This weeks slogan is where the meditation masters are directing us to a fine goal of meditation - awareness. Question is why have they, at such an early stage, begun to direct our minds and mediation practice in this way.

What is interesting to note is why the meditation masters of old put this slogan in this tradition of awakening so soon. The thinking mind needs time to slow down. Stop hopping all over the place. But yet they have put this profound truth as number three in the system of awakening?

At some point in your meditation practice you are going to start seeing that as your thinking mind slows down the flow of thoughts will too. This can be a huge psychological shock to people who self-identify only as 'thinking beings'. Meditation, successful meditation process is quite frankly the antithesis to their self-concept.

Now don't get me wrong or get frightened but there is a lot more to our mind than just thinking. You will learn the more you delve into regular deep meditation practice that thoughts actually come from our mind. That it is mind that we need to get an understanding of not our thoughts so much. They eventually subside. Not to  the point you become a zombie but you chose when to think and not your thinking mind being in complete control of you.

As Ram Dass says, 'the intellect is a great friend but a lousy master.'

Too much thinking is a way of people dissociating. Disconnecting and is the major basis for 'dualisitic fixation' in other words 'self and other'

Why do the mediation masters instruct us to examine the nature of unborn awareness? And why do they specify 'unborn'? What do they mean?

Mediation is a journey to become more sane. Psychologically anyways. The masters are directing our focus inwards and to search and find this elephant in the forest.  Meditation is not just about chillin' out. Its deeper. Much deeper.

We are to search for the fundamental mind the awareness mind. This is not a concept but an experience and don't worry it eventually comes. As the thinking slows down and when the last thought goes and before the next thought arises there is a ...GAP!!!!

Mind the gap and the gap will mind you.

This gap is free and unbounded awareness and we need a training to get to this level of meditation, more training to stay in it and more training again to start to value and identify with this experientially speaking.

Once we get to the gap, which will take a few weeks of daily meditation of over 30 minutes minimum, how do we deal with awareness? The lojong masters tell us to examine it.   And examine its 'unborn' aspect.

This is because awareness has never died and therefore is never born and is unborn. We need to stabilise this practice and this understanding.

When we do we find the stable aspect of our minds. We arrive on the shores of peace - shanti.

Lady Gaga advises look after your career as your career won't leave you. The same can be said for awareness. Invest in it as it will never ever leave you.

 You will always be with your own spirit so you better love it and better have a good relationship with your own spirit-mind.

We cannot give what we don't have.

Enjoy examining the nature of unborn awareness. 

A fine jewel indeed.

Discover Your Beautiful Mind.

Firstly, if you are a nurse, doctor, pharmacist, health care assistant or hospital cleaner reading this, based on the recommendations of the medical homeopathic associations listed below, you should be taking one dose of homeopathic Gelsemium 30c as a prophylactic. Immediately.

This will not interact with any medication that you are currently taking and is safe to use. The remedy is to help your system combat COVID-19 and make you less susceptible to contracting the virus.

‘Homeopathic medicines have been used extensively for flu-like symptoms and in epidemics around the world. If you decide to take a homeopathic medicine, this should be in addition to the various measures outlined above and should not be your only approach. Selection of the most appropriate homeopathic medicine is based on an individual’s unique symptoms. However, Gelsemium 30c and Bryonia 30c are commonly used for flu-like symptoms and have a long-established, traditional usage over many years.’ This is the recent statement from the 4th of March 2020 from:
Alliance of Registered Homeopaths
British Association of Homeopathic Manufacturers
British Homeopathic Association
Faculty of Homeopathy
Friends of the Royal London Hospital for Integrated Medicine
Homeopathy Research Institute
Society of Homeopaths
 
The remedy can be ordered from these homeopathic pharmacies.

If you order one bottle, then you can take one dose which is one tablet and share the other 29 from the bottle with colleagues if they want to try and protect themselves.

There is no connection financially between me and the pharmacies. So from the outset there is no conflict of interest. There is just a motivation to get some proper information about the power of homeopathy out there that could save lives.
 
I am going to try and argue my case for the immediate use of homeopathy in all hospitals worldwide especially in Ireland and the UK. The medicines are also relatively easy to manufacture whilst people are waiting for PPE, a vaccine that may or may not work, and a combination of anti-malarial drugs and antibiotics the latter of which won’t work on a virus anyways. 

So here we go…..

Last year sales of homeopathic medicines in Europe topped £3 billion and out of 500 million European citizens over 100 million, a fifth of the EU, has used homeopathic medicine in the last year. Many medical doctors on the continent are also trained in homeopathic medicine. The pharmaceutical industry has been hell-bent with its heavily funded PR machine to spread lies and misinformation about the medicine that has been safely used for over 300 years to successfully treat patients. They do so as homeopathy poses a massive threat to shareholder dividends if European citizens keep using the medicine which has been working for hundreds of years for them and safely.

