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? Moodiness, crying, disturbing dreams, social withdrawal, old memories surfacing, physical symptoms, (especially in the stomach, digestive systems, or headaches) and inability to focus on day to day work because you’re working through something.

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 addressing 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.

When emotional work shows up in your body

This is what catches people off guard. You started a flower essence for something emotional, and then your body started doing things. Tension you did not know you were holding shows up, moves around, or ramps up before it eases. Old aches shift. You get a headache, a wave of fatigue, a night of vivid dreams, a stretch of feeling wrung out. You came for the emotional work, and your body sent an invoice you were not expecting.

That does not mean you picked a bad essence. Because emotions and the body are so tightly wired together, a feeling that has been stored physically has to move through the body on its way out. So a flower essence working on the emotional level can absolutely produce physical sensations as that stored material discharges. People describe all sorts of it: a muscle that releases and then re-grips, digestive changes, restlessness, sighing or yawning, the odd wave of emotion from nowhere. It can feel like a lot, especially when you did not think the body was part of the deal. It is, and this is often what a healing crisis actually looks like for essence users: the emotional shift showing up as something physical.

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, Since there's nothing of the original plant substance in them, you are very unlikely to be allergic, intolerant, or otherwise harmed by essences. The dropper tops on our bottles are latex though, so that’s the one other physical factor that could be at play. If you have a latex allergy some customers have had mild reactions from the dropper tops. If that’s you, you can put an order note at checkout requesting latex-free and we will put a flat cap lid or latex free dropper depending on availability.

If it gets to be too much, the move is the same as always: ease off. Fewer, less-frequent doses, or a couple of days off to let things settle, then back in gently.

A quick word on dosing, because it trips people up. There is no "high dose" you get by gulping, you cannot suck down a whole bottle to make an essence stronger. What actually makes it stronger and faster is taking more doses: each sip of a dosed drink is a dose, so sipping more often through the day dials it up, and fewer, less-frequent sips dials it down. During a rough patch, dial down.

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. 

A few of our bioessences (Parasite Assassin, Detox Drops) do physical cleansing as well, so on top of the emotional side they can bring a more traditional detox or Herxheimer reaction, feeling worse before better as the body clears things out. The full playbook for that side (herx, pacing, binders, keeping your detox pathways open) is covered in detail in the Clean Sweep book — and if you ran Parasite Assassin, you already have it, it comes free with your order, so read it. The short version: go slow (the more run-down you are, the slower), back off the dosing any time it gets uncomfortable (you do not have to go turbo), and support your exit routes so what gets stirred up has somewhere to go (hydration, minerals, keeping elimination moving; Detox Drops supports open detox pathways). These cleansing bioessences are not for children under 2, and you want your pathways open and supported before you start.

How to Handle a Suspected Healing Crisis

1. Stop taking the essence if the suspected healing crisis symptoms do not subside it was not the essence triggering them. You need to consider other causes of your symptoms. We’ve had customers that have missed important physical causes of their symptoms because they were convinced it was the essence. Once they stopped taking the essence they realized the other causes and were able to get the medical attention they needed. It’s also important to note that a healing crisis presents as mild discomfort, never intense enough to warrant emergency medical attention. If you are experiencing that level of physical symptoms, seek medical care. It is unlikely to be the essence causing it and you need to figure out what is. 
2. Start back slowly if the suspected healing crisis symptoms do subside when you stop taking the essence it likely was a healing crisis. If you want to try that same essence again, start back slowly with a single drop of the essence straight in your mouth and then wait and observe any shifts. If that goes well without triggering a healing crisis you can increase your frequency of taking the essence by putting the typical 4 drops in a beverage but only taking a few sips for a limited period of time. If that goes well then you can increase the frequency of taking the essence by sipping on it throughout the day. 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 want to go for it and rip the bandaid off fast, then you do you. That’s not how we recommend handling a healing crisis but that is how some of our customers prefer to just press on through.
3. Switch if needed as we discussed above, sometimes an essence is just too much too fast for what you need. You may need to switch to another essence and work on supporting your system to be accepting of the shifts the essence that triggered the healing crisis brings. If you have Crisis Care on hand it’s a great essence to switch to for riding out a healing crisis. 

These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. Our products are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.

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