One of the unique properties of flower essences is that they work on an archetypal level. Each flower has a particular resonant pattern and unique identity that can then be applied in many different specific situations. In this article, Patricia Kaminski reviews the primary flower essences used in Dr. Carla Araújo’s program for patients with HIV/AIDS through the Anna Nery School of Nursing School of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Patricia’s emphasis is on understanding the immune-stimulating and health-regulating properties of these flower essences, and their roles in helping not only the patients in this healing project, but also the health professionals themselves, who received flower essences to address various states of overwhelm and depletion while caring for such patients.

Aloe Vera

Aloe Vera is a desert plant well known for its ability to store vital fluid in its succulent leaves. As a flower essence, it is a key remedy for balancing fire and water polarities. There are two important reasons why Aloe Vera can be an important consideration in healing programs for immune-challenged individuals: dehydration and inflammation. The immune response typically includes various conditions of inflammation as the immune system activates its fierce response to infection or foreign invaders. While this fire activity carries a beneficial aspect, long term inflammation damages tissue and organ function. Dehydration can be a consequence of excess fire in the body, and it can be present for other reasons. Long-term use of many pharmaceutical medications can result in chronic dehydration as a serious side effect. Prolonged illness can also alter the internal balance of fluid in tissues and the body’s inner sensing mechanism for adequate replenishment of vital fluids. This balancing aspect can then be distorted in the opposite polarity of fluid retention, including swelling, bloating, stagnation and improper drainage. As a flower essence, Aloe Vera works in both directions to enable the body-soul matrix to healthily regulate the alchemical polarities of fire and water. When the soul can begin to inwardly sense these elemental dimensions, medical conditions with excesses or deficiencies can be brought into equilibrium.

Angelica

All human beings are endowed with a precious spiritual blessing. Each is bestowed with a spiritual guide and protector who can provide inspiration and illumination for the life journey on Earth. Yet in our age of materialism this knowledge of Sacred Being and Presence beyond the physical dimension is tragically negated or ignored. This is an impediment for all human souls, and has the greatest consequence for those who are suffering with illness and chronic disease, including life-threatening ailments. The deep soul questions (Why am I here? Why am I suffering? How do I go on living my life despite my physical setbacks? What if I die?) can’t be answered with statistical projections or actuarial documents from an insurance company. We need to be able to source deeper spiritual realities, to know that we are guided, protected, and informed by meaning and purpose beyond the confines of physical life itself. Angelica helps the soul begin to tap into the spiritual presence that is uniquely available for every human being, regardless of creed or culture. Through this flower, one can feel strengthened, inspired, and filled with soul purpose and meaning, regardless of the conditions or outcome of physical life itself.

Arnica

The Arnica flower flourishes beside sparkling streams of water in the high mountains, each flower a microcosmic shimmering sun of golden magnificence. This glorious ambassador from sublime solar heights has the special mission to bring its gift into the very depths of human pain, numbness, and shock. When the body suffers traumatic pain, injury, or other forms of crippling disablement, the soul seeks a way to escape, deny, or silence the body’s suffering. However, within the psyche, these traumatic experiences have become dysfunctional and destructive “memory codes” that burrow their way into the cellular matrix. Arnica works to deprogram the detrimental information that continuously replicates and impedes healing. The extraordinary force of solar light and life carried by the Arnica flower breaks up and dissolves old patterns from the past, ushering in fresh possibilities of healing and transformation. When serious life-threatening illness or chronic disease has developed, Arnica can be especially potent, showing the way step by step for rebuilding the body-soul template, instilling a “blueprint of Light” as the restorative guiding principle. In its inmost essence, the Arnica flower essence shows us how to bring the core immunity of the Spirit-Sun Self back into positive embodiment.

Baby Blue Eyes

The Baby Blue Eyes flower essence addresses primal traumas related to the masculine/paternal identity. Especially if one did not feel the protective embrace of the father or of father figures in one’s family or social network, the soul can shut down its positive qualities of vulnerability and sensitivity. One takes on a false exterior of hardened masculinity, hyper-defensiveness and cynicism as a survival strategy. This tough exterior can seem to be a source of strength, but it actually cuts off deeper flows of life force and spiritual in-streaming light that can undermine one’s health and immunity. Baby Blue Eyes helps the soul reclaim and re-establish trust, receptivity, and the ability to receive support and healing forces from others by reclaiming an authentic inner sense of the masculine, fathering identity..

