unsuccessfully even with cousins), and said “good” nonchalantly when I asked her how the carpool was going. Her parents had tried for years to form carpools to save on driving. But previously Alice was only comfortable if her parents were always the drivers and it was with kids she knew; now her parents only drove once a week and she was able to carpool with kids she had not known before. She added as if it were nothing, “now I take the bus to school sometimes too!”  

Heidi Schor CCH practices in Kirkland (near Seattle) in Washington. For the past many years she has been on the Board of Directors for the Council for Homeopathic Certification and the chair of the Grading Committee where she has given feedback on hundreds of case analysis exams. She is an adjunct faculty member at Bastyr University where she teaches homeopathic case management. Heidi is also on the faculty of HASC and The Homeopathic Community School.  Heidi is the co-organizer of the Annual Summer Seminar series with Massimo Mangialavori in Seattle and attends his biannual course in Boston. Contact Heidi@HealHomeopathically.us for information regarding the Annual Summer Seminar, and Betty Wood at betty@bdne.org for the fall and spring seminars in Boston.