This is a post about how to nurture your own activism in these tense times. Whether it is purposeful gardening, focused non violence, local protests, letter writing or engaging on social media. All of that stuff can get to us.
This is one of a short series about supporting ourselves and our communities when facing any of the many injustices in the world that we are seeing at the moment. Even if you’re a part time activist for whatever cause stirs your heart or if you don’t consider yourself an activist and are just overwhelmed by the energies in the world at present, these posts will help.
This post is written from personal experience of the healing nature of Bach Flower Essences as support for my own activism and I hope it resonates with you. There are other Flower Essences available – the field of research and application of floral energies has expanded a lot since Bach’s days. His time researching these essences was brief, he died young after a stellar career in medicine, and had only started working with his essences towards the end of his life.
We know that the essences are great for activists because the industrial medical system reckons they don’t work! 😁
What are the Bach Flower Essences
I’ll call them BFR to save me a lot of typing!
BFR are remedies made by capturing the healing energies of certain flowers in pure water and through the mechanisms of either exposure to sunlight or boiling. They are not a herbal remedy in the traditional sense because they contain no trace of the active components of the flowers (though the TGA in Oz insist that there must be SOME trace, so manufacturers must now list the flower by name and an amount in nanograms of that flower included in the bottle.
You need no qualification to use or prescribe the remedies. You just can’t get it wrong because, like Tissue Salts, if you get the wrong one, precisely nothing happens.
The BFR are used for immediate emotional states and work by not counteracting them head on or suppressing them but by helping the positive nature of the person to shine through that emotion. With more experience and study, you can become more astute about which remedies are appropriate and even use them for longer term negative states.
A great example is Beech. – Maybe you are a very critical person, often criticising family members for their actions. That doesn’t necessarily mean that you want to control or dominate them, it often means that you want to see them succeed in what they are doing, to grow and develop but they’re not doing so in the way that you see is right. The flower essence Beech encourages that feeling of love and wanting people to succeed but refocuses it on the love component of what you are feeling and helps you understand that others have their own paths of growth and development and allows you to let them follow that. You may find yourself taking a much more gentle, nurturing approach. You can still be critical but in a much more positive, nurturing way. I know this to be true because it is the very effect that Beech has had with me.
I’ll address the biggest hurdle to using flower essences- the price
I’ll be the first to admit that the upfront cost of a bottle of one of the Bach essences is quite high. It might seem to be too much and I used to think so myself while I was searching for the cheapest, easily available remedies that I could help people with as a community herbalist. At $33-38 AUD depending on where you buy them from, a 20ml bottle may seem beyond our reach.
But…if you consider that, from that little brown bottle, you need only 2 drops in a glass or small bottle of water and, sipped slowly, that is enough for a whole day. In fact, depending on the exact size of the drop, you can have 400+ drops from a 20 ml bottle. At 2 drops a day (minimum) , that’s 6 months worth of remedy! If you find yourself extra sensitive, you can even make a small bottle as mentioned above and take 2 drops of that and put it in another bottle to use and store the original.
The other option is to identify a few key issues that your group or community have in common and purchase a collective bottle between you. This is especially appropriate for Rescue Remedy.
The remedies are traditionally preserved by adding 25% by volume of brandy to the water containing the flower’s essence. Even though you only use 2 highly diluted drops of the BFR, that can be too much for people who abstain completely from alcohol for whatever reason. A solution is to put the 2 drops into warm to very warm water and let the alcohol evaporate. There will, technically, still be the teeniest, tiniest trace of alcohol left (it doesn’t all evaporate), and that seems to satisfy most people. If you make your own remedies, you can skip the alcohol entirely if you want, but the nature of water is that it will go off eventually.
BFR never ‘expires’, but the TGA insists on an expiry date for everything. That means that health food shops may have bottles that are almost expired, and they’ll sell them for cheap. They may even have bottles that have expired and will give them to you because they’re not allowed to sell them.
