homeopathic_meditations

Ok, let's talk about the Calcarea family. As a reminder, I am going to talk about the remedies as if they were people. While I suspect that this technique is at least partially mnemonic in nature, it is also true that homeopaths talk about their patients as if they are incarnations or personifications of the remedies. There are two non-mutually exclusive lines of thought on this: first, there is the so called the "constitutional remedy". You are believed to have been born with a unique sensitivity to some particular set of maladies above others, and your constitutional is the remedy (usually a polycrest) that is the closest to address those maladies in the precise modalities that they present to you most often. On the other hand, thanks to the history of our lives, we are said to go through "stages" when our particular sensitivity is best matched by some other remedy. This is believed to be caused by some external force or influence that is perturbing your life-force field at the current time, but may or may not become a long term trait of us.

Back to the Calcareas, the first thing to know is that, in general, Hahnemann expected his remedies to come from species as could be found in Nature. When he first experimented with Calcarea Carbonica (the polycrest and "flagship" Rx of this family) he did not produce a chemically pure salt by combining Calcium and Carbon in a lab. He used the grounded shells of oysters, which are somewhere in the ballpark of 85% Calcium carbonate AFAIK.

So, Calc-c come from oysters and it is not a surprise at all. Calcarea family have a tendency towards introversion, slowness and passivity. There's no value judgment there. A person with a Calcarean personality may reach balance within her life, and therefore will express those traits as reflectiveness, attention to detail, prudence, etc; while another person with a more unbalanced stance will manifest instead laziness, shyness or hesitancy. Leaving personal uniqueness aside, the way those positive or negative traits will be expressed by the individual depends on what other elements are present in the salt formula. Continuing with the example of Calcarea carbonica, the Carbon archetype is that of the dim witted burly-man, with a robust frame of big bones meant to support and project the force of large, powerful muscles. When you combine that with the Calcium traits, you get sedentarism, which causes lack of exercise and therefore accumulation of body fat; put insecurity on top of that, and a tendency to not talk much unless addressed directly and you get the stereotype of the big, dumb, fatso.

So what else is there in stock for the Calcareas? They have a tendency for fear and insecurities, sometimes manifested in sleep disorders. Every normal human being do show stress responses from time to time, and in the healthier people these tend to be related with anxiety. Because of their introvert personalities, Calcareas tend to be self conscious, so these anxieties may take the form of self doubt, low self esteem, and worry about what others may think of the self. Depending on the person's formative years, there may be a religious anxiety component there, of the sort where there's a sense of guilt or shame beyond the normative response to transgression, even having doubt about the salvation of their soul (yes, it is a Christian concept; Homeopathy was originally created in a mostly Lutheran environment, and expanded first to other Christian countries first). The hearing of bad news, horrible events or even sad stories have a debilitating effect on this patients, too.

When stress cannot be handled this way, other more dysfunctional neuroses arise, we may find a tendency for either phobias (rodents are said to be particularly fearful for the Calcarea type) melancholy or depression. In extreme cases, delusions or ilusions manifest themselves though the particulars depend, as we stated before, on what other elements may be present in the formula.

Speaking of Calcarea Fluorica in particular, its dysfunction seems to spin around money or the lack there-off. While several other Calcareas do have some fears related with not having enough, or towards the consequences of poverty (hunger, low social status, etc) it is Calcarea Fluorica that manifest the most money-centered pathologies of all. Calc-F do seem to have a tendency to accumulate material wealth for the sake of accumulating it, and have a difficult time to assess correctly how much wealth has been socketed away. Calc-F do fear poverty, and will believe to be poor himself even if, objectively speaking, he's better of than a number of his peers. Unfortunately, his self doubt may result in a self-fulfilling prophecy: they rarely put their best effort at work because they expect to fail, so they may end up as underachievers. Also, given that they tend to be in the smarter side of the intelligence scale, they expect to find solutions to their financial limitations that are based on extrinsic factors: this make them easy prey for the sort of scammers that tell pretty stories to the wishful and the naive who are itching to believe those.

Other trait of the Calc-F is that these patients tend to have a hard time making decisions. Again, this is a consequence of their self doubt. They will agonize over decisions, unable to make up their minds until outside circumstances forces their hand. Also, they get dispirited very easily so they need to roll some extra will tries in order to persevere in their projects and take those to good term.

When dysfunction advances even further and the ego barriers begin to crumble, Calc-F show a darker side. They have a severe tendency for great depression. They have a way to look for the uglier side of things, and this drain their energies. They expect that whatever that might go wrong will, and it will go wrong at the worst possible time too.

It is getting pretty late tonight, so I will cut this session now. Thanks all for your attention.

Next time: CALCAREA PHOSPHORICA

Edit: (04/02/2019) Typos, redaction.