Bleeding Heart

The Bleeding Heart flower essence is one of the most powerful of heart strengtheners, imparting the ability to move beyond old attachments and relationships. While we may think of the typical use of the remedy for romantic relationships, Bleeding Heart also addresses a wider expanse of the heart’s reality. This flower can be very important for those suffering serious medical conditions that disrupt the normal flow of life, including one’s relationships with family, friends and work colleagues. Profound heart break and relationship angst are typically under-appreciated and under-diagnosed conditions for those with severe illnesses that disrupt these vital social connections. When the heart “bleeds” with this kind of unnamed anguish, depression or anxiety can result, lowering baseline immunity. The Bleeding Heart flower essence helps the soul accept dissolution and detachment, yet also brings fresh new forces of strength to the heart. In this way the heart establishes a new path forward, forges new nourishing relationships, and discovers ways to sustain or re-form prior relationships.

California Valerian

This flower restores an inner sense of positive expectation and confidence for the future, especially when there is an over-riding sense of dread or anxiety regarding future events or outcomes. Those needing this remedy are prone to energy depletion due to excessive nervousness, insomnia, agitation, anxiety and worry. These deleterious negative states literally eat away at the life body, creating ever greater challenges to immune vitality and strength. California Valerian restores the soul’s capacity for tranquility, deeper trust and positive embrace of the future.

California Wild Rose

California Wild Rose is one of the premier flower essences for the heart. It works beyond romantic, vague, or dreamy notions of love. Rather, the heart learns to activate love as a real force, by becoming more interested in life, in others and in the world. When the heart engages with this kind of authentic love, new energy and healing can flow into the body and soul that are otherwise dormant or stymied. These forces of the heart help us move from a state of over-concern about the narrow self to the larger embrace of the Self as reflected in others and ultimately within the World-soul. This reawakened heart force kindles new forces of immune strength and positive outlook for the future, a soul quality so fundamental for true healing.

Canyon Dudleya

Canyon Dudleya brings calm and equilibrium to the psychic disposition. It imparts a balanced and objective perspective especially when emotions may be overly excited or exaggerated. It plays a very valuable role in the healing journey. When one receives a serious medical diagnosis, it is easy to overreact and imagine the worst possible outcome. The Canyon Dudleya personality has a kind of theatrical disposition that can easily ignite “trauma-drama” episodes. Each physical symptom or any medical setback is immediately projected and hyper-imagined. As a result, such an individual can actually feel more pain, more fear, and more anxiety than might be indicated for the actual medical condition. This highly excited state can have many immune consequences, especially adrenal exhaustion, blood sugar imbalances or manic-depressive mood swings. Canyon Dudleya helps the individual take a more measured and even-tempered approach in the day-to-day incremental journey of recovery and rehabilitation.

Chamomile

This flower is one of the most widely used to facilitate calm when many surface emotions disturb or distort the soul’s inner light or “Sun-Self.” This emotional restoration is especially registered in the solar plexus and related to the physical organs of digestion and assimilation. Chamomile helps one “ride the waves” of various daily emotions, moods and fluctuating feelings. These more mercurial expressions of the soul are channeled into a deeper, more harmonious sense of Self that is able to perceive live events with greater objectivity, stability and equanimity.

Echinacea

While many flower essences address various aspects of immune health, Echinacea is truly at the foundational core. The plant itself has an exceptionally firm yet flexible structure with glowing magenta-red colors. It is the very picture of flowing etheric life united with a strong physical template. These qualities are at the heart of what it means to have immune health. Physical health requires not only a body that is adaptable and resilient, but also a firm core that remains unassailable and able to subdue or ward off destructive forces. In fact, for the human being, we can truly speak of I-mmunity and I-dentity. The inmost essence of our individuality or “I-ness” needs to be powerfully engaged in the healing process—able to simultaneously receive healing impulses and maintain a clear and firm Inner Core.

If healing is felt as only what happen “to” one as a “patient,” then the critical spark of the “I” that ignites and sustains I-mmunity will not be activated. Especially when profound illness and disease are present, the individual can lose connection with this radiant “I” force. It can feel as though the Self is splintered into many pieces, no longer at the center but rather the object of countless medical appointments, pharmaceutical medications, and invasive treatments and procedures. Echinacea awakens and stabilizes the Core Self, so that one’s innate spiritual source of strength and adaptability is at the heart of the healing journey.

