In Memory: Ananda Zaren 1946 - 2008

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Gifted Homeopath, Author, Healer
by Karen Cohen, DC, CCH

The homeopathic community is deeply saddened at the passing of Ananda Zaren on September 24, 2008, four days after a car accident. She practiced homeopathy for 30 years in Santa Barbara, California, and authored Core Elements of the Materia Medica of the Mind, Volumes 1 & 2.

Zaren was barely five feet tall, but had a towering intellect and vitality to burn. Her greatest joy was in helping people get well, but in the fullest sense of the word, not just allaying symptoms, and she offered her patients a non-judgmental warmth that is rare in any health practitioner. … Zaren was a rare jewel and her patients lucky indeed.

—Isabelle T. Walker,
Santa Barbara’s Independent, November 13, 2008

While teaching in Germany, Ananda Zaren was beseeched to come to the hospital to help a tiny patient. Ananda sat in the dim sterile room, observing the small bundle in the intensive care incubator. The pre-term infant was on oxygen, unable to breathe normal room air, and her tiny chest rose in an uneven rhythm as it had for the past three months. When a nurse came in and touched her, the baby seemed to shrink from the contact and tried weakly to avert her face. Ananda noticed that she furrowed her brow, shutting her eyes more tightly when the nurse adjusted the curtains causing a momentary alteration in light. After silently watching for an hour, Ananda had all the information she required. A history of jaundice, an aversion to contact, and photosensitivity formed the “three-legged stool” triad of symptoms that can stand to indicate a remedy, in this case, Natrum sulphuricum. Ananda gave the remedy to the child and left for the evening. The next morning, the infant appeared to be stronger, was able to breathe on her own, and voluntarily opened her eyes to make contact with her mother for the first time. The remedy had done its work.

Homeopathy was Ananda Zaren’s passion and life’s work. Originally trained as a nurse and midwife who attended births, Ananda began formal training in homeopathy in 1976. She sought out and had the good fortune to study with George Vithoulkas, making the journey to Alonissos, Greece, at every opportunity for eight years. She would lie in the bathtub for hours reading the repertory, beginning at the front and then reading it again from the back. Her well-worn copy of Boericke’s Materia Medica was filled with hand-written notations detailing subtle findings that illumined and enhanced her understanding of the physical and emotional terrain of each remedy.

The daily practice of homeopathy formed the very center of Ananda’s life. She often happily worked six days a week, welcoming patients who came from considerable distances and preferring to spend her time in her “learning lab” as she called the practice. Her power of observation was extremely acute and she was a master at cataloguing nuance and gesture, every aspect of human expression, which she interpreted as the language of the vital force. Once a remedy was acting, she relished every moment of follow-up; for her this was precious time spent in the presence of pure living materia medica.

Ananda’s patients traveled many miles to see her. While some made the journey to her Santa Barbara office from southern and northern California, many came from other states and even from countries in Europe. A number of prominent screen actors also were her patients. On one occasion, a nice-looking man came for a first visit. When Ananda asked what his profession was, he replied that he was an actor. “Oh,” she said sympathetically, knowing that many actors are perpetually out of work, “are you doing alright?” “Well,” he replied, “I just won the Academy Award.” Ananda did not watch much television or frequent the movies, and everyone in her practice was given the same degree of special attention.

Ananda had the extraordinary ability to gaze beneath a person’s façade or mask, as she called it, where anger, fear, and grief inform behavior and contribute to physical pathology. She had intimate awareness of the hidden elements of the human psyche. Many of her patients recall a deeply curative and transformational experience that began the moment she beamed her intense light of comprehension, recognition, acceptance, and compassion—followed by the accurate homeopathic prescription.

I remember one patient, a man in his 50s, who came to a clinical supervision session held by Ananda some years ago. He had experienced an anguishing form of restless leg syndrome for more than 25 years and had not been able to sit comfortably through a meal or a television program for decades. The restless legs prevented him from sleeping, but he had discovered that pressure on the bottoms of his feet would temporarily quiet the relentless restless sensation; so if he got up from bed and vigorously jumped up and down and squatted, he could go back and get a few minutes of sleep. Finally, in desperation, he had built himself a sort of rack that he lashed himself onto at night so that he could sleep in the standing position. The referring homeopath had consulted with another senior homeopath, and over time they had given this man every remedy in the repertory rubric, “Extremities, Restlessness, Lower limbs, night”—from Arsenicum to Zincum. After taking the man’s case (with our class of homeopathic colleagues watching on closed circuit television in another room), Ananda came in to discuss the case with us. With a shake of her head and an impish expression she exclaimed: “Oh, I didn’t consider this a case of restless legs—I used the repertory rubric ‘Mind, Desire to Escape.’ This man is running!” After a dose of Belladonna, the patient returned in three months and reported that he had been able to sit though a movie for the first time in many years and sleep well, too.

Ananda’s great strength was her work with women and infants. She felt that infants were fully capable of emotional perception and believed that comprehending the emotional state of the person before you, regardless of age, was requisite to finding the homeopathic similimum. In 1989, she was invited to practice homeopathy for four months in an in-patient allopathic hospital in Schwalmstadt, Germany. It was here that she recorded many compelling cases, such as a woman in a state of pseudocyesis or “false pregnancy” who responded beautifully to the remedy Crocus sativus. Ananda made valuable additions to the understanding of many remedies such as Baryta sulphurica, Bufo, Kali ferrocyanicum, Lac caninum, and Natrum hypochlorosum. She was the author of two treatises on materia medica entitled Core Elements of the Materia Medica of the Mind Volume I and II, in which she described her case-taking methodology.

It is with great sadness that the homeopathic community bids adieu to Ananda Zaren. Ananda worked tirelessly, and her insights will surely inspire homeopaths of the future. She will be dearly missed by her colleagues, as well as her patients, many of whom had been with her for more than twenty years.

In her own words …

Ananda Zaren wrote two articles for Homeopathy Today about treating her own beloved animal companions: “Cats Don’t Talk” in October 2001 and “Dogs Don’t Talk” in September 2003. You can find them by searching the Homeopathy Today Online archives at NationalCenterForHomeopathy.org. Here is a short excerpt:

One of the ways in which I learned homeopathy was by taking hundreds of cases of newborn babies. Because infants cannot talk, I was forced to feel and observe without any limitation. …

Whether you treat an adult, child, or animal, the case-taking and homeopathic skills needed to reach the simillimum are the same, and the depth of where we want to go is the same—to the very soul or the inner reality of the being. We have to know our literature very well and also have a certain sensitivity and feeling for the vital force. If we just use our minds, we will find a similar remedy, but not a simillimum; and if we just use our sensitivity and feeling, we don’t find a simillimum either. We have to use our minds and our hearts together to reach the precise remedy.

—Ananda Zaren

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