Bach Flowers for activists 2

Don’t be put off of reading these posts if you don’t consider yourself an activist and just want to learn about herbs and gardens. It’s all relevant.

Just by accessing this website, you are learning how to grow food, save power, make remedies, and treat minor health issues, all without much recourse to the inttitutions that are causing all of our problems. Every dollar you keep out of the hands of the big companies is a form of activism.

This is the second post in a brief series about self care and health support for those involved in activism. Whether it’s climate campaigning, poverty alleviation, anti-fascism work, or work about any kind of injustice or oppression you may identify with, we all need a little support.

As you may have seen in the last post, the Bach and other Flower Essences can be a great support in these times. There are many other kinds of flower essences out there but I’m writing mostly about the Bach Essences because I’m very familiar with them.

The previous post covered essences that I think are most suitable in the lead up to or during an action. This one will be more about those that can affect how we better chose our tasks.

This post’s essences are-

Wild Oat

Wild Oats may help us to align better with our true calling. If you’re like me, you may have drifted from job to job, interest to interest, and action to action without really finding a home. Some of these activities may have helped you feel partially connected or even brought great satisfaction for a while, but that always faded.

Wild Oat helped me to refine what I was doing as a gardener and casual herbalist into a career dedicated to herbalism and healing. More recently, it has helped me take advantage of recent offers and challenges in various areas and focus my energy, for a while, on going back to university to undergo a graduate diploma in counselling. Wild Oat has helped me find my calling. It is a calling that people have been telling me about for decades, but I just couldn’t connect with it. Wild Oat has helped me to be settled in this thinking.

I’ve heard of some surprisingly powerful realisations coming to people after just a single dose and a good sleep. Wild Oats are that potent.

Chestnut Bud.

Have you ever found yourself getting the same difficulties over and over again? Getting involved in online arguments that go nowhere, getting drained by attending every protest, rally, or action? Getting involved in things and wondering ‘why am I really doing this’? Then doing it all over again.

Chestnut Bud is the Bach Remedy that is for people who keep making the same mistakes over and over. They may not learn each time, or may be so passionate about things that they just get involved in any way.

It’s also a remedy for activists who see people making the same mistakes and not learning from observing those experiences. We often get stuck in the same forms of protest and activism and just don’t see that they’re not achieving what we want them to.

Chestnut Bud, like Wild Oat, helps us align more clearly with our path. Both help us focus on it and bring us closer to why we really are here. Chestnut Bud helps us to realise that we are burning precious energy and causing ourselves all kinds of agitation when we don’t need to. Realising this, we can simplify, clarify, and act.

Maybe you do other things that are undermining your energy and resources. Whenever I became interested in a topic, I had a habit of buying several books on it all at once. Then I would absorb what I needed from one or two of them, and the books would lay silent, some of them even unread. Taking Chestnut Bud when starting a new venture or moving into a new field of interest has helped me save a LOT of money that way.

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Scleranthus

Do you get worked up wondering which option to take? Does the choice between two things make you anxious? Are you constantly switching between one option and another as the better, unable to decide? Scleranthus is for you.

Like the previous two essences mentioned in this post, Scleranthus clarifies things by helping us to move closer to our true calling. When we have two choices, logically, one will always seem better, but often, the second option is close or has a more emotional appeal. Neither may be perfect, causing us to vacillate between the two. Scleranthus helps us to decide what we already truly know inside of ourselves. It may help us make the best decision for ourselves, or it may even help us to realise that neither is suitable.

Cerato

Cerato is best suited for those who are constantly second-guessing themselves. It helps when we often make a choice that we suddenly wonder if it was the best move? It’s not about actually making a mistake – they’re integral and exciting parts of living and learning, it’s about making a choice, then wondering if it’s the best one. Over and over again.

Cerato also benefits those who don’t heed their own counsel and are constantly seeking advice from others. This remedy can align you better with your own intuition, helping you to follow it and, thus, your own counsel.