Fireweed

The Fireweed is a Phoenix flower—it literally seeks out the ash and debris of destructive events such as fire, flood, earthquake and avalanche. In disturbed and devastated places, it rises with stately presence and beautiful magenta blossoms. Similarly, for the human body and soul it imparts powerful resurrection forces. When one experiences life-threatening illness, it is easy to get caught in the undertow. We experience and feel only the diminishment and the disturbance of life forces; it is hard to have hope and to envision future possibilities. We can’t imagine that the broken condition of our body can find its way to new springs of life and rejuvenation. Fireweed instills the vision of new life emerging from the burnt ashes of old forms and previous structures. In fact, as one moves into the deeper message of Fireweed, one can realize that new possibilities and new life destiny are made possible by the fertile force of old substance breaking down and re-creating itself. Fireweed is a vigorous cleanser and stimulant. Its powerful surges of regenerative energy can feel unsettling at first, and then deeply rewarding as we see the old being reborn into vibrant new potential.

Green Cross Gentian

Green Cross Gentian brings forces of fortitude and endurance, especially when one experiences difficulty, failure or seeming setback. In these instances, one can lose the motivation and persistence needed to forge forward. This flower especially addresses the impingement of collective consciousness regarding such challenges. If one receives a medical diagnosis that also carries intense societal beliefs and expectations, one can feel overwhelmed or even defeated. Rather than summoning inner courage and conviction, we are submerged in the weight of a pessimistic or life-negating collective reality. In this way, a type of depression sets into the soul that depletes the immune response. Green Cross Gentian helps the soul “take up the cross of hardship” and summon strong forces of faith and positive vision for the future, despite the challenge of current circumstances or outer social realities.

Hyssop

The Hyssop flower essence addresses states of disease, pain, injury, and related dysfunction that retain their imprint on the body as a kind of psychic scar or badge. This soul state is accompanied by profound feelings of guilt or shame that retain a strong hold on the body. The resultant feeling is that one is not good enough or worthy enough to ever try to receive healing. Hyssop radiates qualities of self-forgiveness, purification, and redemption to heal these old wounds. With this help from Hyssop, both body and soul can re-constellate and move forward on the transformational path.

Iris

Iris is quite literally the messenger of the Rainbow. Not only does she carry shimmering iridescence in her physical flower substance, but at the soul level she also imparts the reality of vibrant color and creativity. The Iris flower essence instills an enlivening force that counteracts or at least counterbalances the tendency of modern medicine to be a gray world of intellectual abstractions and mechanistic technology. Of course, no one can deny the life-saving advances and brilliant mastery of medical innovations, but they are not the whole story. The human creativity of the Soul is a vital component of healing, and Iris champions this Soul Voice. She asks us to be aware of our feelings and to allow our feelings to be a real source of regeneration and re-creation of the Self-identity.

This awareness is so essential in the healing path, whether it be through writing in a journal, painting or drawing, singing, playing a musical instrument, listening to our dreams, or so much more. When the body is weak or challenged, it is all the more important that the soul find its creative juice. These forces of inspiration and imagination bring joy and purpose to life and are at the very heart of true immune health.

Lavender

The Lavender flower imparts gentle, peaceful waves of aroma that soothe the nerves and relax the body. The flower essence of Lavender performs this same role on a subtler level, especially helping calm and balance the nerve and sensory systems and facilitating deep, restorative sleep. The arduous demands of a healing journey, including medical treatment, are stressful and depleting. Furthermore, there can be worry and anxiety about one’s condition that counteract the calm, restful disposition necessary for a sustained healing response. Lavender soothes these types of worry and tension, allowing deeper currents of life force to be registered in both body and soul.

Loves-Lies-Bleeding

Love-Lies-Bleeding is used for chronic states of immune dysfunction. It especially addresses the feeling of isolation and despair that one can feel when enduring chronic pain and various physical impediments. This mind-set usually compounds and intensifies one’s sense of suffering, forming a continuous reinforcing loop of physical pain and psychic anguish. Love-Lies-Bleeding helps one surrender to and release intense feelings of inner compression and self-isolation. Remarkably, this very act of surrender and acceptance helps the body-soul reset and reframe its healing response or find inner peace and a new path forward regarding an existing condition, even if it remains outwardly unchanged.

