Miasmen and the Birth Process:
Harry van der Zee Interviewed by David Nortman 1
Vergleich: Siehe: Miasmen allgemein
In this first part of the interview, Harry van
der Zee tells the fascinating tale of how he decided to pursue a life in
homeopathy. He then discusses the emergence of his thinking about the
homeopathic miasms and how they manifest themselves in the human life cycle. By
integrating insights from Jungian psychology and Stanislav Grof’s Holotropic
therapy with Hahnemann’s miasms, Dr. van der Zee offers a fresh look at the
role of miasmatic states as constructive forces in the birth process and
subsequent life journey. His books on the topic are “Miasms in Labour” and
“Homeopathy for Birth Trauma”.
H: What actually motivated me to go into the
healing profession is the huge gap that there is between human potential for
happiness and health and the actual situation in the world. The amount of
suffering is huge, it’s enormous. And it’s a very sad thing to know that what’s
being done in healthcare is often even adding to this suffering instead of
reducing it. So, homeopathy is a gift to the world, you could say, and it’s
actually connected to the very basis of the healing principle in the world,
which is resonance.
D: We’re here today with Dr. Harry van der Zee.
Could you start by telling us about yourself, a little bit about yourself, how
you got to know homeopathy?
H: Actually I started as a civil engineer, but
already during the studies I felt that that would not be the kind of life I
would lead, in either constructing buildings or designing them. And in that
period, I got more and more interested in, you would say, human affairs:
spirituality, psychology, religion, mythology – all those related aspects that
actually all are very important in homeopathy. And I didn’t know what to do
with that yet, but I knew my life would be around human development. And I felt
then that probably the study that would give me the broadest opportunity to
work with that would be medicine. So after finishing my studies as a civil
engineer, I started other studies: medicine. I didn’t know what I would
specialize in later. And when I had finished my studies and had done some other
studies in transpersonal psychology and things like that, so I started having
consultations with patients to kind of determine what was really the matter
with them, what’s the story behind their complaint.
D: Right!
H: And although people were happy with that,
and in many cases we really got to something which was very essential for them
and that could help them further in their life, I felt that I was kind of
missing an instrument. And I had no idea what that would be. So I then decided
to just withdraw for some time. I went to a monastery, just took water and
apples, and told them not to disturb me and just leave me alone. And I brought
some paint and some ink and some paper and just to write down my thoughts, my
dreams, whatever. And that was an amazing experience, because every night I
would wake up 5 or 6 times with very impressive dreams. So all day I would be
working them out, painting them, writing about them. So the last night I was
going to be there in that monastery I decided to specifically dream on a
direction in my professional life. And so, in that night I again had a series
of 5 or 6 dreams, waking up each time and writing them shortly down so that I
would remember them the next day. And they were focusing more and more closely
on homeopathy, which I wasn’t seriously considering at all, because I wasn’t
interested in a granule for a runny nose, you know. But the dreams I had were
getting so… I was following footsteps in the sand made by a homeopath – that
was one of the dreams.
D: OK.
H: And then there was another dream, and I was
looking at a beautiful forest, a bit like we’re living here but more like in
the tropics. And the beautiful forest was full of colors, and out of that forest
came like a firework of even more colors, just going up like that. And like in
a car commercial there was this ‘No. 1’ coming up, and underneath it said
‘Homeopathy’. And so when I woke up from that dream I thought: this is serious,
I really need to look into this. And what I had then, I think it’s the only
time in my life that that happened, is that while awake I had another dream. There
was another image coming up, and there was this big, old tree, close to a very
clear stream of water, and under this tree there was this kind of cave, where I
was sitting like in a lotus position, and I had found my place. And so I
realized that this direction like homeopathy was to be taken very seriously. And
so I contacted this homeopath I had dreamt about whose footsteps I had been
following in the dreams.
D: A specific homeopath?
