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IN THIS PODCAST, WE COVER:

01:50    Dirty little secret

08:08    Protecting our family

11:51    Fibromyalgia

15:45    Not to take no for an answer

LINKS AND RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THIS PODCAST:

How I Cured my Fibromyalgia with One Simple Medicine

Rhus Tox 30 or 200

(Symphytum 200 mixed with the Rhus Tox is the Banerji Protocol that I teach now — see Remedy Card below)

Sepia 200 – for motherhood fatigue

Joette:  I have to tell everyone what my dirty secret is?! Okay, well, I think everyone has a little bit of this, but maybe mine is worse.

Kate: You are listening to Podcast Number 57 with Joette Calabrese at practicalhomeopathy.com. Thank you for joining us on today’s podcast as Joette shares her experiences and insights into healing our families with homeopathy. As you just heard in the intro to this podcast, Joette is going to let us in on a little secret. Those of you who know Joette or follow her posts or podcasts might be a little surprised at what she has to share with us today.

If you enjoy these podcasts, we’d love to hear from you. Drop us a note on our Facebook page or post a screenshot of this podcast on your social media platform using the hashtag #JoetteCalabresePodcast. Your encouragement and willingness to help spread the message of homeopathy is central to our mission. And, we may just feature your review on one of the upcoming podcasts.

Kate:  So, Joette, you and I are here together today, and we’ve been hashing through some ideas for the podcasts, and what people might want to hear. As we’ve talked, I always have a lot of questions for you, Joette. I could go on and on. But, the thing that intrigued me was — as we were talking — you told me that you have a dirty little secret.

Joette:  Are you going to bring that up today? I have to tell everyone what my dirty secret is?

Kate:  Yes, Joette, you have to tell the world.

Dirty little secret

Joette:  Okay, well, I think everyone has a little bit of this, but maybe mine is worse. I have to admit — I have a temper. Maybe it’s because I’m Sicilian. Sometimes it’s good, but sometimes it’s bad. But I will tell you, it really drives me.

Kate:  I have to interrupt you for a second Joette because I have known you for five years now. (Can you believe that? We’ve known each other for five years.) I have never seen you get upset in the least. I mean I know you’re spunky, but I’ve never seen that side of you. So, this is interesting to me. You know, you got to share more.

Joette:  Well, it’s really all related around my family. You’ve never hurt my family. When it comes to them, I become super protective. I have anger skeletons in my closet. In fact, I have so many of them that they talk to each other and party at night!

Kate:  I’m imagining them dancing around.

Joette:  Yeah, they’re dancing, and the problem is they’re all Sicilian. I think that’s the problem is that this anger comes from this deep-seated desire to take care of the family. I mean, you know all about families in Sicily. But, it has been a problem from time to time. But that’s what’s driven me! It has driven me to such resentment and anger when someone makes a medical mistake or declares something medically regarding one of my family members, and it really gets to my core.

Kate:  That’s understandable. Everyone has that component to their being.

Joette:  Well, yeah, but I’ve actually attacked doctors.

Kate:  Well, what do you mean “attacked,” Joette?

Joette:  Well, not physically. But, I could tell by the look on my father’s face — when I’ve had to practically attack them when my father was around — that he was worried that I might just lunge at them.

Kate:  He was giving you that look like, “Joette …”

Joette:  “Joette, calm down, Honey. Calm down.” I remember one time when my father was in the hospital, and I always stayed with him when he went in. The doctor came, and he said, “We’re going to give you the flu vaccine.” And I said, “No, no, no. My father is not going to get the flu vaccine.” He said, “No, no, it’s our policy to do that.”

I said, “No, no, no. You don’t understand. We have a policy. We have a family policy. My father does not get flu vaccines. End of discussion. Now, if you have a problem with that, I’ll get a cousin who’s an attorney to make it clear to you.” Because they’ve always got these policies and as soon as someone hears policy, they think, “Oh well, maybe I should back off.” No, no, no. You come back — or I’ve always come back — with, “No, I’ve got my own policy. My policy is bigger than your policy.”

Kate:  Yeah, I was going to say …

Joette:  “I hired you pal.”

Kate:  … my policy supersedes your policy.

Joette:  That’s right, that’s right. There was another one. Another doctor came in once and told us about this study that my father could become a part of. He was just trying to get himself published. I know what he was trying to do. He turned to my father. (I could tell that he was a little worried about me. Maybe I had said something before that I didn’t remember, or he could tell by the look on my face and my arms that were folded, and the scowl on my face.) “But he said, “I would like you to be part of this study. Wouldn’t that be a great thing for you to do essentially?”

