Healing crisis's don't get a whole lot of attention in the flower essence world. Some books or sites will make enough mention of it to terrify people so I thought I would share some of my experiences as well as some others that I've witnessed. First, let's remember that in the natural health world the "healing crisis" is always a good thing. It means the treatment is working, albeit a little too well. Many of you are familiar with cleansing, and how if you overdo it you get a range of nasty symptoms and it means you simply need to back off a bit and do a little less. Essences are exactly the same, except you're cleaning out old hurts and things you've been hanging onto that aren't serving you well. It can be painful to see this stuff come to the surface and have your false fronts stripped away. If it gets too intense, then stop for a couple days, let things settle and try again with less frequent doses. The other option is to look at what you're taking and try a different approach with new essences, then come back to the troubling ones later when you're a little stronger.

You don't have to have a healing crisis for essences to do their job. I would say 95% of the time people don't experience anything negative. It's not really something you need to be watching out for, you simply need to be aware of the possibility so you don't get blindsided.

People are most likely to go through a healing crisis if they have blocked things out or are using something as a way of coping. Flower essences do tend to get us to face things that we don't like in ourselves or something that needs our attention rather than let you continue to suppress or ignore. If something of that sort is standing in your way of healing, flower essences will have you facing it down.

So what does it feel like? I've documented moodiness, crying, disturbing dreams, social withdrawal, old memories surfacing, physical symptoms, especially in the stomach, and inability to focus on day to day work because you're working through something. Flower essences shine light on the truth and sometimes the truth hurts.

A seventy year old customer was on a blend long term and needed a refill. She mentioned that she'd just found out she has a half-sister. Knowing that she hadn't had a good relationship with her dad anyway, and now this comes along, I decided to add in some Sunflower. The next day she told me, "I don't think this Sunflower is right, I'm just not happy at all." Happy all the time is unrealistic, even with flower essences, The goal is to react appropriately to whatever comes down the pike. Most of us get it backwards and suppress the big stuff and then overreact to the small things. We took the Sunflower out of the blend and she has it separately to take as soon as she feels like confronting the issue.

For me, I didn't really think of it as a healing crisis at the time, I just knew it was something I had to go through. I was angry and mean and had a lot of bad things happening in my life, a lot of things period and I did not have the time to try to get it together and act like a decent person - I had to be nice now because family was hurting too, so I took some Sweet Cherry, which is broad spectrum negative emotions essence including anger. I took one sip and cried for twenty minutes. I did not just cheer up and get friendly and sweet, I had to wash away all that hostility, it was covering up the pain. Afterwards I was shaky and raw and lighter and dealing with problems as a family member rather than trying to cut them away and be in it alone.

There are certain essences known to be potential crisis servers. One of those is Black-eyed Susan.

Black-eyed Susan is a deeply cathartic essence with a long history of use in treating emotional amnesia, or those things you block out. Why put yourself through the unblocking? Because these events that never get processed can manifest in other ways like physical problems (more on this later) or bad patterns in your life. For example, lots of kids grow up in abusive homes. The healthy ones deal and say "I'm NEVER going to hit my kids, and they turn out to be good parents in spite of what they knew. Others will grow up with that hurt and take it out on their children, and probably they remember how it was, but have blocked out the feelings, the details of what it truly was like. The hurt never really went anywhere, they just shut off feeling. The physical part, I'll give you me again for example, I don't mind sharing unlike most of my customers! I'm a very mild case though. After the umpteenth person told me I was stressed out, I began to consider the possibility that they were right. It took umpteen people because "I have a flower essence company and if I was stressed out don't you think I would do something about it?" Denial as we all know is not just a river in Egypt. I had every reason to be stressed out but I thought I was coping just fine, although I had overwhelming fatigue and was constantly fighting off a cold, even though it's summer. I knew I wasn't right, physically, I'm a health minded person and this stuff just doesn't happen. I was making a great effort to feel better and I just wasn't. "What in the heck is wrong with me?" So since everybody else on the planet seemed to think I had a little stress problem I decided to take some Black-eyed Susan with the intent to gain some understanding in order to move on to a another flower essence.

Taking Black-eyed Susan, I found that there were some details surrounding a family members death that were still bothering me. I had attempted to use logic to squelch it. "Dead is dead, doesn't matter how, he knew Jesus so what is the big deal. Let go already." Geez I'm mean to myself! Would you say that to a friend? I wouldn't say it to my worst enemy but I said it to myself. Anyway, I realized what I needed to do there for my own closure and even acknowledging and giving myself permission to be upset helped. Meanwhile I went to get acupuncture for my physical issues and my lung meridian was deficient which has to do with grief processing and accounts for the fatigue and immunity problems.

I decided to keep taking Black-eyed Susan to see if anything else came up and I had a dream about a giant rooster coming after me. I ran up some stairs to get way but he got me anyway. I didn't fight back because I didn't want to hurt him so I just took my lumps. This to me is a conglomeration of two early childhood events. The obvious was when I was a kid, we had to cut through the chicken yard to get to the outhouse and when I was 3 or 4, the roosters would always get after me so I had to either run or sneak. Sometimes Mom would fend em off for me, but mostly I was on my own. I remember one time in particular the rooster really got me backed into a corner. Now the not fighting back part of the dream, in life I didn't like the roosters and I was happy to have them for dinner, I think I was too busy defending my face to fight back. I think the not fighting back and going up to get away came in later when I was five and I had a big slobbery dog named Moose.

I came home from school one day and Mom told me to get someplace high if I didn't want to be slobbered on because Moose was coming. I could hear his feet on the floor running and looking for me so I paniced, jumped on the bed and got in the middle so he couldn't reach. He started to come up after me so I kicked him in the face and he went blind and freaked out and ran into all the walls and died. I don't remember talking to anybody about this, or them trying to comfort me or even realizing that I might have felt bad/responsible. My family all circled around him, trying to calm him down before he died ( and rightly so) while I watched from the Willow tree at a distance. I think they thought I was fine because I wasn't bawling my head off like 5 year olds do. I don't remember crying at all. It wasn't like I blocked these memories entirely, it's not news to me that I got beat up by chickens and killed my own dog. I find it amusing that the chicken thing was significant enough to come up with a Black-eyed Susan cleanse. I had finally talked to Mom about Moose a couple years ago and she said it wasn't my fault and he had something wrong with him and was gonna die anyway, so I do remember these events, but with Black-eyed Susan everything is fresh again and I am so so sad for Moose and 5 year old me.

Annabeth Meister worked with flower essences for over 30 years and never had a healing crisis until now. Read her account of her troubles with lilac here