Flexibility

An exploration of flower essences to use
for maintaining flexibility.

Flexibility is a quality that can serve us well. When we are flexible, we are able to flow and adapt to changing situations. We are able to readjust our thinking and reorganize ourselves according to what works best in a given instance. However, the real demands of life often leave us feeling brittle, frustrated, and imposed-upon.

Most of us have lives that have a greater or lesser degree of being scheduled and planned. We are aware of the finite passage of time, so we may organize our activities to take the best advantage of our free time. Yet how do we react when our best-laid plans go awry? How easy is it for us to readjust when life brings the unexpected?

Relaxing the Control Grip

Those who were raised in dysfunctional families often learned to control their surroundings and the people around them as a survival strategy. This tendency probably still exerts itself in adult life, even if the danger no longer exists. This need to control can squelch flexibility and encourage a more rigid attitude when taken too far.

Arroyo Willow can support you in letting go of rigidity and surrendering to a more flexible outlook. It can help you overcome the tendency to allow a controlling attitude to pull you into negativity. When something comes up to disturb your best-laid plans, Arroyo Willow can help you let go of being too attached to your plans and find the perfection in the new situation.

Chaos & Change

Chaos is the opposite of order. When things are in order, we usually have a greater sense of well-being. Yet times of chaos are necessary to keep us growing and moving ahead. Sometimes what seems like chaos is simply a situation in which we cannot yet recognize the underlying order. How, then, can we feel flexible and able to deal with chaos and change as they blow in and out of our lives?

The Wind & Storm Formula is the essence to choose for support. This composite formula can help you stand back and observe your inner state as your outer reality changes. It is excellent during times when it seems that the universe has turned up the heat and thrown many things at you all at once.

We usually feel threatened by chaos. When we are in a chaotic situation, we are out of control. This usually leaves us feeling insecure. The Wind & Storm Formula can help us find peace within us as we experience chaos or change. We allow the change or chaos to flow through us rather than resist it. This formula is excellent when we are feeling frenetic, rigid, or resistant.

It is a natural response for most of us to want to control the situations and events in our lives. If we can keep control, then the unexpected cannot happen. The Wind & Storm Formula can help us arrest this pattern of control and just flow with what is present in the moment.

Often life brings transitions. We may leave a job, a relationship, move to a new city, have a child, lose a family member. These are just a few of the major ones that we encounter during our life. When a transition begins, it may be difficult to fully comprehend that we need to let go of an existing reality so we can move into a new one.

The Transitions Formula is the flower essence to use. It can help you let go of whatever is appropriate so you can move on. The formula supports you in every stage of a transition, not just letting go. It helps you embrace the limbo state before the new is born and accept the new when it finally does appear, even if it doesn’t look the way you thought it would. Being flexible and pliable makes for easier transitions.

You may become inflexible when you feel overwhelmed. If you are a single parent, you may “try too hard” to hold it all together. The Single Mother Formula is wonderful for helping you to juggle the myriad details while keeping a flexible perspective. This essence can help you flow with inevitable changes so as to keep overwhelm at bay. Some things will just not get done, even though you did your best to attempt them. The Single Mother’s Formula can help you keep a flexible perspective on what really is priority in the midst of dealing with the potentially overwhelming details of life.

Emotional Flexibility

How flexible are you in your inner world? It’s easier to see the outer things that provoke an inflexible attitude, but how do we recognize it inside?

Sometimes we are inflexible with our feelings. We may feel angry with someone and spitefully grow it into hostility. Or we may hold onto a feeling just because it’s there. This type of emotional rigidity keeps us stuck, replaying the situation inside over and over, feeding our anger. Compass Barrel Cactus can help us overcome this emotional tendency so we can feel our feelings and let them go.

When you can simply allow a feeling to be felt, acknowledged, and released, you are available to be current with your emotions and flexible with what is happening in the moment. This cactus essence can bring your awareness to the place within where your mind reacts to your feeling so you can consciously make a choice to allow the feeling to be felt without having your thoughts stop it or hold on to it.

