The Flowers of Aeskulap – Flower Essences & Therapeutic Touch

 

This article was inspired by a New Year’s Message from Patricia Kaminski and Richard Katz of the Flower Essence Society . To read the full message, please go to www.flowersociety.org/new-year-2015.html.

Milkweed (Asklepias syriaca) has long been one of my favorite wildflowers, and when I did my training with the Flower Essence Society in 2003 , I chose this flower as the object of my plant study . To read the study, please visit http://www.flowersociety.org/Milkweed-Plant-Study.htm

It took me a number of years to fully understand just why I was so attracted to this plant. I have come to the conviction that what Milkweed does  as as a flower essence sums what flower essences  can give us:

Nourishing our being at its deepest level,

and bringing back to life those parts in us that have been asleep, regressed or dead.

Think for a moment of a natural disaster, an earthquake or an avalanche or some  kind of accident. People are buried under the rubble, often for days, and many do not make it. But once in while it happens that when the search is about to be given up because it is not really imaginable that anyone could  survive so long, under layers of broken walls and mud a living human being is found, trapped and and barely alive.

Yet how many people feel just like that! The layers of rubble may not be apparent to the physical eye, but the real person is trapped in exactly the same manner. Whether this is due to trauma caused through long standing circumstances, through events of war, through illness or abuse – the person “under the rubble” cannot get out without help. Just like Milkweed Essence brings to life what has  gone into a state of dormancy, regression, near- suffocation, Flower Essences as such can assist to peel away the rubble, brick by brick, layer by layer.

This is the gem and the beauty of long term Flower Essence application. Someone comes for help, is messed up, anxious, hopeless, filled with unresolved personal problems. The story he or she have to tell often has gone on for years.

And as we start together to peel away the layers, some of the problems begin to lighten, others seem to linger. But in time things change. And what truly feels like a miracle is that after a few years, and sometimes earlier, a human being makes its appearance whom neither I nor the client really knew existed. The seed must have been there, but it remained invisible to everyone, buried under the rubble.

Here is the Hope that Flower Essences bring: the power, the strength of plants prepared as essences is such that they can reach into the deepest layers, can undo the inner prison and bring back to life what had not breath left, and  call forth what was up to then only present as a seed: the human being s in a state that I would like to call the state of Becoming; that state in each of us which which is both the fruit of the past and the potential for the future.

 

Hope – by Lisel Mueller

It hovers in dark corners
before the lights are turned on,
it shakes sleep from its eyes
and drops from mushroom gills,
it explodes in the starry heads
of dandelions turned sages,
it sticks to the wings of green angels
that sail from the tops of maples.

It sprouts in each occluded eye
of the many-eyed potato,
it lives in each earthworm segment
surviving cruelty,
it is the motion that runs the tail of a dog,
it is the mouth that inflates the lungs
of the child that has just been born.

It is the singular gift
we cannot destroy in ourselves,
the argument that refutes death,
the genius that invents the future,
all we know of God.

It is the serum which makes us swear
not to betray one another;
it is in this poem, trying to speak.

“Hope” by Lisel Mueller from Alive Together: New and Selected Poems

Three Essences of Hope