H: Yeah. And so I asked her: You need to tell
me more about homeopathy because there must be something about homeopathy that
I don’t know. And then I heard about this whole development that homeopathy had
gone through in the last decades, with George Vithoulkas, on the essence of the
remedy and the essence of a case. And I just realized that I had been working
on essences with patients but hadn’t translated that into remedies yet. And so that’s
when the whole adventure with homeopathy started, and I just fell in love with
it. It was just wonderful, all these different pictures of remedies, and these
patients. I mean patients were already very interesting, but now you could
relate them to remedies, and remedies could also help you find out the deeper
level in a patient, because of certain combinations of symptoms, there could be
a story behind it of whatever. So, yeah, this was fascinating, and I went to
every seminar I could go. I mean, homeopathy is a fascinating journey of
learning about all the aspects of Creation. You’re kind of investigating God in
all its expressions, or something like that. So this whole journey of
individualizing a case as much as possible and as specifically as possible has
been a fascinating journey for me. And to a certain extent it still is.
But at some point, I realized there were other
aspects to homeopathy, to treating individuals. And that started with my
analysis of the birth process. Before starting with homeopathy I had been
meeting with Stanislav Grof, I had been working with him, I had used his method
of Holotropic Therapy with groups in Holland but also abroad, which was a
fascinating journey as well. Anyway, what he had done, he had made a very
fascinating analysis of the human unconscious, and discovered several levels in
it. And you could say that the first level of experience is a very superficial
one, like if you would use a drug, the colors might become more intense or
whatever, but it has no meaning. But at another level behind that is that you
get into biographic experiences. People start re-experiencing things that they
have experienced before in their lives. And what was interesting in his
observation is that physical trauma is often much stronger than psychological
trauma. And then you enter another realm, and that’s the re-experience of
birth. And his analysis of that, after having seen thousands of cases, and the
levels of the different birth experiences, just based on the biological phase
you go through: there’s the onset of birth, there’s the dilatation phase,
there’s the expulsion through the birth canal, and there’s the actual moment of
birth. And so I figured, if it’s true, it should be certainly true for those
remedies that we say are polychrests for a certain miasm. So I analyzed those
remedies and just compared them with the analysis of the birth phase that I saw
the connection with. And in the beginning I assumed that the sequence should be
from Syphilis to Sycosis to Psora and then being born, because you move towards
a healthy phase. The sequence in life is you start with Psora, you could say,
Sycosis, and Syphilis, and you die. In a healing process you would rather go
the other way.
D: And you saw birth as a healing process?
H: Well, yeah, birth is leading to life and
life is leading to death, so I was kind of assuming it would be the other way
around, also based on some of the symptoms that I had analyzed, and I just
couldn’t fit it.
D: How did you chose to relate… to think miasmatically
in the first place?
H: Well I wouldn’t say I was thinking it, this
is one of the things you hear about in homeopathy, and in treating cases, and
in cases that don’t fully get cured by just this one simillimum, and you need
to get to another phase, then miasmatic thinking comes into existence.
D: So could you explain your order of miasms: I
guess that’s something you introduced in your book Miasms in Labour, your first
book… how you understand miasms function in terms of the human development
process and the birth process?
H: In my first book, Miasms in Labour, I focus
mainly on the three miasms as Hahnemann has described them, and I am very much
convinced there are many more, and that probably the miasms he has described
also include some others, so that there might be subdivisions and things like
that. But in general, you could say that there is something you could call a
pre-miasmatic state, which is connected to before the onset of birth. You could
say that these are those people that somehow have never incarnated: they’re
around and you see them acting and you hear them talking, but in a way, they’ve
never really entered into this realm. And you can think about remedies like
Hydrogen: so these people have… they’re missing substance, you could say. They
can sound very spiritual because they still have a kind of connection to the
beautiful qualities that you can relate to Paradise. But the ability to apply
these in the flesh – like incarnation – and to materialize it and use it in
life, that’s very difficult for them. So they’re just floating around, you
could say.
D: What about Psora, the psoric miasm?
