Using Flower Essences for Releasing the Past
“A very effective and gentle therapy”
Part Two
Colored string - a useful analogy, and how essences
assist in doing what comes naturally
In Part One, I described how each of us carries around our own personal library
of old movies of "stuff" from the past, and how we repeatedly
re-live these old dramas, well past their use-by date. I also spoke of how we
can use energy-therapies, like flower essences, to help us to resolve and let
go of these old energies.
If you could see the energy of your own personal library of unresolved issues,
you would see that it is an extremely complex web of interlocking energies. As
these energies have been laid down over many years (and many lifetimes), they
can be thought of as being layered, with many layers
One often-used analogy for these layers is an onion, but in actual fact it is
much more complex than any onion. It is more like a giant ball of string (or
knitting wool), made up of many, many thousands of pieces of string, all
different lengths, all different colours, and tangled up into a hopeless
mess! How can we ever hope to untangle such a mess?
Obviously, we have to start at the outside of the mess, at the outermost
layer.
We do not especially have to go looking for opportunities to begin to
unravel the mess: life always brings us plenty of opportunities! Every time
that you are confronted by anything that triggers off any feelings of
discomfort: any anger, fear, sadness, guilt, resentment, jealousy, grief, etc,
etc........ Any sort of emotional or mental discomfort. This is a signal to
you that you are being presented with an opportunity to remove a piece of
string from your personal tangled mess of unresolved issues.
You now have a choice. You can choose to own the issue as your own and do
whatever needs doing to resolve it (ie. remove the piece of string). Or, you
can deny that it is
your
issue and try to suppress it, or project it onto someone else. Unfortunately,
whenever you attempt to deny an issue that is yours, what happens is that you
usually add more pieces of string to the mess, ending up worse off than before.
It was by doing this in the past that you got in such a mess.
Many of us, myself included, have gone through many years of trying in vain to
make the denial option work. Finally, most of us come to a crisis where we
have no choice but to face up to the truth. This crisis, sometimes called
"the ten-ton truck", can come in a variety of ways. For some, it
is an emotional crisis like a major relationship conflict. For others, it may
be a major financial or business crisis. And for others, it can be a
life-threatening illness. My own experience of this was a series of crises
which included all of these things!
What has all of this to do with energy-medicine therapy? Because the pieces of
string making up the huge tangled ball are actually strands of energy, we can
use other energies to help to gently unravel the mess. Let's say that the
issue that is currently bugging you the most is a feeling of frustration and
anger at your apparent inability to relate in a satisfying way to members of
the opposite sex. For a complex issue like this, there will be many strands of
energy (pieces of string) in your ball that are the various components of this
issue.
The pieces of string will actually be organized into groups of related
energies, each group being a collection of closely related energies. A useful
analogy would be that each individual piece of string, within a group, is made
up of a slightly different shade of the same colour string as the other pieces
of string in the group.
In our relationship example, we could say that the various shades of yellow
string correspond to the various unresolved issues that you have with your
parents. The various shades of pink string (and there can be thousands of
them) correspond to the many unresolved issues that you have from each of your
major relationships from the past. And the various shades of green string
correspond to the many dysfunctional beliefs about sex and sexuality that you
have been programmed with by the group consciousness of our society. And there
will be more colours, far too many to list here: brown, red, purple, orange,
etc, etc.......
So, each piece of coloured string represents a thread of energy that is
actually an unresolved issue from sometime in our past, some even dating back
to the moment of our conception. But what about energies from past lives,
generally known as karmic energies or "past-life karma"? These will
also be there. Tangled up along with the present-life unresolved issues will
be many unresolved issues that originate from past lives. For clarity, let's
imagine that the past-life energies are pieces of coloured wool. Although, in
fact, it is all emotional type energy, irrespective of it's origin.
In fact, it was often the presence of the coloured wool (ie. past-life issue)
that triggered off the process when we were confronted with a situation in our
life that led us to create a piece of string that we added to the tangled mess!
But, let's leave this for a future separate article on a deeper look at
past-life issues.
Let's get back to the energy therapy. Any good energy therapy can assist in
helping us dissolve the various energies that make up the strands of string and
wool. The precise methodology will differ between, say, Reiki and flower
essences, but they both should, if used correctly, assist in dissolving some of
the strands of energy (string and wool).
