All too often, as a therapist, I sit down with clients, listen to their stories, and readily identify a number of essences that match the negative moods or the positive aspirations that they are engaged with at the moment. Essences are combined in a dosage bottle and handed over and, a few weeks later, the person returns to the consulting room – and nothing seems to have happened!
Working at depth
Essences work at depth rather than on superficial symptoms and yet, as patients, we are used to reporting the symptoms – this backache, or that headache. Unless the therapist can go below the surface and identify the true negative emotions or mental states which are giving rise to the symptoms there is every possibility that essences will be selected which fall short of our aspirations. If the client is in a steady state of despondency she may be so used to that condition that she fails to report it. If the therapist also misses that state then he or she may not select a despondency remedy – Dr Bach’s Gentian remedy comes to mind – and so the client, still bowed down by her despondency, returns with her bad back for the next session. I am not saying that Gentian is the cure for a bad back, but it does help to shift despondency, and if despondency and the bad back are intimately connected then Gentian may well be the answer, or at least a part of it.
Resistance and blockages
Sometimes the trouble lies in the resistance that the other has built up. A lot of the difficulties that draw us to trying essences have occurred early on in life, so early on indeed that we may have repressed those difficulties and then forgotten that they ever happened. Sigmund Freud recognised the resistance more than a hundred years ago and gave it its due importance. Some essences help to dissolve resistance, and thus enable other essences to do their good work.
And those difficulties I mentioned do need to be looked at before healing can occur: they create blockages which deplete our energy until they are cleared. I am talking not only about early abuse and ill treatment, but about less obvious difficulties such as parental constraint or marital break-up or uncertainty for the young child. If these problems can be eased then a major barrier to healing is removed.
One difficulty which afflicts many of us is that of not being wanted by our parents and, as you may imagine, it runs deep. If the mother conveys to the foetus in the womb that it is not wanted that message can be understood by the unborn child and can be devastating. It is buried in the subconscious and a lot of life energy (prana, chi) is used up in the process. If this trauma is identified and essences are used to release it, energy invariably improves dramatically.
Mental health issues
Depression and other mental disorders are often either not recognised or not acknowledged by us or our clients, but they also tie up a lot of life energy which could be better used for healing. There is no cure among the essences for bipolar disorder, but this and other difficulties have mental and emotional components which, when addressed by the essences, can bring some welcome relief and help us to become well again.
These are some of the reasons why listening to the complaints and aspirations of clients and selecting essences to help resolve them may not be enough. Intuition is our best friend in probing deeper, to arrive at the underlying causes of our difficulties.