History & Development of Flower Essences
“Flower essences or flower remedies are a unique and subtle form of vibrational medicine that has become increasingly popular over the last sixty to seventy years. Although most people familiar with this healing approach think that flower-essence therapy originated during the beginning of the twentieth century, there is evidence suggesting that flower essences are an extremely ancient healing modality. While flower essences may be foreign to most American doctors, they have been successfully used throughout Europe (especially in England) by many health-care practitioners. This unique form of vibrational medicine can be quite powerful in rebalancing the many subtle-energy systems of the multidimensional human being.” (Gerber, Vibrational Medicine for the 21st Century: 198)
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“The development of flower essences as a healing modality is often credited to an English physician by the name of Dr. Edward Bach, who lived in the early 1900s. Bach was actually a bacteriologist. His field of study today would be comparable to that of an infectious-disease specialist. He studied diseases that were linked to infections caused by specific types of bacteria. Bach had worked for years trying to find treatments for patients that were less toxic that the therapies of his day had to offer. During his search, he came across the idea of giving liquid tinctures prepared from flowers. Bach was a radical for his time because he strongly felt that the mind and the emotions played a substantial role in most illnesses. Bah came to believe that if one could rebalance a patients’ emotions, then their illnesses, regardless of the cause, would most likely improve. It seemed to Dr. Bach that remedies borrowed from nature might hold the answer to the less toxic emotional-rebalancing therapy he sought. As it turned out, Bach was not only a trained physician, he was also an intuitive or “psychically sensitive” human being. One day, during a morning stroll through the English countryside, he happened upon what eventually came to be known as the Bach Flowers. As he stopped in front of a particular flower, he suddenly became overwhelmed with strong emotions that seemed to come from outside himself. Based on an intuitive hunch, Bach spread some of the morning dew that had collected upon the flower directly on his lips. As the dewdrops from the flowers touched his mouth, the strong emotion quickly vanished, returning him to his previous state of scalm. It appeared that Bach could sense from different flowers the kind of emotional disturbances which each specimen was capable of neutralizing and rebalancing. He soon discovered that by ingesting a small amount of a flower’s sun-drenched dewdrops, that flower’s healing and balancing properties could be easily transmitted to an individual.” (Gerber, Vibrational Medicine for the 21st Century: 200-201)
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“Through his research, Bach eventually came to the conclusion that flower essences worked on the level of the spiritual bodies. He also believed that our human subtle anatomy was magnetic in nature. Much of the modern research on life-force energy (emitted by healers’ hands) suggests that the higher realm of human spiritual anatomy Bach spoke of is composed of an energy and structure that is indeed magnetic in nature. However, the magnetic nature of the spiritual bodies and the life force is different from the “iron filings attracting” kind of magnetism. The energy of the life force is a distant cousin of the magnetic energy associated with permanent magnets. Bach felt that our emotional expressions were reflections of subtle-energy patterns we carry in our “magnetic” spiritual bodies. When people became fixated upon a certain way of emotionally reacting to the world around them, it was because their magnetic emotional bodies were also fixed in similar emotional-energy patterns. Following this same line of reasoning, if the energy patterns of our astral, emotional, and mental bodies can indirectly influence our etheric and physical bodies, then emotional disturbances could eventually lead to physical illness through the subtle-energetic connection between the physical and the spiritual dimensions. Bach, as well as current flower-essence practitioners, always believed that flower essences possess the capacity to vibrationally rebalance disturbances in the subtle bodies and the chakras in ways that lead to greater psychological and physical health. This belief is based in part on clairvoyant observation of flower essences’ actions upon human physical and subtle anatomy, as well as upon clinical observations of patients’ responses to flower-essence therapy. One reason flower essences appear to affect human subtle anatomy so strongly is that they tend to contain more actual life-force energy from plants than do other vibrational medicines.
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“Flower essences contain a kind of liquid tincture of the plant’s life-force energy in addition to the healing energetic patterns possessed by the plant. The flower is the crowning achievement of the plant, containing the highest concentration fo its life-force energy. After all, the flower is the site at which most plants are pollinated and are able to reproduce. When a flower essence is produced using the sun method, the pranic energy of sunlight transfers or imprints a small amount of the life-force energy’s pattern into the water. In some ways, this is analogous to making an old-fashioned sunprint by placing a leaf on photosensitive paper and exposing the paper to bright sunlight. By bathing the sun-exposed photo paper in developer solution, a photographic images of the plant leaf which lay upon the paper is quickly revealed. SImilarly, the energy of sunlight is able to make a kind of etheric imprint of a plant’s flower in water. The water does not actually contain medicinal molecules taken from the flower. Instead, it contains a subtle-energy pattern than can produce profound effects in human beings if appropriately prescribed for various medical and emotional conditions.
