An Interview With The Late Martin Miles, genius homeopath

(Taken from my book, Looking Back Moving Forward)

I braved the M25 eastbound through the Dartford Tunnel for my interview with Martin Miles on Monday 27 June 2005. I had made his acquaintance at a postgraduate seminar on cancer, which he presented to the New College of Homeopathy a couple of months earlier. So I was pretty excited to have him all to myself for a few hours, as this is an area in which I specialise. Not only that but he is one of our enigmatic forefathers who was there at the inception of the renaissance of homeopathy in the 1970s and he is a Fellow of the Society of Homeopaths. From reading his book Homoeopathy and Human Evolution, I knew this was a man whose brain I wanted to pick big time. I perched on a sofa in the front room of his very hippie house, drank herbal tea and revelled in the excitement of having this opportunity.

“I remember asking Thomas Maughan once how many of the old homeopaths were educated in spiritual philosophy. He replied by saying, “All of them who were worth their salt.” Homeopathy is a science and an art that grows out of that. It is a form of alchemy and I was conscious right from the beginning of the need to heal; of the need to cure people’s ailments, troubles and diseases. I was always conscious that homeopathy was a tool of transformation; you could transform people out of their illnesses and their diseases and out of their miasms.”                                                          

 “We teach chakras, endocrine glands and the new remedies. We get other experts in to teach astrology, science and kabbalah etc. It is designed to take students fresh from college. The college experience teaches them to be good technicians who can work with materia medica and the repertory. What we want to do is develop them into healers with knowledge of other things that they may find helpful. The more practitioners understand spiritual philosophy, the more effective they can be as homeopaths; it goes hand in hand. As one learns to see much deeper into one’s patients, one is able to do much bigger and better work.”                                                          

MARTIN:  There are as many ways of prescribing homeopathy, as there are homeopaths. You cannot just teach one way, it is far too rigid and it doesn’t work. Each finds their own way.

ROWENA:  I know. I have to tell you, your book, Homoeopathy and Human Evolution had such an impact on me when I was training. It must have been Jerome Whitney that recommended it to me. After that homeopathy started to make sense because it suddenly fitted into the way I already viewed the world.

MARTIN:  That was the idea of writing it; to get some kind of sense because up until the time I wrote it, all homeopathy books were more or less the same. They trotted out the same story about Samuel Hahnemann and a single remedy and all that sort of stuff. I thought that there was a need for something else; a different type of understanding. So that was really the reason for writing it.

ROWENA:  So tell me your story Martin, how did it all begin for you?

MARTIN:  When I was twenty six I got really ill. I considered my life was kind of on hold at the time because I had a deep sense there was something I was going to do but I did not know what it was. I went through a period of wanting to be a doctor but I didn’t have the intellect for that and I am rather glad I didn’t follow that path. But I got really ill. Not ill in a way that you could put a label on it particularly, and I wouldn’t go and see a doctor because I knew it would be a waste of time. And then somebody said to me, “Why don’t you go and see this homeopath?”

ROWENA:  Thomas Maughan?

MARTIN:  Yes. My friend told me to call him straight away so I did. Thomas answered the phone and said come this afternoon at four o’clock. So I did. And that was the beginning of it for me. His cure was quick and dramatic and, of course, I discovered that you didn’t just get homeopathy with Thomas; there was a lot of spiritual teaching and philosophy as well.

ROWENA:  Did he do that within the consultation?

MARTIN:  No. He held classes.

ROWENA:  Did he offer those to everyone that came for treatment?

MARTIN:  He didn’t offer them overtly, but he didn’t make it a secret either. It was up to the person to latch onto it.

ROWENA:  And you latched?

MARTIN:   I did. Yes.

ROWENA:  What were you doing workwise before then?

MARTIN:  Before then? Oh dear. My father was a very wealthy man and I worked for one of his companies and had done so, other than one other job, since I had left school. Materially it was fantastic – there were a lot of money, fast cars and flash clothes. This was through the sixties and up to about 1973/4. So materially it was a good time but spiritually it was a problem. And I was always very conscious on another level. My father and I were very different; he was a very materialistic man and he was very good at making money. I belonged to that generation that rebelled and he was astonished at my attitude towards life and the world I suppose. He had grown up quite poor in the East End of London so you can understand it from his point of view as well.

