• Home
• Exploring Flower Essences
• Current

A Guide to Flower Essences

Explore what flower essences are and how do they work

Flower essences support emotional wellbeing, personal development and spiritual growth. Each essence carries the energetic signature of a flower, its unique energetic note from nature, and helps you to bring harmony to your thoughts and feelings, nurture your personal and spiritual growth, and encourage lasting change from the inside out.

They were originally developed in their modern form by Dr Edward Bach in the 1930s, and are now used throughout the world by individuals, therapists and holistic practitioners.

Here at Crystal Herbs we have a deep and profound love for flower essences and have been making and using a wide range of flower & vibrational essences for over 35 years. In this guide, we’ll explore what flower essences are, how they work, what they are used for and the many ways they can support you, including bringing balance to mind and emotions, and nurturing the inner shifts that lead to lasting inner change and wellbeing.

What Are Flower Essences?

A flower is the most vibrant, alive and energetic expression of plant or trees life force energy, and it also carries its highest vibrational frequency. We can often feel this, and its resonance with our own energy system, when we sit in the presence of a beautiful rose or in a field of wild flowers

Each flower essence carries the unique subtle energy imprint of a flower, held within liquid form - a part of nature's amazing apothecary. When you use a flower essence, it's the subtle energies of nature themselves that help to bring inner harmony, balance, transformation and change into your life. They are nature's own way of nurturing your inner wellbeing, supporting you on your inner journey of personal and spiritual growth. Flower essences are gentle, non-habit forming, and are widely used by adults, children and animals.

Why Flowers? Flowers are the heart of flower essence therapy and Dr Edward Bach believed they held unique qualities that could help people to find greater inner balance and harmony.

• The Power of Flowers - Why Flowers are Used in Flower Essences?
• Flower Essences and Other Natural Remedies: What are the Differences?

What Do Flower Essences Help With?

Flower essences support your emotional well-being and bring harmony to your everyday thoughts and feelings. They are catalysts for transforming deeply held emotions, core beliefs and for re-balancing your subtle energy systems.

Flower essences can help with the core patterns that we all have to work with, through to deeper soul connection and personal and spiritual growth. You can find essences that will help you with so many different things, including:

New to flower essences?

Find an Essence for How You're Feeling The Bach Flower Remedies Choosing an Essence

How Flower Essences Work

Flower Essences have a very particular and powerful way of helping you to release what is not in balance within you. This might be your old core emotions, thought patterns, and beliefs or other imbalances within your energy field. This is because a flower essence carries a very high vibrational frequency and your bodies energy system will respond to these energies very quickly. It’s a bit like a tuning fork striking a particular note that then invites all parts of your energy system into harmony with that uplifting positive vibration.

Your energy system is comprised of your core spiritual essence and the vibrations of your subtle energy bodies, thoughts, emotions, and physical blueprint. When you take a flower essence, its positive energy flows into your energetic system and helps to release old low vibrational emotions, thoughts, feelings or beliefs, such as fear, anger, guilt, grief etc, helping them to gently clear and release.

Essences always positively affect lower vibrational frequencies in whatever form, so they will help you to raise your vibrational frequency and re-tune and realign any areas of imbalance, reconnecting you with your true nature of love, joy and peace.

This means that Flower Essences can help you in lots of ways, from balancing core emotions and thought patterns, through to opening up channels of spiritual wisdom and transforming old blocks in your body's chakras and subtle energy systems.

Want to explore this more deeply? How Flower Essences Work & How They Can Help You

When to use flower essences?

You can use flower essences in any situation where there is a lack of well-being in some aspect of your life, be that energetic, emotional, mental or spiritual. In our experience, people often turn to flower essences when they're facing challenges they want help with, when they feel stuck in some way in their life, or when they want to expand their spiritual connection.  

Working with How you’re Feeling: Essences are very good at supporting you to work with issues that you are consciously aware of. So you might need help working with core patterns such as doubt, fear, self worth, despair, loss or anger. Or you might feel that you need help to develop more self-love, self expression, grounding, creativity, confidence, abundance or inner peace. It could be that you need energetic support with strengthening your personal boundaries or energetic space, or help with a challenging relationship.

