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Some weeks ago I had a conversation with someone knowledgeable about traditional Chinese medicine. She said: “Problems in the lungs are about grief.” I shrug my shoulders and thought that in psychosomatic medicine lungs are about communication. So what, everybody has his theories.
Then a friend of mine told me this dream: “A man offered us a vial with a vaccine against the coronavirus. One of my friends took it and threw it in the ocean, the other one laughed and said: ‘This virus is here to teach us how to grieve. Why would we want to vaccinate against that?!”
This dream made me think.
In the following weeks I saw many clients coming to see me who were grieving. Even patients dealing with a Covid-19 infection often experienced some kind of grief shortly before or even during the outbreak of the disease. I do not know if this is a consequence of the limitations which the epidemic puts on us, or if it has directly to do with the virus, as the dream seemed to suggest. It is unquestionable that our lives slowed down. Slowing down in itself is enough to allow the past to catch up with us. Why is that so? The past is stored in the nervous system of our body. When we slow down, then we start to feel because our feelings have a slower pace than our thoughts. When we slow down even more, then the body can catch up with us because the pace of the body is even slower than the pace of our emotions. Through the slowing down of the pace of our lives, things can emerge out of our past that are not yet digested, that have not yet been integrated.
Even though these memories often come with uncomfortable emotions of fear or sadness or shame, their rising from the shadows of our unconsciousness can be very positive. If you store all kinds of stuff in your garage for many years, in the end the garage will be full and you hardly can breathe in it anymore. Time for a radical cleanup!
In our inner world there are areas in which we store the past. Once in a while they need to be cleaned up, otherwise the leftovers of the past take up more and more space and hardly allow us to live our lives in the present. Too much undigested past in our nervous system means little freedom for an exciting life, as our creativity will be limited by too much carry-on luggage, that we constantly have to take care of. Time for a radical cleanup! The coronavirus gives us the opportunity to do so.
When our present is not overloaded and overshadowed by the past anymore, then we can breathe more freely. We create space around us. I believe that when we cleanup our past, our lungs are less likely to fill up with mucus that makes breathing difficult.
Emotions are usually the first sign of the past arising. The most common emotion reminding us of pain that we experienced in the past, is fear. It is mainly the fear that something like that might come again. So we try to avoid that in our life. The problem here is that the law of attraction says: What you reject is what you attract. What we try to avoid is what we call into our life. When we do not try to avoid the fear anymore but open up to face it, deal with it, integrate it, then this fear will give way to space. When we have space in our life, then there’s room for intuition, for insight, for creativity. Life is exciting now!
If I understand it fully or not, my experience proves that Chinese Medicine and the dream of my friend were right: The coronavirus teaches us to grieve. It also teaches us to work together as it is not a problem we can solve on our own. The whole world needs to cooperate now.
Please remember that you do not have to do it alone. We need each other to give us stability in challenging times. Sometimes it can be friends or family and sometimes we might reach out to a professional for help.
Homeopathy is a healing modality that can help us heal from a virus infection more gracefully. Homeopathy can also help us to go through the sometimes painful process of integrating past trauma more elegantly and with less friction. Things simply can go easier with homeopathy.
Lieber Roland,
in meiner Teilzeitarbeit im Konstanzer Krankenhaus habe ich kurz an der Corona-Front gearbeitet, Einarbeitung für den Fall eines größeren Ansturms an Patienten. Was mir auffiel, ist eine große Traurigkeit, die mich selbst befiel, als ich dort arbeitete, so dass ich mich fragte, ob ich dort würde arbeiten können. In den letzten 2 Wochen hatte ich Urlaub und Gelegenheit, ein intensive Zen-Sesshin in meiner Praxis zu absolvieren unter Begleitung meines Lehrers übers Internet. Beim langen Sitzen in der Meditation sind viele Szenen von früher sehr lebendig in meinem Herzen aufgetaucht, es ist sehr berührend.
Mir scheint, dass diese tiefe Traurigkeit, die ich bei der Arbeit mit in die Klinik kommenden Corona-Patienten empfand, etwas Überpersönliches ist. Ich kann das nicht genau benennen, aber vielleicht hat es etwas mit unserer extremen Ausbeutung der Erde zu tun, mit unserem Lebensstil, der unsere Mitlebewesen oft so achtlos und brutal behandelt.
Diese Traurigkeit könnte auch ein Hinweis auf die homöopathische Behandlung der Patienten mit Corona-Krankheit sein, ich weiß darüber noch nicht viel. Hier in Konstanz hat eine homöopathisch arbeitende Kollegin die ersten 2 Patienten mit Covid19 in die Klinik eingewiesen, den ersten Patienten hatte sie mit Senega behandelt, und er ist mittlerweile genesen. Könnte so eine abgründige Traurigkeit im Zusammenhang mit der Lungenerkrankung ein Hinweis auf Causticum sein? (Eine Patientin, die vor kurzem einer schweren atypischen Pneumonie erkrankt war (Corona-negativ, es wurden Influenza-Viren gefunden), hatte auf Causticum C 200 zunächst gut, aber nur mit kurzer Besserung reagiert, ist dann aber später mit Caust XM gut genesen.) Könnte nicht auch die Fridays-for-future-Bewegung solche Causticum-Aspekte stark an die Oberfläche gebracht haben?
