Imagine having the knowledge and practice so that when an emotional or physical issue arises, you can treat yourself without ever having to leave the house. This is the goal of Claire Zarb, who is a homeopathic practitioner. She is the instructor, the tool, the gateway for her patient’s to take the things she teaches them and bring them home. This way, they have a full toolbox of home remedies to use whenever they are experiencing a hardship of sorts.
You can learn more about Claire and homeopathy by connecting with her here:
About Claire and her work:
I qualified as a Homeopath in 2010 from the College of Practical Homeopathy with a Licentiate Diploma in Homeopathy. My course covered herbs, nutrition, and flower essences. I also have additional training in Homeobotanicals therapy which I regularly prescribe in my practice.
I went to see a homeopath in my early 20s, mainly because I was considering a career change but also out of curiosity to see if it could help my digestive, menstrual, and skin issues that I was suffering from at the time. I had tried many different therapies such as acupuncture, reiki, kinesiology, herbs, etc, and they all helped in their own way. Still, homeopathy was by far the most powerful healing experience that I had. My homeopath helped me detox from years of using the contraceptive pill, antibiotics, and other strong acne drugs to clear my skin, in turn, this helped heal my gut, and many of my digestive and skin issues went away in a very short space of time. What struck me the most was the emotional support I received from homeopathy; it wasn’t just therapy for physical symptoms but mental ones as well, always looking to address the cause. It was quite a journey for which I am very grateful, as it turned my life and career forever.
I love to hear people’s stories, and how they got to the place they’re at now. This includes their health history but also their childhood experiences, traumas, the good times and the bad, their family history, and their view of the world. All remedies are individually prescribed, so your life story helps me match up the correct remedy for you as a unique being.
Homeopathy explained:
Homeopathy is a unique system of medicine that stimulates your body to heal itself. What a homeopath is trying to stimulate with remedies is what we call Vital Force, also known as qi, chi, vitality, or life force in other practices. The Vital force maintains and directs life, it is a form of energy that underpins all biophysical and biochemical processes and separates living from non-living matter. When we become unwell, we often look to the symptoms as the cause of the problem, but in reality, symptoms are only products of a deeper disturbance. When there has been a disturbance in the Vital Force that hasn’t fully resolved, then dis-ease can begin to set in. For example, maybe you suffer from bereavement, and the shock leads you to come down with a nasty bout of flu, but because of your mental state, you don’t recover well and then start to show symptoms of chronic fatigue. The cause of the dis-ease to the Vital force here is grief, and a homeopath would look to work in that place to allow your body to rebalance and head toward wellness.
Homeopathic remedies are vibrational, and careful selection is made to ensure they resonate with your current state. Each remedy picture has a large quantity of information about the mental/emotional and physical state, which goes into a huge amount of detail. For example, Sepia is a remedy made from cuttlefish ink and is remarkably effective for female hormonal imbalances. The remedy picture includes ‘never feeling well since’ a change in hormones, such as puberty, pregnancy, birth, menopause, or since taking a hormonal contraceptive.
The Sepia state is often someone who feels negative, low in energy, and has little patience for their partner or children, they feel indifferent to those closest to them and would rather be alone. If their period is painful, it feels as if things might fall out through the vagina, and the pelvic floor feels loose and unstable. Their hands and feet are often chilly, and they crave vinegar and sour foods. This is just a snippet of the remedy picture, giving you an idea of the detail a homeopath needs to know to find the right remedy for you!
During a typical session, you will be seated and asked questions about your health and how that particular health complaint came about, and how it feels for you. If there is pain, I want to know what makes the pain better or worse, what the pain feels like, what other sensations appear alongside that pain, when the pain started and the emotional state leading up to it appearing, and so on. Once I have built up a well-rounded picture of you and your health complaint(s), I will begin to find remedies that match and make up a prescription or give you details of a homeopathic pharmacy to purchase it from.
What homeopathy is for:
Technically homeopathy can work with any health complaint because it’s about healing the individual and the unique set of symptoms they have and how they came about to get sick in the first place. It’s not about the diagnosis of a named disease (although sometimes those labels can be helpful for a practitioner to know). Instead, the practitioner acts as a detective looking for clues as to which remedies are needed for those symptoms.
I could treat two different women with similar hormonal complaints, such as irregular periods. Still, it’s likely those two women would receive completely different prescriptions as their symptoms, causation, and backgrounds will be vastly different.
Homeopathy can be used for a wide range of health issues and has a reputation for being particularly effective in treating emotional disorders, skin complaints, acute complaints such as colds, coughs, infections, hormonal imbalances, fertility issues, and so much more.
