The Flowers of Aeskulap – Flower Essences & Therapeutic Touch

I have been using flower essences since 1985.   In 2003-2004, I completed the certification process with the Flower Essence Society.  Yet I had been feeling the need  ‘to drink from the source’ again to receive fresh inspiration,  so  I decided  in 2019  to participate in the Professional Course at Terra Flora. 

One day during that course I asked Patricia about a problem I had been experiencing in regards to which  I felt that  I wasn’t able to get to the root.

I had always felt and observed a general hastiness in my movements. It seemed to permeate everything I did. The way I experienced it was as if I were unable to direct my movements from  a centre that was in charge, and to keep everything in  perspective and overview. I always felt as if I were drawn, pulled into the particular components of my activities, unable to coordinate from this place of overview that I was searching for but which kept eluding me. It was like I was pulled in haste to the cutting board when preparing a meal, pulled to the pen in the bottom of my purse, pulled to get the item in the drawer, hastily rushing forward into the activity, rather than seeing the complete activity from a centre, and taking care of the the various components from this centre.

For example when preparing a meal, I would find it hard to think of what I needed (overview!), assemble all the tools and ingredients, and then start working. Instead, rush pulled me to the carrots first, the cutting board  later.  It meant also that I was often going to the next part of the activity, having completed only 80% of the previous one.  I had tried many essences  to remedy this ‘feature’, which seemed to harbor components of  hastiness, scatteredness, greediness, lack of will power to bring part of an action to a finish, lack of  overview and control, plus something else I couldn’t define. There was something that just eluded me. I didn’t know what it was or where it came from.

 

So, I asked Patricia! She spontaneously thought of Impatiens, but wanted to take some time and intuit it more deeply.  The next day she confirmed her choice.

 Impatiens? That sounded too simple.  I had certainly used Impatiens in the years when I first encountered the Bach Flower essences in 1985.  But I didn’t consider myself impatient, I considered myself hasty. I have gone through long, drawn-out illnesses in my life, other longstanding difficulties, and while the years seemed long and I dearly wanted things to come to a solution, I didn’t experience impatience as my major problem. Also, while I tend to speak fast (Cosmos  essence didn’t really help with that), I do think slowly. When I see clients,  I take time listening to them, and the big picture emerges.  There I am able to reach the much coveted overview.

When driving, I might get impatient with the drivers in front of me  – ‘Why doesn’t this guy just move!’ –  or I  might not. It was as if I had a choice.  I could let the impatience take over or just put it to rest. Another reason why I didn’t consider impatience to be my problem or Impatiens to be the remedy.

In any case, after starting to use Canyon Dudleya http://www.fesflowers.com/canyon-dudleya-balancing-fire-and-water-elements-finding-joy-simplicity for the first time during that course – as I understood from Patricia’s description during class that it had more to offer to than what I had gleaned from the Repertory – and noticing a clear effect on my excitableness,  I decided to add Impatiens.

In the room at Terra Flora where participants could go and prepare essence combinations, I happened to see the FES Impatiens. It was the last bottle at the bottom of the last box in the lay-out. 

I thought, I will try this one! I am here now in California, I will try California Impatiens rather than the English Impatiens from Healing Herbs.

Within a few days of using it, I  felt distinctly how my movements were slowing down. The hastiness seemed to seep out of them, sometimes very noticeably, sometimes less so.

I kept taking the Californian Impatiens glandulifera for more than four months, from July till about November 2019.

During that time I observed a variety of effects, in varying degrees of intensity, some of which I will try to  capture below.

 

I started to move more slowly

 

One change I noticed was that I  would move  my hands and arms more slowly when I was doing things.  Also, when I would need to get up from a chair to get something from another room, I wouldn’t zoom up and forward to go get it, but just walk over without extra speed, sometimes downright slowly!

The feeling of being at the hub of the wheel and steering things from a centred perspective was not necessarily there, but I didn’t rush into things with my motions. I was not sucked towards the objects in the same manner as before.

 

Time lost its capacity to exert pressure on me

Then I noticed that time seemed to lose its capacity to exert pressure on me.  For example, there would be multiple things I needed to get done.   I had a list, either in my mind or on paper.  Yes, there were these things to do.  I somehow  just went about doing them!  The feeling ‘Oh my god, I have a, b, c, d to do, is there going to be enough time for everything?’  was not present.  The list of things to do did not exert time pressure on me.

For me, this was a key experience.

 

Time seemed to move at different speeds, expanding  and contracting

Another thing I noticed at some point was that I would look at my watch, thinking e.g. it must be 3:30 pm, but  it was only 2:30 PM. Or I thought: 20 minutes must have passed, but the clock only indicated 10 minutes!

Things like this kept happening.   I might be expecting a client to arrive in 20 minutes, I still had all kinds of things to get ready beforehand and I would feel, Oh, no problem, I still have 20 minutes!