ROWENA:  Was he a refugee?

MARTIN:  I don’t think so. I think his family may well have been here for a couple of generations. I used to ask him about his past but he would always fob me off and would never really say anything about the family. It could be that they were refugees from central Europe and settled in the east end. He was a good man but he was very stuck unfortunately.

ROWENA:  And your mother?

MARTIN:  My mother came from Peckham. She was very different again. My father was a Capricorn and she was a Scorpio and they weren’t at all compatible. I am more like my mother than my father and I have a brother who is like my father.

ROWENA:  So what sign are you?

MARTIN:  Virgo. My father treated my mother really badly. She suffered, became an alcoholic and died of cancer. My brother, a Macmillan nurse and I nursed her through her last ten days. I mention this because it was a crossroads in my life. I met Thomas at that time shortly before my mother died. As soon as I met Thomas my consciousness opened up as to what was going on. I knew straight away what I was going to do. Here was a system of medicine that worked. It wasn’t rubbish.

ROWENA:  Do you think others are rubbish?

MARTIN:   I think drug therapies are rubbish. Mostly they kill people more than they do anything else.

ROWENA:   Do you really think there is no place for chemo and radiotherapy?

MARTIN:  Yes, I think there are much more sensible ways of treating people. You don’t have to treat cancer patients with chemo and radiation. You can treat them exclusively with homeopathy and you can often get the cancers to go away.

ROWENA:  I can understand how tumours can grow and how they can go away again but what about leukaemia?

MARTIN:   It is difficult but the adult leukaemias are much easier than the adolescent ones. You can get them to go away but the adolescent ones can be very deadly.

ROWENA:  So why do you treat cancer with the new remedies?

MARTIN:  They are relevant for people today. They have today’s energy and they reflect today’s issues. Most of the homeopathic materia medicas contain provings from the Victorian times but there has been a social revolution since then and people are completely different now. If you did a proving of Pulsatilla nigricans now, do you think it would be exactly the same picture as it was? Of course there would be similarities but people use different language to describe things.

ROWENA:  There has been a rise in consciousness so people have changed a lot.

MARTIN:  Well it is a completely different consciousness and so the issues in society have changed. One hundred and twenty years ago the great pillars of society were well in place. You had parliament and the law and the church and the aristocracy were in control. People’s lives were dictated by a code that was outside them. Society had its laws and you had your place in society and your task was to learn how to be within it.

Then there were two world wars that took the power from the aristocracy and this freed the people up more. Then there was the advent of socialism, which was a tool to try and distribute wealth more fairly. All those things worked together and in the last fifty to sixty years those pillars have broken down. The church doesn’t grip people as it used to and the aristocracy doesn’t rule the day. You still have vestiges of both but people are largely free to make up their own minds. We still have different types of government control on people but it is time for people to think for themselves and to individualise.

ROWENA:  The Age of Aquarius?

MARTIN:  Yes. It is time for people to share knowledge and what they have. It is now a hierarchy of ability rather than of the privileged that it used to be. In the past people were appointed to positions because of their parents, which school they went to or club they belonged to. And of course that system doesn’t work, as it has been demonstrated many times. You have to live what you believe, and you don’t have to believe any more – you have to know. It is no longer about belief – you have to live it and when you live it, it becomes first-hand.

ROWENA:  So you weren’t expecting to live the life that you did after you were twenty six?

MARTIN:  No, I wasn’t but I was pleased to wave goodbye to all that materialism because it wasn’t what I wanted and it wasn’t fulfilling.

ROWENA:  But it supported you in those early days?

MARTIN:  It did.

ROWENA:  Well that is one of the big issues with homeopathy – the struggle financially.

MARTIN:  I know it is a problem. I have been most fortunate and have made a living out of homeopathy since I was twenty seven.

ROWENA:  Brilliant. How have you managed to do that?

MARTIN:  I don’t know. I have always had a very busy practice and then I have been teaching as well. I have managed to raise a family on it and still do.

ROWENA:  But you are in a minority, so what ingredients do you think you have for being successful?

MARTIN:  What you need is a driving determination to make it work. You need a burning belief that this not only is a system of medicine that works, but the real need is huge and the power of homeopathy is far greater than any of us have so far perceived. Our consciousness is limited and our consciousness of it is limited. I keep uncovering layers, more possibilities and new ways of making it work so that the incurable become curable, and that is really worth striving for.

