Author:
Deborah Collins
Book:
Journal
Type:
Case
Chapter:
2020.07.07
A remedy of Lauraceae case, “In from the Cold”
by Deborah Collins,
written by the patient herself
DC: This is a case of a woman who has, in fact, never been a “patient”. The young woman, 39 years old, is the daughter of a friend, and we happened to be having a conversation over a cup of tea. She is a highly capable and independent woman, these days a therapist, though she has worked in many parts of the world in various roles, often setting up NGO’s in countries fraught by poverty and war. In her therapy work, she is highly intuitive and independent, developing new ways of understanding human behaviour and helping people to make great shifts in their thinking. It is therefore all the more interesting that the homeopathic remedy that changed her life has nothing to do with this part of her being. With such a strong and independent personality, one would expect her to well on a Lanthanide remedy, 666, yet the one that produced these changes is in fact from the Laurales family, 622. Later on, when the working of this remedy had been completed, she asked for a remedy that suited other parts of herself, and we quickly came up with a fungi remedy – a remarkable story in itself.
The below account is her own description of the process that took place in her over several months. It has been edited for privacy reasons.
Pte: It all started with a very casual, almost throwaway comment to a homeopath friend, Deborah, in August. I mentioned that part of the reason I don’t stay in Europe for the winter is because of the cold. Not just that I don’t like it, but it makes me feel like I’m going to die. Even eating or drinking anything straight from the fridge is impossible. I knew that this was a pathological fear as it sets in the moment I feel even slightly cold and it’s an obsessive thought that overwhelmed anything sensible or realistic in terms of possible solutions.
Deborah asked me where the sensation came from and what memory was attached to this feeling, and totally spontaneously I said, “I remember being frozen in a block of ice, a glacier.” She instantly had an idea and jumped up, asking for a small piece of paper. She wrote one word on it, folded it up, and asked me to hold it. Almost immediately, I felt my body temperature rise, my face flush, and I started sweating profusely. I was boiling from the inside out!
Since I was a child, I’ve had memories of being a tree. Holding that piece of paper brought these sensations flooding back and I felt the movement of nutrient-rich liquid moving up inside me as I had as a tree. I asked Deborah what it was on the paper and we played a little guessing game. Obviously, from the change in my physical temperature I felt it was something warming, and the tree-like sensations inside my body helped too. It also felt aromatic, and I guessed Eucalyptus even though I knew it wasn’t quite right. Deborah explained it was the tree of Lauraceae, much to my surprise as the oil of the remedy of Lauraceae usually brings me up in a red and white blotchy skin rash as it was always too hot for me.
I kept holding the piece of paper all afternoon and the longer I held it the more I sweated and started to really stink! As someone who is very smell-orientated, this was fascinating for me. I can always tell my level of health by my smell. I’m not a stinky person usually, but I really smelt of dead and dying people. Totally gross and not a smell I ever remember smelling in my body in the past. This continued for weeks and even 5 showers a day didn’t hold the stench at bay for more than an hour or so at a time. It was dreadful. Thank goodness my online clients could only see me and not smell me!
But that was just the start. On the second day, I started to notice a distinct shift in my behaviour and thinking, as though I had woken up someone else. I felt a profound schism in my mind as I kept thinking things that ‘I’ wouldn’t usually think. Apart from the smell, I was the same from the outside, but felt radically different on the inside. I find it very difficult to put into words how profoundly disorientating and disturbing this was, like having a mental breakdown or transplant. I can only compare it to being on hallucinogenic drugs and assuming that this would be like a trip, I hoped that at some point in the not too distant future I would find myself being me again. If I hadn’t been staying with my mother in the countryside I don’t think I would have coped. I can only imagine this is what a breakdown is like. It was sometimes relatively fine and sometimes, inexplicably suddenly, horrifically terrifying. However, my body refused to sleep, only ooze stench. Usually, I sleep exceptionally well, but my body would not shut down. Even my pee smelt wrong. On top of my fragmenting mind, I had all the physical, painful symptoms of my 2 ‘home’ sicknesses that I get whenever I get ill regardless of the cause. These are migraines and a glandular throat infection that turns into a chesty cough. Both of these showed up, on top of the elevated body temperature, stinking, and no sleep. At this point, I should mention, I still hadn’t taken the remedy ofLauraceae remedy but I did have some pillules in a packet that I kept tucked into my underwear.