Do remember, however, that the therapy only
assists
us to resolve the issue.
The therapy assists a natural process that everybody
does all of the time. The therapy is
not
a magic bullet that we can use to make the issues go away! As I explained
last month, it is
you
who resolves the issues: the therapy just helps you.
To make up another analogy: let's liken you and your body to a highly
efficient machine, like a petrol engine. You, your body and your body's
energy system, are the engine. The issues that you have to process and resolve
are the fuel and the lubricating oil. To assist the process, you can add
additives to the oil, and you can add additives to the petrol, to increase the
efficiency.
The therapy is the additives.
It's not a perfect analogy, but it's the best that I can think of right now!
Let's look in some depth at flower essence therapy.
Before I go any further,
I will briefly describe what flower essences are.
Some people still confuse flower essences with aromatherapy. They are two
totally different things, like chalk and cheese!
Aromatherapy uses essential oils, distilled from flowers: these oils being
applied (diluted) to the skin or burnt in an oil burner. The healing energies
are absorbed through the skin, and also taken in through the nose via the sense
of smell.
Flower essences are made by floating the flowers on water in a glass for
several hours, in the sun, and then bottling and preserving the water. The
action of the sun transfers the healing energies from the flowers into the
water. The bottled water is then diluted down (usually diluted twice,
actually), and prescribed in mixtures (usually) of several different essences
to be taken (usually) orally. The power of the therapy is in the energy
patterns held in the water, energy patterns that originated in the flowers.
The water (and the brandy usually used as a preservative), is just a carrier
for these energy patterns. A really gentle, yet very powerful, totally safe,
and very effective, therapy.
For more details on the process of making essences, and the use of essences,
please refer to this
article.
The flower essence mixtures are usually prescribed by an intuitive testing
process. Some therapists use muscle testing (kinesiology), and some use a
pendulum to measure the energy. Anything from one to a dozen or so individual
essences can be mixed together in one bottle, and taken orally (usually)
several times a day for a period of from seven to twenty days. Flower essences
can also be applied to the skin, especially in the treatment of localised
conditions like a burn or sprain, or added to massage oil.
Another (more exotic) technique is to dampen a cotton bud with an essence (or a
mixture of several essences) and use the bud to stimulate one or more of the
body's acupressure points. I have experimented extensively with stimulating
the acu-points of the ear, a technique which is very effective as the ear holds
a complete map of the body in a similar manner to the feet and hands. Sort of
like the flower essence equivalent of reflexology!
The original flower essences were the Bach Flowers, made by Dr Edward Bach in
the 1930's in England. Since then, many hundreds of people have made hundreds
of sets of flower essences all over the world. Over the years, I have used, as
a therapist, sets of flower essences from several countries, culminating in
the making of my own set, the "New Millennium Essences of New
Zealand".
Each flower essence has a "definition", ie. a description of what
issue or issues it can be used for. The Bach Flower essences had definitions
that were associated with emotional and mental states: simple, yet very
effective.
Later
generations of flower essences have definitions that often pertain to issues
that are common in the society of their country of origin. These definitions
can be simple or complex. The later generations of essences have a more
complex energy, suited to the complexity of the issues that we are faced with
today.
Since the 1930's, as the decades have passed, there have been several
generations of flower essences, each generation being made to meet the needs of
the time. Mary Garbely's "New Perception of New Zealand" essences
set a new standard for essences in the 1980's, as did the
"Perelandra" essences from the U.S.A. There are now appearing
another, even more powerful, generation of flower essences, of which the
“New Millennium Essences” are an example.
This latest generation of essences have more depth and breadth to their energy
than the earlier generations. For example, let's go back to our ball of
coloured string analogy. When using the "Perelandra" or "New
Perception" essences (or the Bach Flowers): in order to adequately treat
a complex issue (ie. to dissolve all of the many pieces of string of different
colours), I would have to use anything from three to a dozen bottles of
essences. Using the latest generation essences, a single bottle is sufficient.
The above was originally published in the April 2000
issue of the New Zealand
magazine “Inspiration Input”
under the title “Spiritual Therapy
using Energy Medicines”.
Go To Part Three of this Series
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