Flower Essences: A Soothing Treatment for Turbulent Times

As I write this post, we are living through a strange time in our world.

We are experiencing a global pandemic, the scale of which many of us have not seen in our lifetimes. People are stressed, worried, scared and overwhelmed.

At the same time, it is spring time.

It’s a time when flowers and life itself is blooming all around us. When I walked around my neighborhood recently on a social distancing route, I was pulled in every direction by the beauty of the flowers all around me. As I filled my phone with photos of these magical beings, I realized there couldn’t be a more perfect time to write about one of my favorite topics of all time: Flower Essences!

Spring is the season of flowers. And flower essences might just be spring’s gift to us during these unprecedented times… 

What Are Flower Essences?

Many people don’t know what they are. People often confuse flower essences with essential oils, which are the beautiful, aromatic oils you diffuse for fragrance or apply topically for wellness, haircare, and skincare.

However, flower essences have no scent, despite their name. They are liquid, but have no taste. And on top of it, flower essences don’t even treat illness (at least, not directly). Instead, they treat emotional states of imbalance. 

When you learn about what they are exactly (which we will discuss in this blog series) both their existence and the way they work remains a bit of a mystery. There is no good explanation according to our current scientific paradigm for how this treatment could possibly do what it does.

And yet, despite this, I have witnessed flower essences work in my animal patients time and time again. Sometimes even instantaneously and dramatically.

And so I invite you to come with me on this fascinating journey into the world of flower essences.

And who knows? They might just change your world the way they did mine.

Flower Essences: What They Do

Flower essences treat very specific emotional states. Here are just a few examples of emotions that flower essences can treat:

• Jealousy
• Resentment
• Excessive worry about another person’s situation 
• Abandonment by a father figure
• Not enough love from one’s mother at an early age
• Hopelessness
• Resistance to change
• Narrow-mindedness and racism
• Feeling like a victim
• Trauma

It makes sense to us that there are treatments for fear and anxiety.

But jealousy? Closed-mindedness? Abandonment?

It seems crazy that there is something available in the natural world, other than traditional talk therapy, that could treat these mental states.

In addition to treating unusually specific emotions, another fascinating aspect about flower essences is that every flower in the world – even the common weeds that we see in our gardens, in a park or on our way to work – has an essence that treats a very specific emotional imbalance. 

Holly will always, and in every case, be prescribed for jealousy. Pine will treat excessive guilt. While White Chestnut treats worry.

Flower Essences are very specific and need to be chosen carefully in order to have the greatest impact. I have many stories in animals of where I treated an emotional state with the wrong flower and the treatment didn’t work. It wasn’t until I figured out the exact emotional state and the correct flower remedy, that the problem went away.

What emotions in animals do I commonly treat with flower essences?

Believe it or not, but jealousy is high on the list. For anyone who has ever pet one animal, only to have the other animal in the house come over and seek attention, this is not a surprising revelation.

I have also seen the most remarkable recoveries and turnarounds in animals that I treated for trauma. And it didn’t matter if the trauma occurred 5 minutes or 5 years ago. The results were the same and equally extraordinary.

The most common behaviors and emotional states that I treat are fear and aggression. I will share stories in the next coming weeks of how these treatments changed the animal’s behaviors, and what the flowers taught me about the animal’s emotional state.

There are thousands, if not millions, of emotional states that can be treated with flower essences. In fact, there are as many emotions that can be treated, as there are flowers, trees and plants on this planet.

There are people that have dedicated their lives to decoding flower essences. Through a combination of intuition, testing and trial and error, they have been able to figure out which flowers treat what emotionally imbalanced state. Some essences we understand well and have been using for more than a hundred years, while others we are still learning about and trying to figure out.

And while we may not have scientific explanations for how or why flower essences work (they have largely remained under the radar in the scientific world, even though in some ways, I believe that they may represent the next frontier of medicine), I have seen these little essences work their magic in more animal patients than I can count.

In fact, I have come to rely on them in the same way that I rely on medications to work. For certain specific conditions, the essences work like clock-work.

And now, when reading these words, remember that my animal patients have no placebo in the traditional sense. They are not swayed by scientific journals, their doctor’s opinion, an instagram post, the latest fad or popular beliefs.

For my patients, a treatment either works, or it doesn’t.

The behavior either lessens, stops completely, or it doesn’t.

And in the case of flower essences, time and time again, it just appears to work.

Flower Essence Blog Series

Over the next few weeks, I have prepared a series of articles on the topic of Flower Essences. 

We will look at everything from: What flower essences are, how to use them, where I have seen them work, and how to understand any side effects. I will interweave a few stories of animal patients as well as human friends and how I witnessed flower essences impact their lives. 

I will also offer a few flower essence recommendations, in particular ones that may be useful for us humans during this Coronavirus pandemic, as well as flower essences for common pet behavioral concerns.

I will end with a pilot clinical trial that I ran looking at flower essences for cats with inappropriate urination: ie. Cats that will suddenly pee on your furniture or bed for seemingly no good reason.

And we will go from there.

I find flower essences to be one of the most fascinating treatments in the world:

If they truly work (which in all my experience, they really seem to), then what does this mean about our world? About medicine? About our understanding of us, our planet, and the animals and natural world around us?

What else is out there in the natural world that we don’t know about?

We humans have spent decades studying, researching, and attempting to understand the complicated human psyche. We also believe that these complex mental and emotional states are uniquely our own and something that defines us as humans.  

At this time, the scientific paradigm does not believe that animals have the same emotions as people. Instead, animals are said to have “behaviors.” When we apply words such as “jealousy” and “anger” to animals, we are said to be “anthropomorphizing,” or applying human characteristics to them.

And yet, when I look at how flower essences affect my patients, I start to question this idea. Not only are emotions likely not unique to one individual human, but they might not even be unique to our species. 

And on top of it, nature might have known how to solve these problems all along.

We just weren’t looking in the right places.

Next article in series: Lilly: The case of the anxious Cocker