Clinical studies are showing that these medicines outperform their pharmaceutical cousins. Patients in the EU are voting with their feet and money in their droves. In fact, the first path of treatment for most Europeans is to a homeopath and 20% of Scottish GP's, for example, have received training in this medicine. If so, why not in Ireland too?

Homeopathic sales figures show that 70% of the sales were in Europe and 30% in North America. France is the leading market for homeopathy in Europe with sales of over 210 million Euros per annum and with 40% of the population having been treated homoeopathically in a medical setting.

With the oncoming pandemic about to hit and thousands about to lose their lives, a knowledge – even a basic one – about homeopathy it is being argued here, could save lots of lives potentially. Especially for those on the medical frontlines.
 
So what is Homeopathy?
Samuel Hahnemann, a German physician (1755-1843), founded homeopathy as a safer alternative to bloodletting, purging with mercury compounds, and other perilous medical practices of his day. We can now add to this list chemotherapy carpet bombing. He based his new approach on what he called the "law of similars." According to the theory, a pharmacologically active substance administered to a person in good health triggers a series of symptoms. When these same symptoms appear in a sick person, they can be cured by administering the same substance in a homeopathic (chemical free) form. With little or no side effects.

The homeopathic version by working in the persons vital force, cancels out or antidotes the symptoms. Most homeopathic medicines are imparted on a lactose pill which is milk sugar in a pill form.

 Homeopathy is inexpensive to make too which should be of interest to health ministries.

Healthychild.com writes, 'A report to the American Institute of Homeopathy in 1921 documented the dramatic success of homeopathy in the worst flu pandemic in history. The death rate of 24,000 flu cases under conventional medical care in that study was 28.2 percent, whilst the death rate of 26,000 cases treated with homeopathy was a nearly miraculous 1.05 percent.'

So why are we not immediately treating patients with homeopathy?

The statistics are reported in Randall Neustaedter's excellent book Flu:  Alternative Treatments and Prevention.

When a similar strain of bird flu, misleadingly termed Spanish Flu, spread around the world in 1918, it had catastrophic consequences. Over 50 million people died.  However, American hospital statistics from the time show that homeopathic treatment gave a far better chance of survival than conventional treatment did at that time.

For at least the past 150 years homeopathic practitioners have used the medicine Influenzinum as a flu preventive. Influenzinum is a homeopathic medicine made from flu viruses. A proprietary preparation is produced by Dolisos pharmacy each year using the flu virus strains recommended by the World Health Organization for the year’s vaccine production (Dolivaxil – containing Influenzinum 9C). The typical dosage is once per week for four weeks beginning in October or later, followed by another dose three weeks later to prevent yourself getting the flu.

Before anyone says hey COVID-19 is not the flu!!!???  I know I know…. but I have to make my case on the evidence that homeopathy has worked to help entire societies avoid viral infections. Added to this, reduces the symptoms of the infection and manages the disease to a state of being cured for MILLIONS OF PEOPLE!!!? OVER DECADES!!! WHAT COULD BE SAFER???

Oscillococcinum - Bestselling Homeopathic Remedy
The bestselling alternative medicine for flu in the US is a homeopathic preparation of the liver and heart of a Barbary duck (trade name Oscillococcinum). This medicine was first formulated in 1925. The name arose from the belief that the blood of flu victims in the 1918 pandemic contained bacteria composed of balls (cocci) that vibrated or oscillated. Joseph Roy, a French physician at the time identified this supposed pathogen and found it in many animal species. He chose as the source of his homeopathic preparation a duck, possibly an extremely fortuitous accident because of the association between human flu epidemics and bird viruses.

This remedy recently toped Drugstore.com sales list sales in the US alone are in the region of £20 million. A course of Oscillococcinum costs £6, which is used regularly by 5 million French for the prevention and treatment of colds and flu’s. If you know anything about the French, if this did not work and they did not feel the effects, there would be riots all over Paris. But they do work in so many medical conditions. Cancer too. Imagine?
 
Oscillococcinum was first studied in France during the 1987 flu epidemic caused by an H1N1 virus similar to the bird flu of today. This multi-centre study examined the effect of Oscillococcinum (200C) on the early symptoms of flu. Results were published in the peer-reviewed British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology. More patients in the treatment group recovered completely in the first 48 hours than the control group (17 percent of patients with active treatment compared to 10 percent of controls). More patients in the treatment group also judged the treatment as favourable compared to the placebo, 61 % vs 49 % (Ferley, 1989).

