When Dr Edward Bach created his now famous range of Bach Flower Essences he dealt mainly with negative indications, poor emotional states of mind that he would encounter before finding the particular quality he was looking for from the plants he was dealing with, in order to restore himself to a state of parity from that malaise. It is no different for the Allies Of Nature range of flower essences too. 

Here, my own essences are designed to help you overcome bullying to discover your true identity. Thus, it goes without saying that each individual essence, from the eighteen in total, will highlight a negative indication that you will have felt within a bullying type scenario. It will also make you aware of the positive indication that you require in order to counteract this and help you come back into a state of balance. 

Bullying can be a very debilitating circumstance to deal with in your life and also to be able to evolve from without help. If we are bullied, we can feel lost, unloved, unsure of our purpose, be vulnerable and feel very apathetic towards life. 

These are just a handful of negative indications that we can be suffering from that I have selected from the first five essences in the Allies Of Nature range, the Blackthorn, Bluebell, Red Campion, Foxglove and Wild Rose to illustrate the point.  The same could be said of the other essences in the range too had I gone through the other thirteen bottles and their negative indications also.   

The negative indication is the thing that we most recognise that we need help with, it maybe for instance that we are not happy with the way that our life is progressing at this moment in time, we maybe coming up against all sorts of rules, regulations and restrictions, all elements that we might be encountering under a Covid - 19 bullying set of circumstances from our government.

The ideal flower essence to counteract that negative indication from my range would be Yarrow, for it deals with all of those feelings of frustration with the positive quality of acceptance. Once we learn to accept this scenario we soon find we can carry on with our life as per normal as 'It Is What It Is' at the end of the day.  

Similarly we might be feeling a degree of despair within our life, having a feeling of loss or separation, being distant from others. Both Coronavirus and bullying can do this to us, to make us go inward. This is the negative indication associated with the flower essence Montbretia. This flower encourages us to 'Search For The Hero' inside of ourselves and to rediscover our courage, connecting us with our own inner fire and lighting a beacon within not only for ourselves to follow but others too possibly. 

I maintain if one is prepared to follow the whole calendar wheel of flower essences with myself and the Allies Of Nature range you will gradually bring yourself back into a state of wholeness by adding each individual quality that you maybe lacking, or need work on, from month to month. That's if you truly wish to be able to become the best person you can possibly be. 

So my advice to you, if you have ever suffered from any bullying before is to look at my range of flower essences in my online shop to see how best the flowers can help you with the negative indication that you might be feeling at this moment in time and let the essences start to work their magic on you. Then, together with my other shamanic practices we can take you on a journey to help you be the person you were always destined to be in your life. The true adult butterfly. 

If you care to comment on this blog with regards to any issues or feelings it brings up for you please feel free to do so below.

This weekend it feels like the honourable thing to do is to acknowledge the inaugural, pioneering essence of the Allies Of Nature range of flower essences. For on the 6th April 2019 the Blackthorn flower essence was created. At the time, it was a Saturday, it was a new moon, it was the start of the financial year, the Grand National was taking place, and there was no hint of any global pandemic being in the twinkling of Mother Nature's eye, or any other eye for that matter also. 

As an essence the Blackthorn has proved to be a pioneer in many ways for me. The message it wanted to convey to me on capturing it was 'knowing the way'. Thus it has shown me how to collect an essence, educated me on how spirit wants to communicate messages through its flowers to me and taught me that not everything about an essence can necessarily be revealed at the point of collection. A greater depth of understanding needs to be accumulated about it over a period of time. 

A year on for instance, we are in very contrasting circumstances to when the essence was collected. Coronavirus has spread across the planet, there are no sporting events taking place and we are all under lockdown. We are also at a very different point in the moon cycle it must be added too, somewhere between a waxing half moon and a full moon. This illustrates that when a 'Mother Essence' is created it is very much born out of the spirit of the moment and cannot be wholly reproduced in the same way ever again.

There will always be nuances between essence collections of the same flower. Other distinct scenarios will be playing out within nature and society at the time, new influences will be at work, one could be guided to collect the essence on a totally different day or phase of the moon cycle, the planets themselves will all be aligned differently. This will give a slightly contrasting accent to the language being communicated to the practitioner from the flower itself. 

Indeed alternative interpretations can be extracted from the initial flower essence collection when more than one practitioner is involved too. When studying at the Chalice Well we would often collect an essence together and each person's understanding of it would be slightly different. There would however be a common theme running throughout the process. Links and connections within the web of information being accumulated would be the same or similar and this would point to an overall knowledge of what the essence was ultimately about. A golden thread of understanding would then eventually come to light. 

Subtle differences can exist from range to range too when comparing like for like flowers or very similar ones. When I collected the Wild Rose essence last summer solstice and got the quality of 'enthusiasm' from it, it was very reassuring for me to know that when I came into contact with the Wild Rose from the Bach Flower Essences, some time later, that its quality was one of 'enthusiasm' too. This exact match however may not always be the case and our job is then to enquire further as to why such a difference may exist and see where the common ground lies. 

It is good to approach essence making with what we say in the shamanic tradition is 'beginners mind', i.e. we haven't totally drawn a conclusion at the outset of the essence creation, or the journey thereafter, as to what that essence is wholly about. We endeavour to remain open to other thought processes, inspirations and revelations that might come that are reflective of what is happening with the essence as the process unfolds, layer by layer. We will always then have an opportunity to deepen our understanding of what we are being presented with.

That said however, there will always be this overall theme, this golden thread within it, something 'special' about this particular flower and what its purpose is to be upon the planet at this moment in time. This is what the spirit of the plant or flower deva wants to convey to us in allowing us to connect with its unique flower essence in the first place. 

