Classical homeopath Ashley Ager-Dimech offers her perspective on inner beauty vs outer beauty and how homeopathy can help with the eternal quest for the former. She recommends listening to the silence, breathing deeply, releasing those endorphins and looking at what we have and not what we want.

[attach id=263087 size="medium"]There is a dynamic balance between our physical bodies, our relationships, our environment and our inner self.[/attach]

“The natural force within each of us is the greatest healer of all.” Hippocrates

Have you ever heard someone say “she is beautiful inside as well as out”? This conjures up a vision of someone with the face and soul of an angel, but is this the right way to perceive beauty?

There is a dynamic balance between our physical bodies, our relationships, our environment and our inner self. When we are healthy, these are balanced, but when there is disease, there is imbalance.

The Navajo call this healthy state of balance hozho, which also means ‘walking in beauty’. It envelopes a sense of harmony deep within us, which comes out in our physical self and the relationship that we have with nature and with other people.

Classical homeopathy can help us along this journey; it can stimulate these innate healing capacities and marry the inner and outer peace/beauty we all have within us.

We are bombarded with fads and promises of gravity-defying lotions and potions. The PR wheels turn around, subliminally encouraging us as to what to eat, what to wear, how we should look and what we should use. All this pressure reaps an intolerable toll on our emotional and physical well-being, we lose sight of who we are and instead we want to become what they want us to become: needy, reliant wrecks, where the fast pace of life and quick fixes make us slaves to the media machine.

All this sounds very idealistic, I hear you say, but if we just take time to nurture ourselves, to eat a balanced diet without resorting to the ‘vitamins’ you ‘really do need’, to turn off that telephone and TV at least an hour before sleeping (no wonder you can’t sleep!)... Why not listen, instead, to the silence, breath deeply, release those endorphins and look at what you have and not what you do not have or want. Slow your life down; you will gain peace of mind, presence of mind, gratitude and see beauty in things you never did before.

So how can homeopathy really help you with the eternal quest for beauty? Feeling good about yourself, both mentally and physically, comes from within and will shine through in health.

Homeopathic practitioners do not consider each symptom separately, but rather treat the patient as a whole and each person as a unique individual.

A homeopath will inquire about all of the patient’s health issues, not just the main complaint, in order to be able to identify the one remedy that best matches all of a person’s physical and mental/emotional symptoms.

In this way, homeopathy re-orients the body and mind as a smoothly functioning system, one part not separate from the other. Your homeopath can then also guide you with nutritional and lifestyle advice to help you maintain optimal health and well-being. They will listen carefully to each of your symptoms, ask many questions about your lifestyle andhistory, and then take more time to research your case before prescribing your remedy.  The medicine aims to address your chief complaint along with other symptoms you may have so that a gentle and lasting cure can be achieved.

A tutor of mine once told me that in her busy, affluent practice she treated the “weeping rich”. While I saw her point, I feel that wherever we treat clients, be it Harley Street or Brixton, so many of the people who walk into clinics do so because of expectations they, or others, or society puts on them. Of course clients come in with various problems.

One of German physician Hahnemann’s most important teachings concerns the danger of suppressing the visible symptoms of an illness. Better to have the disease on the surface of the body, because from the surface it can exit outwards. Suppressive measures may drive a disease process inward towards a more vital organ. The itching rash, for example, may disappear, but trouble may appear down the road that might be a lot more problematic than a skin rash.

Classical homeopathic treatment will heal from within – if you treat the underlying cause, the outer, less harmful skin conditions will abate if the clients’ constitutional remedy has been found.

This is why the ‘homeopathic conversation’ is so important. Sometimes, one physical symptom is not even associated with another more sinister emotional symptom, but a good homeopath would always make the connection.

Lifestyle choices and maintaining causes always play a part in the direction of cure; there is never a magic pill to curtail all symptoms – treatment takes time, patience and a whole lot of effort on the clients’ part. We are complicated beings, but beings with an amazing ability – that of being able to heal ourselves from within.

Ashley Ager-Dimech runs the Tigne Holistic Centre in Sliema.