ROWENA:  So when did that start for you?

MARTIN:  The beginning.

ROWENA:  Okay, so go back to those days and tell me more about what it was like then.

MARTIN:  I remember asking Thomas once how many of the old homeopaths were educated in spiritual philosophy. He replied by saying, “All of them who were worth their salt.” Homeopathy is a science and an art that grows out of that. It is a form of alchemy and I was conscious right from the beginning of the need to heal; of the need to cure people’s ailments, troubles and diseases. I was always conscious that homeopathy was a tool of transformation; you could transform people out of their illnesses and their diseases and out of their miasms. You could raise them on other levels, completely. And as Thomas said, you could take people through two or three incarnations in one, which was quite remarkable really. And you could you do it much more efficiently, quicker and deeper with new meditative remedies especially in combination.

ROWENA:  Those remedies weren’t around though when he was, were they?

MARTIN:  No they weren’t. They are the product of recent years.

ROWENA:  Do you think he would be approving of them or was he not that kind of a person?

MARTIN:  I think he is behind them.

ROWENA:  Ooooh, tell me more!

MARTIN:  Well, Thomas died in 1976. I had spent a lot of time with him as I used to drive him around.

ROWENA:  At fast speeds?

MARTIN:  At very fast speeds.

ROWENA:  Yes, Peter Chappell told me about that too.

MARTIN:  He was always pushing to see how far he could go in everything he did. You should speak to Jennifer Maughan, his wife. She is now about sixty two or three; she was young when they were together. Whenever I was with Thomas I knew the time was short and that he wasn’t going to be around much longer so I would ask him lots of questions about homeopathy and spiritual philosophy. I know he had been doing homeopathy for about forty years and had worked at the Royal London Homeopathic Hospital. He was a doctor of biochemistry.

He was the original and driving power behind the renaissance in homeopathy and when I knew him he was experimenting with remedies in different ways. He always used them as tools of transformation for his students. Because most of us, by the time we arrived at his front door, for whatever reason, were drugged out hippies – it was quite an achievement to turn us into useful human beings!

ROWENA:  So you were there with Robert Davidson?

MARTIN:  Yes and Jerome and Kaaren Whitney, Peter Chappell and Mary Titchmarsh.

ROWENA:  Is she still around?

MARTIN:  Yes, she doesn’t practise homeopathy as far as I am aware but she does do NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming). Thomas always held his homeopathy classes on a Saturday night, fortnightly. He knew that on Saturday night everybody wanted to go out so he knew only those dedicated enough would come to his class, but I never missed one of them. They continued for between two and three years and then he died in 1976.

ROWENA:  He had lung cancer, and…

MARTIN:  Yes and his heart was very weak as well.

ROWENA:  There seems to be a lot of cancer within the homeopathic community. Have you found that?

MARTIN:  It doesn’t surprise me. It probably comes about because homeopaths take on a lot of responsibility. Dealing with other peoples’ pain is very exhausting and difficult. You have to develop a sense of humour to survive. The deeper you get into the shadow of the valley of death where the illnesses you deal with are dense and severely negative, the bigger the sense of humour and lightness you require. They have a direct relationship.

ROWENA:  Is that how you work then?

MARTIN:  I try. I try. You have to see the funny side of it all. If you don’t then there is an imbalance. If homeopaths don’t get that balance right, I can see why they would end up with degenerative diseases.

ROWENA:  I better lighten up and get a sense of humour then!

MARTIN:  Well, there is a lot that is funny within our profession….

ROWENA:  In what way?

MARTIN:  In describing remedies to others, for instance, they are pretty funny and peculiar aren’t they?

ROWENA:  I see your point. Okay, going back to Thomas Maughan, do you want to say anything else about him?

MARTIN:  He was like a father to me really. I never had much parenting at all, ever; my parents just weren’t there for me. And Thomas knew that, and kind of took over. He was very good, but I must say, since he has died, I have been closer to him.

ROWENA:  Okay tell me more about that.

MARTIN:  Well, he visits me, I know when he is here because when he was alive and you were near him he had this enormous feeling of power; incredible power that you could feel.