H: So, when you have this pre-miasmatic state
in which there is no duality, you could say Psora has to do with leaving
Paradise and with starting to experience the need for all kinds of things. So
the psoric condition has to do with learning to take care of yourself, which
starts with very simple, basic things: How can I live as a human being? Having
food, shelter, how to string my own shoelaces. And in that process, which Jung
calls the formation of the persona, you make a deal. You make a deal with your
parents, you make a deal with your surroundings: if I am like this, if I behave
like that, if I put on a shirt when I’m in front of a camera, if I don’t walk
naked in the street, if I don’t do this, if I say “Yes Sir,” use two words, and
whatever – you learn how to behave as a person, and you benefit through
learning that, because in that way life, community, society will support you.
D: Right. You’re able fully to incarnate.
H: Yes. But it has a price, because certain
parts of yourself you’ve learned not to show. Certain qualities you might even
not see as a positive quality but as something bad that you’d better hide. So
in the formation of the persona, as a consequence you also form what Jung has
called a shadow: parts of you you’d rather not show. And the shadow has a lot
to do with sycosis, with the sycotic phase. Sycosis has to do with the split,
the split between good and bad, light and dark, God-Devil. The split you will
find in the homeopathic sycotic remedies very strongly. In Thuja there’s this
idea of ‘I’m bad, and I’m just looking to the outside world to behave because
that’s the good way’.
D: Right.
H: So, at some point in development you have to
encounter your shadow. I mean, you cannot avoid it, it’s there. And when it’s
there and you’re not aware of it, you feel being a victim of life, and you
don’t feel you can do anything about it. The sycotic phase has to do with the
dilatation phase, and so spiritually, psychologically speaking, first there is
no experience of an exit, but at some point the os uteri, the opening of the
womb, starts to open up, and once you start being aware of your own role and
responsibility and opportunities there, then freedom arises. And that’s when
you start moving into what we call the syphilitic miasm, where you have, kind
of, in the darkness… it needs to get very dark for some people, or perhaps for
all of us, to kind of at some point identify our own light and the light of the
qualities that we own and that we have hidden very deeply away because we felt
they were not okay. So we kind of dive into the depth of the earth and delve up
these qualities, and then bring them up and can use them creatively in life. And
that’s what syphilitic miasm is about. And when people use these in a harmonic
way they won’t suffer: you’re just a creative person that can take on
responsibilities and it’s just a great asset for the world. Whereas the
syphilitic tendency to use these abilities for your own good and to experience
the rest of your world as your enemy is the pathological side of the same
process.
D: So for you Syphilis is hope and creativity
as opposed to what is typically associated with it: hopelessness?
H: Yeah, there is a transition here, and in
this transition, there are several miasms actually which play a role there. The
main one is the Cancer miasm, which is between Sycosis and Syphilis. So the
syphilitic miasm is just fighting its way out. So if you look at the birth
experience as a blueprint of actually every process you can move through in
life, then you can say that the syphilitic phase has to do with fighting your
way out of a situation. And so it has a lot to do with ability, creativity: if
we look in the materia medica at syphilitic remedies, we find remedies like
Aurum, which have to do with responsibility, abilities, leadership, and
whatever. But if you use these abilities to just have as much as possible for
yourself, and when you get into the syphilitic hardened position, then you
alienate yourself from the rest of the world. The world becomes an enemy,
because they might get from you what you want for yourself. And then you get
these extremes that we all know, and we know where this can lead to. Because, I
mean, a simple farmer losing his mind, you could say, might ruin his family,
but a leader losing his mind might draw a whole continent into a war.
D: Right. Can you expand a bit about Stanislav
Grof and his work on this birth process?
H: So, what Stan Grof did is he recorded
hundreds and thousands of experiences of people that have re-experienced birth,
found out that there were specific phases in this birth process which are
clearly connected to a biological state. Very interesting, if you look at
Grof’s analysis and at the experience of many people, that in the syphilitic
stage of birth and in the syphilitic stage of any human, there is this ultimate
moment of failure. Ultimately we will all fail: every story ultimately fails.