 MidwiferyToday.com report that, 'In 1990 German scientists replicated the French study of Oscillococcinum. They used the same criteria as the previous study and enrolled 372 patients. After 48 hours of treatment with Oscillococcinum the treatment group had significantly milder symptoms than the control group, and the number of patients with no symptoms from day two onward was significantly greater in the treatment group (17.4 percent) compared to the control group (6.6 percent) (Papp, 1998).'
 
Both of these studies show a significant curative effect of a homeopathic medicine in the treatment of flu in carefully conducted, double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical trials. Conventional antiviral drugs reduce the duration of flu by about one day if taken within the first 48 hours of illness (Cooper, 2003). These studies show that homeopathy carries the potential to make a dramatic difference in any flu epidemic without the risk of drug side effects.

If homeopathy can help in a pandemic and epidemic why not with COVID-19?

If anyone says there are no studies especially clinical and scientific ones to support homeopathic medicine as an effective medicine they are talking utter horseshit.

Just click here to see some of the many studies that have taken place and that are peer reviewed.

One has to wonder if orthodox medical ideologues will actually listen to or even read the factual evidence?

From experience I find that when their patients ask is it ok to take homeopathy with their allopathic prescription, rather than Dr's saying I have no idea and have no education on the subject and am therefore totally and utterly ignorant of the subject, which to be fair is vast and complex but deeply effective, they say things like, ‘oh, I don’t believe in that.’ And some of these doctor’s call homeopathy superstition. If only it was……

The ignorance of complimentary medicines in Irish medical schools is both breath-taking, indeed anti-intellectual, lacking in compassion and a failure to uphold The Hippocratic Oath to do no harm. If homeopathy works for the patient, alleviates the symptoms with no nasty side effects tantamount to the pharmaceutical industry why is it not available to Irish citizens and especially in the COVID-19 pandemic?

Why has the Irish government not promoted it more as a cost effective way to run our healthcare system which before this crisis was costing millions with people as sick as ever and with more and more flu’s?

Why not put the savings into funding the National Children’s Hospital?

Why are we not doing this?? …Hmmmm....Leadership void? No common sense? Ignorance? Ineptitude? Incompetence? Take your pick….

If in Ireland, we have only 500 respirators for 4 million people and only 5000 for 60 million in the UK, then doctors are going to be forced into the terrible situation of deciding who gets a ventilator and who does not.

In other words, who will live and who will not!?

This is an extraordinary traumatic psychological pressure to put on staff both in the HSE and NHS who in the last seven years of austerity have not been funded correctly, have been exposed to working conditions that have generated burnout of which they are currently at a huge risk of, moral distress and compassion fatigue which we have tried to raise an awareness of over the past five years through our training in 10 Irish HSE hospitals.

This is why I am calling now on the Irish government to make homeopathic medicines available to people who will not be able to be given a respirator.

This is surely the most compassionate thing to do. Not everyone may benefit but it is worth doing so some could possibly live. This could reduce the trauma for healthcare professionals and families alike.

What else is there when there is no respirator available for a patient (A PERSON - A HUMAN BEING) suffering from pneumonia who could die?

Over ten years ago I wrote in the Scottish press asking the question - is anyone planning to stockpile homeopathic medicines proven to effectively treat the flu for over one hundred years? Clearly not.

One of the aspects of the COVID-19 is that after infection it attacks the lungs creating pneumonia which many patients are dying of. Homeopathy has a number of remedies that are used in treating pneumonia. They are listed at this link but you can find similar lists in materia medica books on line.

 The main remedy it seems for the pneumonia that comes with COVID-19 may be · 
·  Antimonium tartaricum

• Indicated in pneumonia and pleuro-pneumonia at the stage of resolution.
• Fine moist coughing is heard all over the portion of the lungs infected.
• Great difficulty breathing, worse towards morning, must sit up to breath.
• Sharp, stitching pains and high fever.
• Person feels sure that the next cough will raise the mucus, but it does not.
• Deficient expectoration with old and very young children
  
  

Russell Malcolm MB ChB FFHom has been practising homeopathy for 20 years and he was Director of Education at the RLHH for six years. He has seen improvement of pneumonia symptoms within 30 mins of a homeopathic remedy being administered.

Homeopathy in some case could even free up respirators and save more lives as the remedy may allow patients to breath better and fight the virus and its effects through support of our immune system.
 

To shut up all the naysayers I think the best living advertisement for homeopathy is the British Monarch HRH Queen Elizabeth II. Some people are saying that Prince Charles was recently treated for his infection by a medical homeopath.

For many years now Queen Elizabeth has a personal physician who is also a medical homeopath.
 
Perhaps Queen Elizabeth’s longevity is down to homeopathy?
 
Anyways folks get yourself some remedies in and perhaps invest now in a homeopathy first aid kit. 

