Show notes
In this special 100th podcast, we cover: 02:05 In the Beginning … 12:30 Let It Snow; Let It Snow! 19:28 Joette and Perry’s Chance Meeting 24:48 “I Have to Write a Book!” 29:19 Joette’s First Client — and Office 33:37 Where is Practical Homeopathy® Headed? Links and resources mentioned in this podcast: How I started out with homeopathy My first book: Cure Yourself and Family Joette’s Mighty Members (my new membership group) 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 100 with Joette Calabrese! Joette: This is Joette Calabrese, and I’d like to welcome you to the Practical Homeopathy® Podcast. Women and men worldwide are taking back control of their families’ health and learning how to heal their bodies naturally, safely and effectively. So, if you’re hungry to learn more, you’ve come to the right place. Stay tuned as we give you the tools — and the inspiration — you need as I share my decades of experience and knowledge using this powerful medicine we call homeopathy. Joette: Hi folks, Joette Calabrese here. Perry: Hi folks, Perry here. Joette: We are doing something a little different today because this is our hundredth podcast! Perry: Wow! Joette: Because of that, we thought we’d celebrate with something just a little different because people ask me about this all the time. And I don’t know how much I want to reveal here, but Perry is my husband. So, I am going to kind of interview him, and he is actually going to kind of interview me as well. We are not going to talk too much about homeopathy in terms of what to use or philosophy or theory or aphorisms, or anything. Instead, today we are going to talk about where we’ve come from, where we’ve gone, where we plan to go with Practical Homeopathy® and JoetteCalabrese.com. So, hi, honey! Perry: Hi, honey! Joette: We are going to start by talking about, I guess … people ask me when did I start teaching. And I can’t believe people would be interested in this stuff! But they have asked me to … so, we’re going to do this. Perry: We are going to give you a little bit of background on Joette and I because maybe that’s interesting. We don’t think it is, but let’s go ahead and try. In the Beginning … Joette: Okay. So, many people may know my story and how I started out with homeopathy, and I am not going to go over that because I have written about it on my blog, and it has been published, etc. But instead, I will start talking about something that we never really talked about that much and that was that I used to teach many study groups in people’s homes and churches and church basements and schools, all over Western New York (which is Buffalo, New York area). Perry: This was when the kids were a little bit older because I would go out at night as well. I owned a construction company. So, we didn’t argue about who was going to go to work. But I would come home from the day, have dinner, and plan to go back out again, and Joette would remind me, no, she had a study group to teach. I was staying home with the kids. In many respects, I enjoyed that, but we needed to get Joette’s business up and going – or at least build her client-base — because that was what we were doing at that time. So, she would go out, sometimes five nights a week! Joette: Yeah, yeah. For years I did that. I would say it was probably two years where Monday night I taught in Black Rock (which is a section in Buffalo). Tuesday night it was Orchard Park (suburb). Wednesday was the West Side of Buffalo. Thursday was Amherst, New York (outside of Buffalo). Friday … I mean it was really like this, and I was also teaching at the same time at Daemen College. I was teaching classical homeopathy. So, it was a very … Perry: To the nurses. Joette: Yeah, to nurses. Well, they were undergrad nursing school. It was a very busy, busy time in our lives, and we were living at that time … Perry: In Colden. Joette: … in Colden, New York, which was 15-acre farm that we had put together. And, we were homeschooling our kids. We had a lot on our plate. Perry: Right. We did. Joette: When I look back at it, I say, “Wow! What great years!” But it was a lot of work. We were very, very busy. We had two goats and 30 chickens, and you and the kids were raising bees. Perry: Ahhh, we were raising bees. Let me tell you about those goats, folks. We would try to pen these goats in. We had a 6-foot high electric fence. And these goats would climb up the side of the hut that I had built for the chickens and the goats, and they would leap over that fence. Joette: And they were Pygmy goats. Perry: Well, they were sold to us as Pygmy goats. Either the boys fed them too much, or we were sold a bill of goods. Anyway, these goats would get out, and Joette would have clients at that time coming to the house during the day. Joette: It was an office. It was actually my office connected to the side of the house. Perry: One time — Joette could look out of her window, and the client was facing it in a different direction — and she saw the goat on the roof of an expensive car. Joette: All four legs! Perry: Like up on the roof of the car. And that was it. At that time, I had one of my guys working at the house. They were fixing something — one of my construction crew. He ran out, grabbed the goat, dragged it — if anyone knows goats, they