I just returned from a five day seminar/workshop, Alchemical Lab II, Making Medicines, presented by Dennis Klocek and Matias Baker at the Rudolf Steiner College in Fair Oaks, CA. The days were a deepening of the work we began a year ago, a sinking into the task of our time: healing through development of consciousness through our relationship to the earth.
Schedule posted on meeting room window.
The schedule was intense, added to by the 108 degree heat that met us Friday upon arrival. Perhaps this beginning volatilized what is too concrete (coagulated) within our consciousness! Morning and evening we listened to Dennis’ life work which applies the principles of alchemy, Paracelsus, Goethe, and Rudolf Steiner, and to some extent, C. G. Jung, to the making of medicines. In the afternoons Matias lead us in practical exercises in which we experimented with these techniques.
One of the important things I bring away is the process of taking a question about one’s work into sleep. One finds the image that represents the question, and then holds this image as one crosses the threshold, hopefully receiving a dream which is communication with the Being behind the image (Goethe). When a dream comes, one tests the dream through listening to what arrives in the light of day: a friend who suggests reading a book about the very thing you are asking; perhaps a picture you come across the depicts what you are querying.
Jung calls these kinds of experiences synchronicity, acausal events—things that like to happen together. Healing happens in this experience of resonance: like cures like. Healing is the experience of resonance with the whole, or the archetype (Jung), or, as Goethe and Steiner would say, with the being behind the image. Resonance between the animal, plant, and/or mineral kingdom is particularly strong when the formative processes in each are similar. This resonance is the core of the power of Biodynamic preparations and of any profession in which healing happens.