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All About the Bach Flower Remedies

Explore the 38 Bach Flower Remedies and the work of Dr. Edward Bach

Here at Crystal Herbs we have a deep love for the Bach Flower Remedies and the work of Dr Edward Bach. The Bach Remedies were the first essences that we started making back in the late 1980s and we have been making and using them ever since. In this time we have always found the Bach Flower Remedies to be indispensable in helping with the the challenging thoughts, feelings and emotions that we can all face at times on our journeys through life. In this guide we'll give you an in-depth look at the 38 Bach Flower Remedies, what they are and how they work, why you might want to use them and an overview of Dr. Bach's understandings and philosophy.

What Are the Bach Flower Remedies?

The Bach Flower Remedies are a set of flower essences that were created by Dr. Edward Bach in the 1930's. They are very simple, natural, and effective remedies for working with the everyday thoughts, feelings and emotions that we all experience in our daily lives. The gentle, subtle energies of nature in the 38 remedies help you to develop a deeper inner peace, well-being and equilibrium in your mind, body & spirit.

The balancing power of nature

Dr. Bach had a deep love of nature and strong sensitivity to the subtle energies of the natural world. He also had a deep inner knowing that the answers to many of our problems could be found in nature. His research and his strong intuition led him to the understanding that each flower holds a particular subtle energy, which could bring unbalanced thoughts and emotions back into balance again. Bach felt that working with your emotions, feelings, thoughts and beliefs, was the key to restoring health and well-being to your mind, body and spirit.

Nature in a bottle

So Bach created the Bach Flower Remedies using the subtle energy of the plants that he discovered in the landscape around him. The Bach Flower Remedies simply hold the beautiful subtle energies of the natural world in liquid form. As he came to realise, it is these positive, balancing, and higher vibrational frequencies of nature that help you to step more into the fullness of your true nature and to come more in alignment within yourself at a deeper and more profound level.

What Do The Bach Flower Remedies Help With?

The Bach Flower Remedies are really supportive remedies for helping you to re-balance your thoughts and emotions and for working with how you are thinking and feeling. They help you to bring about positive change in your life and to remind you of your inherent inner peace, balance and equilibrium.

Balancing your thoughts and emotions

When your thoughts, feelings, and beliefs about life are challenging, or things feel uncomfortable emotionally, the Bach Flower Remedies can help to transform the energy and support you to connect with what is really going on for you at an inner level. Consciously developing a greater sense of connection and inner balance within yourself allows you to see a healthier and more balanced perspective on life. When we feel less afraid, angry, guilty, frustrated, stuck, despairing etc, we create different outcomes in our lives and learn to relate to ourselves and other people and situations in our life in healthier and more heart centred ways.

There are 38 different Bach remedies, each supporting you in a different way. For example Mimulus will help you with known fears and worries, Gorse will help you with feelings of despair and hopelessness, Impatiens will help if you feel impatient or frustrated and White Chestnut will help if you have a head full of spinning thoughts. Dr Bach put it rather beautifully when he said; “I am hungry, I will go and pull a lettuce from the garden for my tea; I am frightened and ill, I will take a dose of Mimulus.”

Deeper connection to who you really are

Dr Bach also came to realise we are most in balance as humans when we have a conscious partnership between our personalities and our Soul aspects. When you consciously re-connect with the power of your heart and the wisdom of your soul, you come into alignment with yourself in deeper and more profound ways. It's like coming back to who you really are in a bigger and more expanded way. So balancing the personality patterns that we all carry is a good way of building that more conscious soul connection, and the Bach Flower Remedies are a really good set of remedies for helping you with this.

When Would I Use the Bach Flower Remedies?

The Bach Flower Remedies are really good for those times in life when you need a little extra help to bring balance to how you are thinking and feeling. Whether that’s the ups and downs of daily life, or those periods that we can all experience when things feel particularly challenging or difficult and it’s hard to find your place of inner balance.

Longer term help

The Bach Remedies are good at supporting you through life long patterns that you need help with; maybe you find it difficult to express yourself, and your emotions get easily bottled up ( Agrimony ) or you're critical of yourself and others ( Beech ) or have known fears and worries and need courage to face up to the everyday events of life ( Mimulus ).

Help in the Moment

They are also really helpful when there are issues you need help with at a particular moment in life; maybe you've lost a loved one and are in shock ( Star of Bethlehem ) or need to give a public talk and need a little help with your confidence ( Larch ) or are finding it difficult to decide between two options ( Scleranthus ).

Using the Bach Remedies

There are 38 different Remedies, from Agrimony to Willow, each one working with a different emotional state or thought pattern, and a combination for emergency situations ( Revival Remedy ). You can use them individually, or mixed into a combination of different remedies as required.

Personally I use the Bach Flower Remedies in both ways. I always have a combination of Bach Remedies on the go. A typical combination for me will cover both the core patterns that I most need help with in life, and remedies to help with more transitory patterns that I'm working with in the moment. In addition there are times when a strong emotion will come up and it's not one that is in my combination, so I'll add that remedy to a glass of water and sip through the day until I'm feeling more balanced. The Bach Remedies are very flexible and easy to use.

Choosing Your Bach Flower Remedies

You can easily choose the right remedies for yourself by focussing on how you are thinking and feeling and on what is going on within yourself and then choosing the appropriate Essence to help. So for example, if you feel guilty about something, take some Pine, or if you feel ungrounded and absent minded, take some Clematis, or if you feel a sense of hopelessness, take some Gorse.

You can find out more about the Choosing and Using the Bach Remedies here and you can download a Bach Remedy leaflet in PDF form here. Here at Crystal Herbs our Bach Flower Remedies are handmade with love and care according to the original instructions of Edward Bach, using his original methods and adhering exactly to the plant species that he identified. If you need help and advice, please do be in contact with us and we'd be happy to help.

