Flower Essences for treating mental and physical health conditions

You won’t find a more elegant method of treating mental and physical conditions than this. Bach Flower Remedies are chosen based on one’s personality traits, rather than on specific ailments. This is a super advantage for those who cannot determine what’s wrong with them. If you stop and think about it, this approach also lets you treat many things at once, and in balance. Also, it lets you strengthen your system even when there are no symptoms.
This approach is counter-intuitive, and it doesn’t even seem possible. Dr. Edward Bach (1886 – 1936), of England, spent much of his life developing his system of 38 flower remedies. Early in his career, Bach (pronounced Batch) was a conventional doctor, but later he became a homeopath. In 1928, the story goes, Bach was at a party when he realized that people seemed to fall into certain personality types. He knew that Samuel Hahnemann (1755 – 1843), the Father of Homeopathy, was aware of the connection between personality and disease, but now Bach started thinking that this might also be a practical approach to selecting remedies. Initially, Bach started using personality-based treatment with a couple of flower-derived homeopathic tinctures he had devised, and with some success. However, he was apparently in search of a better set of remedies to go along with his practiced observations of fundamental personality types.
A couple of years after that inspirational party, Dr. Bach had another important idea: perhaps the energy patterns from flowers could be transferred to water using sunlight. He found that if he floated flowers on spring water for a few hours with sunlight beating down on them, that the healing signatures did, in fact, transfer to the water. Some of the essences, though, are made from boiling the flowers in water, but either way, the practice is to then dilute the water with brandy. Eventually, Bach discovered 38 different solutions that would work for every fundamental personality trait, and state of mind.
The usual protocol is to put two drops each from all of the chosen essences (but no more than seven) into a 30 ml bottle of spring water. Then, four times a day, from this bottle take and hold four drops of the solution in your mouth for a few seconds before swallowing. There are also other ways of taking the essences. As you can see, a little goes a long way. The essences are said to have a shelf life of five years. However, some claim that flower essences should not be stored in the same room with homeopathic solutions because of possible cross-contamination.
A special Bach product is Bach Rescue Remedy. This is made up of five of the regular Bach Flower Essences, and is used for injuries, or for other stressful or traumatic situations.

Getting Started

Some Flower Essence Practitioners are very adept at choosing essences for patients, but if you want to do it yourself, you can buy a pamphlet on flower essences that describes the various personality traits and corresponding remedies, or you can use Rite Care Pharmacy’s Bach Flower Essence Chooser. However, you can buy the flower essences from HerbalRemedies.com for far less. Wherever you buy, make sure to order some empty 30 ml bottles.
There are literally hundreds of different flower essences available from sources besides Bach, and these can easily be found on the Internet. Obviously, most of these don’t follow Bach’s line of thinking, in as much as he believed his 38 remedies suited all situations. Also, many of these other remedies are chosen based on physical symptoms rather than personality traits. Anyway, many users of these alternative essences are happy with the results they get.