Intimacy

An exploration of flower essences you can use
to remove obstacles to creating and
sustaining deep and meaningful relationships.

Intimacy is the creation of a shared sacred space between individuals that is built upon mutual respect and care. Intimacy is made when you can share your individual experiences with another who listens and honors your experience. It also comes from having shared experiences in which you give and receive support to each other. Intimacy can be equally founded upon sharing pleasure and adversity.

Everyone wants and needs intimacy to different degrees. Yet for many, the process of creating intimacy can be fraught with difficulty and disappointment.

Perhaps the biggest problem we might have in creating intimacy with others is reflected in the relationship we have with ourselves. If we don’t fully and unconditionally love ourselves, we can’t fully love others.

For some people, the fear of being entrapped within a relationship and not being able to get out can stop them from coming close to another. Others may be afraid of being stifled by smothering love. Still others may feel unworthy of having intimacy because of a painful experience of not having being accepted in a group at some point in their life.

Feelings of inadequacy can tend to keep you interacting superficially rather than at an intimate depth. Fear of allowing other people close to you can create a distance that is hard to overcome. Communication is the key to creating closeness in relationship, so if you have any issues in this arena it can be a deterrent to intimacy.

Unconditional Love

Perhaps the strongest foundation for creating intimacy is a love for yourself. Unconditional love begins within you and then can extend out to others. If love is the foundation, intimacy can be fostered in a mated relationship, a frienship, with your child, or with a parent. The Unconditional Love & Support Formula helps you find this love, first within and then outside.

This is probably the best essence to turn to when you have any problem with intimacy, even if you are not sure what it is. You can use it as a general support while you search to find if there are specific issues, such as any of the following, that need additional flower essence support.

Fear of Being Stifled by Love

Some of us have difficulty with creating intimacy with another because we are afraid of being stifled by smothering love. You may have had the experience of having love be oppressive. You might had wanted to run away from intimacy because the underlying fear is that it will be too heavy to handle.

Desert Holy is the essence of choice to soothe these fears and melt away the blockages around your heart. It helps you be firmly centered in your heart so that you can look calmly at your fears of oppression and see if they are real or imagined. Desert Holly can bring us the simple joy and serenity of love so that we can create intimacy from that pure place.

Fear of Commitment

Some people equate being intimate with being trapped in a relationship. Since intimacy often leads to committed relationships, whether a friendship or a mated relationship, many people fear that they will be entrapped or confined.

Arizona Sycamore is the essence to use to melt away this fear. It helps you find an inner freedom that shows you that intimacy can support, rather than entrap you. Feelings of confinement in relationship give way to appreciation and exploration of the joy that arises from real intimacy that is built upon shared experience.

Feeling You Have Nothing Special to Offer

If you feel that you have nothing special or important to offer others, this feeling might keep you relating to others in a more superficial way, which is the opposite of intimacy.

Evening Star is the flower essence to use to find self-affirmation and confidence in your essential beauty and worth. When you have confidence in your essential self, you feel much more at ease in sharing openly with others.

Shyness can also be an inhibitor to creating intimacy and those who are shy can use Evening Star.

This flower essence helps us see qualities within ourselves that are unique and beautiful. Sometimes even if we see beautiful things about ourselves we reject them or think that they are not really true. We push our own beauty away. This flower essence helps us trust our beauty and softness. As we look and see our inner beauty, this essence supports us in finding the strength we need to be able to accept it. We go beyond thoughts that reject our beauty.

Intimacy versus Neediness

Some people talk a lot. You may go to lunch with a friend who spends the whole time focused on herself and her problems and never ask you about your life. She may think she is being intimate, but in fact she is feeling needy and self-absorbed.

When we experience the disharmonious pattern of the Milky Nipple Cactus, we constantly demand attention from others. A common manifestation of our neediness is through incessant talking. We may be unable to be silent while with others. Often, what we say is very interesting and captivating, and we insist that others listen. Or, we may just talk, not really having anything important to say. We may suddenly realize that we have been monopolizing a conversation and then feel uncomfortable. Or, we may not realize our attention-demanding tactics, but others may feel tired after spending time in our company.

It’s difficult to build a foundation of intimacy with someone who doesn’t know how to give emotional support. Milky Nipple Cactus brings the awareness of the fact that you have emotional needs and that there are healthy ways to get them met without sucking attention from everyone around you. As you experience what healthy emotional support feels like, you are able to give and receive in an appropriate way. Milky Nipple Cactus can help you pave the two-way street of meaningful intimacy.

Keeping Others at a Distance

Some people have a deep fear or terror of allowing other people close to them. They hide themselves and their talents from others. There is usually a deep fear that if others saw who they really were, they would find them lacking.

Teddy Bear Cholla Cactus is the essence to use for allowing others close. It supports you in seeing that you are not lacking but rather are full and complete as you are. With this inner knowing, you can patiently allow others to come close.

The Pace of Intimacy

Intimacy evolves. It is a building of trust and shared experience. Although we may meet someone with whom we are quickly convinced that we want to have an intimate relationship, its evolution must grow at a mutually agreeable pace.

Sow Thistle is an important flower essence if you feel that you want the development of intimacy to happen more quickly than the other person. Even if you sense that someone is very compatible with you, the other’s pace of developing a close relationship may be different than your own. Sow Thistle helps you step back and ascertain if the pace of your desires for intimacy match another’s. It supports you in finding what is mutually appropriate in the building of your relationship.

This is an excellent essence for those who want a relationship so badly that they overwhelm the other. It can bring patience with your desire and can help slow you down enough to really hear the other’s desires and wishes.

