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Herb Index
Bach Flower Remedies

Treat the Person, Not the Disease
Flowers Heal

In this lesson you will meet the incredible pioneer Dr. Edward Bach. I personally find the essences to be extremely effective, as they get to the core of the problem. The journey through the world of feelings is a long and colourful one and the scenery keeps changing. In your work as a healer you will meet a lot of people with incredible stories to share with you and they are not all pleasant. True healing must touch the soul and to do that you sometimes need to get through some darkness. Don't beat the darkness with sticks, put in a little light. In one prison in the USA. they treat their most hardened criminals by having them work in the flower gardens. After two years they notice incredible changes. I guess that is why we often bring flowers to someone who is sick.

After this lesson you will be able to:

1. explain the healing philosophy of Dr. Bach.
   
   
2. choose appropriate essences for yourself and others.

BACH FLOWER ESSENCES

Edward Bach was a determined and intense individual who possessed great powers of concentration. Bach loved the country and disliked cities. He was known for his great sense of humour, playfulness and his compassion. As a child, he dreamed of being a healer who used simple but effective remedies. He was a dreamer with intensity of purpose and two great interests: a. Healing and b. A love of nature.

By the age of 16 he had already been working for 3 years in a factory, after school each day, to help pay his way through medical school. In the factory, he gained valuable insight and understanding of human nature.

Bach found that anything that interfered with his intuitive action dissatisfied and exhausted him. While exploring both Church and medicine, he came to the conclusion that neither one fully interpreted his ideals, and so he began to look for new truths.

By the age of 20, Bach was a university medical student, there to learn what was known about healing/medicine. He spent little time with books. Instead, he spent his time studying disease by carefully watching every patient, observing the way in which each one was affected by their complaint, and seeing how these different reactions influenced the 

By 1913 Bach was practising medicine, but quickly became dissatisfied with orthodox treatments. He found there was little or no time to study the patients themselves; no time to think about the human side. Everyone was so concerned with the disease they ignored the personality of the individual.

Bach looked elsewhere for employment, and eventually started to work at the "Immunity School" as an Assistant Bacteriologist. Here Bach discovered that certain intestinal germs that were linked to chronic diseases, were found in everyone - whether they were healthy or `sick'. The sick people simply possessed more of them. Bach then discovered that vaccine injected directly into the blood stream acted as a cleanser of these germs. He got great results, but disliked the injection part. He discovered that if a dose of vaccine was not repeated until the beneficial effects of the former one had worn off or become stable, he got better results with less severe reactions.

However, by 1914 Bach was in such poor health he could not enter the army. He continued working and was put in charge of 400 people. He continued conducting research from 1915 to 1919. Bach was an intense workaholic, and so in 1917 suffered a severe hemorrhage/operation. The medical experts gave him three months to live. Bach decided to make the most of the three months, so he totally submerged himself in his own work. He forgot about the illness and as a result, got stronger and stronger. After the three months had expired, he was in better health than ever!

Through his work, Bach learned that to heal any disease and meet all occasions that might arise, you treat the patient's temperament or mood and not the disease. The kind of illness, it's type, name and duration were of no consequence. Bach continued working on his theories around bacteria & polarity, and plants & polarity. He needed a new method of potentising (a vital point in polarity). He studied personality groups who had the same reactions mood-wise, to various diseases. 

In 1919 while working at the London Homeopathic Hospital he discovered "Organon" by Hahnemann. He sat up all night and read it cover to cover and found similar discoveries. Dose repetition showed each case of illness required individual, not mass treatment. "Treat the patient, not the disease." "The physician's high and only mission is to restore the sick to health, to cure."

Even though Organon was going against the medical profession, Bach combined his own work with Hahnemann's.

Colleagues dubbed him the second Hahnemann. Bach became so concerned with this new direction, that he dropped all other work. Bach closed down his very successful practice, destroyed everything in his laboratory and burned all his notes. He packed two suit cases - one with vials, mortar, pestle and some simple tools. The other was full of old shoes, to be sent to a local thrift store. Bach was returning to Nature to focus only on Nature and what he found amongst the trees and plants. Remedies which were already prepared for humans by Nature herself and were only waiting to be discovered. 

He rejected his earlier toxaemia work and adopted the flower essences, treating the mood and the individual person instead. Fear of diseases was one of the greatest obstacles, Bach found. The patients desire to get well was always the deciding factor. Bach knew moods changed day to day, even hour to hour, so in an acute disorder, he would change the remedy frequently. Oncoming disease could even be shown by a change in mood. This is particularly clear in children. We can usually tell when sickness is around by a change in our children's mood.

Bach's first group of remedies covered 12 states/moods - fear, terror, worry, indecision, indifference, doubt, over-concern, weakness, self-distrust, impatience, over-enthusiasm and pride. The three remedies mentioned earlier - mimulus, impatiens & clematis - made up the nucleus. Each fresh remedy needed a new bowl (the old ones were destroyed).

The remedy Cerato was from Tibet (the only plant not native to Bach's England), and was part of the second group of remedies for more persistent states of mind. Bach concluded that an absorbing interest, a great love, a definite purpose in life, was the deciding factor of a person's happiness on earth.

By 1934 the first 3 flower combinations for Rescue Remedy were joined - Rock Rose, Clematis, Impatiens (Wind/Water/Fire). Bach believed all the medical training you needed was to study people and plants. Through Bach's experiences with people, he literally began to see their spirits. He followed the thought that first came into his mind. All these years, from 1930 onward he never charged anyone for anything. 

He settled in a house called "Wellsprings Sotwell". The first 19 remedies would be discovered here. Remedies 20-38 were to be discovered in a different way.  

