In 2011 I was celebrating the launching of my new website design and blog. Now in 2016 I am celebrating many things. I am celebrating my recovery from breast cancer and all of the joy and new opportunities this brings. I am excited to announce that I am launching the next phase of my career – and it involves rug hooking! I am planning to teach workshops on Hook a Healing Mat and will be speaking about how I used my health wake up call to heal and move forward with what makes my heart sing. I will be working with women to tell the stories (in the form of hand hooked rugs) of their journeys From Wake Up to Wellness.
So today I thought it was appropriate to re-post this blog from 2011. The following article is about me and two of my passions – homeopathy and rug hooking. It has previously been published in two rug hooking newsletters (Ontario Hooking Craft Guild Issue 3, Fall 2010 and The Loop, Rug Hooking Guild of Nova Scotia) and Pillars of Health newsletter. I hope you enjoy it!
I recently discovered the passion of rug hooking. After watching my mother craft beautiful rugs for the past forty years, this summer at the urging of my sister I took up rug hooking. The joy I experience in choosing a pattern, selecting fabric and then hooking a rug is similar to the joy I find in the discovery of a remedy that fits my patient perfectly, or studying a remedy and then seeing those same symptoms in a patient that needs that remedy.
With rug hooking, every rug hooker has his/her own style of how high they pull the loops, the tension in their hooking, and so on. Even when the same pattern is chosen, no two rugs will be the same. So it is with homeopathy, where several people may have the same illness or diagnosis, but all may need different remedies to move them in a healing direction.
Both homeopathy and rug hooking require persistence and sometimes fresh eyes. In my rug hooking I am learning by trying and doing. Sometimes the project I am working on is not progressing the way I had envisioned it and I have to put it aside and work on another project for a day or so. In my work as a homeopath, sometimes the remedies I have selected for a patient may not be giving the desired results, so it requires me and the patient to explore the symptoms from other angles and to think outside the box.
Homeopathy has a 200 year old tradition as a system of medicine. We have a solid foundation of provings, material medica and clinical experience that build the basis of our information. We also have innovation in terms of new substances being proven continuously, and brilliant homeopaths devising new ways to take cases or to study and understand the material medica. I am discovering in rug hooking that there are basic foundations of how to hook rugs in the traditional way and there are also some very exciting, new, fresh patterns and methods of rug hooking. The possibilities seem endless.
Rug hooking has brought both passion and balance to my life, and has improved my work as a homeopath by stretching my creativity and encouraging my heart to be light and open to possibilities. I think that a well chosen homeopathic remedy can do this as well, as it moves a person more towards balance and healing.
To summarize, I guess the qualities that a rug hooker and/or a homeopath bring to their work include joy, curiosity, artistry, making connections, persistence, passion and an appreciation for the foundations laid by others.
This is a photo of a rug in my recent Healing Mat series, called Curvy Lines. The mat at the top of this post is my first mat, designed by my mom and hooked with scraps from her years of rug hooking.