ROWENA:  So did he do that with his spirit, unconsciously, or with his people skills?

MARTIN:  It was a spiritual quality that he had and that he had developed. When he died there was a time of quiet and then I became aware again of his energy. It was the same but different. While he was here he was locked in a body that was rapidly falling apart. I know that he was in a lot of pain and distress. After he was gone he was able to shed all that, learn more and refine. He didn’t have that body, brain and nervous system anymore so when I felt his presence it was a huge refinement of the same energy, which was quite astonishing and extraordinary.

ROWENA:  Did he say that he planned on coming back? Did he speak in those terms?

MARTIN:  No, I never heard him speak in those terms but we all knew that he could if he wanted to.

ROWENA:  So do you think that means that he has not gone into another incarnation?

MARTIN:  He hasn’t gone into another physical incarnation and he visits in different guises, I have seen him a few times and he comes in a body of light and sometimes as the eagle.

ROWENA:  Is this mainly to the meditation groups where you create new remedies?

MARTIN:  Yes, he comes into the groups as an eagle or in other forms.

ROWENA:  And you can all see or feel him?

MARTIN:  Some of us can, yes.

ROWENA:  That is wonderful!

MARTIN:  It is.

ROWENA:  So if he was in a body somewhere, a new physical incarnation, do you think he would be able to do that?

MARTIN:  He would probably still be able to do it, but he would be limited.

ROWENA:  And do you think it would have to be a conscious intention?

MARTIN:  It is always conscious. He comes and goes with awareness. Part of what he was training his students to do was to obtain consciousness outside their bodies, which is quite achievable; you just have to work hard at it. It is difficult to separate yourself enough from the demands of the material world.

ROWENA:  But if he was in another life now….

MARTIN:  He is in another life but not a physical one. He hasn’t been born in another; he hasn’t had to be. He has achieved what he came here to do, he doesn’t have to incarnate again if he doesn’t want to. The rest of us, I am afraid, are tied to the wheel of rebirth, until as such time…

ROWENA:  … that we are enlightened. So where did your path take you after Thomas died?

MARTIN:  Our small group – Robert Davidson, Peter Chappell, the Whitneys,  and Mary Titchmarsh – we had to do something to secure homeopathy. The torch had been passed to us. We had joined the European common market, and in most of Europe if not all of it, homeopathy was banned. People were not allowed to use it unless they were doctors.

ROWENA:  And that had been the case for a long time I imagine?

MARTIN:  Yes it had. But we, in the UK, have always had common law, which dates back to ancient times. This means we could practise homeopathy but in actual fact in 1976, very few people did. It was a remnant, really; just a handful of people and they kept a very low profile. So we thought we had to do something, first of all to secure homeopathy, then make it so big that ‘they’ had to accept it. We wanted to spread it as a healing art.

ROWENA:  So how did you do that?

MARTIN:  Well we first thought that we should approach the North London Group established by John Damonte. I remember going up there one day, suggesting it and they thought it was a good idea. We used to have regular meetings and from those meetings came the Society of Homeopaths in embryonic form. We established it and then we all took up offices in it. I was the first chairperson. Then Robert Davidson and I started the first school, the College of Homeopathy (COH), which then became Barbara Harwood’s organisation before it collapsed completely, and disappeared. We enrolled thirty students in the first year.

ROWENA:  So how did you get those students?

MARTIN:  We advertised in some rudimentary health magazine something like, “Education in homeopathy, three year course”. But it would have also been by word of mouth through all the people who had been treated by Thomas Maughan and John Damonte. It was an idea whose time had come. Given a prod and a dig it would inevitably start to move around. That first intake of students went out and practised, spread the work and then they took over some of the teaching.

ROWENA:   These must have been such exciting times!

MARTIN:  It was very exciting. By the third or fourth intake Robert Davidson wanted to expand and had decided he was going to invite a hundred people. I thought that this was not a good idea, as I wanted to teach students; I didn’t want to stand in front of a class and shout at them. In my opinion, it wasn’t really how you do homeopathy and the administration of such a group was a nightmare. Robert wanted to turn it into a big operation and I disagreed. Ever since I had first started prescribing, my practice started to snowball and got bigger and bigger and I found that I was practising all week and then teaching at weekends, which is crazy.