Before my father could even open his mouth, take a breath, and say anything, I said, “My father is not a lab rat. He will not be part of your study.” And, he backed off. He backed off. He went on to tell us about how important this … “No. He will not be participating in your study.”

So, we have to be like that sometimes. Now, had I thought that my father was going to have to go back to this doctor again and again, I maybe would have softened a little bit. But, I knew he wasn’t going to be seeing this cardiologist again. Because we do have to be careful, they have an awful lot of power — especially if it’s over your children. That’s when you don’t argue, and I’ve talked about this many times before.

So, I’m making it sound like my dirty little secret of having this anger is only mine, but I think that everyone can develop this. I think it’s a good thing to develop. Because if we don’t have a wound that’s rubbed raw, then we won’t come back fighting to protect the rest of the body (or the rest of the person). So, the deeper the wound is rubbed, the more equal on the other end is the anger and resentment and frustration — and even frustration is not a good enough word, as far as I’m concerned — anger and resentment that we have to exert in ourselves in order to come up with the correct solutions.

Kate:  So, if we don’t have that deep “why” within us, then we’re not ready to take those steps that we need to, to be bold, to be protective of our families.

Joette:  Yeah. Had my life been filled with medical successes, had my eczema not been suppressed with steroids, had my asthma not been a result of taking decades of steroids — I mean we could go on and on — had all of those events not occurred in my life, and they were saying this, then I would say, “Wow! Dad, a study! You could be on the leading edge of a study.”

But, I’ve had a lot of experience seeing the medical foibles that were foisted upon my father and myself and my child and my mother, and it goes on and on and on. And I had connected the dots years prior, so that when another dot was being presented to us, I said, “Nuh-uh-uh-uh, no more, no more. We’re done.”

Originally, it was driven by curiosity. “Gee, I wonder if there’s another way to do this?” It goes hand in hand with irreverence. That’s what I’m expressing now is irreverence. Because with irreverence, it fosters an open search for ideas, and then a reverence and respect for life.

So, in a way, you have to build your imagination. Everybody’s got this. You just have to flex it. Imagination is part of the human spirit. It’s the dynamism of the human spirit. So, if you’re trying to build your imagination, you want to imagine that you can take care of many of your family’s ills — maybe not all of them, but how about trying for 50%?

Kate:  So, this is almost like a workout regimen. I mean is that what you’re alluding to?

Protecting our family

Joette:  Yes, you’re flexing your muscles. You know, years ago, I worked with this FBI agent. I found it so fascinating because he taught me about muscle memory. He said that when he went to bed at night, he put his pistol — honest to goodness (I think it was a pistol; I imagine that’s what it was) — that he had on his leg that he wore all day, and he would put it by his bedside in exactly the same place and exactly the same position every single day for years. He was trained to do that so if something happened, all he had to do was reach over and grab it, and his finger went right into the placement, and his hand was holding it in exactly the posture it needed to be held. He said, “It was muscle memory. I just had to do it over and over and over again. After a while, I felt confident that if something came along in my family, if something was a threat because of what I was working on in the FBI, I was able to protect my family.”

Well, you’ve got to have a pistol, first, of your own, so that you can protect your family. After a while when you build that muscle memory, “I can do this,” and then you do it, and then you do it again. It’s not unlike the first time I cured my son of sniffles, I felt alive! “Wow! Look what I just did!” Within two hours — after knowing that a pediatrician would have given an antibiotic that would have kicked the can down the road and cause more trouble later on — I did it in a couple of hours. Holy cow!

Then I cured his strep throat. Oh my gosh! I know what a pediatrician would have said about strep throat. “You got to use antibiotics and the big guns,” so to speak. I don’t mean this to be such a bellicose conversation today about all the anger, pistols.

Kate:  Are you hungry or something today? You’re kind of worked up.

Joette:  Yeah, I think I am. No, I am hungry, as a matter of fact. That’s why I’m talking like this probably. But at any rate, we almost have to stir our anger so that we can get that alpha mother out and onto this theatre, this stage of our lives. Without controversy, as humans, we have no interest in moving forward and examining options.