If you’re finding this information useful, share it with your community
Using the remedies
For the purposes of this post, the remedies are used to blance immediate emotional states that have slipped into negativity.
The first step is to acknowledge your immediate feelings and acknowledge that one or two are overwhelming you and putting you out of balance. The next step is to understand that no feeling is wrong. They’re all here to communicate the state of your body and mind to your consciousness so that you can make the changes required. You may feel a maelstrom of emotions draining you, but one or two will usually shine through.
Next, understand that the remedies don’t block, stop, or counteract anything.They work by allowing the good aspects of what is happening to shine through. Unfortunately, Anglish is a poor vehicle for expressing some of these subtleties so some folks use words like ‘fix’ and ‘cure’. The example of Beech is a good way to understand how they work.
Healing crisis – aggravating symptoms
Sometimes, too, the remedies will seem to make a feeling worse. They aren’t. They’re allowing you to see the issue with more clarity, giving you the opportunity to consciously work on it and seek more support.
Remedies for activists
I’ll list the remedies by their effects, not by the signs and symptoms. I believe that this will help you better connect with the one for you. Here we’re looking at relatively short term effects but the remedies can be used for much deeper, long term imbalances.
Walnut
Walnut is a wonderful, protective essence. We can use it when surrounded by negativity, when overwhelmed with information, or even when in pain because a loved one is suffering. It doesn’t block or numb the pain or its cause, nor does Walnut blind us to the reason we are in imbalance. Walnut allows us to step back a little and approach the issues in a more heart centred way. Yes, those issues are real and are affecting us and may be more than we think we can bear but if we refocus a little on our own health we can overcome them
Vervain
To myself and others I’ve read writings from, Vervain is THE remedy for modern times. How many times have you tried to sit quietly, meditate, or even have a chat with a friend only to find that your mind just won’t disengage from the day. Your thoughts keep buzzing. You are still planning, organising in your head. Vervain helps you to slow or even stop all that in order to give you space to rest and heal after a day’s activities.
Vervain is especially suitable for students or online activists, when writing or engagement becomes almost obsessive.
White Chestnut
Like Vervain, White Chestnut helps with an overactive mind. The difference is that while Vervain helps soothe the inflammation of daily mental chatter, White Chestnut helps us with intrusive, unwanted thoughts, especially cyclical ones. Have you ever woken at 3 am and found your mind filled with one or more thoughts that just wouldn’t go away, no matter which technique you used to calm your mind. These thoughts don’t have to be negative. Who hasn’t been a teenager in love, with a mind too full of thoughts for their romantic other?
You can see how this suits a mind that is engaged fully with activism, planning and strategy but needs rest.
Olive
Olive is a great restorer, of both body and spirit. As a herb, we can use it to restore our body and poor, overwrought nervous system. It is a preventative too, a strong antiviral. As I learn more about health and healing, I see little difference between the way we respond to physical viruses or to those composed of information that affect our mind.
As a flower essence, Olive can be used in any case of fatigue or exhaustion, things well known to any kind of activist. It’s especially useful when we have information overload, signified by a sluggish, slow mind.
Oak
Oak is an essence to be used when we need strength, whether physical or emotional. It is traditionally listed as being of benefit to people who are physically strong and engage in physical activities to the detriment of other aspects of life. It can be used though, to strengthen and prepare. It is so good at this that you can use it in your garden to give your new plants the vigour they need for good growth.
Star of Bethlehem /Rescue Remedy
These are for the after effects of shock and trauma. Whether these come from physical or emotional attack or just from the overwhelm that comes from being at a rally or protest or even from seeing some of the sick stuff that is part of contemporary news and media.
Star of Bethlehem is the traditional Bach Remedy for trauma, it helps us to put that trauma into perspective and helps us deal with it better. It doesn’t numb you or take away the significance of the trauma but helps us process it in a better way.
I include Star of Bethlehem and Rescue Remedy together because Star Of Bethlehem is the keystone essence in Rescue Remedy, which also included Mimulus, Impatiens, Cherry Plum, Rock Rose and Clematis. Rescue remedy can then be used in place of any of those essences if you don’t have them handy.
