Introducing Barbara - our new resident homeopath
With the opening of the Green Rooms at the Centre, the team at Refettorio Felix have been busy meeting and learning from people who are keen to help us expand our support services by providing our guests with therapeutic care, support and a sympathetic ear. One avenue we’re pursuing is homeopathy - treatments which in the past we’ve had great success with and we’re excited to see how bringing back this service can help our guests feel healthier and stronger. We’re so pleased to welcome Barbara and Ava as our resident homeopathists who will be working with our guests every Friday in the Green Rooms. To help them provide the best possible care for our guests, we’re looking to raise money to buy a Sulis Remedy Maker - read on to learn more from Barbara about herself, homeopathy, and what this machine will offer us…
Can you tell me a bit about your background?
I started off with a degree in Psychology and did a graduate diploma in Personnel Management before working for a long time in HR. So I’ve always enjoyed working in people-facing roles, as well as having a deep interest in health & wellbeing, nutrition and fitness. My path into homeopathy was quite personal: I began experiencing some health issues which conventional medicine wasn’t able to help me with. I’d been curious about homeopathy as a practice for some time, so explored this as an option for my own healing and found it to be the only treatment that was able to alleviate my problems. After this, I decided to delve deeper into this natural form of medicine and trained to become a homeopath.
What do you think people should know about homeopathy?
Homeopathy follows a holistic approach to treatment: it’s a practice that emphasises the whole picture of what makes up health, rather than just discrete physical or mental ailments. Instead of seeing health as merely the absence of disease, we understand health as a balance, as vitality, in terms of the dynamic state of energy in our body. Homeopathy understands disease as blockages to this balance of energy, and symptoms as the way the body communicates to us the presence of such blockages. Homeopaths believe that the body heals itself by returning to a state of balance, but that we often need help stimulating this natural response.
There are lots of interpretations of homeopathy, and many homeopaths disagree with one another, but I believe that it’s a form of natural health which isn’t incompatible with conventional medicine and can in fact run alongside your doctor’s advice. What I, and I think many people, have found frustrating is being told there’s nothing wrong with you because medics haven’t been able to diagnose you after a clinical assessment. Homeopathy is a much more individualised form of health which recognises that every body and every mind is different, and that this means every treatment should be unique.
What can our guests expect from a session with you?
We would begin with a 30 minute or hour long consultation which is essentially a kind of talking therapy. This is an opportunity for the client to speak freely about themselves; to tell me about how they feel; about their family and personal medical history; about any past physical or mental trauma. Our consultation is a special time where clients should feel able to express their concerns and feelings without fear of judgement; to feel reassured that everything they share is being acknowledged from a point of genuine care. From this point, I would devise a highly specific and individualised remedy for the client to take in the form of pills. Because the remedies are so precise, we would follow up to check that they are working for you and make adjustments so that we’re responding to the constant changes going on in the body’s energy balance.
