In short: Rajan Sankaran's sensation method holds that beneath a patient's symptoms and emotions runs one vital sensation, an experience common to mind and body, from which the remedy's kingdom, family and pace can be read. It adds three grids: seven levels of experience, three kingdoms with their sub-kingdoms, and ten miasms. Sankaran's later writing presents it as an addition to the repertory and materia medica, not a replacement, which is the only way it can be tested.
In brief, the case runs from the surface inward:
- Vital sensation – the one experience the whole case is said to share.
- Seven levels – name, fact, emotion, delusion, sensation, energy and a seventh.
- Kingdom – plant, mineral or animal, read from the character of the sensation.
- Sub-kingdom or family – botanical family, periodic-table row or animal group.
- Miasm – one of ten, describing the pace and depth of the state.
- Remedy – the single source, confirmed in the materia medica.
This is education for qualified homeopaths and students, not a guide to self-treatment.
What the sensation method is
Rajan Sankaran is a homeopath in Mumbai who has practised since 1981, heads the other song academy and teaches internationally. His books mark the method's stages. The Spirit of Homoeopathy (1991) proposed that disease originates in a false perception of reality, a delusion. The Substance of Homoeopathy (1994) sorted those perceptions into plant, animal and mineral types and reworked the miasms. An Insight into Plants (2002; third volume 2007) assigned a sensation to each botanical family, and The Sensation in Homoeopathy (2004) set out the seven levels.
In his 2005 essay The Depth of Homoeopathy, Sankaran writes that the plant families led him to see disease as a vital sensation common to mind and body, closer to the disturbance of the vital force than the delusion had been, with something deeper beneath it, energy, which patients show in hand gestures rather than words. The sensation is non-human-specific, shared between the patient and some substance in nature, which is why it can point to a remedy source; emotions and delusions may be specific to human beings and cannot.
E. A. Thompson of the Bristol Homeopathic Hospital and J. Geraghty described the "Bombay method" in Homeopathy (2007; 96(2):102–107, PMID 17437937) as an interview moving through levels of fact, symptom, emotion, delusion and vital sensation, combined with Scholten's periodic table; Sankaran's own Sensation Homeopathy: An Overview appeared in Homoeopathic Links (2012; 25(2):79–82).
One conflation to clear at the outset: the vital sensation is not the "sensation as if" of the classical repertories. Herbert A. Roberts' Sensations "As If" and James William Ward's Unabridged Dictionary of the Sensations "As If" index local subjective symptoms recorded in provings, and both are among the seven classical repertories on Similia Free. Sankaran's sensation is general, runs through the whole case and is inferred rather than recorded.
The seven levels of experience
Sankaran lists the levels in The Depth of Homoeopathy from the most superficial to the deepest, with a seventh he compares to the empty canvas on which the rest takes form. Each rests on the one beneath it, and the level at which a patient spontaneously stops is, in his account, the level at which everything, from chief complaint to dreams, is experienced.
| Level | What the patient gives | What a prescription on this level uses |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Name | Diagnosis, common symptoms of the pathology | Pathological prescribing |
| 2. Fact | Local symptoms, modalities, peculiar facts | The characteristic symptoms |
| 3. Emotion | Fear, anger, sadness, peculiarly coloured | The mental and emotional state |
| 4. Delusion | Situations, images, dreams | Delusion and dream rubrics |
| 5. Sensation | An experience common to mind and body, often with a gesture | Kingdom, sub-kingdom, source |
| 6. Energy | Movement, pattern, speed, shown not said | The energy pattern observed |
| 7. Seventh | Beyond words; left unnamed | Not a prescribing level |
Two other hierarchies use similar words. Kent's Lectures on Homoeopathic Philosophy (1900) rank symptoms (the mind is the man, and the generals come before the particulars), and Hahnemann's §153 prizes the striking, singular, uncommon and peculiar symptom (see the Organon guide). Sankaran ranks depth of experience, so a peculiar physical fact sits at his second level however characteristic it is. George Vithoulkas' "levels of health", a prognostic grading of overall health, shares only the word.
Kingdoms: plant, mineral, animal
Sankaran's 2005 essay gives each kingdom a basic sensation, and From Similia to Synergy a heading: structure for minerals, survival for animals, sensitivity and reactivity for plants. Nosodes, sarcodes and imponderables sit outside the three; Sankaran reads a nosode through its miasm, his 2005 case giving Carcinosin where the cancer-miasm pattern pervades every area of life (see the nosodes guide). Each example below is readable free on Similia.
Minerals: structure and its lack
In The Synergy in Homoeopathy (2012) Sankaran writes that a mineral case shows no single body-mind sensation; the thread is a sense of incapability or lost capability. His example in the 2013 book is Natrum muriaticum, whose disappointed love he reads as dependence on relationship; Kent's Lectures give grief, consolation aggravates, unrequited affection bringing on complaints (Kent's Natrum muriaticum). Aurum metallicum is a syphilitic mineral in his miasm study: Clarke records hopelessness, longing for death and despair, which Sankaran reads as that miasm's destructive attitude (Clarke's Aurum).