What I have found in my own journeying with the flower essences, and revisiting them for a second time through the calendar wheel, is that they only want to deepen their connection with us and help us understand the original information given about their essence more intimately. 

With Blackthorn, its message twelve months prior of 'knowing the way' had been illustrated to me by way of its pioneering spirit breaking new ground with its blossoms in an otherwise barren hedgerow. It was giving all the other plants 'direction' in so doing, as it would give ourselves 'direction' when we connected with its essence also. How then would that message be further ingrained within us in 2020 when visiting with it again?

On the Blackthorn Medicine Walk that I completed recently in my own back garden, due to the lockdown regulations, I was able to connect with the original tree I got the essence from again. I asked it the question as to what will give us the opportunity of 'knowing the way' forward given our current very restrictive Coronavirus circumstances?

The answer that came back to me seemed to be connected to finding our own inner peace, and then from that place being able to honour all of the other three peaces too, creating peace with others, our community and the planet. We cannot have peace in the world if we have conflict within ourselves.

This further message from Blackthorn ties into the message from the Bluebell as mentioned in my previous blog, that of gaining an 'inner-sense' of ourselves, it being the next essence in the sequence of the Allies Of Nature range of ​flower essences. This further emphasises the connection between the essences as they go through the year. There is a beauty to this unfolding, a poetry, where there is a story to be told which isn't always obvious when each essence is originally collected.

I feel that the spirit of Blackthorn in 'knowing the way' is continually with me as I learn more and more about the flowers and their essences, in how they are captured, manufactured and are then to be used at a personal or planetary level. I can always rely on Blackthorn to give me 'direction' throughout my entire essence journey. 

​If you care to comment on this blog with regards to any issues or feelings it brings up for you then please feel free to do so below.

Dr Edward Bach was a pioneer in the creation of flower essences. He was one of the first people to understand the relationship between the state of our emotional wellbeing and that of our physical health, believing the two to be inextricably linked. 

Dr Bach had the unique ability to be able to place himself in a negative emotional state. He would then walk around his Welsh mountain home sampling various dew drops on different flowers and plants, that were catching the rays of the early morning sun until he was able to decipher which one of them could alleviate the feeling that he was experiencing.

He became aware that through the combination of sunlight and water a flower or plant was capable of imprinting its own unique quality or 'essence' into that water for both his and our benefit. 

Unfortunately for Dr Bach in order to experience this process it meant that he would often spend many days or even weeks in a very unhealthy emotional state until he found the particular remedy he was looking for. However this research, in time, gave him the ability to create his own, now famous, range of 38 Bach Flower Essences. 

What I have found in my own research, in creating the Allies Of Nature range of flower essences, is that the flowers seem to want to work with me in reverse. Instead of me needing to feel a negative emotional state first and then go out and find the particular flower that can give relief to it, I am presented with a flower, that most obviously wants to be the next essence in the range, before I start to experience all what that flower is about afterwards.

It will start to communicate with me, internally, in feelings that I become more aware of that I wasn't experiencing before, or externally, with life circumstances that then start to appear for me. Sometimes the two are linked in order for me to maximise my learning about this particular type of flower. 

This unfortunately has also meant for me that I too have experienced quite unhealthy emotional states of wellbeing in the process of creating this range of flower essences, especially if the flower in question has wanted me to discover something quite revelatory about its essence. 

A prime example of this has been in creating one of the most recent flower essences within the range, that of Yarrow. It was an essence that was created on the 20th December but was being conceived from the end of the previous one, Dandelion, on the 26th November, a whole three and a half weeks prior. 

During this time I began to experience more and more restrictions, regulations, blocks and obstacles to my progression in life and with the business.

Externally, this primarily was related to me realising that I had to register my range of flower essences with the Food Standards Agency. I found out on a Food Hygiene Course in early December that flower essences are technically classed as foods and as such need to be registered with the local council. I was unaware up to this point that this was necessary and therefore I was totally unprepared for what came next.

Unfortunately, in mentioning the full ingredients of what makes up a flower essence, with the vodka preservative included, I landed myself in a whole load of red tape around whether I needed to have an alcohol license or not in order to be able to produce them. This would take me over 6 weeks to sort out.  

Internally, this started to play havoc with my mind. My ego and inner critic began to run riot over my soul and I was beside myself as to what had happened in such a short period of time, and how I might have contributed to my own downfall. 

The elements too were seemingly conspiring against me when it came to collecting the essence. So much so that I wasn't able to capture the Yarrow essence on the day I had first planned, on the 19th December, I had to wait another whole day longer due to adverse weather conditions and travel blockades, problems that just could not be avoided at the time, if I was to listen to my instincts and intuition.

To say that I was stressed about all what was happening was a bit of an understatement. However the quality that I had to learn most aptly about the Yarrow flower essence was in fact 'acceptance'. Once I grasped this concept then all of the frustrations, tensions and negativity around my progress all started to subside. It was like as if I had to go through all of that turmoil in order to start to truly understand what Yarrow was all about.

On reading this last paragraph back through wave upon wave of spiritual truth has just wanted to wash through me in acknowledgment of this 'acceptance', enough to bring tears to my eyes, to make me weep, in affirmation of this fact. Such is the power of learning what it is to be a true Ally Of Nature, or warrior for a new Earth. All is seemingly necessary, or as the Yarrow would say itself, 'It is what it is!'

If you care to comment on this blog with regards to any issues or feelings it brings up for you then please feel free to do so below.