Welcome to the essences

Scleranthus – Scleranthus annuus

I am sure most of my readers know this essence very well, the good old Bach flower, that helps to solve the conflict of stop and go, spend or save, caution and risk and all the other possible inner polarities, that can keep one stuck. An often overlooked feature is the meditation help.

There are certainly more than two ways to meditate, however since Scleranthus is an essence that works with polarities I just focus on two of them, the Eastern and the Western way. You could also call them the hard way and the easy way – but this would not be true. Anyway this would be the hard way: sit down, watch the white wall in front of you and stop thinking. Just like that. It does not matter what your mind wants, if it wants to repeat stories and thaughts you already know – simply shut it off. For us who have grown up in the western society, that values the mind and the thinking so high, a meditation like that can easily become a kind of torture. I think that is why most of us prefer the ‚easy way‘. It bears some food for the mind. When the mind is busy with something unimportant it will not disturb our meditation. At least this is the idea behind it. So we can repeat any kind of mantra again and again or we can count our breaths or work with a Zen Koan (you know the sound of hands clapping – which part of the sound is produced by your left hand?).

Sunflower – Sonnenblume – Helianthus annuus

Imagine this client of me – a giant of a man, almost 2 m tall, but considering himself as a dwarf. He succeeded in making himself small by standing with hanging shoulders and a bowed spine that he indeed seemed smaller than me, although actually he was much taller. He had to look up to me!

Situations like that make it hard sometimes not to burst out laughing in front of a client. This giant played the role of a little mouse without even noticing. He simply did not know what a man he was, all he presented was meant seriously. He shoewed quite clearly how he considered himself: small, helpless, powerless, a nothing.

And then there was this pretty young woman, who behaved similarly. Of course she was not as tall as her male equivalent so she made herself smaller in another sense. She was convinced to be the ugliest being on Earth and in order not to be confronted with the reality she developed a kind of mirror-phobia in order to avoid to take a look at herself. She further succeeded in reducing her perspective by ignoring all the admiring views she might have caught in case she only tried to open her eyes. But the way she prefered to see the world became a kind of self-fullfilling prophecy: I am as ugly as hell, nobody will ever love me, not even take a look at me – and she looks around and notices only people looking in another direction. That is the proof.

To be honest I should say that she became less and less attractive once she decided to make herself even smaller than her 1,60 m size by avoiding any kind of food. It seemed she tried to make herself invisible. She developed anoriexia.

People tend to look at the course of the world from the perspective of their navel. Make the earth subject to you. In fact, one could write the story from a different point of view as well, namely the one of plants. Their story is, after all, much older than that of humans, and while our knowledge about dinosaurs is based upon bone finds, plants were already present when they lived.

Plants possess a very special kind of intelligence, which helped them to conquer the whole world. With much less effort than mankind needed in order to follow their sucessful path much later. A long time ago plants did not have any blossoms. I can not say which event triggered the Eureka experience in them, but the development of leaves into flowers and their attractive coloring made a deal between completely different creatures possible, from which both take their advantage. Flowering plants started to use their color to attract insects, so they would be fertilized and developed a new stance of species cooperation. The winged helpers benefited from the nectar and worked for their beautifully colored contractual partners. And that was only the beginning of this intelligent cooperation. Regarding the fact that many species of insects had been disregarded in collective bargaining, the contracting parties agreed to get them on board in an unconventional manner. Some of the plants moved their blooms to the evening and night hours, and the moths were the ones who could say goodbye to unemployment.