If this wasn’t enough, when Deborah checked up on me, we got to talking about my childhood and teenage nightmares. I had whole series of nightmares where I was a middle-aged male torturer. Starting around 9 years old, I had dreams of ordering people into gas chambers. Once my men had filled the chambers they all left, but I would stay and enjoy watching those inside die. I had other dreams where I raped and tortured people, taking great pleasure in their suffering. I later found out some of these events in my dreams actually occurred, such as the systematic stealing of newborn babies from hospitals and throwing them in bags into the back of a van, and then off a bridge into a river. These dreams were always hyper-real and I can still vividly remember the smells, light quality, room temperature, like it happened yesterday. Deborah and I discussed how this may have some correlation to my fear of misusing my power in this lifetime, if these were past life memories. Along with my fear of (mis-)using my power is a lot of shame at the pleasure I took in other people’s suffering and pain and how much I enjoyed hurting other people.
Deborah found another reference about a remedy of Lauraceae that emphasized this domineering, survival aspect. This remedy of Lauraceae is a tree that can flourish under almost any conditions and will draw resources from all other plants nearby. Its oily leaves don’t decompose in compost either. This remedy of Lauraceae has a power and ability to endure under almost any circumstances. This is exactly what I felt the torturer version of me had done; he’d done whatever he had to in order to survive. This brought huge waves of compassion to me, having spent a lifetime subliminally feeling so ashamed of this part of me. It had also made me feel quite separate to many other women. While so many of my girlfriends talk about their experiences as victims, I’ve always had this energetic burden of being a perpetrator. I felt this shame well up, knowing that sooner or later I would abuse the power I have been granted in this lifetime, as I had done in the past.
Back to the treatment. After a week of constantly being too hot, the sweating dead people smell started to reduce slightly and my body temperature started to normalize. Thankfully, my headaches, swollen glands, sore throat and all the rest started to calm down. This was followed by two more weeks of bouts of sweating, but the smell shifted to my smell when I’ve been ill, and then to smell as if I hadn’t washed for a few days. The third week was also still more stinky than usual, but more like my usual smell rather than the previous purging stenches I went through. The migraines stopped and my glands were up and down for a while. My periods changed briefly, and I expelled huge clumps instead of pure blood. They then returned to normal.
For two months, I felt unattached to anything in my life. Like free-falling but not falling as there was no sense of gravity or up or down, or anything else. I was not sad or depressed, but I couldn’t grasp hold of anything to anchor me, and I flailed with nothing to hold onto. I can only equate it to being the goo inside a pupae after the caterpillar has broken down and before it forms into a butterfly. As much as I could, I surrendered. It was deeply uncomfortable and at times I felt the void would swallow me whole.
Thankfully, in mid-November, I finally stopped smelling of this purging stench – that’s three months of clearing and cleansing and so many profound changes. During that time, I gave away or sold almost everything I own and moved from Thailand to France. I have no desire to chase the sun as I have for the past decade, and I am now settled in rural France with an adorable adopted rescue dog, a car (my first having only had motorbikes until now!), and I’ve bought a flat. I used to gulp my food and I now eat slowly. I have completely lost my formerly insatiable craving for sugar. I’ve dropped six kilos so far and for the first time in my life, the weight is coming off my legs rather than from the top down. But probably the two most staggering differences – as dreadfully corny as it sounds – are firstly, that I’m so much more loving: of others, of myself, of people walking down the street, of strangers doing things I don’t agree with. Secondly, that, internally, I feel so spacious. I am positively cavernous! For anyone who gets easily overwhelmed or filled up by others, you’ll appreciate just how precious this spaciousness is.
These are really huge changes in my personality and life and they feel permanent. I’m fascinated to see this new version of me that is emerging. The last two month were something of a void as I left the previous me and oozed and congealed into the new me. And oh how I love how I feel now!
All that to say, this is the most extraordinary healing I’ve ever had – especially as it was a word written on a piece of paper. I can’t convey how thankful I am. Now winter is here and I am absolutely loving the weather and scenery as she creeps in on frosty footfalls.
DC: This case evokes many questions, one being “what are we actually healing?” The part that initially required a remedy was the one where she was the most blocked in her freedom, the fact that she could not remain anywhere even slightly cold. In her case, this also corresponded to images she had had of herself as someone totally “cold-hearted”. The remedy apparently healed a part of her shadow, well-hidden. It had no relationship to that which we see on the outside, the highly capable and autonomous therapist. It reminds us to look beyond the obvious, and also to take the most “weird” symptoms and feelings of the patient seriously, even if we do not understand them at all.
It also confirms the idea that we have many different personalities, each of which require a different remedy.
Such a deep transformation, brought about by a word on a piece of paper and perhaps also the pillules her pocket, which she never ingested, remind us that homeopathy is indeed “energetic information”, healing the person beyond the molecular level before translating into one’s physical being.