Trauma isn’t the event, it’s our body’s effort to deal with an event that overwhelms its capacity to cope in its regular manner. Often in these cases, the body must create entirely new coping mechanisms which then show up as ‘symptoms’.
I’ll write another post specifically about trauma later on.
Mimulus/Aspen
I include both of these together because they address two aspects of the fear we may experience, before or during an action or because of the potential for ongoing repercussions. Fear blocks the flow of our energies and can lead to not acting at a time when action is appropriate. Mimuls or Aspen don’t block the fear, they won’t suddenly make you fearless but instead, they help you to address the source of those fears in a manner that you can deal with.
There are many subtleties in between the two poles of fear that they represent but generally they can be divided as Apsen – for fears of uncertain origin and Miimulus – for fear of known origin.
You might have a bad feeling about an action or sense something going wrong but just can’t put your finger on it. Aspen will help you calm the negative effects of that fear. It won’t relieve you of its source but will settle your soul and help you to focus without the negative aspect of fear. Unknown fears can be more draining than something you can put your finger on because they engage much more of our nervous system.
At the other end of the spectrum, Mimulus can help us with things we know about. Maybe you are going to a rally but are afraid of any of the negative aspects of travelling on public transport. Mimulus can help you here by grounding you and easing that fear. Maybe you have a fear of crowds or are afraid of the possibility of violence. Mimulus will help ease the flow of your energy so that you can, if you find it appropriate, move on through it and take action.
Crab Apple
I find Crab Apple to be a handy remedy for activists, especially those coming from a place of economic poverty. As people demonised by the right wing of politics and the wealthy (and even those of slightly wealthier groups than us), we are often on the receiving end of negative messaging that portrays us as being a waste of resources, dirty, unwanted, that poverty is our fault. However strong we are, those messages, when repeated may stick.
As an activist, you will often be called names and given derogatory labels. Dehumanising the opposition is a tried and true weapon of colonialism and even has found itself used by every aspect of politics and activism. We’re conditioned to speak down to our opposition.
Crab Apple helps with the feeling that we’re unclean or dirty, that we’re wrong, any of those negative messages that stick (and different messages stick for different people). It helps us focus on the beauty that is in us and, for me, helps remind me that my activism is for a higher good.
Wild Rose
Wild Rose can help when we’re so overwhelmed that we give up. As the Wild Rose can climb over obstructions and show its floral beauty, this remedy helps us to realise that while we are, for the moment, so overwhelmed that we have retreated to a place of relative darkness, we can climb out and shine. That the moment of withdrawal is only temporary and good things still await. Even in the depths of Winter, Wild Roses rest, not completely asleep but changing their chemistry and getting ready for Spring.
Holly
Holly works with anger and jealousy. Anger is powerful, it is an emotion that can be positive or negative, constructive or destructive. It should be a temporary state but sometimes gets locked in.
Holly opens the heart and eases inappropriately locked in anger.
Combinations
The remedies can be combined for more complex issues, long term issues or as a preventative for potential emotional states. Generally, the maximum recommended number of remedies combined together is 5 but I’ve found through experience, 3 usually works fine. The more you use at once, the weaker the specific effect of each
Frequency, not quantity
Flower essences work energetically, pushing unbalanced energetic states in the direction of healing. Technically, there’s no actual active plant component in the remedy. Because of this, increasing the size of a dose doesn’t help and wastes the precious remedy. To get better results, increase the frequency of the doses. In an emergency situation, every 15 minutes is fine. For longer term imbalances, 3-4 times a day is needed. For chronic problems, 2 drops a day is all that is necessary.
That’s by no means a comprehensive coverage of how the Bach Remedies can help us as activists, just those that I’ve explored in depth through practical experience.
Other herb pages on Ligaya Garden
We cover a lot of ground on many herb related topics here on our website. There are whole pages devoted to different topics as well as frequent posts. Some of the links are –