Perhaps one tendency that mothers an inflexible attitude is critical judgement of yourself or others. Usually internalized from criticism you received as a child, self-judgement can limit your perspective and tend to make you rigid or harsh. Foothills Paloverde is the essence to use for support.

Just as this tree has found a beautiful way to adapt to the harsh desert climate, so too can it help us adapt when we experience the harshness of our own minds. Our minds are great tools for defining ourselves and our reality. Yet our minds alone, without the softness of our heart impressions and feelings, can create a desolate reality…

When we can just observe our thoughts and feelings without needing to judge them, we experience a calmer inner life. This essence has been likened to the quiet of the desert at the moment before dawn or just after sunset.

Perceptual Flexibility

There are times when we make things difficult, usually because some part of us wants to have a challenge to overcome. We may stubbornly define a situation as a problem, convinced that we will have to struggle and expend a lot of energy or time to resolve it.

Cane Cholla Cactus is the essence to use for helping you to perceive a situation differently. This essence helps you leap to a new perspective, viewing the situation in a way that releases struggle and allows a joyful resolution. Whenever you need perceptual flexibility, Cane Cholla Cactus can be your friend.

Sometimes flexibility eludes us because of the intensity of input and stimulation we receive. Windflower, whose pliable stem allows it to flow about with the wind, can help you find balance.

We often go through our days with periods of high energy followed by times of burnout. We may feel “on top of it all” one minute and unable to cope the next. Windflower helps us reach an even keel of energy when we experience these ups and downs.

If you are worried about things not being just right, you may become unbending in your attitude. Perfectionism can be a deterrent to flexibility as your focus is insistently held by how you think it should be, rather than on the possibilities of what can be. A perfectionistic attitude can cause stressful and time-consuming action.

Desert Willow is the essence to use to help you step out of perfectionism and into the reality of possibility. Instead of focusing on things being “just right”, you can attune to how something could be easy and even better than what you think.

Flexibility in Being

Sometimes our rigid ideas are base on an inner feeling of insecurity about our capabilities. Candy Barrel Cactus can help us uncover long-stored inner abilities that our insecurities have covered up. In this way it enhances a more flexible attitude and enhances a peaceful, inner sense of capability.

Sometimes we are inflexible because we have learned the “right” way to be, and we hold tenaciously to this societal conditioning even if our inner urge is to break out. The Wild Woman Formula is superb for finding inner permission to step outside of conditioned ways of being so you can uncover what is truly right for you. The essence can help you discover your more pliant nature, shaped by your soul and your desires.

Overly Flexible

What about those who are too flexible? A pliant person is adaptable, but a pliable person is perhaps too easy to influence or too eager to please. The Making & Honoring Boundaries Formula is for those who are too easily shaped by others, or in a sense, too flexible. This is the essence that helps you discover what you really want and supports you in the steps necessary to communicate that to others.

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 flexibility. The process itself of exploring and contemplating your flexibility 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

Arroyo Willow

rigid and needing to control

Candy Barrel Cactus

rigidity of ideas, unbudgeable attitudes due to an inner feeling of insecurity

Compass Barrel Cactus

holding onto anger or other feelings and not letting them flow

Desert Willow

worried about things not being “just right”; perfectionism

Foothills Paloverde

critical of yourself or others

Making & Honoring Boundaries Formula

for those who are too flexible or too easily influenced by others

Single Mother's Formula

feeling inflexible as you juggle the myriad of needs as a single mother

Transitions Formula

feeling like you want to control everything while in the midst of a transition or transformational experience

Windflower

feeling highly energized at one moment, then very depleted in the next

Wind & Storm Formula

feeling unable to allow change and chaos to flow through your life

Wild Woman Formula

being over-controlled by societal conditioning or a self-imposed inflexible concept of self