And for the syphilitic person that is strongly identified with his ego – so
we’re talking about pathology here – this failure is a huge threat, because
when you’re identified with the ego, and the ego would kind of be crushed or
dies, it would mean the end of everything. And that is something that came very
strongly forward in Grof’s analysis. And we know this from the homeopathic
syphilitic remedies also, this idea that it will end with death, destruction. And
what Grof found in those people that he had been working with, is that in this
experience… so you fight for your life, you try to get through this birth
canal, which is a dangerous situation to be, but it’s better than just
suffering inside of the womb that is crushing you. At least there’s a way out:
you might make it, you might not make it. And so ultimately, in the experience
you’ve given everything, and ultimately you fail, and there’s this feeling
like: I’ve given everything but it has been in vain. And he calls this the
‘death-rebirth experience’, because in dying the person gets reborn. Like in
the birth experience, actual biological birth, what we see is there is this
moment of relaxation before actual birth. So there’s pushing and pushing out
this baby, and there’s this moment: wait, no more pushing, and then it kind of…
birth comes. It’s like the Phoenix bird: there has been this fire, which is
hatched, and it has killed the bird which hatches the egg. So there is death
and rebirth within the experience. And so what it is, is just seeing the light:
you come from the darkness, you go through the birth canal, and then you enter
into the light. So that’s what I connect to the acute miasm, if you can call it
like that. And at least with the acute remedies, if you analyze remedies like
Belladonna, Stramonium, etc., they have lots and lots of symptoms that you can
just easily attach to the birth moment – the actual birth moment. And so what
happens, then, is that the individual, having given everything, dies, comes to
life, and then there is… if it’s good, there is the ‘good breast’ as Grof
called it. There’s the mother, the reuniting with the mother, and actually
going back to the experience like it was in the womb before, but now in a
different way.
So before birth, being in the womb is like
Paradise: you don’t know opposites, it’s never cold, it’s never hot, it’s
always perfect – and this is true for everything, if we’re talking about a
normal pregnancy. Then you’re kind of being kicked out of Paradise, you enter
as it were the opposite of it, Hell: no exit, just suffering, and also there’s
this strong opposition between mother and child here. The mother is hurting the
child and the child is hurting the mother, and both have the experience like
this is never going to end, it’s like eternal Hell. Then the situation changes,
in that there is the awareness of a way out, and something to fight for. You
fight for your life, lose it, get reborn, and then again you experience this
unity. But the unity inside the womb is the unity, like Grof calls it, ‘oceanic
unity’: there is no difference between you and me, there’s just oneness. Whereas
the unity after the birth experience – and to me that is just similar to after
the individuation process – is where you reunite as a baby with the mother, but
actually as an individual with life in its totality. So the syphilitic built-up
ego: that is being scattered, and then you experience unity. And instead of
when the ego is dead that’s the end of everything: no, that’s when life begins,
because then you can experience unity with everything, but you are still there
as an individual with all your abilities. Whereas within Paradise you’re just
one with the mother, one with the womb, and that’s it: it’s not differentiated.
At the end of the process there’s this creative individual that reunites, if
you wish, with God, with everything, with eternity, with the mother…
D: …and returns to Paradise but more in the
sense of an enlightened state, [the] Paradise of a grown, conscious being.
H: Yes, perhaps Heaven would be the word for
that, I don’t know: it would be Heaven on earth if you could live like that,
yeah. And that’s in essence the potential of human beings, and there are human
beings that live it, and homeopathy is one of the ways to kind of support that
process. A disease is a collection of symptoms, so on another level a disease
is also a sign of health, of an individual trying to move through a certain
phase in his life, and to make a certain step in its development. And on a
larger level, miasms have the same purpose for the collective. So you can look
at it from the individual point of view: you can move through a certain miasm
and this can be completely something you move through in your individual life. But
it can also happen on a collective level, like with epidemics, or with
collective trauma.
