Self-consciousness

Are you feeling inhibited by your perception of how others see you? Here is an exploration of flower essences you can use.

Self-consciousness can be an uncomfortable state in which you are very aware of yourself, your appearance or your actions and how they appear to those around you. It can trap you into an awkward and uneasy bubble of isolation.

There is another definition for this term, but I would call it Self-Consciousness, with capital letters, which is your awareness of yourself as a conscious being. I think that Self-Consciousness is a state in which you feel connected with the energy of the Creator, and you are aware that you are a conscious being and that you exist.

I think that self-consciousness is a hyperaware state in which you assess how you think others are perceiving you at any given time. Your focus is so wrapped up on what you perceive others are thinking about you that you lose the ability to be established in your own inner connectedness to spirit or the Creator.

When you feel self-conscious, your ego is actively involved. The ego is responsible for reality testing. Part of its function is to create a sense of personal identity. In this process, the ego is constantly poised to test your relationship to those around you, so it is constantly weighing and assessing the people around you. Sometimes self-consciousness is born from a desire to please others so that you fit in with them. Or, there may be an urge to meet their expectations so that you are more acceptable to them.

One big problem here is that your perception of what others think about you is not necessarily what they really think about you. When you feel inadequate, you may project your own low concept of yourself onto others and think that is how they see you. Haven’t you ever gotten to know someone well enough to discuss later your first impressions of each other? If so, you have probably been surprised to find out that their impression of you was different than you might have expected. Often you learn that what they were impressed by was not the same as your own awareness at the time.

If you have taken the time to do a reality check with someone after an uncomfortable encounter, you may have found out that what you thought was his or her perception of you was in fact, very different. We invest a great amount of energy in guessing how others are seeing us. Sometimes our perceptions are right on, at other times they couldn’t be further from reality.

A tremendous amount of time and energy is invested in attempting to weigh how others see us. What if we could use this time and energy in a different way? After all, it is mostly out of our control how others perceive us. While our appearance, the way we carry ourselves, how we dress, and our manner of speech have a definite impact on others, much of another’s notion of who we are is colored by his or her own life experiences and gut reactions and therefore out of our control.

What if we could redirect the energy we give to self-consciousness to self-confidence? What is the foundation for feeling confident and easy? If we can direct our energy to those places within us instead of spending so much time worrying about how others perceive us, we would be more empowered to simply be ourselves. When we are confident, we are focused on our own inner state of being, we become our own reference point, even while aware of those around us. The perceptions of others are less important.

Following are a few flower essences that can support you in changing the awkwardness of self-consciousness into confident Self-Consciousness.

Feeling Inadequate or Inhibited

Often, the feeling of self-consciousness stems from an underlying feeling that you are inadequate, as if you have nothing special to offer to a situation or circumstance. Evening Star is the essence to use in this case. It helps you find confidence in your essential beauty and worth. Just as you are, right now, you are perfect. The Creator made you just like you are for this moment in time. When this realization touches you, you find that it no longer matters what you think others think of you.

Evening Star is excellent for those who feel dependent upon others for self-validation. Being in new or different situations can leave you feeling that you must have someone outside you to approve of you in some manner so that you can feel comfortable. This flower essence supports you in finding that just as you are, you are total and complete.

We use Evening Star for children who are shy. It is also used a lot for children at the beginning of a new school year, or when there have been changes in their school or class. It is also excellent for anyone, in any new type of situation, when feeling reticent, bashful or inhibited.

Self-consciousness with Your Sexuality or Physical Appearance

Star Evening Primrose is the essence we use when there is inhibition or self-consciousness with sexuality. This flower essence helps us by relaxing, loosening, and feeling joy and beauty in yourself. This is the essence that can get you in touch with your own natural beauty that resides within, helping you feel a sense of belonging and gentle sharing.

This is the essence for those who deny their body, who feel out of touch or incomplete in attempting to express themselves physically. It can help replace awkwardness with joy and self-judgement with self-worth and acceptance. If you are self-judgmental about your physical appearance, Star Evening Primrose can support you in finding your inherent beauty, no matter what outer influences have affected you.

Accepting Your Humanness

Some of us feel self-conscious because we are human. We all have little quirks, foibles, and other oddities that make us unique. If you don’t accept and embrace these little oddities, you can feel self-judgmental and self-conscious.

Embracing Humanness Formula is the essence to use for finding self-acceptance. It helps you accept your emotions, body, and even thoughts as the vehicles through which you can gain wisdom and understanding of yourself. It enhances your ability to get along with people and accept your place in the family of humanity.

