Getting to the Source of our Difficulties

As an essence therapist I aim to help my clients to live more freely and discover their aims in life more easily. But this is not so easily achieved. The source of our problems lies further back in our lives than we may be aware. If we can get to that source the essences can cleanse and purify it, but we may have to go back as far as our client's conception to manage this.

It helps me to think of this world as a plane of activity. Enduring souls incarnate upon it in order to discover and develop their talents. This brings them satisfaction and contributes to the evolving universe. The universe itself seems to be guided by its own mega spirit which interfaces with our own and provides guidance as needed - and requested: we maintain many degrees of freedom at all times.

These souls of ours incarnate to a mother who introduces us to this challenging world and starts signalling to us by her thoughts and actions even before she is aware of our existence. We forget where we have come from (a place, apparently, of love where personal development happens in a different way or not at all) and are agog to learn what this world has to offer us. Even in the womb babies are exceptional learners with an emotional intelligence which is frequently unappreciated.

If all goes well the baby grows from conception to birth having absorbed a surprising amount of knowledge about its family circumstances and emerges hungry for more.

However all often does not go well and the baby, to survive at all, may have to absorb knocks which are so severe that on occasion it cannot deal with them and has to bury them very deep so that it can continue to grow. The price it pays for this ring fencing of trauma is to lose energy which should otherwise keep it connected to universal spirit: the life force, chi or prana.

At an extreme the trauma the baby experiences is that of not being wanted at all. Sometimes, for many different reasons, the mother signals by her thoughts to the baby that she does not want it, and the baby, coming from a place of love and with expectations of reciprocated love, is devastated.

The outcome is complex: negative emotions are generated which play out sometimes for the rest of the person's life. Anger and hatred - the polar opposites of love - arise. Huge grief is experienced. The baby is unable to love or cherish itself as it has received the message that it is unlovable, and it develops a sense of worthlessness, of the lowest possible self esteem. And immediately it senses that it must depend on itself to control its environment, rather than the natural carers provided by providence. But of course it is a baby, and naturally is unable to control its environment. This need to control persists, but so does the inability to control.

The therapist can measure the strength of these negative emotions intuitively and work on them individually. Or he or she can choose to short circuit the process by selecting essences which directly impact on the vital energy of the person.

I am a dowser and dowsing is how I get at my intuition. Using my dowsing pendulum I can calibrate the strength of negative emotions and assign a value to them. I use a scale of 6, with 1 the lowest (least negative) and 6/6 the most extreme. This is the scale used by the MYMOP self assessment system. A step change from, say, 6 to 5 in a symptom can be noticed by the individual and used to denote a significant change.

This way of thinking about deep issues of unwellness did not occur to me overnight, but evolved over several years. At first I was sceptical of these dowsing indications. It was not until I found that I had experienced these kinds of difficulty in my own earliest childhood that I gained the confidence to build on my results.

Later I found Neide Margonari of the essence making company Florais de St Germain in Brazil writing about the exact same difficulty. She had developed a composite essence to help alleviate the problem. It is called Formula Leucantha, and I almost always use it to balance the energy of a person who felt unloved and unwanted by the mother in their earliest childhood. If the child experienced being unwanted by the father then Red Helmet Orchid from the Bush essences or Baby Blue Eyes from the Flower Essence Society seem able to assuage that difficulty. (Florais de St Germain essences are distributed in the UK by Sol Carneiro).

The role of the mother goes beyond the physical conception and birthing of the child. She introduces him to a strange new world refracted through her own unique experience of it. We all learn from the mother, and the difficult stuff is a necessary part of the learning package. Without the full spectrum of experience we are delivered to this world incomplete, unable to fully function within it. Hence the mother is naturally revered and protected even when she seems to be too much the bearer of bad news. The father's role is, of course, crucial too. Without his presence or support we are weakened as players.

Recently I have discovered the writing of the late Frank Lake, a counsellor who helped to develop residential workshops in which participants were able to safely regress to their prenatal roots and understand 'that they were actually and accurately in touch with their own foetal sensations and feelings'. Lake reported, from many hundreds of regression sessions, on the fact of some conceptions being ideal - 'there is such a sense of tenderness and love coming and going' - and then dissects the coping response of the foetus when it has lost hope of the ideal. This is varied, Lake wrote, but is typically characterised by a desire not to retaliate against the mother. The difficulties are 'loaded up in the foetus' own body structures' and repressed rather than 'fired back at the placenta/mother'. Sometimes, it seems, the stronger foetuses in conjunction with the more inadequate mothers decide from the beginning to act in the role of therapists, attempting to do all within their power to ensure that the mother is spared distress. This can become a life-long burden.

As I said earlier, the repressions which occur at this early stage can inhibit satisfactory growth. At the least they act as a continuing source of weakness. The individual is often denied his full potential in life. The essences have a remarkable ability to ease these blockages. Formula Leucantha, Red Helmet Orchid or Baby Blue Eyes may ease the initial shock of being unwanted, and other essences act to soften the negative emotions which arise from the very beginning of life and are too intense to grow out of.

Thus anger and hatred can be alleviated by Dr Bach's Holly, or Dagger Hakea and Mountain Devil from the Australian Bush. I frequently turn to Urchin, Forsythia or Orange Honeysuckle from Pacific Essences. The need to control can be assuaged by Green Bells of Ireland from the Flower Essence Society of California (FES), followed up by Poison Hemlock or Sea Palm from Pacific.

Inevitably fear and anxiety are encountered. Dr Bach's Aspen, Mimulus or Rock Rose can be deployed here. I find myself turning to FES Sweet Pea, perhaps followed up by Wolf from the Wild Earth Animal Essences at a subsequent session. Grief is often detected as a deep, underlying emotional state. A composite essence from Wild Earth called Grieving Heart is valuable in shifting this state. It is composed of Wild Horse, Hippopotamus and Gazelle. This might be followed by the Grieving combination from Flower Essences of Fox Mountain.

Another aspect of the emotions of the unwanted child is an inability to love himself. If he does not experience love in the beginning then the 'script' he works from denies him present love. He does not understand love and is unable to extend it to himself or others. Formula Leucantha does a lot to enable this. The combination called Loved & Welcomed from Fox Mountain is an excellent follow-up remedy. Furthermore the child and adult almost always suffer from a related, corrosive state, an absence of self-esteem. Low self-esteem can be countered by Vanilla Leaf and Indian Pipe from Pacific Essences, and by Dr Bach's Larch.

These emotional states, when untreated, deplete the individual's life energy on an ongoing basis. At transition times such as puberty, adulthood and the menopause they can break out and manifest in severe forms of mental or physical ill health including, most obviously, the various kinds of depression. The gift of the vibrational essences is to gentle and disperse these difficult emotions and enable us to reconnect with life and our natural energy so that love can prevail as it always should.         

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Neide Margonari's Florais de St Germain: UK distributor Sol Carneiro at landofreiki.co.uk

Frank Lake's book Mutual Caring