For When you Feel Stuck: Essences are also very good at supporting you to work more deeply too. In fact one of the things that we really love and value about Essences, is their ability to help you to connect much more deeply with the parts of yourself that you may be less consciously aware of.

Connecting with these more subconscious parts of yourself, ones that you maybe hide away from or protect yourself from having to see or feel, can be transformative. These are often the foundational patterns that make up our core beliefs about ourselves and the way that we see life. They are our deeply held emotional wounds, beliefs or the aspects of ourselves that we struggle most to love and accept.

As you connect more deeply with yourself in this way, you create change at a causal level, offering you the opportunity to step more fully into your own power and see life more from the perspective of the heart and unity consciousness. As Edward Bach said, “There is no true healing unless there is a change in outlook, peace of mind and inner happiness.”

Your Bodies Subtle Energy Systems: Essences are a really good support for working deeply with your chakra points and your body's subtle energy systems, bringing a more harmonious and free flowing energy to your energetic being.

Deeper Connection: Essences are also wonderful supportive in helping you to connect more deeply with mother earth and the higher realms.

Flower & Vibrational Essences are a versatile, powerful and transformative way of working with all of these issues. You might find that you'll use essences every so often when you need extra support to work with a particular issue, or you might find that you fall in love with flower essences and use them daily for your personal and spiritual growth.

Using Essences with Other Therapies

Flower essences work really well in harmony with other therapies too. They are often combined with complementary practices such as Reiki, energy healing, kinesiology, homeopathy, bodywork, and counselling, among many others. Whether used alongside talking therapies, physical treatments, or energy-based modalities, flower essences can enhance and support the healing process. If you are a practitioner or therapist, you can integrate essences in with any other therapies that you use, and they will amplify the positive benefits that your clients experience.

What Happens When You Take a Flower Essence?

When you take a flower essence, sometimes you'll find that it will have an immediate effect and you'll feel a shift almost straight away. At other times the process can feel more like a journey that unfolds over a longer period of time as the old patterns and layers are peeled away, rather like the layers of an onion. The time it takes an Essence to work can vary considerably depending on how sensitive you are to Essences and on how deeply held the pattern, issue or state is.

When you're using an Essence it can sometimes be a very calm and graceful process and at other times you may feel really profound and deep changes occurring, and this can be quite an emotional journey sometimes. This is a good sign of the essence shifting through the old patterns, energies and issues that need to be cleared and released.

Choosing the Right Flower Essence for You

The best place to start with choosing a flower essence is to go within and focus on what it is that you feel you most need help with. Remember you're simply looking for an Essence that will help you bring greater balance to how you're thinking and feeling right now.

This is often simply a process of self-reflection and observation. What is going on for me? How am I thinking and feeling? What emotions do I need help with? Where are the energetic blocks within me? Working in this way you are connecting with the aspects of yourself that most need help. From this point of self awareness, a helpful Essence can be chosen rationally or intuitively or by a combination of both methods.

Choosing for yourself: Sometimes this is easy enough to do for yourself, and you can find some useful resources for choosing a flower essence here:

Find an Essence for How You're Feeling Choosing an Essence

If you need a little help: at other times getting some specific help can be the best option, and you are always very welcome to contact us:

Contact us for help and advice Book a flower essence consultation

How Do I Use Flower Essences?

Flower essences are very versatile, simple and easy to use. They can be taken orally, sprayed in your auric field, used topically or used for space clearing or in your environment.

Essences used orally: probably the most powerful way of using essences are to use them orally. When you take an essence orally it goes straight into your body's subtle energy system and works at a deep level to help you to change and transform deeply rooted patterns. A typical adult dosage is 4 drops on or under the tongue 4 x day ( but this can vary depending on the type of essence you are using ).

