History of Flower Essences

Flower Essences have been used for thousands of years by cultures around the world. Philosophers and indigenous healers from many traditions have understood the significance of the spiritual energies of flowers and plants, preparing and administering them in variety of ways. The very first form of flower essences was found within dew, readymade by nature. Drops were sipped and gathered from the cups and petals of flowers and used for medicinal and beauty purposes.

Dew has come to represent Spirit in the form of nature’s own alchemical elixir of life. It contains universal life force that is called (chi) in Chinese, Prana in Sanskrit, and Mana in Hawaiian. All dew is encoded with information about the ecosystem, celestial configurations and the plants, flowers, and rocks it happens to fall upon.

There are records of flower essence use by Ancient Egyptians on papyrus scrolls. The Egyptians knew how to extract both the oils and vibrational essences from flowers, a favorite among them being the sacred Blue Water Lily (Nelumbo nucifera) that grew along the Nile. Flower Essences have also been used in Asia, Europe, South America and by Australian Aboriginals and Native Americans.

Hildegard von Bingin, a 12th century German abbess and mystic integrated medicine with spiritual knowledge. She instructed her nuns to lay muslin sheets outovernight on flowers. In the morning, the dew that had collected onto them was wrung out to treat people with various emotional issues.

The alchemist of the 16th century collected dew from plants on plates of glass during the times he believed were aligned with certain astrological configurations. This dew was gathered to treat emotional imbalances. He coined the term “Doctrine of Signatures,” which is based on the idea that a plant often resembles the tissue, organ or disease for which it is remedial or nourishing. There are several types of signatures or signs of what a plant or flower may be useful for, of which shape, color, habitat, and growing habits are considered by many herbalists to be the most important. These attributes create patterns that tend to express the healing qualities that each plant offers. According to Native American medicine, the most powerful are those that resemble the shapes of animals. These plants and flowers are believed to possess some of the spiritual energies of the animals themselves. A few examples of this are Osha—aka Bear Root with its fuzzy nutrient dense roots, Black Cohosh—aka Black Snake Root (the flower essence of which help drives out poisonous energies and assists in transformation) with its thick rhizome, and Staghorn Sumac with its antler-like projections.

Korean or Red , prized as one of the world’s most powerful adaptogenic herbs, sometimes resembles the shape of a human. This root is frequently used in traditional Chinese medicine for strength, endurance, resistance to stress, libido, and longevity. The flowers of ginseng may not appear as magnificent as its gnarly roots but they too have medicinal qualities and are made into teas because of their detoxifying and highly nutritive value. The flower buds are collected and dried, and are believed to quiet the spirit, brighten the eyes, and enlighten the mind, bringing wisdom.

About Dr Bach

Flower essences were first prepared in England in the 1930s by Dr. Edward Bach. Bach was a visionary healer who recognized the soul-spiritual dimensions of healing, decades before this awareness gained public acceptance. Bach was trained in conventional medicine, but knew that the physical symptoms he treated were intimately related to the emotional and mental conditions of his patients. He sought a natural, non-toxic method of addressing inner levels of human experience. Although widely recognized as an outstanding bacteriologist and homeopathic medical doctor, Bach left his practice to develop a new healing modality derived from the fresh blossoms of plants. During the time the world was suffering from the Great Depression, Fascism and Nazism, Bach developed a set of 38 flower remedies which could help the human soul overcome fear, despair, and depression.

