“Wow, you just read my mind! How do you do that?!”
“Doctor I bet now you know me better than my husband of thirty years does!”
“Uff, one should never have a homeopath for a friend…. They know you so well they can catch your lies like that (snapping fingers)!”
If you have been a patient of homeopathy or have a homeopath for a friend, the above instances would feel familiar. I for sure, get a lot of that! And no, I have no mind-reading super powers nor do I have an extra ordinary IQ. It is because Homeopathy taught me to steal shoes…
How I learnt to steal shoes:
Homeopathy believes that when you have constant headaches, it’s not just your head that’s sick, but it’s you that is sick in toto. That’s why a homeopath will try and understand the entire ‘you’ vis-à-vis your headache – why you keep getting them, how you have been affected mentally or emotionally, blah blah. In-depth patient interactions over a decade is how homeopathy has taught me – to steal (ok, maybe steal was an exaggeration) – to borrow your shoes, walk around in them, and get how it feels to be you walking through your office, your home, your relationships, your dreams, your hopes, your fears and your lives.
Or so I thought:
Lost in my reveries last week, it struck me and I got off my high horse of being in the “high and mighty profession of homeopathy”. Isn’t this true of every profession? Whether you are a software engineer trying to understand the end user’s needs to give your software a user friendly UI, or you are a salesman trying to figure out why your customer should prefer your insurance policy over the others…. We all have to learn to steal people’s shoes and walk in them. Not just to sell to our customers but also to understand why our loved ones react in certain peculiar ways that they sometimes do.
The time I failed to steal:
All this stealing shoes business is easier said than done. Just yesterday, I found myself utterly exasperated by a friend who loves to gossip. (I did not have a problem listening to her gossip about others, until I got to know that she had gossiped about me too!) Let’s call her Reena (to be honest, she still is my friend, wears pointy high heels and could seriously maim me!) Coming back to the story… my frustration, anger and hurt had swollen up my feet so much, I could not get my feet to fit into her shoes! I decided to sleep over my options which varied from a heart – to – heart talk to pounding her to a pulp (puny people do tend to have obese imaginations!)
Sense Prevails:
Today morning, I woke up with a clearer head. I realised that, I needed to get back on my trusted horse of homeopathy. I tried to wiggle my still sore feet into her shoes. Why did Reena gossip? Well maybe, she wanted the attention of the group… Maybe it was just an attempt to spice up a conversation… Or maybe it wasn’t intended to be hurtful gossip. But that was just who she was, and nothing I would say to her would change the person underneath. If I had that much of a problem, I could stay away. Or I could “get” her and let go off of the hurt.
And that is how homeopathy taught me to steal shoes.
You can steal too!
Whether a software techie or an insurance salesman, you are probably already doing it at work. If we could try to do the same for every loved one, acquaintance and even stranger’s shoes – we’d all suffer from lesser sore feet, lesser bruised egos and lesser hurt hearts.