Plants: sensitivity and reactivity
In a plant case, Sankaran writes in the 2012 book, the sensation or its opposite is common to every expression, and the words constellate around a simple body-mind sensation such as tight or stuck. Two Ranunculaceae make a good test: Boericke's Pulsatilla is mild, yielding and changeable, weeping when talking; Clarke's Staphysagria is the remedy of the swallowed insult. Whether they share one sensation is yours to check (Boericke's Pulsatilla; Clarke's Staphysagria).
Animals: survival, victim and aggressor
The animal case shows a survival pattern spread across areas of life; Sankaran's 2005 case map names the poles as victim and aggressor. His clearest mammal example is Lac caninum, a patient who feels harassed, belittled and looked down upon; Clarke's schema records, bracketed as a cured symptom, a patient who thinks she is looked down upon by every one (Clarke's Lac caninum). Boericke's Lachesis, jealous, loquacious, suspicious, worse after sleep and unable to bear anything tight, is read in the 2013 book through the reptile and the bushmaster (Boericke's Lachesis). Sepia, indifferent to those loved best in Boericke, has its own volume, Survival – The Mollusc (2009) (Boericke's Sepia).
Sub-kingdoms and families
The kingdom is too broad to name a remedy, so the 2005 case map narrows it: sensation, then kingdom, then sub-kingdom or family, then source.
Animals are grouped by natural class: mammals (the milks), reptiles and snakes (Survival – The Reptile, 2011), molluscs. The survival theme is expected to take the animal's own form.
Minerals follow the periodic table. Jayesh Shah's foreword to From Similia to Synergy records that Sankaran revised some of Jan Scholten's ideas to fit his own system, and in his teaching the rows carry themes: the third the stages of a child's development, the fourth money matters, the fifth self-expression, the sixth responsibility (chapter headings in From Similia to Synergy, 2013). The series-and-stage model itself is Scholten's, from Homeopathy and the Elements (1996); his bio sets it out.
Plants follow botanical families, each paired in An Insight into Plants with a sensation and its opposite; two examples can be verified in Sankaran's own text. The Loganiaceae as Sankaran groups them (Ignatia, Nux vomica, Gelsemium) carry sudden shock or surprise and the wish to avoid it; his Gelsemium case in the 2012 book turns on that sensation meeting the rubric "ailments from death of parents or friends". Similia's Standard classification follows current botany and places Gelsemium in the Gelsemiaceae, so run that test on Sankaran's grouping, not on Standard. The Liliaceae carry being forced out against holding in, which Jayesh Shah's foreword traces to the Lilium tigrinum symptom that started the family work. A family sensation you cannot cite is not a family sensation.
Family means a third thing in Massimo Mangialavori's work, whose Method of Complexity groups remedies by shared themes rather than botanical or chemical relationship, so a Mangialavori family and a Sankaran family can share a name and not a membership (see his bio).
The ten miasms as pace and depth
Sankaran says in From Similia to Synergy that Hahnemann's miasms came alive for him only when treated as a classification of states and remedies rather than an aetiology: first three, a situation that is hopeful, one that cannot be solved but can be lived with, and one that is destructive and hopeless; then ten, each with a one-word attitude in his lecture headings.
| Miasm | Pace and attitude in Sankaran's teaching |
|---|---|
| Acute | Panic; a sudden threat that comes and goes |
| Typhoid | A crisis to be got through |
| Malarial | Stuck and periodically harassed |
| Ringworm | Doubt; effort and failure alternating with acceptance |
| Psoric | Hope; struggle and effort |
| Sycotic | Fixed; accept, avoid, anticipate, cover up |
| Tubercular | Claustrophobic; hectic pace and intense restlessness, placed between sycosis and syphilis |
| Cancer | Chaos, and a desperate need for control within it |
| Leprous | Isolation; feeling tortured and persecuted |
| Syphilitic | Impossible; hopeless and destructive |
It is a scale of pace and depth applied to remedies as much as to patients, not Hahnemann's chronic diseases. Our miasms guide gives Hahnemann's three with the tubercular and cancer extensions, and the miasm glossary entry defines the classical term.
How a sensation case is taken
Sankaran's 2005 essay prints the case-taking map as questions: at name, what exactly is happening; at fact, how does this affect you; at emotion, what does it feel like; at delusion, what sensation do you experience in that situation, and what are you showing with that gesture. At sensation the answer is sorted into kingdom, sub-kingdom and source; at energy the practitioner observes rather than asks. In his transcripts he also asks for the opposite of the word just used and treats the pair as the sensation. Dinesh Chauhan's paper Internal Focusing – to Explore the Vital Sensation (Homoeopathic Links, 2006; 19(1):17–21) names one technique for that inward turn.
The method is demanding, and Sankaran says so: in the 2012 book he writes that it is very difficult to take a patient more than two levels deeper than the one at which he lives day to day, that sensation-method practitioners often fail because they believe the remedy cannot be found before level five, and that one should go only as deep as the patient allows.
