Resentment

An exploration of flower essences that help you uncover
and root out old resentments.

Resentment is a bitter feeling or indignation at having been treated unfairly. It may be caused in an interaction with a person or with a group of people, or it may be directed at life in general. Resentment is an important feeling to recognize because it can fester and later erupt in spitefulness, ill will towards others, and reactions that create deep wounds and hurts. Unprocessed and unresolved feelings of resentment can be frozen in the cells of your body, and might later create physical ailments.

How can you recognize feelings of resentment and process them fully so they have no power over you? Is it possible to root out the core of old resentments and stop the behavior that they have provoked in you?

Recognizing Resentment

It is important to identify the feeling of resentment. Some of us were raised in families where resentment was a way of life. It might not have been identified as such, but rather presented as a common state of being. Whatever the cause, some of us do not have enough experience identifying our feelings to recognize resentment. The Emotional Awareness Formula can help you put a name to it. Even if you have not previously discerned resentment as a feeling, this formula can help you recognize and understand what caused it.

Feeling That Resentment is Unacceptable

Sometimes you unconsciously bury feelings of resentment because you feel that they are beneath you or unacceptable. Once you identify the feeling, Embracing Humanness Formula is excellent for accepting that you feel resentful. Feelings are a normal part of being human. Once you can accept yourself for having any feeling, you can then fully feel them and move on so they do not have power over you.

This formula is about fully accepting ourselves. It can help us have the experience of knowing that God created us, exactly the way we are. It is only from this fundamental acceptance of ourselves as human beings, with very real human needs and feelings, that we can blossom.

Letting Go

Once you recognize resentment, how can you let it go? Compass Barrel Cactus is the flower essence to use when you find that you are holding onto anger or resentment. The essence helps you find an inner commitment to moving beyond an emotionally stuck place.

Compass Barrel Cactus highlights the area between your mind and your feelings, where your mind reacts to your feelings. At this point in your consciousness you have a choice to make when you feel a feeling. Do you take yourself and life too seriously and listen to the evaluation that your ego is invested in? Or, can you allow the feeling to move through you and see where it takes you? If as you listen to your mind you can let its evaluation go, you may find that what is underneath the feeling of resentment is simply pure energy, that it is your mind’s evaluation that creates the stuckness.

It is possible to resolve old resentments, even years or decades after the initial provocation. Compass Barrel Cactus can support you in letting go once you are ready. It helps you find a partnership between your feelings and your mind’s interpretation of them, supporting emotional maturity and deep inner harmony.

Feelings of bitterness and acrimony can keep you from having good will towards someone or towards life in general. What does it take to overcome a general feeling of ill will towards others or towards life?

Arroyo Willow, Star Primrose and Crown of Thorns are three flower essences that work with different aspects of this state of being.

Taking Responsibility for Your Reality

Arroyo Willow is the flower essences to use as a foundation for taking responsibility for the things in your life. It helps when you feel bitterness and resentful for what life has done to you.

Arroyo Willow’s gently flowing grace helps us retain a flexible attitude toward life. It helps us see and take responsibility for the creative power of our thoughts. It works with a pattern of creating negative situations through a negative state of mind, and then blaming life for what it has done to us.

This flower essence helps us own the creative power of thought. It shows us how a negative outer reality starts from within with the way we think about life. When we change our inner thought patterns, our outer life reflects the change.

Feeling Emotionally Controlled by Others

Star Evening Primrose is another flower essence that is often used together with Arroyo Willow. It also works with inner negativity, but has an important difference. Star Primrose is the essence to use when you feel victimized by life situations and blame it on other people. You feel as if others emotionally control your state of being. The Star Primrose pattern can include a tendency to brood on your inner negative feelings while disclaiming to others that they even exist.

We are all destined to have certain experiences in life. There are some things that we cannot change, they are destined to happen. Yet the one thing we can change is how we decide to respond to what happens in life. No matter what your initial reaction to something is, you can always work with your feelings and find resolution, as long as you sincerely wish to do so.

Blaming others for your emotional state of being is a way to guarantee that you live mired in resentment. In a sense, you are ensuring that other people do control your life. Star Primrose can help you transform emotional negativity by showing you that you have a freedom of emotional expression that is not dictated by others or by any outer situation. It helps establish an inner freedom to interact with your emotions that allows you to take responsibility for yourself. It brings a sense of self-confidence in being.

Belief in Suffering

Some of us were taught that everything that is worthwhile in life is difficult to attain, that we have to suffer or pay a price to earn love, beauty, or prosperity. We may feel resentful of others who do not appear to have suffered for what they have in life.

Crown of Thorns is the flower essence to use to support you in knowing that you do not have earn love or life’s blessings. You do not have to suffer or be something different than you already are to deserve a quality life. Just because you exist you deserve unconditional love. When this understanding arises, resentments about others fall away. When you unconditionally love yourself, that same feeling extends to people around you as well.

Doing Things For Others

Perhaps one of the biggest causes for resentment is when we do things for other people when we really don’t want to do so. It can be terribly difficult to say no to someone’s request for help. You want to help, but sometimes it just doesn’t feel right to do so. Yet how do you say no? When you do something out of a sense of obligation but don’t really feel like you want to, the quality of what you give lacks the quality of heart-felt service.

Theresa Cactus is for those who serve others at any cost to themselves and then resent it. This cactus flower essence can help you sort out what is in your own best interest so when you choose to help others you do so with detachment from the result. The essence can help you learn to evaluate whether all parts of you want to offer yourself to the project at hand or not. When you love yourself enough to consider your own needs first, you are then able to offer that same sense of love in all of your actions.

Freedom from Resentment

Resentment is the opposite of good will towards others. It is vital to search within to see if resentment is lurking, root it out, and find resolution. When you do so, your actions and responses to life become pure and you exude good will in every moment.

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 resentment. The process itself of exploring and contemplating your resentment 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

feeling bitterness or resentment for what life has done to you

Compass Barrel Cactus

holding on to anger or resentment; feeling stuck

Crown of Thorns

for feeling resentment that others are not suffering or paying a price to have beauty, love, or the good things of life

Emotional Awareness Formula

inability to recognize your feelings of resentment

Embracing Humanness Formula

inability to accept that you have feelings of resentment

Star Evening Primrose

feeling emotionally controlled by others and resenting it

Theresa Cactus

doing things for others and then resenting it