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Photo by Jared Rice on Unsplash
“The use of flower essences in healing represents an approach based upon a spiritual understanding of human illness. Dr. Bach considered illness to be a reflection of some form of divine disharmony between the soul and the conscious personality. He put forth the concept that each soul incarnates into a physical body, bringing with it a “divine purpose” that would manifest during an individual’s lifetime. According to Bach’s understanding, the personality becomes disconnected from its true soul purpose, either from outside influences or from internal forces and emotional disharmony. He felt that all illnesses were learning experiences meant to help people recognize the error of their perceptions, their misguided patterns of thinking, and their negative emotional expressions. In Bach’s worldview, disharmony of the mind and emotions was thought to be the breeding ground for all illnesses, regardless of their supposed bacterial, viral, genetic, or environmental origins. The typical emotional patterns of mental and emotional disharmony that Bach believed were precursors to illness included impatience, being overcritical, persistent grief, excessive fear, extremem terror, bitterness, lack of self-esteem, over-enthusiasm, excessive restraint, indecision, doubt, ignorance, denial or repression, resentment, restlessness, apathy, indifference, weakness of will, and guilt (among others). Bach felt that his thirty-eight flower essences provided vibrational patterns needed to help neutralize or serve as an antidote to the negative subtle-energy aspects associated with each of these different negative emotional and mental states. Ingestion of the flower essences was followed by a flooding of the body with positive, healing, rebalancing subtle-energy vibrations. In other words, Bach believed that his flower remedies would not only neutralized emotional- and mental-energy patterns but also infuse positive vibrations associated with specific virtues into an individuale, such as the virtues of love, peace, steadfastness, gentleness, strength, understanding, tolerance, wisdom, forgiveness, courage, or joy. After a period of taking the flower essence remedies, Bach noted profound emotional and mental changes occurring in his patients, along with improvements in their physical symptoms. With time, patientes enjoyed improved overall physical health as they became rebalanced at the mental, emotional, and spiritual levels. With regard to their therapeutic actions, it is important to recognize that flower essences do not actually suppress negative emotions. They merely act as catalysts in assisting the spiritual bodies to release unwanted negative emotional- and mental-energy patterns.
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“The flowers Bach used to make his flower remedies were thought to be from plants of a “higher order.” These higher-order flowers embodied certain soul qualities represented by specific energy wavelengths and frequencies of subtle-energy vibration contained within the plants. Each of the soul qualities “captured” by the flower remedies resonated with or was in tune with a particular frequency in the multidimensional human energy field. According to Bach, each human soul contained within itself thirty-eight different soul qualities embodied by the various Bach flowers. THese qualities might be considered analogous to energy potential, virtues, or even “divine sparks” of intelligence. Through his intuitive research, Bach came to believe that if conflicts arose between the intentions of a person's soul and the actions of the conscious personality, the frequency of the energy field would become distorted, out of harmony, or even slowed down. This vibratory distortion in a person's energy field was thought to create a negative effect upon the person's entire psyche. When correctly prescribed for a particular negative emotional pattern, the Bach flower remedy was thought to “resupply” the person with the emotional vibratory frequency that had become changed or distorted in the first place. In a sense. Bach flower-essence therapy might be considered a way of infusing the personality with a “missing” frequency-specific emotional-energy pattern. While the essences seemed to deliver emotion-specific frequencies of subtle energy, they also appeared to have definite energy affinities for particular soul qualities that were out of balance. On a higher level. Each essence was thought to strengthen contact between the conscious personality and the vibratory qualities of the soul. Thus, a flower remedy would act as an energetic catalyst that helped to reestablish contact between the personality and the soul or the higher self.
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“While the Bach Flower Remedies may work in reconnecting the personality with the higher self, there are now many newer flower essences that supposedly work by providing a wider range of therapeutic actions upon the physical body as well as the spiritual bodies. In addition, a number of the newer flower essences are also said to work by rebalancing the emotional and astral bodies of people in order to create harmony in the face of various disharmonious energy patterns, Like the original Bach Flower Remedies, each of the newer flower essences is quite specific in its vibrational actions upon particular emotional- and mental-energy patterns. Some of the newer flower essences are said to have an affinity for specific aspects of human subtle anatomy (such as particular chakras or meridians), or they may help to create a stronger alignment between the physical body and the spiritual bodies. Among the newly produced flower essences are a group of essences that seem to work primarily at the level of the cellular and molecular structure of the physical body in order to bring about healing. This is in contrast to the original thirty-eight Bach Flower Remedies, which heal because of their ability to rebalance the disturbed astral, emotional, and mental patterns that might have originally led to the physical ailment, THere is still not much hard research to document the physical cellular effects of flower essences upon living systems. However, the clinical observations of flower-essence practitioners around the world, combined with a great deal of intuitively derived information about flower essences, provides therapeutic guidelines for their usage. The scientific validation of flower essences seems to be coming about almost as slowly as the validation of homeopathy in conventional medical circles. Nevertheless, at least one double-blind study has been conducted showing that flower essences perform better than a placebo. So at least preliminary evidence seems to support a real therapeutic effect.” (Gerber, Vibrational Medicine: 202-205)
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Excerpted from: Richard Gerber MD, “The Art of Healing with Flowers” from Vibrational Medicine for the 21st Century, Judy Piatkus, London: 2000. Pp. 198-205.