Compare Hahnemann's §§83–104: the patient tells the story uninterrupted, the physician writes down the words as spoken and asks nothing that would put an answer into the patient's mouth (see the case-taking guide). The standing objection lives here: "tell me more" and "what is the opposite" are questions the practitioner chooses, and the sensation written down is an interpretation of the answers rather than a symptom the patient reported. Recording the transcript, as Sankaran's books do, is the only defence.
Where it fits a classical practice
Sankaran's later position is the useful frame. The Synergy in Homoeopathy (2012) and From Similia to Synergy (2013) present symptoms and system as two sides of one coin, rubrics and provings on one side, sensation, kingdom, miasm and source on the other. He reports that his most consistent results came from the integration, calls the sensation approach an addition and not a replacement, and says of students surprised that he does not always use "Sankaran's approach": "Sometimes I need to tell them that I do not fully believe in Sankaran!" Jürgen Hansel's foreword to the 2012 book records why: some practitioners had gone for the sensation alone, and untrained students were taking sensation courses to avoid learning rubrics and remedies.
A working protocol follows from that.
- Take the case classically and record the characteristic symptoms in the patient's words; let the sensation questions run only as far as the patient goes unprompted.
- Repertorise the totality before forming any family idea, so the hypothesis cannot steer the rubric choice (see the repertorisation guide).
- Form the kingdom and family hypothesis from the sensation work, and label it as one.
- Check whether the leading remedies of the repertorisation belong to that family. If several do, the readings converge, which is what Sankaran means by synergy; if none does, the hypothesis or the rubric selection is wrong, and the case says which.
- Confirm in the materia medica against provings and clinical pictures, not against the family theme.
- Judge by the response at follow-up on the classical criteria (see Hering's direction of cure).
The method remains unicist: Sankaran's published cases prescribe one remedy at a time, and the family work exists to choose it better, not to add a second (see the unicist homeopathy guide).
Objections and the state of the evidence
Family themes are not proving symptoms. Chandran Nambiar's critique Sankaran's Sensation Method – Not Homeopathic, Not Scientific (homeobook.com, 5 April 2012) argues that the kingdom-sensation link has no basis in the materia medica: counting Kent's rubric "Mind, sensitive, oversensitive", he finds 46 mineral, 12 animal and 56 plant remedies, so sensitivity cannot be the plant kingdom's mark. Sankaran's position, in the 2012 book, is that the kingdoms are derived from the provings, repertory and materia medica of their members, which can be checked only remedy by remedy.
Reproducibility. Inconsistent results between colleagues are the problem Sankaran says the system was built to solve, and Jayesh Shah's foreword to the 2013 book concedes that the same method produced great cases and horrible misuse, including remedies given on images alone. Whether two practitioners reach the same sensation from the same transcript has not, to our knowledge, been measured.
The leading question. George Vithoulkas, in Homeopathy (2008; 97(2):103–106, PMID 18439973), objects that projecting an underlying context onto a patient's sensations is a slippery path, because those projections are not recorded in the materia medica and every practitioner will be tempted to find a different one.
On evidence: a PubMed search on 20 September 2026 for "vital sensation" returned three records, of which only Thompson and Geraghty (2007) concerns homeopathy; the Homoeopathic Links papers are not Medline-indexed. We found no controlled study comparing sensation-method outcomes with classical prescribing; that is a statement about what we found, not a proof that none exists.
Reading list
Sankaran's main titles in publication order: The Spirit of Homoeopathy (1991); The Substance of Homoeopathy (1994); The Soul of Remedies (1997); Provings (1998); The System of Homoeopathy (2000); An Insight into Plants, volumes 1 and 2 (2002) and volume 3 (2007); Sankaran's Schema (2003); The Sensation in Homoeopathy (2004); Sensation Refined (2007); Structure and The Other Song (both 2008); Survival – The Mollusc (2009); Survival – The Reptile (2011); The Synergy in Homoeopathy (2012); From Similia to Synergy (2013).
Studying kingdoms and families with Similia
Similia does not encode Sankaran's sensations, his miasm grid or his Schema. His own software is the Vital Quest module, an analysis module for sensation prescribing with its own Sensation Repertory, sold inside Synergy Homeopathic's program (source: synergyhomeopathic.com, 20 September 2026).
On Free, search the seven classical repertories with AI semantic repertory search, including Roberts' and Ward's Sensations "As If", to check whether an "as if" description is a recorded proving symptom before it is read as a vital sensation. Read the 21 classic materia medica books to test a family claim against Kent, Boericke and Clarke. Basic case management is capped at 3 new cases and 3 analyses per month; the plans comparison lists every source.
On Pro, the family view in an analysis flags rubrics where a majority of a taxonomy family's documented members are present and groups the grid by family, on the Standard classification (spiders, snakes, birds, mammals, the botanical families) or on Scholten's; the ranking and every score stay exactly as they were, and only a labelled family-adjusted option re-sorts, as a working hypothesis. Remedy comparison sets a remedy against a family across repertory sections, and the Periodic Table and Plants Table are Jan Scholten's classifications, not Sankaran's rows and families.
The family tools answer one question, which candidates on your sheet belong to the family you hypothesised: step four of the protocol, made visible. Repertorise the totality first, then test the hypothesis; the free repertory is enough to start.