So I had to decide which I was going to do. I couldn’t remain in the forefront of COH and run a busy practice; it was just not possible. So we parted company. Robert Davidson took over the college and I threw myself into my practice. I decided also that I wanted more experience practising before I taught further. And that was that.

Meanwhile the Society of Homeopaths grew. With every lot of students that passed out as qualified homeopaths, they joined the Society of Homeopaths or became part of it in some way and, of course, we had a lot of very talented and capable people that we attracted. So they started doing all sorts of things with homeopathic promotion. Of course, over the years it has mushroomed into what it is now.

ROWENA:  So tell me about the provings you have done?

MARTIN:  For most of them, we sit round in a circle to meditate and we take the remedy. We don’t know what it is, but Helios pharmacy have made the remedy.

ROWENA:  So how do they make it? If, let us say, it was Genesis how would they make that?

MARTIN:  They have made one or two remedies like that, but mostly the remedies they have made are just from physical things; plants and stuff like that.

ROWENA:  So tell me about the meditative provings? How do you do them?

MARTIN:  Well somebody takes charge of the circle and they give instructions on a meditation.

ROWENA:  You are talked through it?

MARTIN:  A scene is set of a place and you have your guardian angel or wizard with you who comes to visit and gives you something. Each person has their own individual experience around that. If you are trying to invoke some kind of energy or spiritual force, then you would set a meditation around that theme as well.

ROWENA:  Then what happens after that; how long does the meditation last?

MARTIN:  I suppose about three or four hours.

ROWENA:  So is it like a journey?

MARTIN:   Yes.

ROWENA:  Do people talk in that time?

MARTIN:  During the meditation nobody talks because they are meditating. In the group I was in we spent a long time learning to meditate together, as a group; a good two, three years just meditating together before we did any remedies at all. We went through all the chakras so all our centres were opened. We went through many processes together which changed us completely.

ROWENA:  I read that you have proved Lac humanum meditatively. Is the proving similar to the other proving of it?

MARTIN:  I think it is rather different actually.

ROWENA:  So how does that work?

MARTIN:  If you do a Hahnemannian proving, it takes several weeks and you are doing it with your body consciousness, your brain and your everyday experience in the world. When you meditate you get away from all that and channel universal information. So you get different levels of the same remedy. It doesn’t mean that one is right and the other is wrong. It is just fine as it is.

ROWENA:  But when you analyse cases do you refer to lots of different books; conventional provings and meditative?

MARTIN:  Yes, I do.

ROWENA:  Do you find you attract people who need more of these newer remedies though?

MARTIN:  I continuously see lots of opportunities to use them, yes.

ROWENA:   Why do you think that is? Universally do you think you just attract people in that state?

MARTIN:  We are able to sit down, meditate for four hours as a group and channel information on new remedies. That is what we have made ourselves fit to do and we can do that so we attract accordingly. Other people do other things in homeopathy. They investigate other areas, go down different routes and that is fine. They do what they do and they attract accordingly. That is how it works.

ROWENA:  Well it makes sense to me but you know it doesn’t make sense to everybody in our profession. How do you feel about that?

MARTIN:  My view and my experience are that you cannot do a great deal of work with one remedy anymore. You used to be able to when I started homeopathy. You could prescribe one remedy and it would affect people on a really deep, profound level. But those experiences have become less and less frequent as the remedies have got weaker and weaker which is very frustrating.

ROWENA:  Why do you think the remedies got weaker?

MARTIN:  Well first of all the remedies are not made to quite the same quality as they used to be because they now need to mass produce them. You cannot build in the same dynamic way by machine as you could by hand. And of course everyone is a lot sicker than they used to be. If there was one single issue that you could pull out and say that this is the major reason for the proliferation of so much illness and madness it would be vaccination.

It is not just that though. You have got drugs – allopathic and recreational, food allergies, bad diets and pollution. Radiation from mobile phones is a major cause of illness and will be so in the future as well. You have got all those issues starting with vaccination for most of us. The children get vaccinated soon after they are born, and it ruins them. It wrecks their nervous system, their endocrine system and their brain pushes them out of their body and makes them mad.

There are so many different layers and so much encrusted disease. Diseases are locked in. Nobody is allowed to have an acute. Children have their own issues and their own diseases plus their parents’ stuff that hasn’t been released. Then they grow up and they have children and their children have their stuff plus their parents and their grandparents. You see what I am getting at here. There is this awful legacy of chronic degenerative disease.

