FEATURE - May 2015 - Santa Fe

Flower Essence Therapy for Spiritual Healing

By Erin Galiger

 

Apart from herbal medicine, which utilizes biochemical constituents of particular flowers for healing, there is a type of therapy that utilizes flowers for their energy, known as Flower Essence Therapy. FET is generally regarded as a complementary therapy in which flower essences are used to treat spiritual, mental, and emotional dysfunctions and, indirectly, physical illness. Many users describe flower essences as medicine for the soul due to the belief that the spirit of the flower connects with the spirit of the person to offer gentle but powerful guidance on how to course-correct their mind and emotions to stay on their spiritual path.

 

Flower essences are energetic pattern-infused water solutions, typically preserved with alcohol, made from individual plant flowers; each contain a specific imprint that responds in a repairing and rebuilding manner to imbalances in humans. A flower essence practitioner chooses appropriate flower essences for a client based on the client’s emotional or psychological state, or people can use FET by means of self-prescription.  

 

It is purported that flower essences were used by the ancient Egyptians, Indians, East Asians, South Americans, Australian aborigines, and, from the Middle Ages at least, Europeans. A doctor who was working with a Nyoongah aboriginal community in Western Australia supposedly discovered the oldest known living tradition of flower essences, dating back at least 40,000 years. The 16th-century European alchemist, Paracelsus, believed that a remedy for every disease can be found in nature, and he is known to have discovered special properties of dew.  

 

An Englishman, Dr. Edward Bach, is credited with the resurgence of flower essences in the 1930s. Bach was medically trained as a physician, pathologist, and bacteriologist, and he applied his skills in the First World War and thereafter. After concluding that the vast majority of his patients’ illnesses stemmed from emotional causes, Bach studied homeopathy and managed to establish a successful practice in the 1920s in London. He suspected that there must be a healing system that was more subtle and less invasive than homeopathy. Thus, he left his practice in London in 1930 and set out to the English countryside to find his answer. Bach keenly observed plants and, through a creative and experiential process, he concluded that flowers have different vibratory signatures that address specific emotional states. 

 

Although Dr. Bach initially classified flower essences as herbal remedies, he later changed the term to flower remedies, presumably because herbal remedies imply chemical constituents in the product. The production of flower essences is directed so as to capture the vibration of the flower, not its chemical properties. Due to the absence of biochemical composition, there can be no conventional mechanism of action to explain how flower essences interact with the body. The approximate final dilution of a flower essence is 1:500,000, and what is left of the flower is believed to be energetic in nature. Also a homeopathic doctor, Bach declared that FET is a “new medicine.” Today, flower essences are classified as “energy” or “vibrational” medicine, supporting the principle that the human body’s natural healing capacity is enhanced by energy stimuli, which for FET, the energy stimulus is the specific vibratory frequency of a flower.  

 

Flower essences are believed to work on the principle of energetic resonance, in that there is a pattern in the energy field of a living plant that transfers to water and is maintained by adding a preservative such as alcohol to the blossom-infused water. The flower is viewed as the crowning achievement of the plant, and thus it is believed to contain the highest concentration of its life-force energy. Colorplate Kirlian photographs taken of a single drop of individual flower essences reveal that each individual flower 

essence has its own distinctive, characteristic bioenergetic radiation pattern.  Current scientific advances in technology will aid in supporting the validity of flower essences.

 

Flower essences offer us an opportunity for our soul’s growth and evolution, and many shamans and prophecies purport that humanity is moving into the age of flowers as our collective consciousness raises into a higher frequency of existence.