Seriousness

An exploration of flower essences
for appropriate balance between
stony-faced humorlessness and appropriate concern

What role does seriousness play in your consciousness? Certainly, it is important to be able to recognize important or consequential events in life. The ability to apply solemn consideration is an important quality. If you had no ability to act or speak with sincerity and earnestness, others would probably not trust you very much. Taking responsibility for things would not be possible without serious commitment. Others would doubt your sincerity if you were devoid of genuine resolution.

However, most of us can descend into being overly serious about the world situation, about the state of our lives, or about our own inner growth and development. How can we find the appropriate balance of seriousness?
What does it feel like when we are over-serious? First off, we lose our sense of humor about things. If someone cracks a joke, we don’t even see it as such, but either take it personally, or we consider the other person as superficial or trivial.

We may become somber, stern, and grim. Things seem to take on a magnified importance and feel as if they are life-and-death situations. We lose the ability and/or desire to spend a little time playing, relaxing and taking it easy.

We may become over-structured and too rigid in our approach to life and spontaneity disappears. We may feel as if we are responsible for everything and we take on projects that would be better left to other people. The world begins to look dangerous and we may adopt a doom-and-gloom attitude that colors everything we see.

When seriousness is out of balance, we may fall into an abyss of depression, worry, and obsession. No matter what is happening in your life, a certain amount of joy, play, and relaxation can put things into perspective.

Following is an exploration of flower essences that can help you find the appropriate balance between stony-faced humorlessness and appropriate concern.

Taking Yourself too Seriously

We all do it sometimes. We take life too seriously and become caught up in discouragement. We have the feeling that life is difficult and that the harder we work, the more difficulties we encounter. We are left with the feeling that we can never quite get ahead of the game, that there are always more obstacles, more work, and that life is an unending circle of drudgery. This is often true in dealing with the outside world as well as our own inner process of healing and evolving in consciousness.

White Desert Zinnia can help us overcome this heaviness by supporting us with lightness, merriment and laughter. Discouragement is a mind-made conclusion that automatically discounts the possibility that favorably supportive things can happen. When we lighten up and relax, we find that our perspective changes. We become grateful for the blessings in our lives and this attitude attracts supportive situations to us. We enter the flow of life and give up swimming against the current.

While immersed in a deep healing process, we can tend to get too serious about our process and become very ‘me’ oriented. We sometimes need a vacation from ourselves. What better way than through laughter? White Desert Zinnia helps us stand back from our mind’s interpretation of everything and just let go. When we detach a bit, we can see ourselves through the eyes of humor and lightness. Just imagine if you were at the moment of your death. Would the things that seem so difficult have the same importance that they seem to now? When we can’t laugh at ourselves, we are overly identified with our ego’s definition of who we are. Laughter and lightness can bring us back to the experience of the wonder and play of consciousness that life really is.

Play

An amazing number of people either forget or don’t know how to play. There are a number of things that are essential to a well balanced life, such as healthy food, exercise, spiritual pursuits, intellectual stimulation, social interaction and play.

Play is activity for enjoyment and relaxation rather than for a serious or practical purpose. It can help us balance the serious and practical attention we must give to many aspect of living. When we engage in play, our attitude is usually frivolous and care-free. We exercise our faculties for amusement and imagination. It gives us the opportunity to stand outside the normal constraints of life and engage in an activity with focus and abandon.

One way we can prepare ourselves or rehearse for a life event is to play it out. It’s an opportunity to engage freely and without constraint. Play can also be a pretext to check out others’ reactions, such as when we flirt.

Whether you have forgotten how or never really learned, A Way to the Elf Formula can help you let go into pure play. Within each one of us resides a joyful trickster. This composite formula helps you place laughter and play among the necessities of life.

Taking Emotions too Seriously

It is your mind that takes offense and then fuels the emotions by playing the scene over and over again. When you are stuck in this repetitive cycle, Compass Barrel Cactus can help release you from this addiction to seriousness.

This barrel cactus flower essence helps you change the pattern by feeling the feeling and then just letting it go. It reminds me of a wonderfully comforting and jolly fat woman who folds you into her embrace while laughing joyfully. After that hug, the seriousness of the situation is never the same.

Feeling Responsible for Everything and Everyone

If you were raised in a dysfunctional family, you probably learned how to take responsibility for things so you could survive. If the folks in charge didn’t provide for your needs, you learned to take action and attempt to get them met as best you could. This is often the pattern of the eldest son or eldest daughter in a family and results in an over-serious approach to life. Upon growing up, this pattern does not magically disappear, but requires conscious awareness to change.

Cow Parsnip is for those who automatically take responsibility for things that are better left to others. It comes up for those who automatically feel as if they are responsible for everything around them: all the care and well being of others, the overseeing of projects so that they are done correctly, the endless tasks and chores of daily life, and the control of just about everything around them. This eliminates the possibility of fun, play, and relaxation in their world.