Homeopathy stimulates your body’s healing responses and can be a very useful tool in supporting your overall well-being, it’s particularly helpful to have a kit of remedies at home so you can treat yourself and your family for acutes. Because it addresses both emotional and physical symptoms, it can be used in multiple ways to support you in times of illness, stress, or worry. If you have a driving test coming up, you could take remedies to help alleviate feelings of anxiety, or if you lose your job, you could use remedies to help alleviate symptoms of grief and loss. I sometimes wonder how I got by without homeopathy!
From the patient’s point of view:
The type of homeopathic training I had is known as Practical Homeopathy. It means we use a variety of methods to prescribe remedies as opposed to just a classical method of prescribing to help address 21st Century living. Some of the methods take into account a drug layer that may hinder the patient from fully healing, I see this frequently in practice in relation to hormonal contraceptives. Often the patient started taking them for issues such as acne or irregular periods. After that, a myriad of symptoms started appearing, some many months later, so it’s hard for them to be sure what caused the issue in the first place.
If I see this pattern within the patient’s timeline, I’ll use the tautopathic method, which focuses on the drug or toxin taken by the patient which appears to have caused the symptoms. A tautopathic therapeutic approach involves prescribing the original toxin or drug in a low potency (usually after the indicated remedy has been given and failed to cure, or sometimes alongside indicated remedies to accelerate healing). I find this a very successful approach within my practice.
Most patients report how much more in touch they feel with themselves post a consultation. They start to notice more about how their body functions, their thoughts, and some of the traumas in their life which have brought them into a state of ill health. It gives them space to talk, to offload some of their emotional burdens, and to feel listened to. Also, when you find a remedy that fits well with what they’re going through, they can get excited that a remedy sounds just like them and become really fascinated by the level of detail that homeopathy goes into.
To be honest, after many years of working in this field, I’ve given up trying to convince people that homeopathy works! Often those who are the most skeptical are the ones who have never tried it, so it’s a bit of a waste of energy to debate with them. I was naturally skeptical when I first tried it, but I’m living proof that it worked for me, and my patients tell me it works for them, so that’s what matters most. I find a grassroots approach works best as more and more people try homeopathy and share the benefits with their friends and family. I often hear the argument that there’s no scientific evidence for homeopathy, but that’s simply not true, the Homeopathic Research Institute is a great place to start for studies. https://www.hri-research.org
Claire’s well-being tips:
I often suggest that patients find a spiritual practice they can partake in regularly. Whether that’s journaling, meditating, going for a walk in nature, a yoga practice, or even doing something creative like painting or pottery. It can be very grounding and gives us a sense of purpose and peace, so much about our modern lifestyles relates to achievement, but this can be a very stressful way to live, so times of conscious rest and recuperation are important.
Ask for help! You don’t need to suffer alone. Sometimes that can be in the form of a friend or family member, or sometimes it’s necessary to seek out a professional. I have my own homeopath, and so do my children; I find having that objective, the external view takes the pressure off me to be the ‘fixer’ for everyone in my family. It’s also an act of self-care. How can I be a good homeopath to others if I do not take the same consideration for myself?
Claire’s resources:
I’ve been enjoying listening to podcast interviews with Dr. Bruce Lipton about our negative belief systems in the unconscious mind and how they account for 95% of what we do, and how to go about changing those belief systems.
I’ve recently read two books by Dr Brian Weiss in relation to past life regression and future life progression, his books are mind-blowing!
How to Do the Work by Dr. Nicole LePera (holistic psychologist) is an excellent book about recognizing your patterns and healing from your past.
The Body Keeps the Score – Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma by Bessel van der Kolk MD. Another insightful book about the mind-body connection.
How to Fail podcast and book by Elizabeth Day. I love listening to the interviews (including celebrities and those with a high profile) document areas of their lives where they failed. It proves that all humans go through phases in life where things don’t quite go to plan, and the amazing growth opportunity that can emerge from these said ‘failures’.
Homeopathic Psychology: Personalities of the Major Constitutional Remedies: Personality Profiles of the Major Constitutional Remedies. By Philip M. Bailey. This is one of my favorite homeopathy books that goes into much more detail about the major remedy types.
Sensitive is the New Strong by Anita Moorjati – an excellent book for empaths to help them cope in an increasingly harsh world.
Learn how to connect with your own body and teach it to heal itself by tapping into its own healing processes. Homeopathic practitioner Claire Zarb is helping people do just that. She opens the door for them and gives them the knowledge to use this power within themselves so that they have a toolbox full of home remedies as needed.
You can learn more about Claire and her work here:
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