Covid

By the end of March 2020 lockdown for the coronavirus was fully in force throughout the UK, my wife's osteopathic clinic had shut down, and I was cancelling all my clients without exception.

These cancelled clients, however, were those who came to see me for face-to-face meetings. But quite a number of them were perfectly happy with a telephone conversation, or to send me a detailed e-mail (I still find Zoom something I prefer to avoid). So while a number of people were masking up, distancing, and thoroughly washing their hands, I was still working with a substantial proportion of clients who looked forward to recounting their troubles and receiving a helpful bottle of essences by post the next day.

Within a few weeks I was noticing some interesting and intriguing similarities between these clients-at-a-distance. First, it was apparent that almost everybody apart from the very young registered symptoms of Covid-19. Second, their typical negative emotional state was one of grief or grieving in some form. Third, those who grieved usually tended to display lung pathology. When I say 'display' I am perhaps overstating the case. What I was seeing was frequently not discernible at the physical level: my dowsing saw it, but in most cases a scan of the lungs - or so I inferred - would not.

And this tallied very closely with the real world Covid cases of the time: March, April, May. It was only later that the spotlight fell on the asymptomatic cases. The early pattern seemed to be something like this: coughing, sneezing, general unwellness; lungs affected, extreme difficulty breathing, hospital, ventilator and, very often, death.

Going back to my old and new clients, lungs and grief - as in traditional Chinese medicine - were intimately connected. There are a lot of essences in the world's essence pharmacopaeia that support and clear grief, but the ones in my collection which came up consistently and frequently were Grieving Heart from Daniel Mapel's Wild Earth Animal Essences, usually followed by Kathrin Woodlyn Bateman's Grieving from her Flower Essences of Fox Mountain range. By the time these two essences had been deployed, at least in the earlier days, the Covid-19 pathology was cleared from the client's system.

The impression I formed from looking for relief for these clients was that Covid sought out and accentuated all the existing and residual (unprocessed) grief that a person was holding. And note that my most effective grief essences were combinations. Daniel Mapel describes Wild Earth's Grieving Heart as 'providing powerful support for releasing the emotional pain and tears that need to be shed in order to move forward.' It combines three essences: Wild Horse, which nurtures the healing heart, Hippopotamus, for embracing deep feelings, and Gazelle, for feeling safe while grieving. And Kathrin Woodlyn Bateman writes of her Grieving essence, which combines no less than eight separate flowers, that 'it addresses all types of loss' and that it 'has been helping people release their whole lifetime reservoir of grief and yet it seems to release it painlessly.' These were 'broad spectrum' grief essences, and very effective they are too, over a broad range of pent up grief.

What of the asymptomatic cases? Here, again, I think that Covid picks on your weak spots. Whatever negative emotions you are harbouring that you have been unable to release, Covid finds these out and shines a spotlight on them, thereby accentuating them to a point where you have to deal with them - or be swamped. I am reminded of one of the most - to me at least - notable aspects of the menopause: when it arrives it is these negative emotions with which the woman is involved, inescapably and sometimes painfully. And essences are called up accordingly, to resolve those long locked up negative feelings. Once the essences are chosen which shift those feelings the Covid pathology seems to melt away.

Are there positives to be taken from coronavirus? I think so. Change comes: the mid-life crisis in men, the menopause in women. With the change come the emotional challenges which have so far been dealt with inadequately in the life. The hormonal changes we meet bring the challenges into the open, encouraging us to review them, often from a different and useful perspective. The role of Covid seems rather similar. Just because change has been re-presented to us doesn't mean that this time we will necessarily get it right. So perhaps Covid is a further opportunity - another clarion call to successfully respond to long held emotional problems. Perhaps we still don't get it right: perhaps that is why the elderly among us suffer so disproportionately from Covid-19.