Jan Scholten Seminar 2010

Review of the seminar by Jan Scholten
on 6/7 March 2010 in Berlin

“I like to give bad seminars,” Jan Scholten said at the beginning to his roughly two hundred listeners.
In the past he had found that seminars are especially well received when they consist of 90% familiar material. He, however, prefers to present the audience with the unfamiliar: new remedy pictures, often whole groups of new remedies, new approaches and viewpoints, and a wealth of video cases.

Of course Scholten first once again explained the basics of his method: the understanding of the periodic table and the concept of series and stages.
His working method can be sketched roughly as follows:
In conversation with the patient one strives to really understand the problem; one must be able to put it into a single sentence from which everything else becomes understandable. One finds out which life-theme needs to be resolved (series) and at which developmental stage the person is stuck, i.e. how they react to the problem (stage). If one can then narrow it down to the mineral kingdom, one has already found the remedy! And if it is a salt, one at least already knows one of its ions...

The method is simple and beautiful in itself - in practice its application can, however, be tricky, as the discussion of the video cases showed.

Among the participants there were often quite different views. Jan Scholten always explained his choice convincingly and one could easily follow his train of thought - but would one have arrived at it oneself?

Incidentally, Scholten sometimes needs ten years and even more remedies to finally find the right one - to err is human and even the best homeopaths make mistakes.

On the first day Jan Scholten spoke about the periodic table and, using video cases, presented some lanthanide salts; on the second day he explained his ideas on the plant kingdom. Scholten's plant systematics are recent and not yet published in books. For most participants the ideas were therefore “unheard of” and the remedies new - who, after all, knows the essence of bellflower, guelder rose and chrysanthemum?

The botanical tree

Scholten starts from the botanical classification of plants into families and arranges these families in a “taxonomic tree” according to their degree of development. For the individual families he identifies themes - similar to the series of the periodic table. In the seminar he explained the themes of Araliaceae, Campanulaceae, Caprifoliaceae and Compositae. Members of these four families are considered highly differentiated and thus stand in the crown of the “taxonomic tree”. And indeed we find aspects of the likewise complex lanthanides again: autonomy, freedom, control and sensitivity!

The idea of stages can also be applied in the plant kingdom to determine a plant's position within the family. (The decision for a stage is based on knowledge gained from cured cases and also from provings.)
It was astonishing to see how the notion of series and stages can also find application in the plant kingdom.

Scholten is known as an important theoretician, but he does not hesitate to discard theories if they are of no use in practice - however well established they may be. This became clear several times during the seminar, for example when the subject of “potencies” came up: someone wanted to know why he almost always gives a C1000 in monthly repetition. Scholten replied spontaneously: “Why not? It works wonderfully!” Chutzpah and humour of this kind contributed greatly to the cheerful atmosphere of the weekend.

New impulses for one's own thinking could be gathered in large numbers; often remarks made in passing triggered an “aha effect”. Beginners and advanced practitioners alike could gain a deeper understanding from the seminar - both of homeopathy and of human problems in general.

It was an all-round good seminar - inspiring, uplifting and motivating!
To the photo gallery

Jan Scholten Seminar 2008 on DVD
Interview with Jan Scholten (30 min) on DVD

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Author: Dörte Müller. Further impressions from the congress