I remember another experience  where one day  I had to get from a place in Ottawa West to a place 10-15 minutes even further west to vacuum my car, then go back downtown for a doctor’s appointment, all within one hour. Ottawa is certainly no metropolis, but the timing was  I really go and vacuum my car or wait and do it another time? I went, and somehow I was at the doctor’s office within 45 minutes! I still don’t understand how that was possible. Often I asked myself, where is all this time coming from?

 

I became more punctual

Another thing I noticed that since taking Impatiens  that I became  punctual. I  was not  late anymore. I was not someone to be very late habitually, but often just a little late, or I would arrive last minute.   Now I was always  few minutes early, and I rarely felt rushed when I have to go somewhere.

 

This is something enormously profound.  People that are habitually late have a very difficult time being on time, no matter how hard they try. There is always something at work that interferes with their time consciousness and intentions.  I knew that from my own experience too.

Impatiens was working wonders.

 

A healing crisis

Two and a half months into taking  the Californian Impatiens, I had the following experience which I noted in my  ‘Time Diary’ on September 11, 2019:

 

“Yesterday everything felt just like it used to be in the past. I looked at my to-do list and thought, How am I going to finish all this, there is not enough time! I have a transcript to write, my Turkish lesson to do, I still need to go through my financial statements, do some personal  study, sort out emails, to get ready for client meetings….! I felt everything pressing in on me from all sides and time running away. And whenever I looked at my watch, it was later than I had thought. Where was this wonderful calm state where I could look at all the things I had to do, and time could pressure me not? It was gone!”

This was the total opposite of my previous experience. I experienced an inward tenseness when it came to time which had a hue of panic.

Time was in control, not I, or at least a certain guise of time was in control.

 

Yet I knew that the problem wasn’t with the items on my to-do list. It was elsewhere. But where?

I was not sure what all this meant. Was I, after taking  Impatiens for 10 weeks, experiencing the R 3 state of the 4 R’s, namely ‘Reaction, Resistance and Reconciliation’ (see also Patricia Kaminski’s article http://The four levels of flower essence response, http://flowersociety.org/4Rs.htm)  where it feels that everything is back to square one ? Or had I been reaching another level of my ‘natural’ haste and hurriedness, and really needed a different essence? I had recently read more on Ocotillo and wondered whether it was this essence I now needed. I really did not know.

I asked a long-term friend to dowse this question for me (the same one who tested the Rock Water as described in my older article on Rock Water) and the answer she received was that I was experiencing the 3^rd R state of the ‘Four R’s’.

So, I continued taking Impatiens, and within a few days I was back to the state where I would look again at all the same to-do items on my list and feel: “Yes, I need to do those things. I will get to them.”

There were even moments when I thought: ‘There are a number of things I have to do, what were they again? Let me check on my list.’

This experience was a revelation for me.  I had experienced the ‘out of order’ state of my relationship  to time returning in its crass essence; I could feel time doing something to me, pushing me rushing me, and being  powerless in the face of it.  Then, a few days later, I found myself in exactly the same  life circumstance,  and time couldn’t ‘do its thing’ on me.

What an experience of polarity, all within one week!

 

As the Flower Essence Repertory explains, flower essences don’t work through the Law of Similars like  Homeopathy, nor through the Law of Opposites as allopathic drugs. They work through the Principle of Polarity.  

 

The same polarities can be seen in the plant itself

Like with all plants, this polarity can also be observed in the form and growth patterns of the Impatiens plant:

Impatiens glandulifera has shallow roots. It doesn’t take time to settle and put roots down. There is none of  the staying power of Chicory, which is almost impossible to uproot; Impatiens can be pulled out easily.  It is considered an invasive species because it pushes other plants aside. ‘Just get out of my way.’  It grows fast, in its main growing season it is said to grow up to an inch a day.  The growth lines on the stem are straight and sinewy; there is no meandering around.  The leaves are pointed and lanceolate, sharp like lances or spears.  And the bullet-like seeds – the ripe seed pods will split open when touched and send out the seed bullets. I have played with the Spotted Touch-me-not which grows here in the area and watched the seeds splatter. (The above description is heavily inspired by Julian Barnard’s book “ Bach Flower Remedies – Form & Function.”)

Yet the flowers of Impatiens glandulifera are pink-white, with a shape that is complex and intricate compared to the straight-forward growth of the stem and leaves, invaginated, open to the world and to the insects crawling into them.  The flower heads, gently swaying on the stem on their small stalks (peduncle), don’t trap the insects like some plants do but allow them to crawl in and out.

Here we see the balance of polarities so typical for the plant world.  The upward pressuring rush and ill temper of most of the plant are balanced by gentleness, sensitivity and pink-white colour and intriguing design of the blossoms.