After Bach’s death in 1936, the preparation of the flower remedies was continued by his devoted assistant, Nora Weeks. She directed the Bach Centre, and dispensed Dr. Bach’s remedies to a small but dedicated group of practitioners around the world. Nickie Murray began working with Nora Weeks in 1962, and was trained in essence preparation and selection, including the identification of proper plant species and habitats. In 1978, Nora Weeks died, giving responsibility for carrying out Bach’s work to Nickie Murray with the help of her brother John Ramsell. Nickie Murray left the Bach Centre in 1988 to pursue spiritual service, and subsequently died in 1997. In 1988, Julian Barnard, who learned the preparation of Dr. Bach’s remedies from Nickie Murray, began his own separate company, Healing herbs, to prepare flower remedies following the traditional methods of Dr. Bach. In 1991, the homeopathic company A. Nelson & Company, Ltd. (Nelsons), took over bottling and distribution of the Bach Remedies, and formally acquired the Bach Centre’s business in 1993. Nelsons sells the flower remedies through their subsidiary NelsonBach, using the trade name “Bach Flower Essences.”

What are flower essences in the simplest terms?

Flower essences are the energetic imprints of flowers and their environment, preserved in water and a small quantity of brandy. Each flower has its own particular characteristics and hence its own unique imprint and information about its environment recorded in the essence. They are nature’s gift to our healing.

What can Flower Essence Remedies do for you?

They can assist you to:

Cope with every-day life challenges calmly and with clarity

Empower who you are in the world

Heal past hurts and hidden emotional patterns that limit your personal growth, health and vitality

Ease dealing with day-to-day challenges such as stress, grief, anger, self- worth, relationships and abundance

Address unconscious & conscious emotions and fears

Release memory vibrations held at cellular level

Become balanced in your heart center offering improved expression of feelings.

How do Flower Essences Work?

Flower essences bring about mental and emotional balance by primarily influencing our body’s energy systems. According to Gurudas, "Flower Essences and Vibrational Healing" and "The Spiritual Properties of Herbs", flower remedies are assimilated into the bloodstream when ingested or absorbed through our skin. The remedies create an electromagnetic current in the circulatory and nervous system and activate the meridians. They amplify and balance the chakras, the body’s energy centres, under the Indian energy system. The chakras in our physical body correspond closely to our body’s endocrine system, which governs all hormonal activity, and catalyses many of our mental, physical and emotional functions. The flower essences influence our body’s energy system, which include the chakras, meridians and aura through the principle of resonance. All living things in nature influence each other by "tuning in" or vibrating in harmony with each other via resonance. For example, we are able to tune our radio to a particular station because we are tuning the crystals in the radio to resonate with the frequency that the radio station sends out. If you were to put two mechanical grandfather clocks together, with their pendulums swinging at different points in time, they will soon swing in accord through resonance. Similarly, flower essences coax our body gently and powerfully to harmony by influencing the energy patterns in our body to vibrate in health and harmony with them.

Although flower essence societies and researchers have collected thousands of case studies that show flower essences successfully relieve people of their mental and emotional blocks, standard scientific experiments have had little success in proving or disproving the effectiveness of flower essences. That is because there is still has no technical means to research the "active ingredient" of flower essences, just as there is has no real technical means to measure life force. This makes the task of establishing why wild flower essences have a positive result an issue for modern medicine to solve. It is important for all of us that wild flower essences do work and only of interest to a minority of people why they work. . .

Vibrational Medicine

Flower essences also belong to a branch of energy healing called vibrational medicine. The field of vibrational healing is increasingly recognised as the medicine of the present and future. All things in nature have energy that vibrates or pulses at specific frequencies. Vibrational healing uses the frequencies of nature such as light, sound, magnetism, and flowers to influence our bodies to vibrate healthily. In fact, all our cells have vibration. Pulsing together, they create a field of energy or aura. When all the cells in the field vibrate harmoniously together, we are healthy. When they pulse in discord we become ill. Our thoughts and feelings also hold they own energy frequencies. If we are stressed or in pain, such discordant energy creates energy blocks and illness within the body. Thoughts alone can maintain good health, cause disease, or even death. A most extreme example of this is when Australian Aboriginals "point the bone". Aiming a bone at some- one is said to cause death and even young healthy people die for no "logical" reason, be- cause their belief in this curse is so strong. Even without such dramatic examples, there is scientific evidence to show the power of the mind to influence our good, or ill health.