know what that’s all about — and put it back inside the fence. Joette: But the fence was, I mean, it was six feet when you started, but because we recognized how grandly these goats could leap, we acutally … you built a higher fence! It went up to something like 10 feet! Perry: Oh, my gosh! Joette: And it was electric! They didn’t care! Perry: They didn’t care. Joette: No, they didn’t care. One day, we got home from church, and it was summer. And the windows were open, but the screens were in place. Perry: Right! Joette: We came home, and one goat was on the piano — a baby grand piano. Again, all four feet! (It could have been the one that leapt up on the car. The other goat was on our sofa, and it was eating a page out of my repertory. Now, I freaked out because the repertory was an expensive book! At that time in our lives, everything seemed very expensive. Perry: The couch was used. Joette: It was my brother’s couch that he gave us. So, anyway, it was eating a page out of the book. I know this sounds crazy, but it was actually a page that was in the section of the repertory under “stomach, appetite.” And it ate that page. It was so ironic, but that’s what she ate. Perry: Did we tell them that the chickens followed the goats into the house? Joette: Yeah. That’s true. Because once the screen … what happened was the goats had pushed through the screened window in the living room. Perry: Leaped in! Joette: And then, as a result of that, the chickens followed. Perry: Their buds, the chickens followed ‘em. Joette: Basically, we had a menagerie in our living room. Perry: We had a barn in our living room. Joette: How about the time … we just have to tell this story because it was so much fun. We had a van, and we’d go out for the day or something and be with the kids. It was one of those slider-door vans, and the door was left open. We had emptied out the groceries. The kids had helped me empty them and bring them into the house, etc. And I noticed a few hours later that the slider was open on the door. So, I directed one of the boys to go close the door, and he did. The next day … and you know, every night the kids would put the chickens and the rooster to bed in their coop and close the door because otherwise the fox or possum would get in there. So, we had to be very careful of that. So, they had put the chickens to bed, as we said, and then the next morning, they let them out. But this morning instead of hearing the rooster crowing the way he normally did in a very bright and brilliant crow, we heard, <extremely muffled> “Cock-a-doodle-doo.” “Something’s wrong, where is that rooster? It sounds like he is muffled like he is in a pillow or something.” <extremely muffled> “Cock-a-doodle-doo.” I looked out, and the rooster was in the car — feet perched on the top of the back of the driver’s seat — crowing! And we heard him off in the distance. I can’t tell you how disgusting that car was within less than 12 hours. Perry: Yeah, but you know what, this didn’t teach us anything. Because every year, we’d increase the size of our flock due to normal flock attrition. Joette found a breeder down in the southern tier somewhere that had a specific kind of chicken that she wanted the boys to experience. And so, she sent me down there in the car with boxes to collect these young chicks. No, they were not chicks. They were … Joette: Teenagers! Perry: They were teenagers. So, I got about 20 of them in these multiple boxes in the van and closed the boxes up. Put them in the van — they were quiet — and started back on the thruway. And one of the boxes opened up, and the chickens came out. Now, I am on the thruway, and they are flying around inside the car! People are driving by and looking! Joette: Well, chickens make a mess in very short order — forget the feathers, that makes a mess — but the chicken poo is not very nice to clean up. Perry: Horrible. Joette: We had bees; we had ducks; we had a pond. We stocked the pond twice — because there was a crane that every time we put them in, the crane came and just gobbled up everything. Perry: Ate the fish. Joette: So, we just gave up. Perry: We did. Joette: We just used it for swimming and forget fishing. Perry: Right. Joette: Here is the problem. We are both city people, and we wanted to raise our kids in the country. And so, that’s what we decided to do. We really were green behind the ears. We really did not know what we were doing — even though we read up on it. We tried to do the best we could! It was an adventure. It was fun. There is no doubt. Perry: It was fun. The bees, we have kept the bees for multiple years — through the winter. Joette: Lots of honey. Perry: And we did get a lot of honey out of them. We had a lot of experience. One time one of our hives swarmed, went across the street and went into the eaves of our neighbor’s. Joette: I don’t know if people know what a swarming hive looks like or sounds like. I had never seen anything like this. You see pictures in children’s books about a swarm of bees, but you have no idea how intense it is — the experience. All five of us were outside. It was a Sunday afternoon, and we heard this “electric” sound, and it was really strong electric sound. And we didn’t live around electricity. I mean, we had electricity, but we did not