Dr Edward Bach (1886-1936) was a renowned bacteriologist and homoeopathic physician who innovated on the fringes of conventional and alternative medicine to overcome the shortcomings of his day. Practicing in the pre-antibiotic era after the Great War, he improved the practice of vaccine therapy, advocated a vegetarian diet to avoid cancer and evolved a revolutionary manner to rebalance the microbiome with his ‘Bowel Nosodes’. These are still in use today and comprise a range of homoeopathic remedies prepared from the pathological organisms derived from stool cultures collected from clinically similar patients.
His Pièce de résistance was undoubtedly the introduction of a series of 38 flower essences which became known globally as the Bach Flower Remedies. Like many a maverick he was initially lauded then parodied by his peers particularly after sacrificing a lucrative Harley Street practice to wander through the British countryside in search of plant remedies
Bach acknowledged the brilliance of Hahnemann, the founder of homoeopathy; he marveled at his achievements but questioned whether forcing a response on the patient with a remedy in line with the Similia principle (in which like cures like) was too aggressive a challenge. He became increasingly aware that the practitioner’s goal should facilitate self-healing in the patient through empowering them to accept their life choices and consider whether to make changes in line with their ultimate purpose. This arose when he ventured beyond what he considered was Hahnemann’s limitation in questioning the true origin of an ‘untunement’ of the Vital Force being the origin of disease.
Where the Swedenborgian school had influenced homoeopathy’s progress by linking the genesis of disease to original sin, Bach took a more pragmatic approach and advocated a patient’s free will choice determined their physical and mental health. He was especially interested in how free will governed the attitude of the patient towards their symptoms, and this became a central theme of the Bach Flower remedy therapy to follow.
Earlier in his career as the registrar of a 400-bed ward in the London Temperance during the First World War, Bach gained much experience of neglected psychological issues alongside physical disease. He encountered extreme PTSD and horrific injuries, the legacies of shell-shock, gassing and emotional trauma which presented in patients for decades later.
Having established a reputation as a wunderkind at the Royal London Homoeopathic Hospital for his Bowel Nosodes, he sought to replace nosodes (remedies made from disease material) with plant essences. As he gravitated towards vibrational medicine, he became conflicted by his practice of treating a disease with a disease. He realized this was essentially replacing a negative with a negative, whereas he preferred to treat a negative with a positive and leave a positive resident in the void.
Much influenced by his awareness of the angelic beings in Nature he sensed the green kingdom had an agreement to provide of themselves. Plants and trees provide far more fruit than they require to establish new generations, and this is to our benefit. An apple tree provides scores of apples not just one to seed the next generation. Furthermore there are many types of plant, some designed for food, some poisonous and yet others with a higher vibrational purpose. He sought plants from the latter with heightened vibrations that could benefit mankind when prepared as a flower essence.
From the outset Bach Flower remedies exceeded the bounds of homoeopathy insofar as they embraced an opportunity for the patient to become aware of their choices and take responsibility for their symptoms. The remedies operate on the attitude of the patient towards their symptoms rather than the symptoms per se. Bach determined that disease was instantly karmic insofar as the patient acquired symptoms when they repeatedly denied their intentional life path and refused to accept lessons that were pre-incarnate choices. Sadly, this all-encompassing aspect of Bach Flower therapy failed to gain acceptance, and met strident opposition from his peers, in particular with influential consultants at the RLHH such as Wheeler and Dishington who’d been strong advocates of the Bowel nosode therapy and thought Bach had simply lost his mind here. Bach Flower therapy collided with mainstream medicine and Bach became an outsider practicing what was deemed to be ‘herbal medicine’ among the laity. He made claims for the remedies which put him in bad odour with the GMC of the day but by which time he was so far outside the mainstream he ignored their sanctions. Despite these challenges Bach Flower remedies received a welcome audience and global reputation that far exceeded his success with Bowel nosodes.
His Bach Flower remedies were fundamentally different from other therapeutic modalities as they operated not on the symptoms, but rather on the patient’s attitude towards them. The roots of Bach Flower therapy originate in Bowel nosode prescribing but were enhanced by actual lived experience. Bach would sit on the Cromer beach and note the attitude of bathers as they entered the sea. He noted the variable attitudes as some would rush in bravely whereas others tiptoed in gingerly and then some were indecisive and went in and out. These attitudes were thematic signatures of the seven groups he borrowed from his earlier work.
Thirty-eight flower remedies were divided into seven specific pathological groups borrowed from the work on Bowel Nosodes. Bach burned his notes before he passed in 1936 at the age of 50, but it’s implicit these groups represented over or under sensitivity in the chakras or centres. The chakras are orange-sized balls in our subtle bodies of which the underside closest to the physical plane is referred to as a centre at the interface of the etheric double and skin surface. Since these centres hover over key endocrine glands physical symptoms associated with dis-ease are translatable into predictable pathology through concerted opposition to one’s life-lessons.
Bach prescribed flower remedies according to the patients’ collective attitudes, noted in his consultations. He recorded attitudes such as overt fears, uncertainties, sensitivities and behavioral responses and prescribed a combination of flower essences covering these. The self-treatment bottle would then be used by the patient to make up a daily dose of remedy in a glass of water sipped daily. Repeat consultations monitored the change in attitudes and reduction in physical, mental and emotional symptoms as habitual attitudes receded. The prescription was reassessed at each consultation and continues or modified as required.