D: OK. So this is, then, the overview of your
first book, Miasms in Labour, which you published in 2000. Now, more recently,
in 2007, you published Homeopathy for Birth Trauma. So could you tell us about
this book, why you published another book on seemingly the same subject: What’s
the difference and what do you wish to convey in this second book?
H: What I realized by studying many cases and
by also looking into the literature, is that the way we deliver babies into our
world today has a lot of influence on how society develops, and that the
choices we make in this all have consequences. Now if you go through it just
phase by phase… The whole situation of conception: there are many people that
have problems in getting pregnant, many women. If I look at my cases where this
has been the case, there was very often an issue involved that had to be solved
first. If you just let medicine induce a pregnancy and not solve the issue
which might have to do with motherhood or whatever it is, or with abuse in the
past, or whatever – if you don’t solve it, it means that the child is being
fathered, and will enter into these ‘miasms’, as you could say, and could just
be the next carrier of whatever this information is. And I’m very convinced
that the way a person is born is an expression of this individual already. And
if we already start by inducing birth, we cannot overrule the person – that’s
the first step to overrule an individual. If you can allow the natural process
to just take place as it will do, that’s wonderful. And with homeopathy, in
each phase of birth you can help a woman to go through that phase. And it
doesn’t only mean that she goes through it on a physical level, but that which
kind of withholds her to, for instance, relax during dilatation – that could be
something traumatic from her own past – if you can treat it before, or during,
it will help. So it will not only help a healthy labour, it will also help on
the psychological level, to move through a certain trauma or pain or memory or
whatever is there. And the sooner you can treat this the better. So ideally you
have a completely healthy individual before you even start with conception.
D: But even you would say that somehow their
soul chose that experience?
H: I’m not able to know. But what I’ve found,
for instance, in the birth experience, is that if you look at the pattern in a
person’s life, and if you’re able to analyze their birth experience, either
because they have re-experienced it or -what I’ve done a lot more- is by just
asking the mother about the birth experience, pregnancy, conception, the whole
thing. What you see is that the pattern later in life is already present in the
birth experience. And if you can go further back than that, then you find the
same pattern already during pregnancy, or even around conception, or in some
people that either have memories or re-experiences of it, or dreams about it,
in past lives, or what seem to be past lives. So it’s not the idea of a tabula
rasa, of a completely blank sheet, and when this person is being born then the
birth experience, the parents, the school, etc. start filling in the empty
spots. No, there is already a pattern there, and the birth experience is an
expression of it.
D: Could you expand on the notion of synchronicity,
which I guess comes from Jungian psychology?
H: Synchronicity ties in with the fact that
life is endlessly more connected than we as humans are aware of. We have this
idea of this separate me, and I go from here to there, or I sit on this couch and
I talk to this other person, and there is a light bulb here, and my wife is
gone, she is doing something else, and this is all separate. But I think the
interconnectedness is so much more than we are aware of, and that synchronicity
is just happening all of the time. The only thing is that, being aware of it –
that is something we usually are not. So what I’ve noticed is that I notice
synchronicities a lot more when I’m kind of balanced within myself. And whether
synchronicity also occurs more in that situation, I don’t know: either I notice
it more, or it also occurs more. It’s like things go without friction:
synchronicity is part of that. So it’s the right person at the right time.
D: And also things having a meaning, events
having a meaning as opposed to being coincidences?
H: Yeah. When we just accept life as it is,
every moment, in the here and now, all of the time, we don’t suffer. What is
there is exactly what it should be, and once we are aware of the option to
reduce the suffering due to it and move through it in a more gentle way: not by
removing it but just letting it be what it is, and perhaps accepting the lesson
which is connected to it. That’s what we can promote with homeopathy, and
that’s beautiful. So life is perfect all the time, actually. We don’t suffer
from the actual situation. We suffer from the idea that it should be different.
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