 

One thing I would like to mention is that while I was taking Impatiens, I happened to be contacted by someone who was also using Bach Flower Essences.  She used HealingHerbs Impatiens and  had tried the Californian Impatiens after I shared some of my experiences with her. From both our observation I would say that the English Impatiens helps more – or more quickly – with feelings of irritation and  impatience, whereas the Californian Impatiens seems to work more on the experience of time itself. I noticed for example that even after taking Impatiens for a month or two, I  was still not mentally particularly gentle with other drivers on the road etc. This surprised me at the time because I would have suspected otherwise.  After about three months I noticed that somewhere along the way this  had changed, too.  My conclusion is that the Californian variety does help to come to greater gentleness and patience, but these effects show up later.

 

What is the the nature of Time?

Yet, to come back to the experiences re the nature of time and the experience of in September, I kept wondering:  where exactly was the painful distortion in the my experience of time?  Was it in my soul, in how my soul could enter the flow of time?  Or was the problem with Time itself, and did I experience  one of the many faces of time, a destructive and negative one?

It was almost as if I were shown different guises of time. This  leads me back to the question what  that we call time really is.

This is a question I have lived with for many years. Through experience and reflection I have arrived at the understanding  that time is  a mysterious ‘something’ which can change it appearance, guise, qualities and move through us and our life streams in different ways  at different moments.

 

 Time runs away – then stops running

To illustrate this, I will briefly insert another experience I had recently which did not involve Impatiens but  a different essence, Green Cross Gentian. There were a few days in December 2019 where I had felt acutely that time was slipping though my fingers, running away from me.  I had a quite a bit of work to do, was trying to get it done, and somehow it was always later than I thought it was. It was not that I  was idling or  being distracted. Somehow everything I did took more time than it should have; I had the unpleasant feeling that I was chasing after time, it was running away from me and I just couldn’t catch up. On this occasion I suspected a particular influence of a more psychic or spiritual nature directed at my home.  This is not the place to go into the details of it,  but the essence that I needed to deal with this influence ( the fact that is was stealing time from me was just one side effect)  was Green Cross Gentian. https://www.fesflowers.com/green-cross-gentian-flower-essence-gives-us-strength-faith-to-meet-the-challenges-of-our-time/Green Cross Gentian is an essence I have been finding  very helpful when people are carrying energies or karma linked to the planet as a whole.  I decided to spray Green Cross Gentian in every room of my home, and within one hour time wasn’t slipping through my fingers anymore.

It was remarkable.

The more I observe, the more I am certain that time can expand, contract, accelerate, slow down, stand still, disappear, that it has its own tread and velocity. In a talk I recently attended, the presenter described Time as the sculptor of our lives.  She described how certain experiences can get locked into time: when we have suffered trauma for example, the past intrudes into the present and assumes a presence that doesn’t rightfully belong to it, almost like a tenant one cannot evict.

I have long wondered: what exactly is Time?  There are no quick answers (no pun intended). Phrases  like ‘time doesn’t exist’, or ‘time is relative’, or ‘ the past doesn’t exist’, don’t really  have much substance.  Nor is time this thing we try to measure with our clocks that has sixty seconds a minute and is always constant. That is at best the corpse of time. Corpses are real too in their way, but only as corpses. To think that something that is living and flexible can be caught, apprehended, comprehended with something as fixed as clockwork is illusory.

 

Time has so many aspects! It is cyclical, periodical, it has rhythm. Time brings a lot of repetition, yet new things that haven’t existed before enter into these cycles. The year always has the same four seasons, yet every year brings something new is different.  Time can also come from the future. Sometimes we have dreams in the now that bring in an element from the future.

Maybe the essence of Time is more akin to way a plant grows through time, rather than to the movement of the hands of a clock.

What would a plant be without time? What would wine be without time? What would music be without time?

 

Chronos and Kairos

I don’t have the answer,  I have my observations, experiences,  my thoughts and questions, and of course, time to continue living with this question! The Greeks had two words for time that I am aware of: Chronos and Kairos. Chronos is the basis of chronology, of measurable time.  Kairos is difficult to define, exactly because it isn’t finite and measurable.  Here  is an excerpt I  found on Wikipedia:

“Kairos has classically been defined as a concept that focused on “‘the uniquely timely, the spontaneous, the radically particular.'”^[10] Ancient Pythagoreans thought Kairos to be one of the most fundamental laws of the universe. Kairos was said to piece together the dualistic ways of the entire universe. Empedocles was the philosopher who connected kairos to the principle of opposites and harmony.”

In biblical terminology,  Kairos was thought of as the quality of the right moment. Older cosmologies speak of deities ruling or representing time (e.g., Chronos, Saturn, Father Time, to name a few).

Kairos eludes the neat little blocks of experience that our modern minds crave. Yet our modern mind is just  few hundred years old at the most, a drop in the Ocean of Time.

 

And then there is the power of plants to alter the disharmonies we can feel in regards to time. How come a plant has the ability to do this? What did the Impatiens essence do for me?  Did it bring the way  time lives in me in synch /synchronicity with the way Time actually exists?

I  believe this was part of its action.

 

Thank you, Patricia for bringing me the gift of Impatiens.