Fear of Making Mistakes

Sometimes the feeling of self-consciousness comes from fear, especially the fear of making a mistake or of repeating the mistakes of the past. Scorpion Weed is the flower essence to use to harmonize this causation.

This flower essence supports self-forgiveness that can release you from the past. It helps you calmly face your fears, looking at them realistically, so they become emotionally manageable. Scorpion Weed supports you in knowing that there are no absolute mistakes or failures, only experiences from which we can learn and grow. When we are free from the fear of making mistakes, confidence blooms and we find it much easier to handle any kind of situation.

Inhibition or Performance Anxiety

Those who are self-conscious when needing to perform some task, take a test, or even manifest a creative idea can be helped with Purple Aster. These types of disharmonies are often felt by those who try very hard at things and who work themselves without joy. Self-consciousness can push you to try too hard, which results in your hyper-vigilance of how others are perceiving you. The harder you try, the less joy and vitality your actions have.

Purple Aster helps change the feeling that you have to push and struggle to make things happen to feeling like you are in sync with the rhythm of the universe and that your actions are united with universal will. In this way, you no longer feel the intense pressure that you have to make things happen perfectly, you relax and are brought along with the flow. When you are in the flow, it is no longer interesting to assess how others see you because you are simply being and having fun.

Purple Aster is the essence of choice if you feel inhibition about manifesting any project or idea. If self-consciousness is blocking you from taking the first step in bringing an idea into manifestation, use this flower essence.

One woman had written a number of plays but had never let anyone read them. She said, “I decided that I had been procrastinating enough. I selected Purple Aster, Cliff Rose, Anchor-Manifestation Formula and Celebration of Abundance Formula.”

She reported that three days later she got a “big shot of energy”, put the plays in bound presentation form, and sent them out to different theaters around the country. Two weeks later, a theater in Hollywood called and told her they wanted to produce one of her plays. She went to Hollywood, the play was produced and was a great success.

She told me, “This behavior was completely unlike me. I thank you and God and all these flowers. Taking your flower essences has changed my life.”

Tools and Inner Resources Build Confidence

You can feel self-conscious when you are in a new situation, a new job, or other circumstance in which you have not had previous experience. When you are on a learning curve, attempting to familiarize yourself with a new technique or skill, it is natural to feel somewhat self-conscious. Owning the Level Formula is excellent to help create ease with this type of self-consciousness. This formula is excellent for helping you find the resources and skills that you have already developed but haven’t applied them in this new way. Owning the Level Formula can help you see that you already have what you need within you and it helps you be patient and self-confident with your learning process.

So many of us have spent years in situations applying mastery that we forget that it’s great to be a beginner, to be learning something new. It takes time to master something and learning can be fun and exciting if we are confident in the process. Owning the Level can help you with exactly that.

Selecting the Most Appropriate Flower Essences

Not every flower essence mentioned above will be appropriate for every person’s specific needs. Different people have different issues around self-consciousness. The process itself of exploring and contemplating your self-consciousness issues is important. It is the foundation for successfully selecting the most beneficial flower essences. Usually, careful self-examination can clearly show you which of the above flower essences are most appropriate for your particular needs.

Though you can use more than one flower essence together, you probably will not need to use all of the ones mentioned here. After contemplating your relationship to this issue, select the flower essences that apply for you, or use an intuitive method to select among them. (For more information on how to do this, see The Art & Technique of Using Flower Essences.) A general guideline is to use four drops at a time, four times a day, in water. However, it is fine to follow your intuition and use them as often as you like. Most people find that they tend to use them more often in the beginning and less often towards the end of the cycle. Unless otherwise indicated, a cycle is usually two to four weeks. [more]

For information on how to clearly evaluate the effects of the essences you have used, see The Art & Technique of Using Flower Essences.

List of the Flower Essences Mentioned in this Article

Embracing Humanness Formula

inability to accept your human failings and quirks

Evening Star

feeling dependent upon outside sources for self-validation and support

Owning the Level Formula

feeling that you do not have the the tools or inner resources to handle a new or different situation

Purple Aster

inhibition; for the stress of trying too hard; performance anxiety – a form of self-consciousness about how your actions appear to others; self-consciousness that blocks the manifestation of a creative idea

Scorpion Weed

fear of making a mistake, or of repeating mistakes of the past

Star Evening Primrose

self-consciousness with your sexuality; self-judgement of your physical appearance