Through my many years of experience as a spiritual counselor and healer I have met numerous people with chronic illnesses who have been on long journeys of attempting to heal themselves. I have, on more than one occasion, been one of those people myself. Perhaps learning to heal yourself is part of the path of becoming a healer for others. I don’t know, but it does seem to help people when I can either share bits of my own experience or things I have learned helping others.
There are three things on my mind today about healing:
- The importance of believing you can heal.
- The ability to forgive yourself if you haven’t healed or if you blame yourself for your problems.
- Allowing yourself the best life you can despite physical hardships, differences, or disability.
As a healer you would think that my whole purpose is to help people heal completely and fully (and, to be honest, I certainly have felt that way much of my life). But on the healer path, you run into things that tell you that this is not always what it’s all about. I think of the desperate mother wanting me and Paul to help her infant son grow the large part of his brain that he was born without. (We didn’t say yes to that.) Or the many people who want to make their gay child not be gay. Or to have their otherwise wonderful child not be . . . any number of things. Autistic and highly sensitive traits were probably the most common ones people wanted us to heal, but you’d be surprised at how often we were guided to redirect the session another way when requests like these came up. At a certain point I realized that true healing often requires loving yourself and figuring out how to love and support your loved ones to thrive as they are, warts and all.
This should probably be a book and not a blog post. But let’s talk about the three topics from the point of view of flower essences that can help.
Believing In Yourself
Whether we’re talking about a physical illness, an emotional problem, or a major life issue of any sort, if you think you can’t heal or that you’re not up to the task, you’re acting from a place of defeat before you even start. Maybe you even think that there is something broken in you. But if you have even a glimmer of a thought that maybe you could improve your life if you could only get past this belief, then consider giving one or more of the following flower essences a try:
Gorse: when you’ve been through a lot of disappointment or failure and have been giving up, Gorse can help you accept the life experiences you have had thus far and gather the faith to face a new day with a more positive mental attitude.
Self-Heal: when your faith in your ability to heal has been rocked to the core, Self-Heal can rally your inner healing forces and bring back an inner feeling of well-being to help you feel more up to the task.
Self-Forgiveness
If you grew up in a family like mine, you may have been taught to feel like anything that goes wrong in your life is your own damn fault. “That’s what you get for . . . blah, blah, blah.” And there are certainly New Age health gurus who say things like “your body believes everything you say. Have you been having negative thoughts?” Well, so what? The best thing a spiritual counselor ever said to me was “Anybody who had been through what you’ve been through would have the same struggles.” He wanted me to say that to myself, to have compassion for the frightened little girl who became sick through worry and then was shamed into blaming myself for having that experience. And guess what? Taking on that suggestion healed a chronic illness I had worked on in multiple ways but still had for 20 years! It went away that very night and whenever the symptoms threatened to return I repeated that same affirmation and the symptoms would disappear again. Eventually, they didn’t return.
Since then I was exposed to healing modalities that work with energy meridians and acupressure points where forgiving yourself while tapping those points is used when an emotional problem doesn’t otherwise resolve. Forgiving yourself helps you let go of the past (including actual mistakes you may have made). And that can be the key to opening the door to a more positive way of approaching things in the future. A flower essence that might help?
Pine: When you constantly blame or criticize yourself for things that have gone wrong, Pine can help you forgive and find compassion for yourself. It helps interrupt the habit of thinking you are worthless or irredeemable or that nothing you do amounts to any good. It helps you accept what has happened, forgive yourself, and feel freed to move forward despite past mistakes.
Accepting What Can’t Be Changed and Living the Best Life You Can Anyway
Some things can’t be fixed. Disasters happen and things are forever changed. And sometimes the things you were taught to want to change are natural to who you are and are best accepted and worked with instead of fighting against it. And, finally, some of the traits we were taught to think of as deficits in ourselves can even be a matter of cultural indoctrination. Gay people and people of color know what I mean but there are even cultural biases when it comes to traits like introversion and sensitivity.
I found that out when I had the opportunity to travel to China for the Fourth World Conference for Women in Beijing in 1995. At the time I was having challenges related to being a sensitive and increasingly psychically open human being and I was thinking there was something seriously wrong with me. Even though I had been a sensitive and introverted person my whole life, this was not an appreciated quality in the family and cultural circumstances I grew up in. But when I was in China I learned that people like me were the most revered people in their society. That was a shocking eye-opener and one of the major turning points in my life as I started to think of my “disability” not as a curse but something to be nurtured and worked with in more effective ways.
So how do we learn to accept and work more effectively with our physical and emotional challenges and disabilities? After you’ve worked with forgiving yourself, you might consider forgiving others others who hurt you or, at least, the universe, God, the fates, however you want to describe it, for you having had this experience. Forgiving it, as I said above, so you can move forward into a future less weighted down by negative thought patterns based in the past. I’m not an expert at this so I’m asking my inner guidance for suggestions for flower essences to lead the way:
Holly: Well, that makes sense. Holly is a heart-healer. It helps people forgive and find compassion for themselves and others when they feel cut off from love and are stuck in a cycle of anger, jealousy, hate, or paranoia.
Then there’s the added condition of feeling cut off from a healthy happy future because your body / mind / emotions are stuck in despair about the things you can’t do, can’t do anymore, or can’t do the same way as other people. Again, I’ll point to Holly for self-forgiveness. Then consider:
Willow: for renewed optimism when you feel so miserable about your current circumstances that you’ve fallen into resentfulness or bitterness. It helps you be more forgiving of what has happened and more able to have faith in your ability to chart a better course despite it.
Dogwood: to help you be more at ease with your body. It helps soften the emotional hardening and resistance to the situation that tends to create additional physical tension. It can also help you have a much healthier relationship with physical aspects of life in general.
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Flower essences are used to assist with mind-body-spirit interactions and individual results may vary. They are extremely dilute which makes them quite safe. But because so little physical substance can be detected in a flower essence solution, these products are presumed to work on an energetic or vibrational level—something that cannot be adequately tested by western scientific methods. Claims made by me, therefore, are based on personal experiences and the evidence of the combined multiple decades of case notes by Dr. Edward Bach as well as Healing Herbs and Flower Essence Services (the companies who make the ingredients I use in my products). This is not, however, accepted medical evidence or substantiated scientific evidence from a modern allopathic point of view. I am not a medical doctor or licensed healthcare practitioner.
Statements made have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. The information provided on my blog, websites or by this company are not a substitute for a face-to-face consultation with a health care provider, and should not be construed as individual medical or mental health advice. Consulting with a health care provider is a must for anyone taking medications or working with a medical or mental health condition, and highly recommended before using any herbal product. Please consult your doctor or health care provider for any possible contraindications and/or interactions with current medications. I trust you to seek the medical guidance you need to use any of my herbal products healthily at your own risk.