Pioneered by Dr. Edward Bach in the 1930’s, a flower essence is a liquid preparation imprinted with the etheric pattern of a particular flower. Like a homeopathic remedy, the liquid – usually spring water with a little brandy added for preservation – contains little or no detectable chemical substance of the flower delivery Greece from which it was made.
To understand flower essences (also called ‘flower remedies’), you can imagine that all things are made up of vibrating energies – modern physics and eastern mystics both confirm this – that there are no finite particles, but instead repeating, dynamic energy patterns.
Material objects are made up of huge amounts of energy really, as Einstein had shown with E=mc2, where the amount of energy (E) is equal to the mass (m) of an object times the speed of light (c – a very big number) squared.
Now picture a beautiful red rose – bright, colorful, vibrant – the Rose has a particular energetic pattern, one that is repeated in every other red Rose (though not exactly, but very close). There are energy frequencies that are particular to the red Rose that are different from all other flowers. The vibrations that make up a Rose are faster than many other flowers (Rose is considered a very high-vibration flower), and these vibrations are woven together in a particular way.
Now imagine any other flower – a Geranium for example – it’s vibrational patterns are different from the red Rose – slightly slower perhaps, and woven together in a different way. It is these vibrational patterns of each flower that give them their particular characteristics – color, shape, smell, texture, and the like.
Now, somewhat like a sound from one source can make a material across the room vibrate with sound energy (as your eardrum may vibrate from the plucking of a guitar), flowers can cause water to vibrate with a different sort of energy.
It’s not so much a sound, or even light (though this is closer), but ‘etheric’ energy – the very essence of the flower has a vibration that is imprinted upon the water in which it is placed. The water, being made up of vibrational energy itself, retains some of the vibration of the flower that was soaked in it.
This etheric imprint is stored in the water, and can actually be transferred from the water at a later time to other objects (or beings) also made of vibrational energy.
So, what does all this mean to us?! Well, Dr. Edward Bach held the notion that the source illness or disease was emotional in nature. And when one ponders what emotions really are, one can conclude that each emotion is a particular energetic state of being.
All emotions seem to have a particular energy – love, despair, anger, fear, appreciation – one can consider each of these a different energetic pattern. Dr. Bach considered negative energetic states, negative emotions, to be the source of disease in the body, a theory supported by much of the world’s healers. Dr.
Bach also thought that these energetic states can be transformed, and that one of the transformational methods he discovered was the use of the vibrational patters of flowers – it was then that Flower Essence Therapy was born.