More than fifty years ago, a doctor and researcher, Dr. Edward Bach developed his new form of “flower remedy system”, which focused on the mental and emotional factors as causes of illness.
What happens to the physical body is a manifestation of our mental, spiritual and emotional inner movement. The human body is a temple for the spirit.
The Bach flower remedy system attempts to treat the patient’s soul. Bach believed physical illnesses to be a result of an instability on an emotional level, as a conflict between the “personality” and the “higher self”. The real purpose of the remedies, he had found, was to ‘bring us nearer to the Divinity within’. It is the ‘Divinity within which heals us’.
If plants help to heal, it is because they too are linked to this spiritual dimension. They are an expression of divine forces at work in nature, part of a sacred world. When we connect with a plant, it is the property of some subtle energy within the plant, a kind of plant spirit or consciousness, we connect with. And it is from this spiritual dimension that healing comes.
The thirty-eight Bach flowers encompass all of the important quality of the human psyche. The millions of permutations and combinations of the 38 remedies make it possible to deal with every unique and constantly in transformation personality. The remedies gently restore our emotional balance, re-harmonizing negative emotions by stimulating the opposite virtues.
They can safely be combined with other homeopathic or conventional treatments.
The essential concepts:
1. Man has a Soul which is the “Real Self”; a Divine, a Higher Self of which the body is the earthly temple. Our Soul, who resides in and around us, guides, protects and encourages us.
2. We, as we know ourselves in this world, are personalities down here for the purpose of gaining all the knowledge and experience which can be obtained through earthly existence, advancing towards our real nature. The Soul knows which environment and what circumstances will best enable us to do this.
3. Everything is in constant transformation, it is transitory. Life is a moment in the course of our evolution. Our physical self is our temporary instrument to gain consciousness.
4. As long as our personalities and our Souls are in harmony, all is joy and peace, happiness and health. When personalities are led astray from the path laid down from the Soul, a conflict arises. This conflict is the root cause of disease and unhappiness.
5. The unity of all things: the Creator of all things is Love. Any action against another affects the whole, because by causing imperfection in a part, it reflects on the whole.
6. The therapist would assist the patient to a knowledge of himself, to recognise those elements which are causing a conflict between the Soul and the personality, to eradicate and replace them by the corresponding virtues. He would help the physical body to gain strength and assist the mind to become calm, bringing peace and harmony to the whole personality. The remedy lies not in a battle against our “faults”, and not in a use of will power and energy to suppress a “wrong”, but in a steady development of the opposite virtue. To struggle against “fault” increases its power, keeps our attention reverted to its presence.
7. If we stop identifying ourselves with our physical body, we could discover its wisdom and use it as a vehicle towards our Souls.
8. We develop individuality, by freeing ourselves from the worldly influences and obeying only the dictates of our Soul. Our every action derives its origin in ourselves.
9. No great ascent was ever made without “faults” and “falls”, and they must be regarded as experiences.
10. Our physical self is ourselves externalized, an objective manifestation of our internal nature; it is the expression of ourselves, the materialization of the quality of our consciousness.
11. Simplicity: a therapeutic system needs to be simply enough to allow the patient itself to use it for its own self examination and healing.
12. Peeling the onion: layer after layer we precede from the outer emotions into our inner core.
