Fear

Flower essences for separating the real from the imagined

One of the biggest emotions we have to face in life is fear. Fear is a distressing emotion, aroused by impending danger, evil, or pain, whether the situation is real or imagined. It is a mental or visceral conclusion that can act as an impetus to action or that immobilizes you.

Many fears are healthy ones. They can keep you safe. They can inhibit you from taking actions that are not in your best interest. Healthy fear can keep you from doing things you would ultimately regret. In dangerous situations fear can provide you with the power to survive. This kind of fear is instinctual.

It is not this instinctual type of fear that I want to explore, but rather the type of fear that the mind creates. This is the type of fear that holds you back from joyfully living life or taking chances and allowing your soul to lead you into experiences that you may otherwise resist. When we allow fear to hold us back from having experiences, we may stifle the very essence of the soul.

We have two main Desert Alchemy flower essences for fear. One of them harmonizes the fear that stems from your relationship with the structure and limitations of life. The other flower essence addresses the type of fear that originates from your interpretation of the consequences of your actions.

Sense of Limitation

Fear that stems from your sense of limitation may hold you in inaction. It may keep you from moving ahead in life. The fear is mainly focused within you and often paralyzes you. This is the type of fear with which Thurber’s Gilia flower essence works.

Sometimes you experience things in life that leave you feeling limited, confined, restricted. You want to move ahead, yet you feel held back or paralyzed by fear. Thurber’s Gilia flower essence helps you when you fear that you will never emerge from your limitations. You may have been struggling to leave behind a limitation for so long that you are tired, frozen, and feel utterly powerless to effect a change. The essence supports you in moving beyond the concept of limitation, and helps you access the courage to face your fears and limitations directly. It helps you penetrate into and through anything fear-related.

Sometimes you may use fear to keep yourself in a limited state. You probably feel most comfortable when you have a definite sense of what you can and cannot achieve. When you do not have to choose from too many options and when your possibilities seem limited, you may have a feeling of safety and of being in control. Yet, your perception of limitation can sometimes be a way of hiding from life. You may use your sense of limitation to keep yourself from having to interact with the unknown, from moving on into territory where you are uncertain. Thurber’s Gilia helps you in this situation as well. It supports you when you are afraid that you will move out of your limitations, and you will then be faced with the terror of the unknown.

If you have compulsive or obsessive tendencies, Thurber’s Gilia can often help to soften anxieties. It helps you access the courage to face your fears or distress directly.

Interpretation of Your Actions

The other main type of fear has its cause in your perception of actions you have taken in the past or want to take in the future. Its cause is rooted in your external interactions with the world, and your judgements of them. This is the kind of fear that you might project onto other people or onto the world. Scorpion Weed is the essence we use for this type of fear. If you project your fears outward and see others or situations as threatening, Scorpion Weed is your flower essence.

Scorpion Weed helps you if you fear the consequences of your actions. You can use it if you are afraid of making a mistake, or of repeating the mistakes of the past. There is often the underlying fear that you will not be forgiven, that your errors are irrevocable. Sometimes you fear that your actions will result in the loss of someone’s love.

Scorpion Weed is also an important essence to help you recover from guilt, which often has its roots in fear. The flower essence supports you in knowing, not just intellectually but with your whole being, that there are no absolute mistakes or failures, only experiences from which you can learn and grow. It helps you trust in your essential goodness and light. You can forgive yourself and release the past. The flower essence of Scorpion Weed can help you calmly, realistically, face your fears so they become emotionally manageable.

In dealing with fear, you might look to see if it is mainly internalized, and use Thurber’s Gilia, or stems from an external, action-oriented cause, and choose Scorpion Weed. If your fear contains elements of both, or if you are unsure, use both flower essences in combination.

Fear is an important emotion. In theses times of quick and dramatic change, we don’t have to allow fear to keep us frozen, or keep us from living the life we truly want.

Fine-Tuning

Being in the desert, especially for the first time, can evoke fear in many people. At the same time, the desert provides many flower essences that can fine-tune specific types of fears. The Cross-Reference section of The Alchemy of the Desert book lists many specific fears and the flower essences that support harmonizing them. If you want to fine-tune the process of ridding yourself from fear, check it out.

Selecting the Most Appropriate Flower Essences

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

Scorpion Weed

Helps you overcome consequential fears: of making mistakes; of the consequences of your actions; of failure; of loss of love; of not being forgiven;

Thurber's Gilia

Supports you in resolving limitation-based fears: that you might not emerge from a limiting situation; that you will emerge from a limiting situation; of your identity being threatened; that keeps you frozen in inaction.