When a woman takes the contraceptive pill there is an instruction to the pituitary gland to shut down. We now have three generations of women that have taken the Pill,so that is three generations of instructions to the pituitary gland to shut down. So when the next generation comes along they find themselves infertile because the pituitary gland doesn’t work. If it doesn’t work, it doesn’t send instructions to the ovaries and therefore the ovaries don’t work and the whole system of fertility breaks down.

ROWENA:  I have prescribed Folliculinum frequently. Do you prescribe that or are there other remedies that you see that work to clear Pill damage?

MARTIN:  I do prescribe that a lot and also Pituitary Gland.I also prescribe Sycamore  seed which has a great affinity to the pituitary gland and I suppose the one remedy that clears the pituitary gland, the thyroid gland and to some extent the thymus gland more than any other is Calcarea carbonica. That is in everybody because everybody is stuck at that point.

ROWENA:  So do you prescribe one remedy sometimes or is it always combinations?

MARTIN:  It is always combinations really. You prescribe constitutionally don’t you?

ROWENA:  Yes. Do you think that people are one remedy in some ways?

MARTIN:  In some ways they are, yes, but if you prescribe that one remedy it is not going to work in the way that is needed or maybe in the way you think it would or should work.

ROWENA:  Or it did in the past?

MARTIN:  Or it did in the past. It is just not going to do it. So you need to prescribe other remedies as well. So I would prescribe constitutionally on one level and then I would prescribe for endocrine glands and chakras depending on which ones are out of balance or lacking.

ROWENA:  How do you know when something is out of balance?

MARTIN:  When you interview the patient and take the case you find out where the weaknesses, difficulties and problems are. You can tell then which of the chakras and which endocrine glands are malfunctioning and you work on strengthening and correcting those areas. So you prescribe constitutionally and then you prescribe on that level of chakras and endocrinology. Then, of course, you need to give physical organ support, which more than anything else, is usually for the kidneys or for the kidneys and liver. The kidneys in most people are pretty weak so they need to be fortified. I also use nosodes frequently.

ROWENA:  Do you have a protocol on using those or does it depend on the person?

MARTIN:  Largely it depends on the person but often I prescribe a nosode, then a constitutional remedy, then a nosode and then the next time a constitutional remedy and so on. It really works quite well. If you cannot see what the dominant miasm is then give them a Carcinosin 10M or 50M and it will separate the miasms out. So when you see the patient next, you will see the dominant miasm or the first one that comes up. Prescribe for that and then you will see the next one and so on.

ROWENA:  Do you get aggravations or over reactions to remedies?

MARTIN:  Yes, sometimes you do.

ROWENA:  How do you deal with those?

MARTIN:  Unless the patient is in danger of losing their life, which is very, very rare, or the patient is in pain, I try and not to prescribe to stop the reaction. It is better not to palliate and just leave them alone. So when the patient phones up and complains bitterly that something dreadful has happened you say very good! You need to read what is going on and reassure them that what is happening is okay, part of a process and what should be going on because that is what homeopathy is. It invites you to take a little journey and sometimes it is a bit bumpy but that is okay. People are so suppressed. You give a homeopathic remedy and it is just a can of worms. The whole lot explodes all over the place and that is good.

ROWENA:   So who is in your circle of meditators?

MARTIN:  Janice Micallef, Colin Griffith, Jill Wright, Terry Howard, Diane Pitman and Sylvia Treacher.

ROWENA:  Do you still see them?

MARTIN:  Not officially as that group came to an end but we still do meditative provings. We still gather different people around us, put groups together, and do remedies.

ROWENA:  What made you come up with remedies like Apple?

MARTIN:  Well it is an obvious one to do really isn’t it? The fruit trees are said to be really quite refined and advanced in the vegetable kingdom.

ROWENA:  So when you start thinking about it there are just endless remedies to prove. Could you tell me more about the meditative provings and what happens during them?

MARTIN:   We meditate in silence for an hour to an hour and a half and then we share our experiences.

ROWENA:  If people are sharing their experiences how do you avoid being influenced by each other? Or does it not matter? I am just trying to put myself in that space and imagine what it is like.

