Podcast 99 – Moms with Moxie: A Powerful Matriarch

 

IN THIS PODCAST, WE COVER:

 

03:11    “Nourishing Traditions”

10:31    Learning is Key

16:50    Becoming a Matriarch

19:29    Polar Opposites: Complacency

22:38    Polar Opposites: The Savior

26:05    Pneumonia/Bronchitis and Ear Infection

 

LINKS AND RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THIS PODCAST:

 

The Antibiotic Alternative: Balance Your Bugs Without the Drugs

How to Raise a Drug Free Family

Gateway to Homeopathy: A Guided Study Group Curriculum

Joette’s Cold and Flu chart (Developing a Homeopathic Brain – A Cold, A Flu, A Cough; Which Is It; Which Remedy?)

Feminopathy: How You Can Correct Female Ailments Using Safe, Inexpensive and Effective Homeopathy

My blog, podcasts, Facebook Live events and courses

Gateway to Homeopathy: A Guided Study Group Curriculum

 

Kate:  This is the Practical Homeopathy® Podcast Episode Number 99 with Joette Calabrese.

 

Joette:  Joette Calabrese here, folks. I’m happy that you’ve joined me for my podcast today. You’re in for a treat. From my virtual classroom, I’m privileged to see how homeopathy is transforming lives all over the globe. Their successes inspire me. They’re glorious and powerful, and I can’t keep their triumphs a secret. I want you to hear the excitement my students experience, too. So, you can be inspired by their unique stories.

 

With the help from Kate, my reporter, I bring you a podcast series I call, “Moms with Moxie.” Sometimes we even interview “Dads with Audacity” or “Teens with Tenacity.” See how regular mothers and others — average folks who love healing those around them — have gone from freaking to fabulous by simply applying what they’ve learned using what I call Practical Homeopathy®.

 

 

Kate:  Hi, I’m Kate, and I would like to welcome you back to the Practical Homeopathy® podcast. Today, we’re going to have a different type of a Mom with Moxie podcast. We’re actually going to be talking about “the big picture.”

 

Jordan is a big picture thinker, and I can’t wait for you all to hear what she has to say about the power of being a matriarch. So, Jordan, welcome to the podcast.

 

Jordan:  Thanks for having me, Kate.

 

Kate:  I am so excited because we’re going to be changing things up a little bit. You are going to be talking to us about the big vision. Like, what is the big picture? Why are we doing this as moms? Why are we using homeopathy, and what does this mean to us, and how does it empower us?

 

So, before we get started, Jordan, tell us about yourself.

 

Jordan:  Sure. I’ve got five little ones. I have all the way from eight years old down to nine months old: Terry, Simon Peter, Elijah, Thérèse and Felicity.

 

I homeschool them. I’ve been doing that now for a couple of years.

 

But before I was homeschooling, I was a youth minister for about 10 years. That’s kind of my other side passion is ministry, reaching out to teens. So that’s really heavy on my heart.

 

This May, I’m celebrating my 10-year anniversary, so that’s super-exciting.

 

I’m relatively new to homeopathy. This has really been only something I’ve been doing for now, like, maybe eight months. But I am just so passionate and excited to share what I’ve learned — and hopefully, to encourage those who are learning, too, along the way.

 

Kate:  Yes, I can’t wait to hear what you have to say. When we talked a little bit earlier, I was very excited that you wanted not just to talk about those individual success stories or the struggles that you might have with homeopathy, but to talk about how this really can change our family’s lives. How it can empower us!

 

You said that yourself, you’re very new to homeopathy. But at the same time, I feel like you have a lot of wisdom in this. So, I want to hear about what led you to finding out about homeopathy. How did that journey come about?

 

“Nourishing Traditions”

 

Jordan:  I’ve always been suspicious of the allopathic medical paradigm for a long time, but I didn’t know what to replace it with. I just kind of still went along with it for the most part, so gave Tylenol, Benadryl, things like that.

 

But then, I really, Kate, can boil it down to certain key events where something shifted in my thinking. And the first key event was when my mom handed me the book “Nourishing Traditions” by Sally Fallon — and I would recommend any mom to get that book.

 

Kate:  What a great mom you had that she gave you that book! That’s awesome!

 

Jordan:  She did! I think she was surprised I read it. Because literally, she took it and gave it to me, and I think within a month, I had read it cover to cover.

