Overindulgence

Using flower essences to tame desires, cravings, and behavior toward others

What pushes us into overindulgence? Sometimes we unconsciously eat and later realize it was too much. Other times, we feel we that something is missing and we attempt to fill ourselves with food, hoping it will satisfy that hazy feeling. Other times overindulgence with food happens because we love the taste so much that we continue to feed our senses and eat more and more. How can we find moderation and a feeling of satisfaction?

Overindulgence is also the state of allowing someone else to have too much of something. We may overindulge our children’s wishes, sometimes because in the moment it simply seems easier, or other times because we want them to feel that we are nice. How can we find moderation in this instance?

Following we will explore flower essences that can help with the root causes of overindulgence.

How Much is Enough?

When I think of overindulgence, I automatically think of Hedgehog Cactus and its ability to help you find the balance between overindulgence and self-neglect. This flower essence is wonderful for teaching you the middle ground between too much of a good thing and nothing at all. Especially for physical self-care, this flower essence’s support is excellent for either self-neglect or overindulgence.

Hedgehog Cactus is also great for when you know that you should be taking care of yourself in some way but just aren’t doing it. Perhaps you know that your chocolate indulgence is counter-indicated for your health, but you keep eating it anyway. In terms of overindulgence, the essence helps you make decisions that support your physical best interest and activate taking action on them.

Feeding the Senses

One causation of overindulgence is because of one or more of five tempters: the senses. The five senses provoke your desires. You may see a chocolate cake and immediately want to eat the whole thing because it looks beautiful, it smells luscious and tastes rich and creamy, making you feel really wonderful.

Yet, even if your senses provoke your desires, will you engage in the potential debauchery of consuming the whole cake? Your mind probably knows, either from experience or common sense, that eating the whole cake would ultimately result in feeling terrible, even if the experience of actually eating it satisfied your senses. Yet you may often feel powerless over your senses, as if they are directing the show without you.

Cardinal Flower can restore you to conscious usage of life force energy. When the senses tempt, this flower essence helps you choose how you will use the energy that has been provoked into being. The energy that makes up the desire can be redirected to another usage. Cardinal Flower helps you choose and direct the energy in the direction you choose.

Emotional Needs

Another causation of overindulgence has its roots in the mother-child relationship. Those who had a difficult time disconnecting from mother are often left feeling as if they don’t know how to care for themselves. Whether they were never breast-fed, were suddenly weaned from mother before they were ready because of illness or any other complication, these folks are usually left with an inner feeling that they don’t know how much is good and how much is overindulgence.

Milky Nipple Cactus is wonderful for resolving this inner dilemma. This flower essence is great for those who feed their emotional neediness with food, sex, alcohol, or any other type of overindulgence. It’s as if they are attempting to get their emotional needs met through a substance or action. Milky Nipple Cactus brings an inner sense of autonomy, purging a sense of inadequacy and the feeling of always needing others to take care of your emotional needs.

Reward Me, Please!

One flower essence has shown itself to be very effective for overindulgence of sweet things, chocolate, or carbohydrates. It is called Hairy Larkspur and it has shown over and over to be effective in disrupting the compulsion or even addiction to these sweets.

Often, but not always, when asked, folks mention that they were rewarded as children with sweets for good behavior. There is often an association between sweets and being good. Often, underlying the compulsion to eat sweets is a feeling that some part of you is dirty or disgusting or needs to be cleansed. This feeling of needing to be cleansed in some way is not always present when the essence is indicated, but might be.

The essence clearly stops the cycle of compulsion for sweets and frees you from feeling locked into something uncomfortable. It helps untangle the association between sweets and self-nurturance.

The Discipline of Balance

If overindulgence of something has been an on-going issue, developing discipline with the decisions and actions that support finding balance is essential. Activating & Honoring the Warrior Formula can help you find the archetypal inner warrior who can support you in this. This formula helps you access courage, resolve, and focused energy to conquer your inner enemies so you can overcome your inner tempters.

Addictive Overindulgence

If you find that your overindulgence has escalated into an addiction, you can use Harmonizing Addictive Patterns Formula. You can use it on its own or in combination with any of the other flower essences that seem appropriate for you.

Harmonizing Addictive Patterns Formula is for all the stages of recovering from any type of addiction. It enhances your awareness of any addictive pattern and helps you find an inner commitment to take responsibility for your decisions.

Indulging Others

We have looked at our own overindulgences and how to work with them with the flower essences above, but there is another type of overindulgence that is about others around us. Sometimes we attempt to gratify another person’s wishes to excess. This is overindulgence of our attempt to please others, and there is a great flower essence that helps. The Nice Guy Formula is for those who want to be nice, or at least seem nice to others, at any price.

There are a few drawbacks to the strategy of the nice guy. One is that he tends to want to rescue others from their difficulties rather than empowering others to help themselves.
[…]
There are usually several reasons why the nice guy doesn’t empower others. First, he probably wasn’t taught this sort of behavior himself. Second, he may see others as being incapable of helping themselves. Third, he wants the opportunity to fix or rescue someone because he usually, consciously or subconsciously, wants something in return for his efforts. His actions usually have strings attached, but they are often very subtle and he may not even realize that they exist.

The Nice Guy Formula is excellent for resolving the tendency to overindulge others.

The Nice Guy Formula helps us clearly see what is right in the situation, regardless of how others might view us, and it helps us find the courage to follow through, even if we fear being perceived as less than nice. The reality of this position is that others will truly respect us for setting limits and giving them the opportunity to learn to be self-empowered.

Overindulgent Parenting

As parents it is often a challenge to let go of a tendency to overindulge our children, but as a single mother or father the challenge can become monumental. Sometimes it seems so much easier to just give in to your child’s wishes because you are stressed out and just don’t have the brain-power or stamina to take a stand. Combining the Nice Guy Formula with the Single Mother’s Formula can help.

The Single Mother’s Formula helps to deal not only with the overwhelm of needing to play both mother and father roles, but it helps with the guilt that you often feel that you are not giving your child enough. These two formulas used together are wonderful for helping you in overcoming overindulgent parenting.

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. Usually, careful self-examination can clearly show you which of the above flower essences are most appropriate for you.

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

Activating & Honoring the Warrior Formula

activating the discipline required for overcoming the tendency to overindulge in something

Cardinal Flower

What do I do with these impulses, whether they are about food, sex, or anything involving the five senses? How can I redirect them?

Harmonizing Addictive Patterns Formula

if your overindulgence has become an addiction

Hairy Larkspur

feeling compelled or addicted to eating sweet things, chocolate or high-carbohydrate foods

Hedgehog Cactus

for finding a balance between self-nurturance and overindulgence

Milky Nipple Cactus

problems with the mother-child relationship; feeding your emotional needs with food, sex, or whatever

Nice Guy Formula

overindulging others; letting others take advantage of you

Single Mother's Formula

giving in to your children’s wishes because you are stressed out and it is just easier (use together with the Nice Guy Formula)