Walnut - for the future version of you

If there’s a key image which I associate with the Walnut flower remedy, it’s thresholds and open doors. A doorway is always an opening to somewhere new or somewhere different. A step forward from here to there.

But we must beware of short-circuiting the reasoning by thinking great change or new openings automatically require a dose of Walnut. People may not need it if they are pleased and in the throes of readily making the transition.  Yes, they may be slightly nervous, daunted, wondering if they’ll cope, but they only need Walnut if the change is proving difficult to process.

Walnut is not for change, per se, it is for the emotional state when our resilience, our purpose or stability, is being undermined by other people or even our outgrown thought patterns.

Walnut is in the Group: Oversensitive to Ideas and Influences. And just as Centaury (in the same group) cannot say No to others asking for help, so those in need of Walnut are overly influenced by other people or the pressures of old habits. And this happens just at the point where they need to step through the door into a larger future.  So if someone is on the cusp of changing career or lifestyle but is being persuaded against the move by someone, or an outside factor, then Walnut would help the individual to resist, and follow their heart.

In a state where we need Walnut we are hovering between two worlds, the world of the past, the familiar, where others want us to remain, and the unknown, uncertain world of our future. This transitional state can be – psychically – intensely unstable as a new life struggles to be born, rendering us particularly susceptible to interference from other energies.

Walnut will protect us from the influences holding us in the past. It also strengthens our decision and our determination to step up and out into a new future.

Photo: Peter Herrmann on Unsplash

"Don’t be so attached to who you are in the present that you don’t give the future version of yourself a chance."  Vinh Giang

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Behaviours, emotions and unmet needs

Dame Maggie Smith in Downton Abbey.

In a reel on communication skills*, the advice was that there are no good behaviours or bad ones, only those which serve you or don’t serve you. The behaviours which may have served you in the past, may nowadays be hindering rather than helping you.  He was talking about communicating but the same is true of how we relate to people generally.

With regard to flower remedies of course, it is not the actions of the person consulting us for help which are of importance, but the emotions behind them. However, often it is our emotional state which leads to certain behaviour – such as a Heather type talking incessantly about their own concerns – thus giving us a clue as to what is going on with that person.

In soothing and recalibrating our emotions the flower remedies also prompt us to adjust our behaviours.  This occurs because when we are at peace we learn more about ourselves, which in turn contributes to our spiritual evolution.  When we think of people we know who are energy vampires, or self-pitying, or who can never make up their minds, do we think they have full self-awareness?  Probably not. But once we become more self-aware and can see we are monopolising the ‘conversation’, or criticising people, or neglecting our own needs for rest and self-care (for example) then we start to understand that these behaviours or actions arise from a negative mental state.

These emotions evolved because we were trying to fulfil an unmet need – for affection, connection, autonomy, safety and so on – and are perfectly justifiable and understandable at certain times of our life.  However, by taking the flower remedies, our emotional balance returns to a healthy state of tranquillity, and with their help, we learn to appreciate that those emotions (and the concomitant behaviours) no longer serve us.  We are evolving to a stage where we no longer need them: the Winter of our past is giving way to the flowering of a new Spring.

* @askvinh is a teacher of communications-skills, on Instagram and YouTube

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