Treating the Person not the Situation or Issue

Through his extensive studies, research and observation, Dr Bach came to recognise that although his patients came to him with very similar problems and difficulties, their reaction to these situations was not necessarily the same.

He discovered that using an appropriate flower essence to treat a patient’s emotional and mental reaction to their life situation promoted greater balance & harmony and facilitated lasting change and benefits. His motto was always ‘treat the patient not the disease’. You could equally say 'treat the person and not the situation'. We all react differently to the situations we encounter in life. The same situation might make one person afraid, another person feel angry and lead another person to feel guilty. So looking at how you react to a particular issue or situation is key, rather than thinking too much about the situation or issue itself. Dr Bach believed that “there is no true healing unless there is a change in outlook, peace of mind, and inner happiness.”

As well as providing a very useful set of tools for re-balancing mind and emotion, one of the gifts of working with the Bach Flower Remedies is the deepening of your understanding of your inner world, your emotions, thoughts and feelings. Building this deeper relationship with yourself also allows you to build deeper relationships with the other people in your life and to have a more in-depth and profound way of understanding yourself at all levels of your being.

The Philosophy Behind the Bach Flower Remedies

Dr Edward Bach was driven throughout his life to find a deeper understanding of illness and disease and to help people to overcome the problems that they faced in life. One result of this was the creation of the 38 Bach Flower Remedies, for which he is now best known, but just as important in many respects, were his philosophical understandings. These understandings were documented through the letters, public speeches, books and pamphlets that he left behind, providing us with a foundation for understanding human well-being.

During the course of his research he developed a philosophy based on his innate understanding that life on the physical plane of existence was intended to be a conscious partnership between the physical (personality) and non-physical (soul) aspects of ourselves and that disharmony in the physical body was simply a 'reminder' that the personality self was in some way out of alignment or balance.

The importance of balancing mind, body and spirit

Dr Bach’s philosophy is as simple as it is profound; that we need to remember our spiritual origins and the inter-connectedness of mind, body & soul. He believed that "so long as our Souls and personalities are in harmony all is joy and peace, happiness and health." Or to put it another way, when we are in a place of emotional and mental balance within ourselves and we have a more conscious partnership between all aspects of ourselves, our mind, body and spirit function in harmony together.

So Dr Bach came to believe that the real cause of disease originated not in on a physical level, but on the spiritual level. He concluded that it was a result of conflict between our human personality and ourselves as a spiritual being. He saw the symptoms of disharmony in the physical body as nothing more than a reminder that the personality self was in some way out of alignment, and these symptoms would ultimately disappear as greater emotional and mental harmony was restored. This is why Bach said of his remedies that "these remedies work, not by attacking disease, but by flooding our bodies with the beautiful vibrations of higher nature, in the presence of which dis-ease melts as snow in the sunshine".

Edward Bach - A Brief History

The 38 flower remedies were developed by Edward Bach in the U.K. during the 1920's and 1930’s and are now collectively known as the Bach Flower Remedies. Even today the 38 remedies that he discovered remain the most well known and frequently used of all flower essences.

Dr Bach is often considered to be the ‘founding father’ of modern day flower essences and with good reason, since his pioneering work has provided the inspiration and foundation for the great expansion that has taken place in this field over recent years.

The man behind the remedies

Dr. Edward Bach was a medical doctor and a man with ideas that were well ahead of his time. The driving force behind his whole life was his dream of finding a simple form of ‘medicine’ in the shape of pure natural remedies, which would be readily available to everyone and capable of promoting positive change. It was his vision that this simple treatment would one day replace the more complicated scientific approach of his day.

His life path led him from being a doctor at University College Hospital in London, where he also researched vaccine therapy, through to pathology and bacteriology at the London Homoeopathic Hospital, a Harley Street practice and then discovering the 38 flower essences. He was enormously enthusiastic, dedicated and driven in pursuit of his dream and was prepared to give up whatever material success he had to achieve it. Edward Bach lived a relatively short but very fascinating life and what we know of it mainly comes from his work and writings, the biography written by Nora Weeks and personal accounts from other people who knew him.

You can find out more about the life of Dr Edward Bach here and you can find some quotes from and about Edward Bach and his work here.

An Unfolding Vision

Edward Bach was a pioneer, with ideas well ahead of his time. He had a vision for what life could be like if we were more connected to our hearts and in tune with the wisdom of our souls. A life where we created more from a space of oneness and love, and that this inner harmony would be reflected in our outer creations. In Heal Thyself he said; "The development of love brings us to the realisation of unity, of the truth that one and all of us are of the one great creation." The Bach Flower Remedies were created to both help people with their everyday thoughts and feelings, and also to help to facilitate this bigger spiritual picture, and they are very good at both.

The understandings that were such an integral part of Bach's work are an echo of those of many of the great sages, mystics and spiritual teachers through history. Beneath the surface noise of everyday life, you can see a gradual unfolding of these understandings, as more of us become conscious of the need for change and aware of the deeper connections that can be made from the space of the heart.

With everything that is going on in the world, our evolution into living from the heart, deeply connecting with our souls, and feeling our oneness with all of life, is more important than ever. The understandings and the Bach remedies that are the legacy of Edward Bach are an empowering and fascinating part of that process.

We really hope that you have enjoyed our look at the Bach Flower Remedies and the work of Dr Edward Bach. We're here to help, so if you need any help or support, or have any questions about the Bach Flower Remedies, or how to use them, please do get in contact with us, and we'd be delighted to help you.