So, people who live a charmed life and don’t have illness — which is pretty much nonexistent — but if they have mild illnesses, and they trust that the doctor has got the answer, and they take the Tylenol, and the headache goes away. And they have a cyst, and they have it extracted, and then another cyst comes out, now four cysts come up. And then they have not put together all of the strands of understanding that you remove one cyst, and others will pop up later. Or that you treat an illness that’s met with an antibiotic, and you find that there’s another one that shows up shortly after that. If they don’t make that connection, then they just fall for the methods that are handed to everyone.

But, once you realize and make that connection, you sort of can’t help yourself. I urge people to read the book, “Medical Nemesis.” I’m pretty sure it was written by Robert Mendelsohn. We almost have to have drama, we humans, to fan our hostilities and resentments. So, we can say, “Whoa, whoa, whoa! What just happened? I can’t believe this happened.” And then we dig and look for the answers. So then, once we start digging and looking for the answers, and we start coming up with a few — maybe just a handful — then that starts to determine our identity.

I mean how do we identify ourselves? Are we someone who’s acquiescent? Who’s passive, and who says, “Yes, Doc. Okay, Doc. Whatever you say,” and believes all that the doctors have to offer? Listen. I’m not saying you throw your doctor off of the ten-story building. I’m saying that you need your doctor to identify conditions. But, don’t for a second believe that that’s the only solution. There are thousands of solutions.

Kate:  Or that he has all the answers, because they can’t possibly.

Joette:  It would be impossible.

Fibromyalgia

Just the other day, there was someone who commented on my blog post. She had commented about the fact that I had cured myself of fibromyalgia. And I had! It was pretty severe. I mean, I was chronic fatigued, and joints were all aching. You’re just touching my tendons, just touching my arm, you push, “Ow. Ow. Ow.” Everything hurt! It was achy. I felt very out of sorts; slept too much. I used Rhus tox. Now, I can’t remember what potency it was. I wrote about it in one of my blog posts. Maybe it was a 200. Maybe it was a 1M. It was long enough ago that I don’t remember.

That is key, mind you. It was long enough ago that I don’t remember. I cured myself of fibromyalgia. And I did it for my aunt. I’ve taught many, many people, and they’ve reported back to me that it has worked.

So, this person wrote and said, “You shouldn’t talk like that. You shouldn’t say on your blog post — and give people false hope — that you cured your fibromyalgia. It must have been some other reason. Maybe you helped some of your symptoms. , fibromyalgia is incurable.”

I thought to myself, “Really? How do you know that? Because what? Somebody told you that or because you haven’t been cured yet?” I would have believed fibromyalgia was incurable because I was told the same thing. But I said, “I’m not going to believe that. I’m going to look further.” And so, I did.

So, I wonder why the person just doesn’t take the Rhus tox. That just confounds me! Oh well, if you’ve had it for all these years and you’ve been told it’s incurable, well, I guess — okay. So that’s what I said on the blog, “Oh, all right. So, I guess you just have to live with your fibromyalgia then. Don’t look anywhere else. Just listen to what you’ve been told and accept it.”

Kate:  Well, the other thing is that some people may think they tried it. It’s not working exactly to the extent that they thought it would, or that it did for you. But you have to remember, there are so many variables: how often are they taking it, what potency? There are so many things that you need to look at. So, you can’t make a blatant statement like that, and say, “It doesn’t work because I did this one thing.”

Joette:  Well, yes and no. Because when we use protocols as I teach them on the blog and in my courses (but I try to give as many away as I can for free on the blog), if you follow the protocols — the right potency, the right frequency — and you have the condition named properly — it is fibromyalgia, right? It’s not a broken arm; it is fibromyalgia — then you will likely have success. It’s when the diagnosis is incorrect — not from your doctor, but that perhaps maybe you have misdiagnosed it. And you didn’t realize that, indeed, it was a broken arm, and it turned out that you were calling it “fibromyalgia” all this time.

Kate:  Or it could be the doctor because that’s one of those things.

Joette:  Could be.

Kate:  I don’t know that they can …

Joette:  Yeah, it’s subjective. No, they can’t. It’s very subjective. Listen. As I’ve said before, my mechanic can’t figure out what’s wrong with my car! He can’t diagnose my car’s problems. How was it that we expect another human being to always understand exactly everything that’s going on in the human body? So, you try, and if it doesn’t act, you try something else. Give it a good shot and try something else if that doesn’t act.

So, I find that very frustrating. But all I can say is as I said on the blog, “Oh, okay.” I don’t even know what to say to someone like that. Really, you don’t get that you should be trying and looking further? Just not sitting back and saying, “Well, I’ve been told …” So, as long as there’s an opportunity to make alternations, and we throw up our hands and we say, “There’s no way,” then we’re never going to get ahead. There’s always a way. Always. Not just in health but in every single concern or problem on earth.

