INTRODUCTION TO BARBARA WREN'S
PHILOSOPHY OF HEALING
Throughout this work, we emphasize wholism and I would really like to define how we, the College, see wholism, as it is such an overplayed word and has acquired all sorts of strange meanings. To be wholistic means to be tied in with the greater whole and the greater whole means that we have total acknowledgement that everything in our Universe has an influence on us. Most people are quite happy to think that the Sun and the Moon have an influence on us (they so obviously do on all plants and tides for example), but beyond that it may be considered very strange. But we are going to be looking at some rather suppressed but fascinating facts: for one the idea that we do not generate most of our energy from food, we actually should be able to produce 60% of our energy from light.
There is something very interesting about all the different alternative
therapies, something that they have in common apart from being concerned with
healing, and that is that they are about creating movement within the body. A
large emphasis in my teaching is on helping the body to cleanse and thus
release and to create freedom within itself. To do this requires a lot of
movement, so I am going to be emphasizing water and dehydration. We shall be
looking at those environmentally as well as inside our own bodies.
When we consider therapies like aromatherapy, reflexology, massage,
homeopathy, acupuncture and kinesiology, we are looking at moving energy and
moving fluids within the body. It is always interesting, and this also shows
up very clearly in kinesiology, how tests will give different results
depending on whether the body is hydrated or dehydrated at any one point in
time. This is particularly clear with testing for allergies - where long term
dehydration is a major factor.
We will refer often to the dehydration concept because of the alert system the
body goes onto as soon as it feels dehydrated. For me, water is the
fundamental tool for the nutritional therapist to use. Here is just one
example from my practice and experience to illustrate what I teach:
A previous student of mine, who is an aromatherapist, had an elderly lady come to her with tinnitus.She had previously seen all the consultants, but they could offer her no help. She had come for a massage. The therapist requested that this lady stop all diuretic drinks and drink 4 pints of water each day. Within 2 months, her tinnitus had gone.
We are also going to be looking at the very important naturopathic law that
maintains that we always have to cleanse before we can re-nurture. The inner
cell cleanse is synonymous with the Sun-Moon activity which will be explained
in the Day/Night Cleansing Cycle section, because it is incomplete cleansing
cycles that lead to the great imbalance of the minerals within the cells.
When we are born, the subtle bodies do not get fully incarnated because our
bodies are so depleted of the necessary minerals; people are not "fully
present". We notice the 'cut-offness', which is recognized as a very
Tubercular characteristic in Homoeopathy. People are born more and more
deficient, then have things made worse by suppression, life-style and
dehydration, and so we have a situation where we can appreciate that what is
happening to the planet is mirrored in what is happening to our bodies.
This imbalance has increased from the time of our grandparents, to parents, to
present picture. It is not possible to manifest CFS/ME in one lifetime, for
example - there has to have been an inherited weakness. Look at the inherited
picture: it is always very easy to note the progression of imbalances when you
are looking at several generations. First of all (we are all being born
dehydrated) you are going to note the dehydration level, then the resulting
lack of movement (i.e. chronic problems) because there is not enough fluid in
the body, leading to lack of inner cleansing.
How might you assess vitality? The greater the symptomatology, the lower the vitality; the 'drier' the picture, the more dense and rigid. But, if you think of all challenges as contributing to the dehydration and the related cellular difficulties with cleansing, you can see how we come to have so many so-called intractable health problems.
My opinion is that treatments fail because the routes of elimination
(especially the liver, which is the "vacuum cleaner" of the blood) have not
been opened up and because treatment is too intense, too heavy, in the initial
stages. The most effective thing I do is to empower the person by pointing out
how all their symptoms, past and present, are interlinked and to tell them
about the vital importance of drinking enough water.
My family history is an example of the progression of disease from celiac
disease (gluten sensitivity) and psoriasis to alcoholism and/or anorexia and
thence to CFS/ME or schizophrenia. Edgar Cayce's work, which came to my notice
via a patient, connects with my thinking here and illuminated my understanding
of my own family history. The west coast of Ireland, where my family comes
from, provides a good example of what has gone on with reference to the
Tubercular miasm (an inherited weakness), which is strongly connected to
chronic fatigue. Ireland has the highest incidence of TB, which is ultimately
a calcium imbalance - the calcium is not in the right places within the body.
Ireland also has the highest incidence of celiac disease. Conventionally it is
accepted that, if you do not treat celiac disease, you end up with
schizophrenia and there is a strong connection between schizophrenia,
alcoholism, anorexia, bulimia and CFS/ME.
My mother was conceived during the slump in economic activity in the north of
England, and her mother lived mainly on potatoes. My mother was born with a
form of psoriasis. Potatoes are part of the belladonna family, which adversely
affects psoriasis. She died when she was 40 because of her small intestine
snapping, a very unusual thing to happen. Cayce thought that in psoriasis
there is a very porous ileum (the part of my mother's intestine that snapped).
I had inherited some of her toxic load and eventually developed anorexia and
then CFS/ME.
I see this as an example of the manifestations moving on different levels. Let
me elaborate a little. My grandmother showed no symptoms. My mother showed her
problems through her skin (psoriasis - physical), and then internalized them
in her small intestine (life threatening physical). She had children with
mental/emotional problems: myself who developed the anorexia and my brother
who was an alcoholic.
The body will do all it can to protect the brain, one of the most vital
organs, so the dehydration level has become seriously high by the time we find
the mental/ emotional symptoms showing up. I suggest that we are almost all at
the stage of manifesting mental/ emotional imbalances. The development goes
from the physical, to the life-threatening physical, to the mental/ emotional
level where it does not really show up on the physical any longer. When we are
treating a patient, we bring the picture back down from the mental/ emotional.
In CFS/ME, we often find anorexia in the case. So, over the generations, we
see the picture moving up to the higher levels. I have even had a case where a
man had the whole progression within his lifetime however.
I do not separate the 'psychological' from the physical because I believe in
working wholistically. I use the Chinese approach through the concept of the 5
Elements. I see dis-ease as arrested emotion. If it happens to be grief, a
Metal Element imbalance, it will affect colon, mind, lungs and skin. If it is
left there as an imbalance, it will gather up the Water Element imbalance, so
kidneys and bladder will be implicated, and fear will manifest. Release in the
physical body brings with it release of emotions.
You will always see a trend going through from the previous generations to the
present. The vitality of the grandparents would have been much greater.
Therefore, when looking at symptoms, it is very helpful to go back two
generations, to give yourself a picture of three generations. Check health (or
illnesses) of parents (if alive) and what parents (if not alive) and
grandparents died of.
The patient is going to be much more toxic and sicker than the grandparents.
Here is a typical progression of the disease picture through the generations:
1st generation might show arthritis (physical)
2nd generation, asthma showing up (physical)
3rd generation, M.S. or maybe CFS/ME presenting (physical + mental/ emotional)
4th generation, a complete flip to anorexia, bulimia, schizophrenia (mental/
emotional)
It is most effective if you treat very gently. Nowadays, therapists see so
much that has gone wrong that the tendency is to jump in and do lots of things
to the patient. But the vitality is not there for the body to be able to cope
with such measures - you can only work with the energy that is there in the
body. So, if you direct your efforts at treating only what would have been the
grandparent's part of the toxic load as your starting point, correcting only
the comparatively minor imbalances they would have showed, you will not get
aggravations, you will not be manipulating. If, on the other hand, you go
piling in supplements into a 'dry' body, you are going to create chaos, which
is sometimes referred to as a 'healing crisis'. I do not see them as
synonymous.
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