MARTIN:  Well that is part of the training of meditating together. That is part of what you learn to do; to have your own experience of whatever the meditation is. If you are making a repertory you have remedies you put in bold type, remedies you would underline and remedies you would have in plain type. That means that perhaps everybody in the circle might get one or two of the same experience; then half the circle might get a particular experience and then maybe one or two would get something nobody else got and through that you build up a picture of the remedy. If we don’t have recording equipment then we have somebody who writes all the reports down using shorthand.

ROWENA:  And you don’t know what the remedy is before you do it?

MARTIN:  No we don’t. It is a double-blind meditation. We did a meditative proving of Latrodectus mactans. There was already a conventional proving but it didn’t have a very big picture. After I took the remedy and went into the meditation, the first thing I got was a spider’s web; I was on a spider’s web and it was shaking.

ROWENA:  That is amazing! Well it is not really amazing as it makes perfect sense but it still is amazing nevertheless! Do you know what I mean?

MARTIN:  Yes, I know what you mean and what was extraordinary was, as one side of the spider’s web started to shake the other side started to shake as well. Now the spider’s web was the size of the universe and it was also the size of a spider’s web. It was both. And there was a kind of extraordinary tension and acuteness of the senses. One of the group coughed and I jumped out of my skin. Interestingly spiders have an intolerance of noise and that is what I experienced.

ROWENA:  So did you start thinking that it might be a spider or do you stop yourself doing this as part of the training?

MARTIN:  You don’t start to use your brain to speculate what the remedy is. You keep the brain out of it and you go into the meditation and experience it. What was so interesting about this particular proving was that this was a remedy that illustrated the unity behind all life. We were all on this spider’s web, all of us, and the person on one side was connected to someone on the other. When one side started rattling the other side started moving as well. It was quite an extraordinary experience and we realised that Latrodectus mactans is a remedy that brings the kind of universal consciousness that all life is one. It is important for people to get that kind of consciousness if they have no concept of the unity of life.

ROWENA:  That has brought up a few things for me. I read a book many years ago, Bridge Across Forever[, about that connection that people have, and actually I did see it as a cord, or like part of a web; that once you made a connection with somebody you feel that connection always but also obviously we all have that connectedness. Do you think all homeopaths need to believe in universal connectedness or can they work on a different level?

MARTIN:  You can work on whatever level you find it. It is perfectly valid on any level. And it is with patients as well. Patients come for two reasons. They come to have their physical ailments dealt with, whatever they may be, serious or superficial. And then there is another group of people who will come to use homeopathy as an instrument to unfold their own power and their own potential.

ROWENA:  So tell me more about the meditation circles.

MARTIN:  For six years we have run three two year meditation circles. Janice Micallef runs the meditations and they are really experiential for students and involve them on a very deep level. Then Colin Griffith and I do the class instruction. We teach chakras, endocrine glands and the new remedies. We get other experts in to teach astrology, science and kabbalah etc. It is designed to take students fresh from college. The college experience teaches them to be good technicians who can work with materia medica and the repertory. What we want to do is develop them into healers with knowledge of other things that they may find helpful. The more practitioners understand spiritual philosophy, the more effective they can be as homeopaths; it goes hand in hand. As one learns to see much deeper into one’s patients, one is able to do much bigger and better work.

ROWENA:  So do you have a course that is running now?

MARTIN:  We just did a summer school in Greece.

ROWENA:  Was that at the end of a two year training?

MARTIN:  No. It was just a one-off for a week. We did it differently this time and took a group of over thirty students. They did two provings and I must say I have never seen a group of people move and change so much in a week; it was astonishing. And of course the little island of Paros is a safe place to be and to open up. There is nothing threatening there as it is like living in England in the 1950s. They loved it and had a wonderful time.

ROWENA:  They were postgraduates?

MARTIN:  They were all postgraduates and they experienced themselves in a different way that week.

ROWENA:  It changed their perception?

MARTIN:  Yes. This is the first time we have done a Guild for three or four years as we had closed it down. So now we might open it up again; we will see what happens.

ROWENA:  I would imagine there is a demand for it. Prometheus the journal, stopped as well, didn’t it?

MARTIN:  Yes, I am afraid so. That is because the three of us, Janice Micallef, Colin Griffith and myself are so busy that we have no time to organise it.