have any … Perry: Not high-power lines. Joette: Perry, I think we looked simultaneously. We looked up, and there was this, what would you call it? A column. Perry: Column. Black. Joette: Black column that had to have been 10 feet wide and about 30 feet tall. Perry: 30 feet tall. Joette: It was loud, and the electric sound was the sound of the bees. They had all left the hives. Perry: Bees. They were following the queen. There were two queens in the hive. And the one queen decided, “I’ve had it.” So, she left, and all the bees decided to follow her. Joette: She needed Sepia, folks. She left the babies. She left her husband. She needed a couple of doses of Sepia 200, but it was too late because we didn’t know where she was. Perry: She was gone. Joette: So, we very carefully, without too much excitement … Perry: Snuck back in the house. Joette: We guessed, “Okay, come on boys, let us get in there. Come on, get the dog. Come on get the cat. Let’s get into the house.” We watched it, as you said, it travelled across the road. Perry: It went into our neighbor’s eaves. Joette: Yeah, we had to deal with that later on, didn’t we? Perry: Yeah. Right. Joette: We had to help them. Oh, my gosh. So, we have lots of animal stories. You know, you don’t realize how interesting animals are, and how much they influence — how they used to influence — people’s lives until you’ve lived on a small farm like what we had. You know, lots of terms like “hen-pecked” and “ruler of the roost,” and so many … “sitting duck.” Perry: “Sitting duck” and “dead duck.” Joette: We experienced that! We experienced that a few times. We had some baby ducks. You want to tell that story? Perry: Oh. No, that is not a good story to tell. Joette: Yeah, it was kind of bad. Maybe we won’t do that … we won’t tell that. That’s not a very nice story. Perry: Yeah, we won’t tell that story. No. No. No. Joette: Alright. So … Let It Snow; Let It Snow Perry: Do we have any winter stories they might be interested in? Joette: Yeah! Well, we lived on a ski hill. Perry: For those of you who ski, you are thinking New Hampshire, Vermont, or maybe the West. No, no, no. This was 750 feet elevation. It was longer to come up on the lift than to ski down the hill. But it was fun, and it was right across the street. I taught there for, I don’t know, probably 10-12 years. Enough that all three of the boys went through the program; all three of the boys were teachers. It was a great experience for them. Joette: Well, it gives them their social lives then because they were homeschooled. Perry: Social life and teaching … the whole thing. Plus, of course, the reason I did it — it allowed us to have tickets for free for the season. Season’s passes. The boys used to just basically put their skis on in our driveway, ski down the driveway across the street (in the wintertime it didn’t really ever leave the street) and then right down the hill. We didn’t care. It was a small enough little area. It was a family-run ski area at that time. Everybody — the ski instructors and the ski patrollers — all knew my boys, and they would have reported to us … Joette: So, they had lots of freedom; they just went off for the afternoon. Once they finished their schoolwork, they could just don their equipment, and off they would go for hours until dinnertime. It was a great amount of freedom for them and for us as well. Perry: Right! No, it was fun, it was fun. Often, I’d come home from work, and I’d just don my skis, and I’d go over. Remember that one night I went over by myself? Joette: I do. I knew what story you are going to tell. Go ahead, honey. Perry: So, I went over at night, and it’d just snowed. So, there was a little, I don’t know, an inch or two inches of powder snow. If anyone skis, they know that’s pretty exciting. So, I went over night skiing. Now, night skiing is a little bit challenging because the light causes the trails to become very flat. You can’t see the contours. You can’t see the bumps. You can’t see anything clearly. I was skiing on a particularly steep section of this hill. As I skied down, I came over the top of a little ridge where it dropped away a little steeper, and I am going too fast. Suddenly, I realized I am in the middle of a slalom course! Now, “slalom course” means all of the slalom gates, all of the poles — and at the time they were bamboo poles — are all over this thing like an obstacle course unless, of course, you know the pattern. Well, I didn’t know the pattern, and I’m in the middle of it and going too fast. Obviously, I fell — because I clipped the poll and fell. In the language of skiers, when you make a terrible fall, it’s called a “garage sale” because my skis were in one direction, and my poles were in another, and my hat and my gloves — gone. I think what had happened is I had fallen forward and not done a complete forward roll, but instead landed on my shoulder blades with my head pushed into my chest — my chin pushed to my chest. Because when I awoke, I rolled over and sat up, and the natural thing you do, of course, is you start feeling — make sure everything works. You feel your fingers; you wiggle your toes. Everything was working, but I had no idea where I was. I was totally disoriented. I don’t kn…
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