Heather

Heather is one of the remedies that I’ve found a new use, contemporary use for. It is usually recommended for when folks find themselves self obsessed – I like to think of the example of the kind of person you go on a date with who would talk only about themselves. The ‘oversharer’ fits under Heather’s umbrella, too. I get it a lot as a herbalist (the oversharing, not the dating side of it) – I sit down for a chat with folks and suddenly I’m hearing long, extremely detailed descriptions and questions about their health. Sometimes, I wish I had a little spritzer of Heather that I could give them a quick spray with! Of course, I understand their need – the medical system doesn’t listen, so they need an outlet, but sometimes, I just want to talk about the weather.

Heather is for the oversharers. Those who wear their hearts on their proverbial sleeves and need to tell people what they are thinking and feeling at every opportunity. That’s why I call Heather the ‘anti-facebook remedy’. Heather is especially suited in this social media age of quick posts and quicker responses. A world where people are constantly trying to validate them self with self obsessed pics themselves or even of their food and spraying every single thought they have out into the ether. Then only feel good when the likes and hearts come rolling in. If you think you are spending too much time online and getting too worked up, maybe Heather is for you?

It affects activists, too. You may see injustice online and want to share it, needing everyone to know how you felt about this issue. Heather isn’t for those who write long posts that are thought out, researched, and often rewritten many times. Rather its for those who are constantly posting or reposting things, almost without reflection.

Sharing ones ideas and even one’s pain is perfectly normal. As a communal species that has evolved by sharing, we need to do it. We it in order to be part of a healing community

When one is in a place where they have no ability to regulate this need, a person may find themselves sharing at every single perceived opportunity. They may share something that then opens the floodgates to a dumping of a whole lot more than they bargained for onto the poor listener. It may make the listener feel uncomfortable and may also embarrass the speaker. Heather helps us rein in this tendency. Sharing is great but when it becomes an overwhelming need, it can be detrimental. If you’re an activist involved in planning and organising, you will undoubtedly have come across that one participant who keeps turning the conversation to themselves and their needs or trauma dumping and draining the impetus out of the meeting. Heather is for them.

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Red Chestnut

Sensitivity to other’s suffering is one of the hallmarks of being a decent human being. It’s what radicalizes many of us and turns us into activists. However, it can become a negative trait when it becomes too exaggerated. It is hard to watch children starving in Gaza, and it is difficult to hear of deaths in the Sudan or Congo. Maybe we have friends caught in the horrorshow that is the current the US too. Naturally, we can become worried and concerned, but sometimes, that concern can become a huge drain on the energy that we need to live our own lives. Concern is a natural, positive thing and one that’s got us through many of the trials and tribulations we’ve experienced both in our daily lives and as a culture, but like many things it can take over.

Like any other emotion (I classify concern as an emotion, others many not), concern and worry for others can overwhelm us at times. If you’ve ever kept listening for a car to come up when your kid is out on a date or spent sleepless nights worrying about your partner’s health when all they have is a relatively minor illness, you have experienced some of the things that Red Chestnut can help with.

Laying awake night after night worrying about families in Gaza is something that, while it shows your humanity, doesn’t do you any good, It drains your energy and erodes your health. Red Chestnut doesn’t make us cold and indifferent. It brings us the understanding that there are times and places to do our work and that our energies are sometimes better conserved.

Red Chestnut can help refocus your energies and concerns and help you understand that there are some things that you should not spend every moment pouring the energy of worrying into. It helps you understand that while there are things that we can do, that, this, right now, isn’t helping and that your energies are better conserved for other tasks.

It also helps us to understand that everyone has their own path. Whether through divine guidance or personal choice, we all have to follow our own path and that we can’t be responsible for all of the choices and actions of others. If we take that responsibility on ourselves, we smother them and their opportunities for growth at the expense of ourselves.

I think this set of remedies can help us clarify our thinking, easy our energy use while still remaining true to our hearts and make it easier to maintain our efforts as activists without getting stuck in areas that may not be right for us.

I hope youre enjoying this little series. I think its time to prepare ourselves for more challenging times but not in the prepper way. If we look at and are honest with ourselves we can make greater , more efficient changes where the world needs. Flower Essences help us with this. Next in this series, I’ll address the sadder side of activism with the remedies that can help us with grief, sadness, and disappointment.

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