Dein obiger Artikel hat mich sehr berührt, ich freue mich sehr, von Deinem Leben in Vancouver Island zu hören und bin Dir tief im Herzen sehr dankbar, mir die Homöopathie nah gebracht zu haben.
Dein Markus
Dear Markus,
I am deeply touched to hear from you after what seems and even might have been decades since we met the last time.
Let me answer in English so English speaking readers can also benefit from your precious observations: Markus is a German MD and homeopath and he had been working in a hospital in the South of Germany in preparation for the corona epidemic. While working there he had experienced an intense sadness.
Thank you, Markus, for sharing your experience. I agree with you that this sadness is both individual and simultaneously a collective phenomenon. It warms my heart that you connect this also with the exploitation of nature. If the depletion of habitats, the mass extinction of species and the grave consequences of global warming do not make us sad, then I do not know what would be able to touch us. I believe that it is one of those things the virus hopefully will teach us: that we need to open our hearts for each other including for all the beings that we share this planet with.
Warm regards, Roland
Love this. Great thoughts.
thanks Roland…for saying this and doing all you do.
so insightful and helpful Roland, thank you for this posting it reflects my own experiences with my own history of respiratory issues and the current reality of my life. Bless you for your care and thoughtfulness.
I heard about this prediction for years from the Native elders. They always spoke about it as the great teaching. Never a tragedy, but a teaching.
Thank you for sharing of the treasure of your intimate knowledge of Native wisdom. It is a pleasure to hear from you.
Thank you for this insightful blog post. It resonates with my own experience, and of some of the dreams that I have been having throughout this pandemic. It feels as if there is a general, collective grief pertaining to earth ( our treatment of the planet), as well as of what is happening on a global scale to humankind.
I agree Teresa. I have heard quite amazing dreams from people who had gone through the corona disease. These dreams point in the direction you are mentioning, towards more sensitivity and a deeper connection to nature, our plant and animal brothers and sisters and to earth herself.
Thank you, that was beautiful . And as a student of TCM as well as Homeopathy I love the integration you have brought forth, through words . I love reading your newsletters, and I am looking forward to when we can meet again as a community to share in one of your C4 sessions.
love and blessings!
How inspiring to read You Roland. Thank You.
there is so much healing in the last few months in regard to my early…very early days. Yes, with support, I could not have done it alone. And there is so much grace in this togetherness….Both, the one who gave guidance/healing and the one receiving guidance/healing receiving what is there for them to receive.
Thank you Roland, there is indeed a feel of Grief. I am still dealing with my personal grief and I got sick this last December. It went straight to my lungs. It still bugs me so now and then. Exercise helps a lot.
Thank you, Wilma, for sharing your experience. I guess I have to apologize to the traditional Chinese medicine knowledge for not believing it right away.
Hello old friend. I am sitting here smiling as I sit here and read through your insights and these beautiful comments. I love the thread of these shared sentiments and experiences through humanity. I also had a deep experience with a virus that matches the identifying factors of this current situation, at the end of 2018. Lungs, deep grief for months, very long recovery…and I think back now at how life was still moving at quite a pace that didn’t easily bless the full immersion in my emotions that has been carved out for us all right now. Alas, the teachings were still delivered and I’m grateful to the lessons. I’m grateful to you for your authenticity and your open heart, for your sharing, for the deep work you do which ripples out amongst us all. Thank you Roland for being a teacher, and for also being a student along with the rest of us. I’m grateful to be here experiencing this time right now with all of you.
Thank you for sharing your journey and your grieving with us.
It is quite an exciting time right now, maybe it is the time we had been preparing for for decades. It is a time to show up with our grief and do our integration work, it is also the time to show up for our community.
I send blessings to you, your family and your work.
Thank you Roland and Markus for your insight! I talked to you (Roland) before about the grieving and the lung; the relationship of the lung and the intestines; both are organs of letting go of the old/past (is this what grieving is all about?) and at the same time taking in the new fresh air (lung) and food (semi digested and ready to be absorbed) to create an ongoing opportunity for life to continue. Now we have arrived at this portal in our collective human existence on this planet and the choices we can make. After the grieving we have to call on love and compassion to safely enter in our next level of existence on this planet. So how do we do that? Find it interesting to read about the remedy Causticum being good for the grieving and this virus outbreak, especially because I associate this remedy with old age, arthritis, difficulties in moving. Is there a message in this? And what would the next remedy be?
Dear Marlene, so far, homeopaths did not find one single remedy as an answer for covid. It seems to be more a sequence of remedies, according to the sequence of stages of this specific outbreak. Another factor is the variability of the virus. Scientists have already identified several strains, all with slightly different symptomatology and severity. It might be that we need to follow the challenge of the virus in our responses to it and stay flexible. Sometimes it feels more like a dance.
Internationally, Causticum is not one of the remedies for this pandemic. Theoretically it could be but practically it did not happen. As I had mentioned in the newsletter before, Phosphorus plays a big role as a remedy.
I was also intrigued by the use of causticum because I associate it with the feeling of injustice and the need to take action to rectify the wrong that has been done. Certainly, these feelings come up when we look to all injustices done to the earth and the indigenous people who have been mistreated because they were devoted to protecting the earth.