WHAT ARE BACH FLOWER REMEDIES?
This is taken from the Bach Centre at www.bachcentre.com and is used with permission.
Dr. Bach designed his system to be simple. It may seem overwhelming at first, but anybody can learn how to use it. Most remedies are sold in liquid form, and the idea is that you will mix together the remedies you need so that the mix of remedies matches your current emotional situation. Like Dr. Bach, we believe that healing on an emotional level has knock-on effects on other levels: a healthy emotional life and a balanced personality will allow your body to find its own natural state of health.
There are 38 remedies in the Bach remedy system. All of them were discovered in the 1920s and 1930s by Dr. Edward Bach, a well-known bacteriologist, physician, and pathologist.
Each remedy is associated with a basic human emotion. Mimulus, for example, is for when we are anxious or afraid about something specific. Taking the remedy helps us overcome our fear and face it with courage.
The remedies are in liquid form so that you can mix together the remedies you need to help balance your current emotional situation. Like Dr. Bach, we believe that healing on an emotional level has knock-on effects on other levels. A healthy emotional life and a balanced personality will allow your body to find its own natural state of health.
Dr. Bach designed his system to be simple. It may seem daunting at first, but anybody can learn how to use it. On this site, you will find all you need to get you started. We have pages where you can look up every remedy and find out what they are for. Other pages tell you how to select and take the remedies. Below you will find how they are made, and we have lots of recommendations for further reading if you want to know more.
How the remedies are made
The remedies are made using one of two methods.
Dr. Bach devised the sun method for certain plants – mostly the more delicate flowers. The sun method involves floating the flower heads in pure water for three hours, in direct sunlight.
And for other remedies – mostly the woodier plants and those that bloom when the sun is weak – he created the boiling method in which a remedy maker boils the flowering parts of the plant for half an hour in pure water.
In both cases the heat transfers energy in the flowers to the water. The energized water is then filtered and an equal quantity of brandy is added to it as a preservative. This creates the mother tincture.
Mother tincture is then further diluted at a ratio of two drops to every 30 ml to make the stock bottles that you see in shops.
Dr. Bach was a humble man – he would lead sing-songs in the village pub, play football with the local kids, smoke his pipe and enjoy a drink. He would be delighted to see the remedies so readily available and as easy to access as our daily vegetables, bread, and fruit.
But he was also a man with a vision: he wrote about a hospital of the future where doctors would treat their patients as individuals, where patients would understand the nature of their discomfort, and where the healing medicine of nature would nurture their feelings and their soul.
Since 1968 when Nora Weeks obtained the original medical licenses for the remedies, our desire to keep the system unchanged and available to as many people as possible took us into areas that seem far removed from simply going out into the countryside to prepare a remedy in the sunshine: compliance with directives and regulations, official inspections, quality control, fire insurance…
Bach Foundation Registered Practitioner