Joshua Tree Flower Essence: Healing Generational Trauma

Our Emotional Inheritance

Joshua Tree flower essence is recognized throughout the world as an aid to heal trauma from our family and ethnic inheritance.  We not only have a physical inheritance associated with our genetic lineage, but also cultural and psychological patterns passed on through the psychic bonds that tie us to our family tree. Joshua Tree flower essence is a powerful healing catalyst that helps us understand these generational influences, to learn the lessons they have for us, and move on to find our own individual path in life.

For example, patterns such as alcoholism and drug addiction, physical and sexual abuse, racism and misogyny, violence against self or others, emotional and mental illness, and trauma from war or disaster, can have profound effects for many generations, even if the specific experiences seem to be in the past. As William Faulkner famously wrote in his novel The Nun, “The past is never dead. It isn’t even past.”

Joshua Tree: A Most Unusual Plant

Joshua Tree grows in the high desert in the Southwestern US. It is not a true tree, but rather a Yucca plant (Yucca brevifolia), with a many-branches in a tree-like growth form. When a flower blooms at the end of a branch, the growth stops in that direction and then starts in another direction. This can lead to a very convoluted and complex shape for older plants, which can live for many hundreds of years. We can say that the very form of the plant is a record of its past development and blossoming, a kind of living “family tree.”

For more insight into Joshua Tree, read this in-depth Botanical Profile of the Joshua Tree by Richard Katz, this discussion of the Soul Signature of Joshua Tree by Patricia Kaminski and the use of Joshua Tree Flower Essence by the Italian flower essence practitioner Donatella Tordoni.

A Legacy of Generational Trauma

We recently received a significant report of the use of Joshua Tree flower essence to deal with the horrific family trauma from the Holocaust, the mass killing of Jews and others by the Nazi regime during World War Two.

Mary Davis, a life coach and wellness consultant who uses flower essences in her practice, described how all of her family—her parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles—were refugees during the Holocaust.

Mary’s parents did not talk much about their refugee experiences, as that would trigger too much trauma. Nonetheless, Mary felt the impact in her present life. She said, “I felt that there was a family curse, and it was this darkness that just permeated my mind and heart.”

When she discovered Joshua Tree flower essence, she felt that it dispelled this darkness. “If I don’t take it,” she said, “I can feel the darkness creeping back in again.”

Mary described the effect of Joshua Tree as giving her the freedom to live her own life, not to be invisibly bound by her family’s past.

Comparison with Pedicularis Flower Essence

Both Joshua Tree and Pedicularis essences awaken us to the influences from the distant past that still affect us in present time. However they do so in quite different ways.

Joshua Tree essence relates to our blood-line ancestry. This plant is associated with the moon. Its soft-white blossoms release their fragrance during the cool desert night, glowing softly in the moonlight. Esoterically, the moon governs the forces of reproduction and family ties. With Joshua Tree essence, we learn to accept the challenges of the family and ethnic nexus that our soul chose for this incarnation, without letting this generational inheritance block the destiny path that our soul has laid out for this life.

Pedicularis (Pedicularis groenlandica, also known as Elephant’s Head) connects us with profound insights from the evolutionary journey of our soul.  It is a very different plant than Joshua Tree, herbaceous, growing in lush high mountain meadows in the western US. Our research has found that this essence stimulates deep soul memory that can give us insight into our present-day challenges, or karma. This memory relates not to our blood line or family lineage, but rather to the experiences of previous soul incarnations. For example, a present-day fear of water could be related to a past life that ended in a drowning. In esoteric teaching, this soul memory relates to the archetype of Saturn, or Chronos, also known as “Father Time.”  Pedicularis helps us to realize the relationship of challenges we meet in this life to the past experiences our soul has encountered, typically in the context of very different family and ethnic identities.

Both Joshua Tree and Pedicularis can give us real insight into pre-birth influences that affect us today, either through our blood-line inheritance or our soul’s past incarnations.  It is important to keep such insights grounded into real experiences of our current lives, so as not to be tempted by projection or fascination. Nonetheless, such insights can open up doorways to further soul work beyond looking at the early years of this present life.

Joshua Tree flower essence is available here.

Pedicularis flower essence is available here.