Flower Essences- The Poetics of Plant Medicine
I was sobbing and shaking, nearly hyperventilating, sunburnt, overworked and emotionally melting down. A dear Aquarian friend hugged me and thrust a small yellow labeled brown tincture bottle into my hand and said try this!
Within a few minutes I was completely changed. I had pulled myself back together, stopped despairing, and felt human again. The inocuous yellow labelled bottle was Bach Remedies Rescue Remedy, sold at health food stores everywhere.
This dramatic scene was my first encounter with the potent magic of flower essences. They are the first plant medicines I ever worked with before tinctures, infusions, and the rest. The ones I lean on the most and reach for in the darkest and lightest times.
Currently I’m completing a 9 month flower essence apprenticeship with Liz Migliorelli of Sister Spinster even though I’ve been working with essences for well over a decade and making my own many years.
My human design line 1 profile is really showing…but I digress.
There is something so spectacular about being in this deeply devotional container with other sensitive plant people who also communicate with the natural world in the language of flowers, dreams, and synchronicity.
Liz said in our opening class flower essences are the poetics of the plant medicine. Yes! I thought, this is exactly where I am meant to be.
In the simplest terms flower essences are created by putting flowers in water, under sunlight or moonlight, or both~ which imprint and impart the energetic signature of that plant, and that water is then preserved with some alcohol. So there are no actual chemical constituents of the plant in the flower essence.
Essences work via entrainment on the more subtle aspects of our emotional and mental bodies.
“We have been conditioned to think of ourselves as chemical and mechanical beings, but we are also extremely electrical. Most people think of the nervous system when they think of electricity in the body, but it has been determined that collagen, the connective tissue that is present everywhere in our bodies, is also a conductor, that our blood carries a charge, that our bones conduct electricity, that our heart is an electrically driven oscillator, and that our brain waves are electrical frequencies.”
The truth is we are indeed beings of light, water, and energy. Frequency is foremost.
Flower essences are the plant medicine I most lean on and work with consistently. Generally recommended to be taken over time, a month minimally, several times a day. Personally, essences have helped shift so much in my world, and been allies during some of the hardest, saddest times in my life.
The process of taking and making essences is about coming into a very real, nuanced, and observational conversation with the natural world, that includes the plants, the minerals and soil, the planetary movements, the weather, the insects and animals. All of these elements that are present while making the essence go into the remedy, which also includes the story of the medicine making as well.
I’ve experienced such incredible synchronicities that can only be summed up by saying that
Earth magic is so real.
Just like there are blueprints for buildings, our Biofield, also known in more esoteric literature as our aura, IS our personal blueprint and template that gives rise to our physical body. Imbalances and dis~eases being experienced have actually been happening first as disturbances in the Biofield.
While mainstream medicine treats the mind and body as two separate entities, modern brain research reveals a complex intertwined interplay between the two, how our emotions and thoughts have a strong effect on our physical state, and vice versa.
Since flower essences work on the more subtle mental and emotional bodies, this can then have a cascading effect and resolve physical issues as Dr Edward Bach came to see in the 1930’s through his rigorous empirical experimentation and practice.
While there is evidence of ancient peoples including the Egyptians making remedies from the morning dew of flowers, it was Dr Edward Bach born in England in 1886, that popularized this practice.
Despite being a very well known and respected bacteriologist and orthodox physician, he became disillusioned with conventional medicine and turned to the field of homeopathy for ten years, another form of energetic medicine, but still felt there was something else out there that needed to be brought forward.
He then decided to pack up his life and practice, leaving London for the countryside and work with wild flowers. After a lot of experimenting and observation he found which part of the plant and the best way to preserve and potentate the remedies he was working with, and he systematized the Bach remedies which are still widely used today.
“The linear mind is what creates the boundary line between us and the world. Location of consciousness in the brain closes the door to Nature. But the door is unlocked.... Perceiving through the senses opens the door. The more sensitivity we cultivate to sensory flows, the more directly we perceive with our senses,
the wider the door opens.”
We have so many ways to directly perceive information from Nature, and anyone who works with the plants knows it’s not necessarily a right brained linear way the plants communicate with us.
Flower essences are multidimensional medicine and asks us to slow down, to notice, to soften, and become present with what is.
“Nature is alive and talking to us.
This is not a metaphor.”