The question arises as to whether if Bach were alive today, almost a century after he introduced the Bach Flower remedies, how he would have advanced the therapy? I sense he would have listened and been guided to make changes to enhance the therapy. And my feeling is that this would have been in a manner to empower the patient to be more responsible for their life choices and actions.
In 1997 I was approached by several experienced practitioners to make Bach Flower remedies. They claimed to be dissatisfied with the products available, which according to them did not work as well as they used to. So, I set about preparing mother essences from flowers I harvested according to Bach’s original methods. Once made into stock bottles in the traditional 1:240 dilution I provided these to practitioners to use in practice. They were very satisfied these new remedies worked as they should and ever since many users have commented on their vibrational quality.
I turned my attention to the method of prescribing and began educating practitioners and patients in Bach Flower therapy. After initially following the original consultative method above I questioned whether the traditional approach was sufficient or whether, if Bach were alive today, 90 years later, he would have evolved an improved method of prescribing. Bach’s mission was to develop a system of self-healing accessible to all. But his practice reflected a traditional consultation with the inevitable patient dependency on the practitioner to diagnose and prescribe. The hierarchical nature of the consultation and the dependency on the practitioner to know for the patient’s life choice seemed inconsistent with Bach’s mission above.
The issues I had related to the heart of the matter:
When the patient presents a complaint to the practitioner it usually concerns something they don’t like and in a sense this reflects an attitude of the rejection of a life lesson. The basis for this is that we all have a life purpose but on a free will planet we have the choice to follow or ignore this. The opportunity to learn from experience is motivated by an inner feeling to accept and follow the lesson be it good bad or indifferent. The principle is to accept everything that arrives at one’s door as you can be pretty sure it’s for your attention. Be very clear that acceptance does not require you to like the opportunity, but crucially you can only change what you accept. If you reject rather than accept, you squander the opportunity to learn and grow closer to an appreciation of who you really are aside from a personality.
When the patient’s mind is offended it rebels and rejects the lesson which they demand to be removed. In essence the patient is asking the practitioner to collude with their distaste and prescribe something to remove the reason for their very purpose. This very unevolved approach appears to be the human condition. The incongruity between what we say and do is mired without some consideration and honest self-reflection.
Hence we arrive in incarnation with a plan to learn who we really are, the plan is delivered by lessons which can be good, bad or indifferent in our opinion but are nevertheless unique to each of us. If we accept the lesson and work through it the outcome is the opportunity to change and grow. But if we reject the lesson and replace it with a drama or invite a victim status, we are bound to repeat the lesson over and again until we change that choice, at which point it requires a crisis to push us into acceptance that we will do anything to be relieved of the pain or suffering.
As human beings we have free will to choose in every moment but how aware of this are we? What do we listen to when making a choice, our heart or our head? Are these in agreement or conflict?
If we are guided by our heads the influenced ego mind cannot risk looking bad in the eyes of others and seeks justification to support ignoring the lesson, maintaining the behavior which underpins the issue. We become blind-sided to the problem and disassociate from it. Often, we are aware of the issue but make every attempt to ignore, belittle or underplay its relevance and in so doing perpetuate the problem which over time will move from mental and emotional to physical as the denial literally matters. We give ourselves reasons to do this, but the reasons do not matter; only our actions matter.
Extrapolating Bach’s principles I realized the imperative of empowering the patient and bringing them into the heart of the therapeutic process. If left to report the symptoms and ignore the cause, for them there is no learning. Learning requires being open to conscious choices and the ability to change attitudes and habits. Change requires acceptance and curiously this itself turns out to be responsible for cure. Over and again patients in which I used this new method had instantaneous awareness of themselves causing the problem by adopting patterns of behaviour that maintained the status quo. The shift to become aware after taking the remedy combination was swift, by which I mean 30 seconds to 2 minutes from the first dose.
The empowerment is instantaneous too. When you imagine yourself a victim and quickly realise you alone are choosing your fate, there is nobody to blame, BUT you can make a different choice in the moment. Here we see entrenched ideas swiftly overtaken by feeling in which truth at a deep and personal level moves the patient from resistant to accepting.
Our truth is only uncomfortable to our influenced ego mind that wishes to defend its own existence and resists change. Our minds fear change and separate in a dualistic manner, applying preferences of good and bad. Our feelings are not tainted by duality, they are whole experiences and therefore unlimited by both time and space.
Ideally reception of information arrives through feeling and is translated up to the mind as knowing without thinking. The feeling allows the polarity of preferences experienced by the mind to be moderated by the process of consideration. Acceptance of the lesson occurs in this manner. As soon as you stop fighting and allow yourself to accept the experience, a phenomenal change occurs
Now this is not just theory, but experience borne of practice. The new method of selecting Bach Flower remedies enables patients to experience this process of acceptance without years of psychotherapy. I refer to its simplicity as the ABC Method and teach this as a two-day online course and use it in practice with patients. The beauty of the method is that it embraces the patient’s choice by inviting them into the process. They rapidly experience an awareness from their guiding intelligence translated via feeling. The feeling is then translated into a narrative of the most relevant and timely lesson they need to consider. The Bach Flower remedy then serves as a repeated reminder of the message and facilitates the process of change. This occurs solely according to the free will of the patient once the resistance to change is relinquished.
The outcome is often rapid and lifechanging.
The ABC Method Bach Flower therapy course is a two-day training conducted as an interactive online experience. Bookings are at Ainsworths website https://www.ainsworths.com/Bach-Flower-Courses/
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