Magic Realms

How do you combine flower remedies for yourself? How do you choose which remedies are the most important? Why only seven remedies?

For obvious reasons, diagnosing and combining for yourself is going to be a bit more difficult than taking a consultation and diagnosing for someone else. In a way, you need to stand outside of yourself and try to look at things objectively. The below scenario will give you key points to focus on when doing this and should be used as a guide rather than a rule book.

Firstly, decide on the most imminent problem that you currently have – what is the thing that is bringing you the most amount of disease and disharmony? This isn't as easy as it sounds when you're angry, a bit depressed, have menopausal symptoms, your husband's just left you and you've started to get arthritis in your right hand! What's more prevalent, the anger or depression? Do you feel grief? You're sure you should, but where is it? Actually, maybe you're only feeling all of these things so much because you're menopausal – maybe you should treat the menopause? Etc!

To be objective, it's important to use a bit of logic as well as instinct. Most women have menopausal symptoms later in life and you were due to go through the menopause anyway, so that probably isn't the cause of all your problems. You're husband leaving probably triggered the symptoms, but you can't bring him back, so let's momentarily put that to one side. You can't feel any grief, nor can you force yourself to, so don't worry about that so much at the moment. This leaves the anger, mild depression and the arthritis. Well the depression just comes and goes, it's more copeable with and it doesn't press your buttons as much as when you're angry. You know the arthritis has gotten worse since you became so angry, and you're pretty sure that if the arthritis miraculously disappeared, you'd still be damn angry! So we're left with anger.

When you have pin-pointed this, treat only that. Working with vibrational remedies is like peeling an onion, the onion, being symbolic of all your problems – you can only shed one layer at a time. You can only see the layer beneath once you have taken off the one on top.

In the above example, you have decided to treat the anger. Treat this before anything else, even if you know the reason behind the anger and all the other symptoms you have. Often what happens is, that you'll treat the anger, the anger becomes more manageable and starts to fade and you can suddenly see how to deal with the cause of it, or you end up realising that what you think is the cause actually isn't. In the above scenario, you may begin to cry two weeks after starting on the combination you've made for the anger you have… here is the grief. Then, you look at remedies to treat the grief, and so on.

If you feel that two symptoms are so intrinsically linked that you need to treat them both at the same time - as is often the case, but sometimes hard to see objectively (ie, you think that the anger and mild depression are two sides of the same coin) - then do this. There will be no harm in treating them both at the same time if this is the case. What is best to avoid is a situation where you're trying to treat everything and end up treating nothing as you're body and mind aren't ready to process everything at the same time.

It may also be best to tell someone who understands what you're doing that you are treating yourself, unless you feel capable and strong enough to be your own support.

There is a suggestion that it's best not to use more than seven remedies per combination. This is simply because you should be able to focus enough on the situation to pick just one (or two if they're linked) thing that needs treating at a time – seven remedies is enough for this. If you look at a list of remedy descriptions and think there are ten you definitely need, then the chances are that you're not being objective enough in your diagnosis.

If self-diagnosis is not something you can do at present, then that's what a flower remedy practitioner is there for. Some people are very happy self-diagnosing and some never feel comfortable doing it; it really doesn't matter as long as you get better!

All in all, I believe that making remedy combinations for yourself help you to get to know yourself better and help you to get to know your remedies better. As this knowledge increases, it will be easier to understand the way your body and mind work, what grievances you're susceptible to, which flower remedies you respond the best to and how you get better.

Article by Dianna Hardy. Originally published by www.chisuk.org.uk on 4th March 2008

*This method of choosing flower remedies applies mainly to Bach Flower Remedies and other flower remedy systems. Systems such as Indigo Essences recommend a more relaxed way to choose your essences. This can be viewed HERE. I've used both methods and ultimately, I believe that either method can be used with either system and that the method that suits you best will be the one that works best for you.