Cow Parsnip flower essence helps highlight this detrimental pattern and then let it go. It supports you in lightening up and letting go, allowing the the universe to bring unimagined possibilities of resolution. It helps you integrate play and relaxation into your day or your inner processes, fostering deep inner strength and the awareness that everything will be all right, even if you don’t know how.

Worldwide Doom and Gloom

Presently we are passing through a time where an amazing number of foundations of worldly existence are up for transformation. As we watch social, economic, and environmental systems crumble and prepare for change, it is very easy to become caught up in a doom and gloom attitude. Many of us are displaying a fatalistic attitude, feeling defeated and ineffectual. Even though there are many very serious issues in process on the world’s stage, if we allow ourselves to fall into a defeatist attitude, how will we effect the highest possible outcomes?

Whatever our future holds on a worldwide basis, we are fully responsible for our own personal attitude, which affects the collective whole. Crownbeard helps us see into the future, understand our present conditions and ascertain the right actions to take. It encourages positive interaction and relatedness to the world around us and our environment.

Crownbeard helps you from withdrawing into the feeling that the world is unsupportive or hostile. It helps you emerge from feelings of alienation and encourages you to speak out when appropriate. The essence supports maintaining the awareness of the great seriousness of the world situations while fostering optimism and faith. It encourages a positive interaction and relatedness to the world.

Seriousness of Motherhood

If there is one role that can easily descend into over-seriousness, it is probably single-parenting. Attempting to be the breadwinner, mother, father, and have a personal life all at the same time can be so stressful as to create serious guilt and exhaustion, the fertile breeding-ground for over-seriousness.

The Single Mother’s Formula is excellent for dealing with feelings of overwhelm with all the roles and functions you need to effectively raise children on your own. The essence can help you see how letting go of too much seriousness is often the solution to parenting your child most effectively. Often, the simplicity of a fun-filled half-hour can more than make up for the lack of an important-seeming task. This flower essence helps you step back from the seriousness of parenting to accept yourself and your perceptions of your “failings”. It helps you manage your feelings of overwhelm and over-seriousness through self-acceptance and remembrance of your purpose as a parent.

This flower essence can be used by men or women alike. It is also very helpful for parents who have spouses that are not able to be present on an daily basis, leaving them feeling like single parents.

Expecting Things to Go Wrong

Perhaps one of the most energy-consuming ways to focus your mental energy is planning for what might go wrong in the future. When you are caught up in this pattern, there is no longer room in your life for fun or soulful experiences. Sonoran Rainbow Cactus is the essence that can turn this attitude around.

I had a client a year ago who told me that she had no joy left in her life. She felt dead inside, as if there was no spontaneity, soulful meaning or anything to which she could look forward. I selected Sonoran Rainbow Cactus together with two other essences. When she returned three weeks later, she shared that for the previous two years she and her husband had been stockpiling guns, ammunition, food, water and other survival necessities for what they deemed would be the coming world crisis.

She shared that she felt the Sonoran Rainbow Cactus made a tremendous difference in her attitude. “I just have to thank you so much for helping me find where true joy resides within me. I was so caught up in planning for what was going to go wrong in the future that all the passion and joy of life was gone. I feel I have truly let go and I know that there is a higher power in my life that will take care of what is necessary. I feel I have my life back. I am happy, joyful and I feel safe and secure in not knowing what the future will bring.”

A Walk on the Wild Side

There is perhaps no greater cure for seriousness than an untethered spirit. When your life becomes over-scheduled and too serious, unleashing your wild woman just might be the solution. The Wild Woman Formula is for exactly that.

The Wild Woman is an important aspect of ourselves. It is her expression that frees us from too much societal conditioning and too many layers of proper manners. She is the one who introduces us to deeply creative, courageous or other surprising parts of ourselves that supply a richness that we never imagined existed within us.

Given the freedom to express herself, the wild woman is a force of pure and powerful energy that knows her self-healing power. This formula helps us recognize and allow expression for the wild woman in each of us.

Selecting the Most Appropriate Flower Essences

Not every flower essence mentioned above will be appropriate for every person’s specific needs. 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

A Way to the Elf Formula

inability to allow yourself to be silly or playful

Compass Barrel Cactus

taking your emotions too seriously

Cow Parsnip

feeling like you are responsible for everything; often indicated for the eldest child

Crownbeard

awareness of the great seriousness of the world situation leaves you feeling hopeless and dispirited

Single Mother's Formula

feeling that the responsibilities of motherhood have left you unable to be playful

Sonoran Rainbow Cactus

planning for what might go wrong in the future

White Desert Zinnia

feeling that you can never quite “get ahead of the game”, that there are always more obstacles, more work, more struggle

Wild Woman Formula

inability to let loose and be spontaneous