ROWENA:  So going back to how to be a successful homeopath….

MARTIN:  Well I think you have to be willing to prescribe in different ways other than classical. If you are just going to prescribe classically it is not going to work. That is on a fundamental level.

ROWENA:  Unless you attract those patients that will respond to those remedies, no?

MARTIN:  Possibly, I don’t know of anybody who would just do well on one single remedy. Others have their own stories and their own ways of using it and attract patients accordingly but for me it does not work.

ROWENA:  The concept of the Holy Grail isn’t that they only take one dose but that even in an acute, their specific Holy Grail remedy will get them back into balance even if the symptoms of the acute are not in the remedy picture.

MARTIN:  Well, sometimes the chronic and the acute are the same remedy and sometimes they are not.

ROWENA:  In terms of who has influenced you Martin, obviously Thomas Maughan but what about other homeopaths or spiritual teachers?

MARTIN:  Well I am good friends with Janice Micallef and with Colin Griffith and I think we influence and help each other.

ROWENA:  When you give remedies in combination, how does the healing work? We were taught that if someone is out of balance, the remedy works as a catalyst to instigate a healing response of the vital force. If they are having different messages from several remedies, how does that work? Are the messages on different levels?

MARTIN:  They are not getting different messages that conflict. It is all the same message but from a different point of view. As you say, it is sorting them out on different levels.

ROWENA:  Like peeling an onion….

MARTIN:  You can peel it from one side and you can peel it from another side and you can then take the next layer off. People come with a legacy of so many different issues. They may have suffered grief some time in their life and their heart has shut down, so you would use remedies like Natrum muriaticum maybe to help the heart open, but at the same time you realise the heart cannot open unless there is some stability in the solar plexus.

ROWENA:  So that is the energy centre representing identity?

MARTIN:  Yes. So you have to strengthen the solar plexus at the same time as getting the heart to open. The syphilitic miasm has its root in the heart and the thymus gland so you are going to use that to try and help the heart as well. If the person has been vaccinated it will create a blockage, which can be very difficult to break through. I have a patient of my age who has never been vaccinated; I have been treating him for years but there is nothing ever wrong with him. When he came to me he had ulcerative colitis and it cleared up really quickly because he hadn’t been vaccinated. He never has any problems that a couple of remedies haven’t cured.

ROWENA:  I am happy to say that I wasn’t vaccinated.

MARTIN:  That is wonderful! I suspect you respond very well to homeopathy.

ROWENA:  I do.

MARTIN:  Well there we are. You might even be able to get a single remedy to work well for you. If you treat children who have been vaccinated you have to use a lot of remedies and repeat them often and that is how you get through it. If you just give one remedy and don’t see them for weeks or months, it is just not going to do anything. It just won’t because you come up against that barrier of the vaccinations.

ROWENA:  But I use LMs with a lot of my patients and they work really well.

MARTIN:  Yes, LMs work well.

ROWENA:  I always explain homeopathy as a process – that as a result of taking their remedy over a period of time they will experience an unravelling. I especially tell patients this that have cancer or emotional issues. Martin, do you think homeopathy will become dormant again?

MARTIN:  The problem we have now is what is happening with regulation; it could stifle homeopathy. In order for our profession to really flourish, it has to be practised with complete freedom. If you try to impose controls about who can prescribe, who cannot prescribe, how they prescribe, in what situations they can prescribe and so on, you are going to kill it off. It is not going to have that bigger freedom that it needs. If you, for instance, say homeopathy has to be taught only in universities then we will only get academics attracted to the profession and not necessarily those with life experience or other skills, for example. I hope it doesn’t go that way. If we get under the control of doctors and doctors’ practices they will decide what they sell and to whom.

ROWENA:   It is very unlikely they are going to refer to a homeopath unless it is one of those heart sink patients that they are just trying to get rid of, don’t you think?

MARTIN:  Well, yes, that is right. And then when you get those patients they are likely to be taking a range of drugs that they have been prescribed and if you want them to stop taking the drugs you are immediately in conflict with the GPs. It is a hard one but we will see how it reveals itself in time.

ROWENA: Thank you so much Martin for sharing your thoughts and time with me.

[i]Bach, Richard, Bridge Across Forever, Pan Books, London, 1985