Bach became so sensitive, he could pick up on the distress of his patient coming to see him, before they arrived. Even though Bach was exhausted, it didn't stop him from seeing patients and students, and receiving correspondence from all over the world. Bach took great joy in lay people using his work, as he felt strongly that healing should not be in the hands of just a few people. From this point forward he wanted to be known as an Herbalist. The medical establishment threatened to take him off of their registrar as a medical doctor (many times), and Bach's reply was to go ahead and do it. He was far more interested in healing people than being called a medical doctor. Even though this would have meant he could no longer visit people in their homes, it didn't really affect him, because he found people that came to see him were helped the most anyway. As it turned out, they never did remove him from their registrar.

Subsequently he trained a number of people who had been studying with him, to continue spreading his work and the 38 flower essences. He felt complete with that body of work.

Life to Bach was continuous, an unbroken stream, uninterrupted by what we call death, which merely heralded a change of condition. Bach was convinced that some work could only be done under earthly conditions, whilst spiritual conditions were necessary for certain other work. On November 27, 1937 he died in his sleep. 

"I want to make it as simple as this - I am hungry, I will go and pull a lettuce from the garden for my tea; I am frightened and ill, I will take a dose of Mimulus." Edward Bach

Bach believed that the two main reasons for ill health were 

1. not following your own personal destiny.
   
   
2. harming others.

  for love.

The less you open your heart to others, the more your heart suffers

Give me a Sense of Direction — Wild Oat

  helps you to decide your aim in life.

Ease My Inner Torment — Agrimony

  inner peace, honest cheerfulness

Help Me Face the Unknown — Aspen

  fearlessness, adventure

Encourage My Tolerance — Beech

  acceptance, tolerating differences

Strengthen My Self Worth — Centaury

  self directed

Restore my trust in my self — Cerato

  quiet self assurance

Support Me During this Extreme Stress — Cherry Plum

  courageous and calm

Help me pay Attention — Chestnut Bud

  attentive, learns from mistakes

Open Me to Service — Chicory

 selfless

  present, curious

Help Me Feel Clean — Crab Apple

  broad minded, mentally disciplined

Restore My Confidence, I'm Feeling Overwhelmed — Elm

  confidence

Help Me Regain My Enthusiasm — Gentian

  encouragement

Restore My Faith — Gorse

  faith

Help Me to Listen — Heather

  selflessness

Help Me to be Present — Honeysuckle

  letting go of the past

Get Me Through the Monday Morning Blues — Hornbeam

  involvement

Find Me Some Patience — Impatiens

  patience, acceptance

  self confidence

Help Me Face My Fears — Mimulus

  courage

End This Sudden Black Depression — Mustard

  joy

Help Me to Keep Going — Oak

  perseverance

Help Me with this Total Exhaustion — Olive

  revitalization

Rid Me of this Constant Nagging Guilt — Pine

  genuine humility

Support the Healer in Me — Red Chestnut

  radiate healing

Help Me Deal with this Terror — Rock Rose

  selfless courage

Restore My Flexible Nature — Rock Water

  flexible mind

  stable decisiveness

Restore Order after the Trauma — Star of Bethlehem

  reordering after shock or trauma

Send some Light into this Darkness — Sweet Chestnut

  acceptance of help from a higher power

Help Me Catch up to Myself — Vervain

  high state of flow

End this Being Right but Not Related — Vine

  sensitive leadership

Help Me Make this Break — Walnut

  the link breaker

Help Me be More Involved — Water Violet

  involvement

Help Me Still My Monkey Mind — White Chestnut

  quiet and still mind

End this Resignation — Wild Rose

  enthusiastic interest in life

Transform all this Resentment — Willow

 self-responsibility

Bach Flower Essences

A couple of cases that come to mind using the essences are: a young woman came to see me for cervical cancer. The doctors wanted to do surgery and told her that she would never have children. We decided that her condition was connected to her emotions and that she would use the remedies faithfully changing them each week as needed. Her cancer cleared up and a few years later she gave birth to a beautiful girl. 

Next was a school teacher who was suffering from extreme fatigue. We were using the remedy Vervain for stress, strain and over-enthusiasm. It is for people who are always one step ahead of themselves. The next time he saw me he related an incredible experience to me. He was in his garden and he felt his whole being change as he felt the two parts of himself finally merge as he experienced catching up with himself. His energy level changed and so did the direction of his life.

The last was a young woman with pre-cancerous cells in her cervix. After the session with me she decided to quit her job. About a year later while living and working in California she remembered our consultation and her condition. She went in for a pap smear and her cells were normal.  I do not remember if we actually used the essences but we did use the essence of Bach's philosophy, which was to follow your own path.

Local Essences

Oregon 

grape root: listlessness, apathy, indifference 

Lavender: male\female energy balance 

Rosemary: ecstacy 

Calendula: steadiness of mind, maintain your own thought patterns 

Plantain: collecting negative emotions and drawing them out 

Dandelion: truth, dispelling illusions, sharing the truth 

Wild rose: cleaning up psychic energy after an abortion 

Shepherd's 

purse: psychic bleeding 

Blue camas: freeing emotions that collect in the solar plexus 

opening up the inner visual channel 

Gold: adaptability, relaxes excess mental energy 

Arbutus: enhancing passion, sexual or other 

Cedar: nourishment, opening up to giving and receiving 

St. Johnswort: ease the pain of separation of any kind

Maple: accepting or changing the drama in your life 

Whale: bringing subconscious blocks to the surface 

breaking down the isolation 

barrier supports group energy 

Eagle: rising above body consciousness 

opening up communications with the spirit world 

vision quest 

Deer: guardian of the spirit world 

easier transition to and from spirit world

Mastodon: very yang energy 

helps to ground you 

Robin: rebirth, lightness and cheerfulness