Essences sprayed in your auric field: Essences sprayed into the auric field act very quickly and are especially helpful when you're feeling temporarily out of balance or off centre. However when you use an essence in your auric field you don't get quite such a deep acting effect as you do when you take it orally. As an adult you might typically use an essence spray liberally in your auric field 4 x a day, again depending on the type of essence you're using.

Essences used topically: essences can be very effectively used when applied topically too. Using essences on energy points, pulse points, or on areas where you feel energy is stuck or you need help, are all good ways to use essences topically. Four drops on a small area is usually a good starting place. Essences in cream form, such as the Revival Remedy cream, are another good way of applying an essence to your skin.

Essences used for space clearing: essences can also be used as space clearing sprays, especially combinations like the Positive Vibrations spray. You can use them around your home, work place or anywhere else that has old stuck energy that needs clearing, this can be especially helpful in hotel rooms or other places you may be staying in. Working with Essences in this way helps to keep your energetic space clear and where necessary to clear and release any stuck energies, thought forms or emotions from other people or difficult situations.

Essences used environmentally: you can also use essences horticulturally with your plants to help them adapt, flourish and grow better. You can use them to release trauma and restore balance to earth energies in places on the land that need energetic support. Its also lovely to include Essences in sacred ceremonies on the land.

Flower Essences - An Ever Unfolding Journey

We really hope that you have enjoyed our look at flower essences! Essences are part of our ever unfolding inner journey of change and transformation. It’s a journey of discovery that takes you into your heart, deepening your relationship with yourself and connecting you more fully with who you really are. We're here to help, so if you need any help or support, or have any questions about Flower Essences and how to use them, please do get in contact with us, and we'd be delighted to help you.

---------------------

Some Frequently Asked Questions on Flower Essences

1. Do Flower Essences Have Side Effects?

No. Flower Essences simply contain the energy imprint or vibrational frequency of the flower, tree, gem or crystal from which they are made. As such there is no 'active ingredient' as you might find in a pharmaceutical drug. However what you may feel as you take an essence are profound and deep changes occurring at an emotional and energetic level and this can be quite an intense journey at times. As mentioned above this is a good sign of the essence shifting through the old patterns, energies and issues that need to be worked with. Please note that Flower Essences are usually preserved in brandy and water and so they do contain alcohol. If you are sensitive to or are avoiding alcohol, we can also provide alcohol free alternatives for many of our essences.

2. Can Flower Essences be Used with Children?

Yes! Children can respond very quickly to flower essences so it is important to choose the most appropriate type of essence when using them with children, particularly babies or very young children. When choosing an Essence for a child, remember that no matter what the issue is that you are working with, you are simply looking for an Essence(s) that will help to bring them greater balance in how they are thinking and feeling, and to re-balance them at an energetic level. You can find more help and advice here: Essences for Children.

3. How Do You Make a Flower Essence?

A flower or vibrational essence contains the vibrational frequency or energy imprint of the flower, gem or crystal from which it's been made. So essentially when you make an Essence you are imprinting the energy or vibrational frequency of a flower, gem or crystal into water and this gives you what's called the mother tincture or mother essence. There are several different methods of making an essence, but the most common on is the 'Sun Method'. You can find out more about making an Essence here: How are Flower Essences Made and you can also find out more about How We Discover What A Flower Essence Does here.

4. Can Flower Essences be Used with Dogs & Cats?

Yes! Dogs and cats respond well to flower & vibrational essences. We'd usually suggest starting with the Bach Flower Remedies and choosing two or three remedies that best reflect how your dog or cat is reacting and what issues they are presenting. You might also find that one or two deeper acting single flower essences or single crystal essences may also be helpful: Essences for Animals

5. Flower Essences and Other Natural Remedies: What are the Differences?

Flower Essences belong to a wider family of natural remedies, and we’re often asked what the differences are between flower essences and other complementary remedies. If you’re new to essences and you’re unsure of how they differ from homeopathy, herbal remedies and essential oils, you can find out more here: The Differences Between Flower Essences & Other Natural Remedies.