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The Story of Desperation - Told by the Willows
Willow – Salix vitellina
This is one of the Bach flower range that may die out, in some parts of the world it is endangered. In this case it is not we humans who are causing it, however we are currently facing a natural occurring cross-breeding with the White Willow – Salix alba. Perhaps one day we will no longer be able to make use of an essence made from the original Willow tree, but tests have shown that Salix alba may be able to replace the „old“ Willow essence. Anyway as long as we have got it we shall use the Willow Edward Bach once chose for people suffering from bitterness and grief.
Bach‘s category is „despair and despondency“. There are a couple of remedies in this group. The special thing about a Willow state is, that it needs some time to develop. You will hardly see any children suffering from a Willow related emotional state (although it is not impossible). When something really bad happens, the loss of a beloved person, a terrible accident, a life threatening diagnosis – this indicates any emergency combination and/or Sweet Chestnut. The kind of despair that indicates Willow however comes slowly and needs repetition of the bad luck, the disease or whatever. The first failure usually does not mean too much, everybody fails every now and then, after the second one we decide to put more effort in whatever we want to achieve – but what are we going to do after the 20th failure? And after we applied for a new job a hundred times without any success, will we really prepare ourselves as carefully when we apply for the 101st?
Mondviole - Abundance or Greed?
Money Plant / Honesty – Lunaria annua – Mondviole
Americans often find it hard to understand why the Germans do not have a word for abundance. However this somehow reflects how the Germans see the world. People like me, who translate flower essence books into German, have their difficulties to find an appropriate expression for it. However every single word has a hidden catch. E.g. the German ‚Überfluss‘ is alright on the first sight, but is has a second meaning: not necessary, it can even mean waste. Germans – and I have to admit I am one of them – are stuck in polarities of rich and poor. Nobody can be rich without keeping another one poor. We all know that bananas, coffee, cocoa and other goods are only so cheap in Europe, because we do not pay an appropriate price for them, which could make the workers in South America rich. It seems: either them or us. This gives us a bad conscience, but we prefer a bad conscience to expensive bananas. You see: we are stuck in polarities. We think in terms of win and loose.
Well known essences reviewed: Scleranthus
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?).
Be upright and self-assured
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.