Cabbages & Oranges

The appointment was made before I wrenched the lower discs in my lumbar spine which are fused, and prone to aching after sudden knock or twists. It made the journey hellish to say the least. The clinic I am going to comes highly recommended and I am most anxious to be treated.

After a number of preliminary stops we head off en masse in the car to Kildare, my sister, my nephew and I. He has taken up a position on the back seat with his gangly teenage legs and feet stretched out - the better to sleep.  Limping along behind them , I realize with a start that he is now taller than his Mother.

Everyone is taller than me.

Pauric Gibbons is not your average kind of Homeopath or TCM practitioner. He is not sitting behind a desk with an array of charts and  books. There is not a reception area or a girl with a phone checking your name off against a heavily underlined book.  We walk across the tree dappled drive, ring the bell and walk in.  There are people everywhere.  Some are sitting on white armchairs reading, one is having a conversation on her mobile which obviously involves a man, as between bursts of tinny hysteria from the disembodied voice comes patient sighing.  Others are tiptoeing up and down the halls and there are people in a kitchen drinking tea.

 There is a smell of Oranges.

The three of us take our seats in the white room, with me eyeballing which chair will lend my back the most support. I feel completely exhausted and drained and near to sleep myself.  This has been a constant for so long now, it is beginning to feel like the norm.   Bones ache, legs ache,   my wrist won’t support the weight of a kettle and a general feeling of malaise or torpor on any given day.

As the song says “I’ve been down so long, it’s starting to look like Up”

I find a needle sticking out of the side of the couch.

This is my sister’s second visit and they know her and ask how she is doing. Then the man himself comes in. He pauses in the frame of the door to take in the room with a sideways glance and waves one arm vaguely  in our direction. “She’s still not eating the cabbage” says he and wanders into another room. He comes back and stares into my nephews eyes.  “This young fella is nervous in the blood and its affecting his eyes”   - (My Nephew is attending today for Visual Snow, and he wears glasses to study)- He sits in a chair across from me and smiles lazily at me.

“Have you had a stye on that left eye recently?” he asks.  (It was Blepheritis.)

“Who are you holding a grudge against?” I respond – myself.

“Do you know that you have no energy at all and that you are depressed? What’s your diet like?”

“50% chicken and 50% chocolate” I reply.

He advises to give up the chicken which he describes in his accent as pure Pie-Zen. Did I mention Pauric is a farmer, and that his hands are calloused and roughened and blackened from pulling and hauling? Did I mention that he looked like he just came in from milking a herd of cows and that his curls may have had hay in them?

He leads me down the hall to a room to be needled in. “Your energy is on the floor and you barely were able to walk down the hall, you have a pain in your back that is lifting you and your thoughts are all over the place.” He places a needle in my left hand. It hurts. And another.  Ditto.  The same on the right hand and for a finale , one on the very top of my head. “We’ll have to get this Chi moving” he says and explains it is hurting as the energy starts to move.  (Authors Note – Chi is the term for universal life energy as understood by TCM (Traditional Chinese Medicine) practitioners. He tells me to relax and leaves me to chill. In the pursuit of a story I dragged my bag over with my foot and despite the waves of soreness took the photo that accompanies this piece.

I know.

After 30 minutes or so where I had decided that I would throw out every single thing in my house and put tongue and groove on all the walls and paint them white, he comes back in and removes the needles and gives me water from a filtered jug. Then I get to see Catherine, who will diagnose  what remedy I will need.

Lifeflow  believes in a mapping system to the inner world of the person, through observation and listening to the language  of the person in which the disease is expressed. Thus enabling the healer to recognize the frequency (Homeopathic remedy) that contains the sensations that are the causation of the disease.

I am slumped sideways in the chair, holding my head up with one hand and tell her that I am so sore “even my hair hurts”. We have a session that involves dreams, colour therapy and childhood.  I am sure the buzz words I used made it a no-brainer for the remedy I needed which is dropped onto the back of the hand and licked off. Excuse me, but it works. As does the bag of clay she recommends  I take every day from now on. She hands me a heavy bag of rust coloured soft clay. I squash it between my hands while she explains it is great for bones, joints, and osteoporosis. You drink a glass of the clay every morning in water or juice. Excuse me, but that worked too. I find my nephew sitting reading in one of the rooms and he tells me that the floaters and snow have gone from his eyes. He is delighted. “Someone should blog about this” he says – “people need to know about this place!” and hands me an Orange.

Paurics parting words to us were to eat cabbage, and oranges and drink plenty of water, he told my nephew to eat an onion every day and then he went off to milk the cows at sunset. 

Contact: health@lifeflowcentre.com
Telephone: +353 (0)87 1411662
Venue: The Lifeflow Centre
Moorefield Road, Newbridge, Co Kildare

M.D.M.