Risking in Communication

The main way you create intimacy is through communication. Sometimes there are things you want to say but are afraid to do so. You think about how the other person will respond to what you say and you are convinced that he or she will either take it the wrong way or will stop liking you. You cannot control how others will interpret or react to what you say. It’s a risk to interact with words. Something is built or something is torn down when we communicate.

Fishhook Cactus is the essence to use for all issues about communication. It supports you in taking a risk to open your mouth and say what you know you need to say. It is most often true that once you move through your fear and actually communicate from your heart, the other person doesn’t respond in the way you thought. Usually she really hears what you are saying and meaningful intimacy can be founded.

Emotional Risks

In healthy relationship-building, you share with others, bit by bit, information about yourself while others share with you. As you share things that are deeper and more meaningful to you, it’s important that you see how the other person responds before going on and sharing more.

When you share something that is really important to you, it is vital that you pay attention to how the other person responds. Are they supportive, sympathetic, or do they belittle what you say? It’s important that you feel good about how someone responds to the things that are important to you before you share more deeply.

Some of us may not have realized this important part of building intimacy and gone ahead, shared too much and been either ridiculed or belittled. This wounding often results in inhibition that precludes comfortable intimacy.

If you find yourself secretly harboring your thoughts, feelings or needs for fear that others will either not understand or will belittle you, you might want to use Purple Mat flower essence. It can help heal old wounds so you can mature emotionally and take the risks necessary to create intimate relationships. Part of healing these old wounds can be learning how to share, bit by bit, rather than jumping in all at once. Purple Mat can support you all the way.

Intimacy and Sex

One of the most intimate experiences we can have with another is through sex. It can be so powerful that some people think that it is the only way to be intimate with another. The Sexual Harmony Formula can help us resolve confusion with sexuality and intimacy. It helps us in having a sensitive attunement with another so that intimacy can extend beyond the sexual act.

When we have sensitive attunement with another, it creates the foundation for meaningful sex.

If we have not built comfortable intimacy, we may find ourselves thinking about our performance during sex. Instead of flowing naturally with sex, we objectify ourselves or our partner. We think about what our next move will be; we wonder if we are pleasing him or her enough.

All this thinking and worry can pull us away from experiencing the physical and emotional connection that is possible with sexual union. The thoughts become more important than sex itself. When we are so focused on our thoughts, we pull our focus from our bodies and dissociate. To experience the deep pleasure of sex, we need to be present to focus on physical sensation and spiritual union.

The Sexual Harmony Formula is excellent for supporting us in resolving sexual addiction as well as helping us be responsible with our sexual impulses. It can help us build a great foundation for experiencing a deeper intimacy with sex and resolving any confusion about the two

Intimacy and Lust

Lust is uncontrolled sexual desire. When we want to have sex more than our partner does, or when the timing of our desire does not correspond to the timing of our partner’s, how can we deal with the intense feelings that arise?

Klein’s Pencil Cholla Cactus can help you have your feelings but honor the feelings and desires of your partner. It supports you in focusing on what works in your relationship rather than feeling at the mercy of your lust.

Holding Back Emotionally

Klein’s Pencil Cholla has another important support for intimacy. It can help you if you have the feeling that you are emotionally more developed than your partner. As a result, you hold yourself back in relationship, feeling that he or she wouldn’t understand you. You may feel that your relationship isn’t really emotionally supportive, but you stay in it anyway. You think that you have tried, but your partner just doesn’t understand. Often, the real problem is that you are holding back emotionally and not continuing to nourish intimacy by helping your partner understand your reality and needs.

Klein’s Pencil Cholla Cactus helps you evaluate your role in the relationship. How have you created this situation? Have you been honest with your feelings? Have you shared what is meaningful to you and nurtured mutual sharing? Klein’s Pencil Cholla Cactus can help you answer these questions.

Intimacy in a Group

Intimacy is not only for one-on-one relationships. You can be intimate in a group of people. Some of us may feel unworthy of being part of a group because of having been ostracized from one at some point in life.

The teen years are what I like to call the “herd consciousness” years because teenagers spend important time creating social relationships in small groups. Many people have unresolved feelings from having been rejected from a group as a teen. The feeling of rejection from a group can come at any age and can leave a lasting conscious or unconscious scar that results in the feeling of being unworthy to be with others.

Bloodroot is the flower essence to use for healing these deep feelings of rejection and strengthen self-love. This essence can help you experience oneness and find your niche within a community.

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 intimacy. The process itself of exploring and contemplating your intimacy 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

Arizona Sycamore

fear of being entrapped within a particular relationship, structure or form

Bloodroot

feeling unworthy of being with others, usually as a result of having been ostracized by a group

Desert Holly

fear of being stifled by smothering love

Evening Star

the feeling that you have nothing special to offer others creates superficiality in relationships; also for overcoming shyness

Fishhook Cactus

reluctance to communicate; refusal to discuss or negotiate an issue for fear of losing face or risking your position

Klein's Pencil Cholla Cactus

feelings of lust are overpowering consideration of your partner

Milky Nipple Cactus

excessively talking about yourself or your problems without acknowledging others’

Purple Mat

fear of something important to you being devalued or rejected by another

Sexual Harmony Formula

inability to have intimacy without sex

Sow Thistle

pushing to make intimacy happen too quickly

Teddy Bear Cholla Cactus

deep fear or terror, especially of intimacy or of allowing others to come close enough to see your true self

Unconditional Love & Support Formula

unconditional love begins within you, then can extend out to others