Flower Essence Healing Crisis and How to Handle It

Healing crises are not the norm with essences, but can definitely happen.  If you are having a rough time since you started an essence, hopefully this will shed a little light.

First, let's remember that in the natural health world the "healing crisis" is always a good thing. It means the treatment is working, albeit a little too well. Many of you are familiar with cleansing, and how if you overdo it you get a range of nasty symptoms and it means you simply need to back off a bit and do a little less.

Essences are exactly the same, except you're cleaning out old hurts and things you've been hanging onto that aren't serving you well. It can be painful to see this stuff come to the surface and have your false fronts stripped away. If it gets too intense, then stop for a couple days, let things settle and try again with less frequent doses. The other option is to look at what you're taking and try a different approach with new essences, then come back to the troubling ones later when you're a little stronger.

You don't have to have a healing crisis for essences to do their job. I would say 95% of the time people don't experience anything negative. It's not really something you need to be watching out for, you simply need to be aware of the possibility so you don't get blindsided.

People are most likely to go through a healing crisis if they have blocked things out or have been coping in a detrimental way. Flower essences do tend to get us to face things that we don't like in ourselves or something that needs our attention rather than let you continue to suppress or ignore. If something of that sort is standing in your way of true healing, flower essences will have you facing it down.

So what does it feel like? I've documented moodiness, crying, disturbing dreams, social withdrawal, old memories surfacing, physical symptoms, (especially in the stomach, or digestive systems) and inability to focus on day to day work because you're working through something.

Because emotions and your body are so closely connected, emotional detoxing can cause a lot of physical shifts. It's important to remember that on a physical level, essences are two ingredients; brandy, and water. If you do not have a problem with either of those ingredients, you are not going to be allergic, intolerant or otherwise harmed by essences. 

Flower essences shine light on the truth and sometimes the truth hurts.

A seventy year old customer was on a blend long term and needed a refill. She mentioned that she'd just found out she has a half-sister. Knowing that she hadn't had a good relationship with her dad anyway, and now this comes along, I decided to add in some Sunflower. The next day she told me, "I don't think this Sunflower is right, I'm just not happy at all."

Happy all the time is unrealistic, even with flower essences, The goal is to react appropriately to whatever comes down the pike. Most of us get it backwards and suppress the big stuff and then overreact to the small things. We took the Sunflower out of the blend and she has it separately to take as soon as she feels like confronting the issue.

Sweet Cherry for me personally is always a feel good cry. It feels very "disarming," as in taking away whatever I'm using to defend myself against those who love me. (Chuckle). I can get a lot of walls up in a hurry. It's a broad spectrum negative emotions essence including fear and anger.

There are certain essences known to be potential crisis servers. Anything that delves into repressed stuff, or is a catalyst for change, means you may be in for an adventure. One of those is Black-eyed Susan.

Black-eyed Susan is a deeply cathartic essence with a long history of use in treating emotional amnesia, or those things you block out. Why put yourself through the unblocking? Because these events that never get processed can manifest in other ways like physical problems, or bad patterns in your life. For example, lots of kids grow up in abusive homes. The healthy ones deal and say "I'm NEVER going to hit my kids, and they turn out to be good parents in spite of what they knew. Others will grow up with that hurt and repeat the pattern with their own children. They probably they remember how it was, but have blocked out the feelings, the details of what it truly was like. The hurt never really went anywhere, they just shut off feeling. Black-eyed Susan is not one to play with, but when you need to get to the bottom of why you act the way you do, it's invaluable.

Some Notes on the Bioessences

These are a little different because you have the emotional healing crisis potential of the flowers, but also the potential for more traditional herx reactions as physical cleansing and healing takes place. Generally the sicker you are, the more you need to take things slow. If you are experiencing something really unwarranted and not a typical cleanse reaction, you need to look at the possibility of other medical issues unrelated to essence use. 

Remember, you are in charge of this process. If its gets too hard, you can quit. You'll have made progress, and you can take another run at it later. If you have some Crisis Care on hand and things get rough, use it. And if you wanna go for it and rip the bandaid off fast, then Godspeed my friends.