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Welcome to the essences
Bindweed Trio - the self-liberation trio
The bindweeds twist, they do not grow straight, but in curves and are dependent on an external support, a branch, a railing, a grid. On their own, they stay on the ground. This signature suggests that authenticity can be more important than ascension, since the flowers on the ground are no less beautiful than those striving for the sun.
The Bindweed Trio gives us a tool to free us from our inner mental and emotional support wheels, which are only a symbol of our insecurity and lack of independence. If you want to be free, you have to let go. That can scare you. Helping to overcome this is the foremost task of these three flowers.
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?).