Mariposa Lily

Mariposa Lily provides a nurturing, mothering matrix of healing forces. The ability to feel and be nourished is powerfully connected to the capacity to feel and receive love. This body-soul nutrition is a profound health-giving force that each child should rightfully receive from the mother and early caretakers. The Mariposa Lily flower essence addresses deficient and dysfunctional conditions from birth through childhood and young adulthood that can imprint into the body-soul identity and affect overall vitality and immunity. Mariposa Lily especially imparts the ability to receive up-building and replenishing nutritional forces, thereby greatly assisting the immune strength of the body. Ultimately, Mariposa Lily restores the profound archetype of Mother—one’s personal experience of Mother and one’s ongoing relationship to the nurturing archetype of Mother within the soul.

Mountain Pride

Mountain Pride has an invigorating influence on the soul, helping awaken hidden reservoirs of strength and potential. With this flower, one finds renewed courage and initiative for removing impediments and taking responsibility for one’s destiny. Through Mountain Pride, obstacles or challenges can be transformed into new forces of action and self-expression.

Penstemon

Penstemon is one of the most fundamental flowers for soul strength and sustained endurance. The plant itself grows in high altitudes above the tree line and is assailed by nearly constant stormy conditions of snow, rain, wind and lightening. Yet its delicate ethereal lavender purple blossoms speak of transcendent spiritual forces, made all the stronger through adversity. This flower essence especially helps one accept conditions that are not ideal, and might never return to “normal.” The new normal might be that we have reduced physical ability, or severe reduction or loss of a physical function or capacity. Yet we still have our life and our body, and the soul can find the grit and the grace to move in new pathways toward the future. Penstemon teaches us that acceptance of limitations is not defeat but rather a profound challenge and opportunity to move forward in a new, adaptive, and determined manner.

Self-Heal

This flower is one of the most renowned, used throughout the world to stimulate health-giving forces. Its fundamental quality is to instill an alchemical connection between one’s core sense of Self and its relation to the physical body and immune health. In taking the Self-Heal flower essence one begins to be more consciously aware of the thoughts, feelings and actions that are contributing to or depleting one’s state of health. One begins to recognize and cultivate an inner sense of responsibility and conscious decision-making, thereby becoming an active partner in the healing journey rather than a passive recipient. This self-healing force works in not only the physical body but also in the life and soul templates, helping the individual “know” more deeply what nourishes and what depletes healing. Thus, one works beyond the constraints of a medical diagnosis or external prescriptions, toward greater internal wisdom and beneficial choices for genuine self-healing.

Saint John's Wort

The Saint John’s Wort flower essence instills radiant solar forces of light into the whole human being, including the cellular matrix. This light especially works to counteract qualities of anxiety, despair and depression that can obscure the soul’s self-identity. These chronic states of depression deplete the immune system because immunity is profoundly connected to the ability of the cellular matrix to register and assimilate light in all its forms, from physical to spiritual.

Yarrow Environmental Solution (YES)

YES is a baseline formula for the immune system, utilizing the synergistic qualities of three forms of Yarrow as well as Echinacea and Arnica flowers. The comprehensive, powerful and penetrating qualities of this formula allow it to work deeply into both physical and psychic structures of health and immunity. In particular, YES helps the immune response to be self-regulating and dynamically balanced. This means that excessive immune responses, such as abnormal states of heat, allergy and inflammation, as well as hypo-immune responses, such as stagnation, infection, reduced circulation and lack of warmth, are brought back into their vital, alchemical wholeness.

Zinnia

Zinnia restores a sense of humor, lightheartedness, and playfulness to the soul. Long bouts of illness and chronic disease often deplete one of the most vital healing forces known to humanity: the ability to smile, laugh, and feel a sense of pleasure and joy in life.

Those who are chronically ill or face devastating prospects for recovery, often become grim and overly morose, defining their reality more and more in dire medical terms and abstract prescriptions. This soul condition creates intense heaviness and burden in both body and soul, impeding the immune response. Zinnia helps the soul recover one’s innate sense of humor, learning to find it even in the small events of daily life, those moments where one can step back and find laughter, playfulness, joy, and renewal.