Flower Essences & Self-Healing

Flower essences can profoundly heal our thoughts and emotions. Flower essence actively catalyse our intuitive wishes, clarify consciousness, intensify creative abilities and help us regain balance and peace of mind. They do this by counteracting negative thinking and supporting positive qualities like love, understanding and tolerance. They assist self healing by encouraging self analysis to recognise and understand the problem. They clear "the fog" and enable the user to envision his/her own life plan with clarity. They make it possible to understand our purpose and destination. They can give the courage and confidence to take the necessary steps forward in the search for our inner selves. The principle of flower essences’ healing force is based on the knowledge that a real cure from illness occurs only when far-reaching emotional balance is reconstructed.

The effectiveness of the flower essences lies in a person’s own courage to stand up, and to do that which the person honestly wants to do, and to be certain that this is right. Although many ancient cultures used some form of flower essence for healing, much of the information was hidden or lost until Dr. Bach rediscovered flower essences. His discovery was a major breakthrough in healing. He believed that good health was the result of emotional, spiritual and mental harmony. For Bach, the real cause of disease is a conflict between Soul and Mind. This conflict is manifested in distortions in our body’s energy field and has a negative effect on the whole psyche. These days we call this conflict stress, and many of us accept that such stress reduces our immunity and causes disease. Bach believed that using flower essences to lift the spirits and connecting each person to his/her higher nature could resolve such stresses and conflicts.

“The greatest gift that you can give to others is to be happy and hopeful yourself: then you draw them out of their dependency. The action of these remedies is to raise our vibrations and open up our channels for the reception of the spiritual self; to flood our natures with the particular virtue we need, and wash out from us the fault that is causing the harm. They are able, like beautiful music, to raise our very natures and bring us nearer to our souls and by that act to bring us peace and relieve our sufferings. They cure not by attacking the disease, but by Higher Nature, in the presence of which, disease melts away as snow in the sunshine. There is no healing unless there is a change in outlook, peace of mind and inner happiness".

What to Expect from the Flower Essences

There is a full spectrum of responses to the flower remedies. Some people report immediate, discernible, and very dramatic results. Others appear to notice no differences at all, and may only slightly perceive shifts in well-being and in mental- emotional states after a very long period of time. Most people typically respond to the essences somewhere in the middle of this range.

Especially when the remedies are used for change in the inner life, we are likely not to experience them in a very direct way. We are more apt to observe their effect over a period of time, as we notice subtle changes in the way we act, or in the way we view ourselves and others, and even very real changes in our sense of physical well- being.

Flower essences are not substitutes for meditation or other self-awareness practices. They are inner catalysts, that stimulate our ability to respond, or take responsibility for our growth. They can help us deepen our contact with ourselves, to be more in touch with our feelings, underlying attitudes, and our spiritual self, and thus empower us to make real changes in our lives.

It is also important to understand that flower essences are not drugs, and have markedly different properties from psychoactive drugs such as tranquilizers, anti- depressants, or psychedelics. From the point of view of materialistic medicine they contain only minute, insignificant amounts of physical substance. The flower essences are actually an etheric imprint held in the medium of water, which then speaks in a subtle language to the human psyche or soul.

The essences leave each individual free to respond according to inner rhythms and needs. This is why the flower essences are so safe, yet at the same time extraordinarily effective. Their action is not bio-chemical, but vibrational. Rather than overwhelming or masking consciousness, essences work gently with the awareness of the individual. They do not work by modifying our behavior from without, rather they evoke our freedom to make changes from within, by bringing to consciousness core archetypal pictures which are already present within the psyche.

How to use the Remedies

The most common way for people to take their essences is to put a few drops (maybe 4 or 6) under the tongue a few times a day. It is important to activate the vibration of the essence by shaking the bottle before each use.

