Last week I found myself sitting a week-long Sesshin (focused Zen meditation retreat) in upstate New York. Happily, that is part of my job as the executive director of the NY Zen Center for Contemplative Care.
The week was rich with knee pain, mosquito bites, and maybe even some increased capacity for self-awareness. Afterwards, I was thinking about why we so often link meditation and compassion. Why should this activity which could be seen as a form of selfish withdrawal actually bring about a sense of commonality? I’m not a Zen monk but I think it has to do with an intimate awareness that arises, when sitting, of the suffering you and others are experiencing in real-time. With extended meditation periods, your mind starts to see itself in all of its discomfort along with corresponding bodily discomforts. Then you sense others working through some similar labyrinth of their own, which extrapolates into a sense of shared experience.
I believe this has alignment with homeopathy. After all, homeopathy literally means “similar suffering”. Like a well-chosen homeopathic remedy, meditation can be a safe means for bringing neglected problems to the surface, within a dedicated space for resolution. That is more than symptom management, it is seeing and feeling a symptom clearly, in all of its nuance and connectivity, allowing for new understandings or hopefully resolution.
I sometimes feel that the 1990’s, with that period’s superficial readings of all things old or alternative actually set back valuable practices by relegating them to the dustbin of woo or new age. Homeopathy became a catchall for “natural” medicine and Zen became a marketing slogan for everything from shampoo to dog beds. That’s unfortunate because it overlays a murky film on valuable knowledge. In this time of overmedication for every complaint and rampant distraction from addictive apps, meditation and homeopathy remain powerful examples of sophisticated practices for self-healing. They are ways to engage with the reality of our deep, chaotic present and may even provide means for healing, ourselves and others.
If I could remove one word from the English language, it would be woo. More and more, we see solid scientific research that supports what those of us in the fields of complementary medicine observe on a daily basis. And the sooner we can actually look at the research without bias, the better. If you would like further information on research,
the Homeopathy Research Evidence Base is a good place to start.
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