 

I was just on my way to Minnesota. I had a long, 12-hour car ride from Michigan. So, I opened it up, and I read it. My husband was driving, so I was sitting in the passenger seat and just reading, reading. And it opened a huge door that I didn’t know was there.

 

I got into raw milk first. As I was reading it seeing that was a big thrust of Sally Fallon’s way of thinking, I was like, “Okay, let’s do raw milk.” That was a huge step for me. I was really nervous.

 

I remember Anthony, my husband, going to get the milk from the farmer’s market and bringing it home. I said a prayer before we drank it. I was like, “Please, Lord, I hope this is the right call,” because I’d been given lots of mixed messages about the safety and the efficacy of it.” But I thought, “I think this is what we are supposed to do.”

 

We went ahead, and we have been drinking it ever since. Love raw milk. (This was probably about a year and a half ago, by the way.)

 

Kate:  Can we talk for just a second about how you grew up? Was your mom very much into whole foods and Sally Fallon growing up? Was that the culture of your household, or is this something that your mom just found recently.

 

Jordan:  This is more recently for her. Growing up, it was pretty similar to what most people were doing in terms of diet. This was a slow build for my mom.

 

We have a very interesting family dynamic. I am the second oldest and then down to my youngest sibling who is 11. My mom has had a chance to parent the older siblings (and myself) in a different way. Now she is doing those more holistic ways with my younger siblings.

 

But no, when I was young it was pretty much typical diet and, along the way, sort of discovering this other direction to take her family.

 

As a young mother, I’m benefiting from her discoveries enormously.

 

Kate:  Did she also learn about homeopathy with you?

 

Jordan:  My older sister and I are leading the charge, and she’s following along, too. She’s open to it. She is an avid learner politically, nutritionally now. So, he is definitely on board.

 

We are kind of filling her in, like, we’re giving her remedies to try saying, “Hey, Mom, you got to buy this.”

 

She let me buy her a whole remedy kit. So, she’s on board. And we’re hoping eventually that she can start taking classes and really getting invested like my sister and I had been.

 

So, that was the first event.

 

The second one was my son’s ear infection which doesn’t sound like a good thing. But one night he awoke in the middle of the night with a really painful ear infection. I was able to stave that off with an onion. Onion …

 

Kate:  Poultice.

 

Jordan:  Onion poultice. Yes! I had read that in that book, “Nourishing Traditions.” I thought, “Great! We’re going to do the onion for Simon and Elijah.”

It worked for Simon. It did not work for Elijah.

It was really hard watching him writhing in pain, nothing was helping him. I even resorted to the typical Tylenol/Motrin alternating, and it was just not working. I remember thinking, “There has to be a better way. There has to be something I can do.”

That is the moment. I can pin it and say that is when the inner matriarch awoke in me, and I knew that I needed to start learning.

The morning comes, he’s still in a lot of pain, but I’m still holding out hoping I don’t have to take him to get the antibiotics. But then that whole day, he’s not doing well. So, I relented, and we took him and got him the antibiotics.

But I just kind of made that decision in me that never again — I am going to find a better way.

So, that’s the second key event that kind of spurred me along this journey.

Then, I would say another important event was a few months after the ear infection with my son, my niece came down with pertussis — which if anyone knows about that, that can be a very scary, serious illness. They, of course, gave antibiotics but that doesn’t help the symptoms of the sufferer.

I remember thinking, “Wow!” That was a moment again where the insufficiency, the inadequacy of the allopathic paradigm was just smack in my face again. I kept thinking in my innermost thoughts, “I have to keep searching for something. I can’t, as a mother, depend on this (in my opinion) failing medical paradigm.”

I kept searching, searching.

 

And then as I mentioned, I had gotten on to the Weston A. Price diet through the Sally Fallon book. So, I was doing raw milk. I was just starting to culture vegetables. I’m not a good cook. It sounds silly, like, how hard could it be to culture vegetables? But I was literally thinking I need someone to show me this.

 

So, I reached out to a fellow mom who had been doing that for a while. She came over to my house; we were chopping up veggies, putting them in the brine. We’re talking, and we chatted for a long time.