Kate:  I was just listening to someone who was talking about why she was so successful. And she said, “It’s because I learned not to take ‘no’ for an answer. Someone else hears the word ‘no,’ and that’s where they stop. I say, ‘I’m not going to accept that as an answer. Don’t tell me you’re not going to do this or whatever it is,’” and she pursued it. She dove in. She had moxie!

Not to take no for an answer

Joette:  Right. Everyone needs to have had a job in sales. If you haven’t ever had one then you ought to get one, because sales is all about hearing, “No, no, no.” And you keep saying it, “No, no.” And you keep explaining why your product is so great. “No, no, I don’t want it. I’m not interested.”

Then bam! Someone says, “Yes.” Oh, you just made a sale. No one knows about all the “no’s” you had to hear, but you become callous to it after a while. You don’t even hear the word “no.” In fact, if you hear the word “no,” it should get your cockles up and get you thinking, “Oh yeah? I don’t take ‘no’ for an answer!” You don’t have to say that to him, but you think, “That person thinks I can’t do this. I’m going to do it. I’m going to show them and myself — they may never hear from me again — but I know that I can do this.” And it takes that.

Kate:  So Joette, do you think this is something that’s innate in us, or something that we need to learn?

Joette:  Well, I do believe it’s the heartbeat of being a mother. Every quiver of our heart is dedicated to our families. But, I don’t know that everyone recognizes that by going to “the expert” that we can still fight that off — that information that we got. Because it’s only an opinion that this pediatrician or this doctor is giving us. You go to ten more doctors, and I’ll bet you get different answers. But when we are a mother or a grandmother, to be honest, we have no choice. Look to the animal kingdom — minus the animals that eat their young — but besides those … (We’ve all had those days, right?)

But aside from that, if you don’t feel as though you have enough to fight, if you don’t feel as though you’re an alpha mom enough, you probably need a couple of doses of Sepia 200 because you’ve been exhausted by the hormones changing, and too many babies, or too many years of birth control — not too many babies — I mean, having many babies all one after another, or just having had a baby, or having had years of birth control pills. Take a couple of rounds of Sepia 200 for a few weeks. That really gets things up and running again.

Kate:  Right. So, most likely, you get caught in this web of busy-ness and life and kids and stress, and you can’t see clearly.

Joette:  Right. So yeah, you can’t get caught up in the web. You have to parse it out. Think about all the things that we worry about all the time over the last year. Just think about that. Actually, do this: just jot down all the worries that you’ve had and really write them down. I’ll wager that no more than about 2% or 3% were really realized.

If we don’t try, we won’t succeed. It’s important that we realize that a lot of the worrying we mothers engage in is superfluous and never really comes to fruition. So, it’s important to put those aside and start focusing on learning how to take care of your family.

In case you haven’t noticed folks, this is not just about being able to take care of your family’s ills but your mothering style. Our mothering style almost becomes a political statement or more importantly, a human rights movement. It’s about the fundamental dignity of the family.

So maybe my feistiness today has to do with that book by Saul Alinsky, “Rules for Radicals.” Because we can learn even from scoundrels, and he was. His goal was to overturn the American government back in the 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, and is still going on today in his political camp. He’s no longer alive, but that is what his goal was. But by learning what radicals do and how they change the political scene, and more importantly, what he taught in his book was how to change your thinking so that you can become a radical.

And in a way, we have to be that way inside of us. We don’t want to go out and picket and hate doctors and modern medicine. We need them to a certain degree from time to time. What we don’t want is a ruling over us in terms of what we can and cannot take care of ourselves, and how we can take over many, many of the ills that come along in our families’ lives on a day-to-day basis.

Kate:  So, be strong, be brave.

Joette:  Yeah, have guts, spunk, and moxie — and pluck. I love that word, “pluck.” And then in the end, it’s all about being radical, baby. Radical!

Kate:  You just listened to a podcast from PracticalHomeopathy.com where nationally certified homeopath, public speaker, and author, Joette Calabrese shares her passion for helping families stay strong through homeopathy. Joette’s podcasts are available on iTunes, Google Play, Blueberry, Stitcher, and TuneIn radio.

Thank you for listening to this podcast with Joette Calabrese. To learn more and find out if homeopathy is a good fit in your health strategy, visit PracticalHomeopathy.com.