Radical Healing Integrating the World's Great Therapeutic Traditions to Create a New Transformative Medicine

Back in 1972, when I began my search for a better approach to health and illness, one of the first books I acquired was American Indian Medicine, by Virgil Vogel. I pored over the descriptions of how different tribes used common plants, many of which I had known growing up in the woods and fields of the rural South. I was fascinated by the notion that nature could heal, and I felt in my bones the power of that truth. By early 1973 I was in Lahore, Pakistan, sitting beside a hakeem, a practitioner of traditional Unani medicine, in his indoor/outdoor consulting booth at the edge of a dusty street. Surrounding him were shelves of hand-labeled bottles holding exotic compounds that had been patiently ground in a mortar and pestle. A year later, when I began my training in Ayurveda and homeopathy, I discovered the subtlety and complexity of such natural medicinals and the power they had, not merely to relieve suffering, but to catalyze personal growth and transformation. After returning to America, I hauled around my kit of remedies and potions, offering them hesitantly and with some embarrassment to friends and patients. Today, nature's medicinals are quite in vogue, popping up everywhere--shiny new versions of those myriad little bottles fill shelf after shelf in health-food stores and even pharmacies. They come from many parts of the world and reflect a variety of therapeutic schools. The most widely available are herbs, homeopathics, cell salts, and flower essences. Though each of these classes of natural remedies has its own breed of practitioner, a common thread runs through them: they are all lifted from the same living matrix that nurtures and sustains us human beings. As a result, such medicinals tend to convey complex, natural, informational patterns that can be used by the human system to reprogram the body and mind. Because these medicinals come from the larger biosphere, they encourage the kind of personal reorganization and spiritual evolution that is congruous with an overall shift toward a healthier planet. They heal us into a wholeness with Nature. Though all of the medicinals we will explore here have the capacity to promote change and reorganization, each type provides a distinct therapeutic "angle," with herbs being used most often to affect organ systems, homeopathics for rebalancing the overall "vital force," and flower essences for addressing the dilemmas of the mind. Understanding the principles that govern the use of each class will allow you to learn to use its basic remedies and, if you wish, to stock and apply the home medicine kit detailed in Section V. Meanwhile, your personal experience with the transformational effects of natural remedies will provide a foundation for much of what you'll learn in the rest of this book. 1: Herbal Traditions Dr. A. came into the Center for Holistic Medicine in New York City looking sallow and breathing heavily. It had been all he could do to get himself there. He was exhausted and sick, but relieved to have made it. "I left the hospital," he said. "They told me not to, but I did anyway. I couldn't deal with all the tests and medications." Dr. A. was a psychoanalyst of the old school. He had escaped Vienna as the Nazis arrived, and had come to America already middle-aged. Starting over in New York was no small challenge. In order to open professional doors that would otherwise have been closed to a man his age, he simply told everyone that he was ten years younger than he was. With his energy and determination, he was questioned by no one, and he'd become quite successful. But now, at the age of eighty-six, it was all catching up with him: the cumulative professional responsibilities, the rapid tempo of New York City, and a physical constitution that had never been very strong. Under the stress of trying to maintain the pace of a younger man, all his systems hadBallentine, Rudolph is the author of 'Radical Healing Integrating the World's Great Therapeutic Traditions to Create a New Transformative Medicine' with ISBN 9780609804841 and ISBN 0609804847.