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Some Thoughts on Rock Water
The conventional use of Rock Water: strictness and restriction
Dr. Bach’s
Rock Water
is an essence which has become one of my favourites in the recent past. The more I discover its transformative potential, the greater my admiration of this essence becomes.
The conventional use of Rock Water: strictness and restriction
Flower essence literature describes Rock Water as an essence for people that hold high standards, mainly towards themselves. These people lean towards self-martyrdom, an ascetic approach to life and strict self-discipline. Götz Blome writes that the
Rock Water
people usually feel somewhat uncertain in regards to their feelings, emotions and natural desires
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. They have a hard time handling the colourful reality of their feelings and of life in general. At the same time, they tend to have a strong will combined with high ideals. Their thinking shows a trend towards a certain immobility. They try to get a handle on their perceived weakness by keeping a tight reign on their feelings through concepts and ideas. Here their strictness towards themselves comes into play. Based on their clear-cut views of right and wrong and of (self-)perfection, they often follow strict self-improvement regimes of one sort or another. These self-improvement regimes may be aimed at their diets, exercise, meditation practice or something else. True
Rock Water
people typically have long lists of what they are doing to improve or maintain their physical, mental and spiritual health. I remember a
Rock Water
client who would come to her appointments with me with a well filled-in
Case Evaluation Form.
Under the section
Please list other therapies engaged in while taking the essences
there would often appear a list of at least ten other health measures she was pursuing. At first, I usually felt that I was really negligent in taking care of myself when I read through these lists... Yet, true
Rock Water
might still feel miserable because they are unable to fulfill their self-imposed standards and expectations.
Discovering a new understanding of Rock Water: reviving the flow of energy
The descriptions we read of the type of person in need of
Rock Water
are not very flattering. However, I have found that
Rock Water
essence can have much much wider applications than helping people out of the above described mind-set.
My first ‘non-conventional’ experience of
Rock Water
essence goes back more than 10 years. Being quite ill at the time, I had taken up the practice of Qi Gong. After a week or two of practice, I would feel a profound energy drain every time I started the exercises. While tiredness was certainly a key symptom of the illness I had, this rather sudden onset of exhaustion was different. At the time, I was using only the Bach remedies. As far as I remember, I had tried
Olive
,
Elm
, etc., to no avail. A friend of mine who was a skilled dowser and whom I asked for help, suggested
Rock Water
essence. Neither of us understood why this particular essence tested positive. However, next time I started the Qi Gong exercises and the feeling of exhaustion set in, I took
Rock Water
. Lo and behold, as soon as I took it, the exhaustion started to lift. This experience kept repeating itself during my subsequent Qi Gong practice.
Today, these seemingly perplexing effects of
Rock Water
make perfect sense to me. They can be better understood when one looks more closely at the omnipresent and mysterious substance we call water. In his book
Bach Flower Remedies - Form & Function
, Julian Barnard gives an eye-opening introduction into the element of water.
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Stories of creation tell us that water is the substance of primal beginnings. It is found in the brightness of the sky and in the dark depths of the earth; it passes through global cycles of movement, transforming and being transformed. It rises from the earth, comes back to it, merges with the depths of the earth and rises again. The movement of water is essential for all natural processes including the weather. Water is the element that creates wholeness, globality, like the cosmos forms a whole.
... Water desires nothing for itself, it gives of itself freely... . As in its very nature it is itself pure, it can purify, refresh, heal, strengthen, revive and clarify all things... . Water...makes itself clear and transparent; in the pure play of colour in the rainbow it attains the fullness of possibilities. Nothing could better describe the gifts of Rock Water essence. The philosopher Hegel called water ‘the mother of all that is special’ 7 . Rock water is the mother essence of all - special - flower essences.
Schwenk writes about the brain: “...its undulations are the movements of the etheric element of ‘water’ that have become
organ:
they have been laid down in flowing lines. There is a particular relationship between thinking with the etheric world. The activity of thinking is essentially an expression of flowing movement.”
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.
Broadening the application of Rock Water: the flow of energy and physical effects
These observations, while offering a perfect description of the gifts of
Rock Water
essence the way we know it, also give us a glimpse of why this essence may have much wider uses.
Rock Water
can have definite physical effects. I once saw a young girl as a client who had Downs syndrome as well as some features of an Indigo child. Her bowel movement was minimal.
Rock Water
was included in her essence formula, and I would ascribe the improvement of her bowel movement to this essence.
There is another atypical observation I made just recently. A client of mine had kept mentioning the word “flow” or rather lack thereof in the description of some difficulties she had with family members. There was no rigidity of conviction or strict principles playing a role in the family situation, but in the relationship with both her daughter and mother, a lack of flow was felt. It was the repeated mention of the word “flow” that made me think of selecting Rock Water essence. This was the 14th time I saw this client, and we had used many other essences successfully. It was however, the first time we introduced Rock Water . Generally, the results of this essence were astonishing. First, the client had a dream about of the bottom of a lake the week after she started taking this essence. She also had a sense that she was being washed from inside and that everything was becoming more multidimensional. Knots in her being seemed to be soothed. However, what struck me most during our conversation was the effect this essence seemed to have on dealing with “family molds,” patterns of behaviour that exist between family members and seem to have an existence of their own. During the consultation, we were both marveling at the power these molds can have in our relationships with family members. Yet Rock Water seemed to have the ability (it was used in a larger formula) to make these molds conscious first of all, and then dissolve them. The family situation she was describing was one where I would normally have considered numerous other essences, like Walnut , Goldenrod , etc. etc. Yet it was the repeated use of the word “flow” that had made me choose Rock Water , not with intention in mind to dissolve family pattern/or molds, but with the intention to bring back flow into the relationships. Rock Water seems to be an essence that can be of assistance in dissolving crystallized patterns of behaviour between people, even if none of the people involved displays particular Rock Water traits. As Götz Blome aptly summarizes in his book The New Bach Flower Essence Book : “Rock Water is a primal remedy. This inconspicuous essence, prepared form pure water sprung from a pristine rocky source and charged energetically by the sun, is the life elixir amongst the Bach remedies, because it dissolves self-destructive life-denying tendencies... . It represents basically the life enhancing and life maintaining function of natural water. 10
Footnotes
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Barbara Schuster grew up in Germany where she studied languages and trained to be a Waldorf teacher. She moved to Ottawa, Canada in 1984, where she found out about the Bach flower remedies and started using them regularly. Later she lived in Zimbabwe for several years with her family, where she fell sick from a mysterious illness which took several years to be diagnosed and eventually healed. During her recovery, she started making flower essences from local wildflowers and also discovered FES and Pacific Essences. Barbara went through the FES certification process in 2003/2004. Apart from working with flower essences, Barbara also practices Therapeutic Touch and works as a part-time translator. In addition, Barbara pursues studies in Anthroposophy, particularly the subject of socio-economics.
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