There are also many other creative ways to enjoy your flower essences. They can be added to balms, to allow absorption through the skin, added to sprays mists to enhance the environment, complement oils in bath water or massages and more. Flower remedies also complement work with the auras and the charkas. Taking the correct remedy can restore balance to the auric field.

Other Ways to Enjoy Your Essences

Be imaginative and creative in your healing. Essences can be used in beauty and hair treatments, in massage, shiatsu, and and can also be applied to points

•Bath: Flower essences can be added to a bathtub full of water ( a few drops) as their energies will fill the entire auric space of the person who soaks in the tub. A few drops can also be added to liquid soaps, silky creams and shampoos. All of these products should be free of chemicals for best results. For a full-on healing bath experience, try adding epsom salts, a few drops of essential oil, a few drops of flower essences and a quartz crystal (clear, rose, amethyst, smoky or citrine) to the water.

*Anointing the body: use 1 to 3 drops (or one spray) on the anointing points. Anointing is rubbing the self, other people or objects with oil, an unguent or essences, for healing, protection, purification or embalming. Anointing the body is an ancient practice, common in many religions and spiritual traditions. Self-anointing can invoke healing and protect from undesirable energies. Anointing the body can be done at any time, whenever you feel the need. Just follow your own intuition.

Anointing Points: Apply an essence or balm onto the soles of the feet, reflex points, the chakras, behind the knees, the genitals, the base of the spine, the wrists, the heart, the breast, under the chin, and on the forehead. For subtle anointing apply an essence or balm to the wrist, forehead (the third eye) and the back of the neck.

*Spray mist bottles: add 6 drops (or two sprays) to 100-ml bottle of mineral water or rainwater. The most popular way to use flower externally is through mist bottles, because a wide area can be covered all at once, and the gentle droplets of a fine mist are often refreshing upon the skin. Mist bottles are also used as an alternative to cleansing with smoking herbs for those who are sensitive to smoke or unable to apply this method for other reasons to a particular space.

In order to make your own mist bottle, first add a small portion of alcohol to preserve it (depending on how quickly you intend to use up the mist), then add a pure water of some kind. Rose water is an excellent choice for use on the body because of its healing and nourishing qualities, not to mention its sweet and uplifting aroma. If you have a favorite essential oil or know how to blend oils, then add your oils to the water and alcohol mixture. Last, add the flower essence or essences of your choice. Shake the bottle well before each use.

* Affirmations & Mantras : The uplifting effects of positive affirmations can be significantly heightened with the use of flower essences taken before or after a specific prayer, chant, or intention that is made aloud. For example if one is seeking to release anger and become more peaceful in general, they might try taking an essence for emotional release and reciting the following:

“I release the burden of anger and I open my heart to love”

Beverages: You can supercharge your water, juice, teas and other beverages with a few drops of flower essences. For best results only add essences to natural juices and avoid blending them with drinks that contain preservatives and synthetic colorants.

*Auric massage: use 1 to 3 drops or one spray for auric massage (see below instructions)

Auric massage works on our energy field, which surrounds and extends about two feet beyond our physical body. Auric massages can bring balance and harmony to our physical bodies. To achieve maximum results, follow this simple effective routine:

•Take your Remedy orally, then place a drop or a dab of the balm into the palm of your hands then rub your hands together to activate the vibration

•Raise your hands above your head with palms facing the sky. Take a minute to send out the gift of love from nature to the world, loved ones and to yourself.

•Then circulate your hands around your auric field. Start doing it about two feet above the head.

•Move down slowly to the area around the back of your neck, over to your forehead, then down to your throat, across your heart and your solar plexus, continuing down to the feet.

•Place the palms of your hands towards the earth and hold, sending out love.

•Then draw up the healing energy from the earth and start to circulate your hands again around and up your auric body. Take the energy above your head, again have your palms face skywards and send out healing energies to the world, loved ones and to yourself.

•Finish off by placing your hands above your heart. Close your eyes and take three deep breaths. Take your time to feel the love and peace within.

