In Twelve Healers, Dr Bach mentions the word fear five times in the first 300 words for he knew how much fear lives in every one of us. And I suspect he also knew what psychologist Tara Brach currently says: ‘If you have any really difficult emotion and you scratch below the surface, you will find fear.’*
Dr Bach gave us – out of 38 flower remedies – 5 notionally for
fear. But when we scratch below the surface we can detect fear in almost all of
the others. When we need Gorse, for instance, we can detect the fear that there
is no point in trying further as the situation is doomed to failure. With Wild
Rose we are numbed into apathy from the fear of being powerless to change our
circumstances. (Freeze, flight, fight, the trinity of how fear affects our
adrenals.) All the remedies in the
Despair Group are for fear of life never being as good as it was once, not good
enough to meet current need, nor improving in any way.
And the remedies in the Overcare Group are all about the fear
of losing control – the ‘fight’ element in adrenalin stimulation. While in the
Loneliness Group, Impatiens and Water Violet point towards ‘flight’ and Heather
shouts of the fear of being excluded from a loving circle, from the warmth of
the fire at the heart of the tribe.
Dr Bach of course never wanted us to scratch below the
surface when finding a remedy for someone. He made it clear that we should
select purely on the basis of what the person is feeling now, whether it’s burn
out after a long period of stress, inability to be decisive or to say no when
under pressure, and so on. But for those
of us interested in psychology and the development of the human psyche
(especially with 100 years of advancing knowledge and understanding available
to us), what lies beneath the surface will continue to be of interest and
importance. When we understand someone,
our hearts can support them in other ways.
‘Fear is an intelligent emotion.’* We need its primeval drive
to protect us from anything that may harm us, but too often the mind goes into
overdrive in the anticipation of what might happen. The origin of the word worry in fact comes from the verb
strangle – and look how often we can see worry and anxiety strangling our
pleasure in daily life and choking our ability to cope or meet challenges.
Hornbeam, Walnut, Scleranthus, White Chestnut are just the first to spring to
mind for these occasions.
We suffer fear because of feeling a loss of connection with
others. In that suffering we are no longer in a position to listen to our
heart^, which would tell us that we are not alone, we have never been cut off
from connection with the wider human family. The flower
remedies help us to remember that. By dissipating fear and worry they restore
our sense of community, of belonging, of being One with all that is.
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| Photo: Ally Matson |
* Awakening your Fearless Heart, Parts 1 and 2 by Tara Brach on Youtube
^ More on this in my previous blog.