 

It wasn’t until the very end of our meeting that she just happened to say, “Have you ever heard of homeopathy? Have you ever heard of Joette Calabrese?” That was pretty much the end of our discussion. It wasn’t like we discussed it anymore or delved into it, because it was at the very end of our meeting.

 

But that’s all that I needed. As I say, if Weston A. Price opened the door, Joette blew it open!

 

Because once I delved into what Joette had to offer, I thought, “This is it! This is what I have been looking for. This is what my mother’s heart has been aching for. Something that I can start learning so I can take care of my sick child. I can take care of their needs. I don’t have to wait until nine o’clock in the morning when the urgent care opens, and I have to take them to the doctor — and all they’re going to give me are harmful drugs with side effects. I have something that I can learn, and that I can do!”

 

That to me was the gift from God. It was something that I can totally see His hand in each step of the way. Every event, every heartache, every failure, led up to that “aha moment,” and I am so grateful for it.

 

Kate:  It offered you a solution. It offered you hope. It offered you the feeling of empowerment.

 

Jordan:  Absolutely. I don’t think I could become the mother I am supposed to become without homeopathy. I truly believe that.

 

Kate:  From that moment, you decided I am going to learn about this, and you went onto Joette’s website? How did you learn then more about homeopathy?

 

Jordan:  It was a blur because once I discovered it, it was just like, boom, boom, boom, boom. I couldn’t stop.

 

I think I went on the website, and I discovered she’s got classes! I love classes!

 

I’m kind of an academic by heart. I love learning. I love things being organized, as you know, Kate. I like things in an organized manner. I’m not a Google person that likes to Google things in kind of piecemeal information. I want it laid out systematically, comprehensively, intelligently.

 

So, when I saw Joette’s list of classes, I thought, “This is for me!” And it had what I was looking for, Antibiotic Alternative — and that was the first class I took.

 

I have since taken also the Drug-Free family course.

 

But I remember just begging my husband, “Please can we find the funds to do this class? Can I take it now?”

 

God bless him. He said, “Yes, you can do this. I know that you need this. This is what our family needs.”

 

So, right away, I mean, almost within a week of hearing about her, I was signed onto her Antibiotic Alternative class and just gobbled that up.

 

Kate:  Then you started a Study Group, too, right?

 

Learning is Key

 

Jordan:  Right. So, learning is key. Self-education is so critical to this. But I think another huge part of this is relationships.

 

So, I discovered that as much as I was learning, I needed women around me to support me, encourage me — obviously be another source of information — but primarily, I was looking for community support. That is why I began my first study group. Again, this was only a few months after I had started learning. But I thought I learned a lot, but I think what we can offer each other is support.

 

Kate:  Jordan, let’s stop there for a second. Tell us how you went about starting a study group because I know there are a lot of listeners that might be a little nervous about starting a study group. But they want the same thing as you, right? They would like a community of people to come alongside them and learn together and support one another.

 

So, tell us how you went about finding those people and starting the group.

 

Jordan:  The very first thing I did was to email. Remember that woman I talked to you about who came to my house to ferment carrots or vegetables? I reached back out to her, and I sent her an email. I said, “I’m so amazed, impressed with what you have shown me. What do you think about joining together and recruiting women?” Because I didn’t really know a lot of women besides my sister who could potentially be interested.

 

So, I teamed with another person is what I did — you know, that was of the same mindset. She talked to some of her women in her mom’s group. If any of you are a part of a mom’s group, a homeschool group? So, that’s where she reached out.

 

Then I had my sister who I was close with and invited her to consider doing it.

 

Then another friend who had never heard of homeopathy, but we had talked about holistic things before … cod liver oil, colloidal silver … things that indicated to me, “Okay, she’s probably somebody that would be interested.”

 

Then I sat on it for a while, and I would invite more people.

 

And then I did … I got some people back saying, “I’m not interested.”

 

And that’s okay. I think those of us that start groups have to be prepared for that.

 

Then I kept sitting and thinking, “Who else in my church? Who would be interested?” And then another woman came to mind. She was somebody that I knew drank raw milk.

 

I guess the way I did it was, number one, I teamed with another woman. Number two, I just considered those who I had seen developing what I think to be healthy lifestyle habits: raw milk, trying to use holistic things instead of drugs. So, that’s where I went with it. A lot of these women had not heard of homeopathy but were open once they were introduced to it.