My ire is not just for successive governments trying to undermine homeopathy as a relevant medicine in our age or the pharmaceutical industry but also the homeopathic organisations across the EU who have failed to challenge the fake news condemning homeopathy. Two false rumours do not make a fact. To counter some of the false news with fact would be easy but they never employ a PR consultant to do so. This could eventually lead to homeopathy being made illegal. A number of legislative attempts have been made over the last decade concerning complimentary medicine. But who is complementing who?

Acupuncture for example does not pose a threat to the drug industry which is why the American Medical Association allows physicians there to train and practice this singular aspect of Traditional Chinese Medicine or TCM.

Remember a few weeks ago they were saying face masks were not relevant and now 'they' are saying they are. Use your head. Don't let the PR machine of MamaPharma dissuade you with their 'astroturfing' online campaigns to convince you or dissuade you from something. Especially something that could be beneficial to our society.

The factual information is there, the clinical studies too but only if you look.

Be well....

My next blog will be about the potential of herbal medicines to support your immune system. So sign up to the mailing list straight away.

This slogan is this processes first attempt to get us to reflect and see that our minds, without mindfulness training, can end up being too 'tight' and closed minded.

Meditation and these slogans are about opening those minds up quite like how a can opener works.

We end up perceiving everything as too real with regards our personal and conditioned perception. We need at times to lighten up and this slogan repeated to ourselves helps us do just that.

Al our experiences are fleeting.......so lets stop with all the pressure.

Reality and what it is, is such a huge topic in Western philosophy never mind Eastern. One commonly spoken maxim is that 'there is perception and there is reality'. Are people speaking about how they perceive a situation or reality. So many women, as TV star Gok Wan repeatedly shows, perceive themselves as bigger in size than what they actually are.

In reality they are 25% less in size than what they perceive.

Sometimes our maps of the world are not the world. All experiences are fleeting. Once they happen they are over. But we have an amazing capacity to replay them over and over in our minds dousing ourselves with stress biochemicals such as adrenaline and cortisol which cause us to age faster.

Bad enough an argument happens once but do we really need to replay it in the YouTube of our minds seven times over?

Our untrained minds are like glue! They just keep sticking to things. Starting in meditation we constantly have to keep trying to detach our minds from all the things it has become attached to.

Dharma  is a  Sanskrit word for phenomena. So therefore we should regard all phenomena - both good and bad as being dreamlike.

In other words we could be slightly detached from our attached way of perceiving things that can be quite rigid. This can lead at times to 'my way or the highway' type attitude.

What you think might be good for you may not be for someone else. By this I am not speaking of 'idiot insight' like enabling an alcoholic and therefore not applying this slogan correctly or indeed any slogan.

What this slogan is trying to do is introduce again and again to your mind is - openness.

To keep us out of our ego hedgehog curling by rolling up in a ball and keeping the world out and sometimes even a better way of doing things.

Discovering a sense of openness, a natural quality of your mind, is such a landmark moment in mindfulness training and practice. We don't have to take everything so seriously. Or be so reactive we can have some space....

This slogan will also help those with the Lifetrap of 'Unrelenting Standards'. 

Our choice if we are stressed is between continuing with being attached to things or start to detach and let go and trust and get some space and serenity.

The more attached to things we are we will have little peace.

We still have to operate but this slogan is speaking of operating with an openness of mind.

An open mind can accommodate more for it is - when you examine it and not take my word for it - vast like space but with one defining quality which you have to discover through your own meditation practice.

The key thing here is to reflect on the experience of the dreams that we have.

One thing to note is that we WATCH the dream - mostly. We even WATCH ourselves in the dream in a few cases. Who is that? What part of the mind is doing that? Is it thought? What is it?

We observe from a distance which is natural detachment. So if we can be detached naturally from it all in a dream then we can do the same in the waking life as if it is all a dream.

The more and more you investigate this slogan and reflect on it the better. You will see how much of what we experience is dreamlike.

The Aboriginal wisdom culture of Australia has an understanding similar to this in terms of what they call dreamtime. They understand this state of mind as more real than the waking life and they have spiritual reasons for saying so that you will discover the more that you study and practice. Here is an example of their art depicting what they see and perhaps where they go in their dreams.

This slogan of Regard All Dharmas As Dreams is so relevant to the current pandemic crisis. Thousands are losing their lives. This leaves us with more ethical responsibility to live our lives to the fullest in their memory and not waste it worrying about things that don't matter and to now, while will still have the chance, to deepen our practice which will give rise to wisdom and compassion which will enhance our lives and those around us.

The current COVID-19 pandemic will give many who have learned to meditate time to practice and even have a retreat. Take stock of their lives, prioritise what matters and wake up from the DREAM of all the human doing and return to be a human being and to.....

Discover Their Beautiful Mind....