A few weeks ago, I was given a small glass jar filled with water, a vegetable glycerin preservative, and a subtle energy imprint of seven flowers chosen by my subconscious mind. I was told to put 4 drops of this mixture into my drink at least 4 times a day. After a month or so, I hope this ritual brings about an emotional shift that culminates in my ability to “make me glow,” as the cheerful handwritten label on my bottle says. Masu. When I received this bottle, I had actually already started Radiate ME and completely understood what it meant and thought nothing could be more stupid. Wellness reporting is a slippery genre.
At this point in the evolution of the Second New Age, many health-oriented exercises are often rooted in (or disastrously appropriated from) long-standing Indigenous traditional practices, while Western culture It has settled into a mainstream general space. The doctor is prescribing yoga. Reiki is offered as a gentle complementary therapy in some hospitals. The flower essences I was experimenting with fall into this category in some ways, but they are still “on the very strange end of the spectrum,” says Edzard, emeritus professor of complementary medicine at the University of Exeter and a long-time critic of all flower essences. Ernst says. Things are contiguous, he said candidly in an email. They are often used by people who are already in the zone, such as already undergoing meditation, craniosacral therapy, or taking spiritual herbalism classes.
I first learned about flower essences about a year ago at a popular yoga studio in Brooklyn, where my teacher mentioned a flower essence workshop she was running. Over the next few months, I fell in love with the concept. I think it’s because I like feeling confused.Contrary to the name, flower essences are not flowers. essence In the sense that it contains actual flower particles. Do not dare to confuse it with essential oils. It doesn’t smell like anything. It looks like nothing. As a product, it’s as vague as it is flashy. That’s what I came here to learn, and maybe that’s what’s important.
Essences are made by placing the flowers in a clear bowl of water and “charging” them in the sun for two hours, or by boiling the flowers in water for 30 minutes. The water is then said to take on the subtle healing vibrations of that particular flower, but no physical plant components remain. (Technically speaking, I’ve been putting a drop in my water ever since I received flower essence therapy from Mr. Aki Hirata Baker of MINKA Brooklyn.) However, I’ve noticed that some people who use flower essences I’ve met some – quite sane – people. Author Naomi Klein once told a New York paper: times She started using Bach Rescue Remedy, a blend of essences, to calm her mind while reporting in Iraq. “I don’t feel like it’s working at all,” she says. “I think of it as kind of a talisman.” Bach Remedies also counts professionally free housewife Shannon Beador (along with Jennifer Aniston, Naomi Watts, Martha Stewart, and Dr. Oz) as a fan. It is advertised as.
“Flower essences used to only appeal to people over 40 and people interested in health food stores,” says Sarah Crowe, a flower essence practitioner featured on Goop. But “health food stores” have evolved into a $4.2 trillion global market, and while this trend remains niche, Flower Her Essence has become more popular than Whole Foods, trendy pharmacies, and CAP Beauty. It is sold at wellness specialty stores. They’re offered in treatments at high-end spas, cited by “health consultants” as a gentle sleep aid, and practitioners say they’re seeing a surge in business. You can purchase the essences individually or receive a custom her blend in your flower essence therapy session. “This is definitely in the up-and-coming category,” Crowe said.
My session at MINKA, a community-oriented healing space with sliding scale payment options, began with something like talk therapy. Frankly, it was great. I told Aki Hirata Baker, my radiant flower essences therapist and co-founder of MINKA, that I was worried that I was becoming too introverted. (This irony was brought to life as I sat in a flower essence therapy session.) You’re just hiding yourself, you’re hiding your brightness, really.” she decided. “And people can’t see you.”
Based on the issues we highlighted, I was to intuitively choose a particular card with a picture of a flower on it. She arranged and rearranged them into geometric shapes on the floor until she was satisfied. She then blended the corresponding essences and administered Reiki to the bottled substances to give them a “boost”. All in all, I had a hard time finding anything unpleasant about this. Devaluing something that feels good, even if it’s objectively a carefully blended and expensive bottle of water, is a confusing project.
How much can you do nothing? Nothing can change your life? Hirata Baker thinks so (though she may not express it that way). She says she has given this therapy to about 100 people, and the response for most of them has been, “Oh my god, life has meaning now.” But, she added, “taking flower essences doesn’t change you.” “It gives you a new way of perceiving your reality. So if you don’t change your ways, things will stay the same.”
This lack of clear or immediate impact is part of the appeal for some. Flower essences are “for people who are interested in nurturing something deep and need a little art to receive it,” says Alexandra Roxo, 35, a wellness coach and influencer. She used to use flower essences for stress relief (and now “for harmony”). She is excited about meeting certain plant friends.”
Brooklyn-based doula Anna Chichev, 33, also likes the subtlety. She started taking essences after a friend of hers received training in flower essence therapy, and she believes it helped her get out of some personal issues she was stuck in. Her interpretation is close to Klein’s “talisman” theory. ““Flower essences are an act of consciously tuning into what you want to work on,” she said. “We don’t know the effects of the drug itself, but when you combine it with intention, it’s really powerful.”
Naturally, there is no scientific evidence that flower essences can effectively treat psychological problems or stress beyond the placebo effect, but placebos can be mysteriously powerful. Flower essences were developed and codified in the 1930s by Edward Buck, a British bacteriologist and homeopath who believed that all illnesses are expressions of negative emotional states. (He died young of cancer.) And outside the realm of peer-reviewed science, it’s not always easy to say what causes change in us, or when change occurs. In the few weeks since I started drinking the custom “Radiate ME” blend, something definitely happened and I felt a little lighter, but things tend to happen in life and people sometimes feel lighter. is known. I wrote my favorite song and had someone listen to it. I entered graduate school. I have eczema under my nose that won’t heal. I find myself trying harder to say thoughtful things to people and listen to their perspectives in my head. I reminded myself that my life was okay. There was a general feeling that something was being resolved on the back end. Whether this was actually true didn’t seem to matter at all.
In the lexicon of wellness and neo-spiritual circles, “holding the intention” to do something is an important part of doing something. Perhaps growth can be induced more easily and in a more practical way than we think. The broad school of thought known as Western esotericism holds the idea of ”an energy field that can be intentionally aligned between the astral body, the mineral body, the human body, the human mind/spirit, and the divine,” says James.・Pastor Lawrence says: A professor of new religious movements at Berkeley’s Graduate Theological Union told me via email. In other words, everything we need is already here. It’s just a matter of channeling it. As the natural world dies, raw capitalism erodes basic dignity, and political institutions become more unstable, the appeal of a mystical realignment with the physical universe is sometimes expressed in strikingly counterproductive ways. Even so, it’s obvious.
“I think a lot of people are looking for some other way of seeing the world. [we’re] said John Haller, a professor emeritus of history at Southern Illinois University who has written about homeopathy and the placebo effect. “I see the youngest generation wanting to say to their elders, ‘You’re missing the point!’ Maybe there’s something about flower essences that creates space for a ‘new self-identity.’ It could be, he added.
Flower essences seem to demonstrate that Craving a home-grown solution a little more explicitly and wildly than others, proudly emptied of any physical substances involved – no crystals, no acupuncture, no physical contact. For progressive New Agers, emptiness can be an attraction in itself. The final frontier of empowerment is perhaps a blank space. Because if it seems like something is happening when there is nothing there, for some it means, for us and for reality, that there is more to it than this.
