by Mary Aspinwall

An interview with world renowned homeopath, Mary Aspinwall, who now has a practice in downtown Santa Barbara.

Mary, can you tell us a little about Homeopathy?

Yes, I’m always happy to talk about my favorite subject! I love homeopathy, I feel it pretty much saved my life, when nothing else was able to help me. It is one of those therapies that seem almost too good to be true. I talk with my clients for about an hour and a half then I carefully research to find something in Nature that experiences similar suffering to what my client has described. Then I give that substance in an extremely diluted form that works on their vital energy (what in Chinese they call qi). It is like giving someone a very deep wake up call and then the innate intelligence of their own system begins to put everything right, from the inside out. People are just astonished by the results. You can see that shines through in the testimonials I get. People say things like:

“It works ... better than I would ever have dreamed of…”

“I would go as far as to say it was miraculous.”

“The remedy …worked like a dream.”

“Mary suggested I take a specific homeopathic pellet. Wonder of wonders! The next morning, the depression was gone, and did not return!”

“Suddenly I felt better than I had in years.”

“Homeopathy is so wonderful and so simple. How can one pill help so much?!”

That was my first reaction too! This is so wonderful – how come everyone isn’t using Homeopathy? The truth is millions and millions of people are using it, all over the world, particularly in Europe and India. Homeopathy has a huge fan club, including Gandhi, Mother Teresa, the Queen of England, Sir Paul McCartney, Cindy Crawford and Doctor Oz, to name just a few. The great jazz musician, Dizzie Gillespie put it very nicely:

“There have been two great revelations in my life: The first was bebop, the second was homeopathy.”

I’ve spent most of my adult life singing the praises of homeopathy and educating the public on how to use it themselves for first aid situation and minor illnesses. In the early 90s I designed four homeopathic kits that are now international best sellers and for many years I’ve written articles for Homeopathy Today the US’s leading Homeopathy magazine.

What do you consider the main differences to be between homeopathic medicine and conventional, pharmaceutical medicine?

Most conventional pharmaceutical medicine sees symptoms as the problem and the aim is to suppress them, even if the price of doing so is unwanted side effects. Homeopathy looks at symptoms as helpful signs that there is underlying dis-ease and uses the symptoms to distinguish what substance is needed to completely remove that underlying dis-ease. Once that is done the symptoms are no longer needed. Homeopathy is holistic, it looks at the whole picture and then it stimulates your entire system to respond and restore health harmony and wellbeing.

Best of all it is a truly ecologically sustainable medicine. It uses natural substances, but in such tiny amounts that these natural resources are conserved. These micro doses mean there are absolutely no harmful side-effects and no true homeopathic remedy has ever been recalled in Homeopathy’s 200 year history. It is not motivated by greed as all homeopathic medicines are completely patent-free. All our homeopathic medicines are tested on human volunteers, not animals. They don’t pollute the water supply or our environment.

I can see it has a lot going for it! Can you tell us in a little more detail how you work with clients?

Yes, I’m what is called a Classical Homeopath. That means I work very intensively to get to the deepest acting remedy I can find for each individual. This is also called Constitutional Prescribing. By that we mean that every aspect of the person’s Constitution (spiritual, mental, emotional and physical) is helped by just this one remedy.

Homeopathy is a very sophisticated language based therapy. About a decade ago a group of homeopaths in Mumbai, India who were studying under Dr Rajan Sankaran made a major breakthrough in case taking and case analysis. They named it Sensation Method and it is probably one of the most significant advances in the history of homeopathy.

Using Sensation Method means I am able to differentiate much more clearly between those needing Animal, Vegetable or Mineral remedies.
Mineral concerns are:
existence and later separation, identity, security and task, creativity and performance, responsibility and finally disintegration and death.

Plants concerns are:
Sensitivity and reactivity, matching a stimulus with an equal and opposite response, emotion, sentiment, fluidity.

Animal concerns are:
attack, defense, survival, sexual attraction, competition, a split in consciousness.

So initially, I am able to determine which Kingdom my client’s Constitutional Remedy belongs to. Then by focusing mostly on physical sensations the client is often able to access deeply buried information that helps me to identify the remedies they need. The case taking process allows people to access a realm that they normally wouldn’t be able to reach. In fact, they often describe the substance to me, usually without any idea what they are describing. Here are a few examples of my clients' own words to illustrate how this works in practice:
“A void, nothing else, space, a very cold artificial color, vibrating,
buzzing, electrical.” (Neon)

“Squeezing, can’t flow, small, dense, pressing in, no more hollow space, squishes
out, ruptures, slimy, gelatinous. Rubbery, green, dense. V-shaped reservoir of
nourishment.” (Cactus)

“Speeding up, closing in, spins around, gets smaller, paralyzed, trying to survive, pulls things from me, steals my life. A circular sphere emanates from me.
Animated like a puppet.” (Spider, with empathy for its prey!)

By using highly detailed computer software I was then able to confirm that Neon, Cactus and Tarentula respectively, were capable of producing similar suffering to my clients when tested on healthy human volunteers. I was therefore able to prescribe them with great confidence and my clients went on to have huge health benefits, across the board.

What can Homeopathy treat?

Homeopathy has been practiced for over 200 years and there is a wealth of evidence to show that has been used successfully to treat all manner of injuries, infectious diseases, epidemics, poisoning and chronic illnesses. However, rather than give a big long list of ailments here, I want to stress that the art and science of Homeopathy is based on a never failing natural law. My task as a Homeopath is to find a perfect match for each individual’s unique experience of suffering. Once this match is found, the results will be felt on every level and health, harmony and well being will be restored.