•When ready gently open your eyes, and give thanks for the gifts of nature.

•Complete the auric massage by using the Love Remedy mist and spray above the head (crown charka) and inhale as the mist falls as a veil gently over your face.

Extra resources:

Essence Clarity Meditation

First, get comfortable wherever you can relax for a minute and begin by taking a few deep belly breaths. Sense your connection to the heart of mother earth. Identify what discomforts, if any, are present in your body in this moment. Close your eyes and feel, see, and listen to what this discomfort might be trying to convey to you. Does it correspond to any issue or present life situation that you perceive as blocked? Allow any impressions to materialise in your mind’s eye, revealing their colors, shapes, sizes, sounds and sensations.

Several areas might light up or just one in particular. See if you can focus on only one at a time. When you’ve located the area of your body where discomfort dwells, visualise holding a glass filled with water over the area. Or, you can actually hold a glass of water. Allow the discomfort of that feeling to be absorbed by the water, until the water is completely imbued with the essence of that particular discomfort.

Now, lift up the glass of murky water above your head. Ask for the Source (whatever aspect of God or deity you pray to or believe in) to purify this essence of yours into its polar opposite. For example, if you’re holding a glass full of hatred, ask for it to be purified into love. See divine light pouring down into the glass in a shimmering golden white hue. Take as long as you feel you need—until it feels right. When the water is purified, drink it. See yourself renewed. If you are still feeling any discomfort, repeat the process of locating where else you are blocked, and allow it to be transformed.

Now, think of your present situation again. Do you feel differently about it, or a bit more at ease? Have a new perspective or some random and brilliant idea? If there is any hesitation to act on your newfound realisation or any discomfort holding you back, repeat the essence meditation as many times as it takes. Identify what you truly feel, desire or don’t desire about this situation.

Follow your intuition, and follow up with an action, no matter how small it may seem, to confirm your transformation after this meditation. Much of the time, the negative emotions we feel again and again are patterns, guilt, and excuses we’ve accumulated for not living up to and acting on our dreams. Fear of failure is worse than failure itself, which of course is nonexistent in the grand scheme of things.

If you had difficulty with visualizing any of this, especially with the negative energy being transformed, then simplify the overall meditation. You can even hold a class of actual water and ask that your Higher Self imbue it with a particular quality of love, calmness, inspiration, or whatever you need.

Important—this water is only for you to drink and should not be offered to someone else as its vibrations may not be suitable for them.

Rose Visulisation

Imagine yourself in a beautiful garden on a pleasant day. Many beautiful plants are all around you, but one in particular attracts your attention, a rosebush.

Imagine a rosebush, with many flowers and buds...Now turn your attention to one of the buds.

The bud is still enclosed in its green leaves, or sepals, but at the very top a radiantly colored point can be seen. Focus on this image, holding it in the center of your awareness.

Now, in a slow movement, the sepals start to separate, turning their points outwards and revealing the radiantly colored petals, which are still closed...The sepals continue to open until you can see the whole bud. Next the petals also begin to unfold, slowly separating...until a fragrant, fully opened rose is seen...At this stage try to smell the perfume of the rose with its characteristic and unmistakable scent.

Now imagine that a ray of sunlight shines on the rose, giving it light and warmth...Take a few moments to experience the sunlit rose. Look at the very center of the rose. In the center of the rose, you see Transforming Power.

You see this Transforming Power in whatever form your consciousness may reveal it to you.

Now, identify yourself with the rose: imagine that you become the rose, or that you take the whole flower inside of yourself...Be aware that the rose – and the Transforming Power – are always within you and that you can get in touch with them and draw on their qualities whenever you chose...

Symbolically, you are the flower with a center of pure self-awareness and Transforming Power.

From this Center, you can become aware of all the other flowers in the garden, a great variety of flowers, with one thing in common; they all have centers of pure Self Awareness and Transforming Power