Flower Essences: What are they?

Flower Essences are a fascinating and powerful way to work with plants for healing. Working with herbs themselves, as extracts of various kinds or as food sources, uses the chemical components of the herbs as well as their vital energies. Aromatherapy uses a particular set of the chemicals present in plants and also engages their energies. Flower essences contain an absolute minimum of chemical and biological material, and offer wholely the energies of the plants.

Flower essences are water-based solutions which contain the essential energies of flowers. They are made by floating flowers in water and allowing the light of the sun (or in some cases the moon or stars) to help the water absorb the energy signature of the flowers. The structure of the water molecule is such that it can store these energies.
When a person places a few drops of a flower essence under the tongue, the energy of the flower floods one's aura, vibrating at its own special frequency, and can nudge the vibrations in a person's aura toward their own frequency. This creates an immediate effect on the emotional and spiritual levels of the aura. In the section about how the essences work, I will try to explain how this effect can progress to healing on the physical level as well.

I am sure people have worked with plants in this way for millenia...washing one's face with dew on Beltane morning, or being prompted to lick the dew off particularly beautiful flowers.
It was the work of a sensitive and dedicated physician, Dr Edward Bach, which first started to characterise the healing properties of these preparations. Bach was a medical doctor with an interest in homeopathy. He worked for many years within this discipline and developed remedies called nosomes, which were homeopathic preparations of bacteria. He became discouraged at how little it seemed medicine was able to heal. His work convinced him that if people could be at peace emotionally, they would be and stay healthy. Recognising that he had always felt most peaceful in the woods near his childhood home in Wales, he decided to take a break from practice and go there for a period of contemplation.
I'm fictionalising based on facts here, but one can imagine that after a while of looking for answers and failing to find them, he might be getting somewhat desperate. Then, one morning, while walking along a path ruminating on whether he should return to his practice, his attention was drawn to the lovely flowers of Impatiens. Seeing the dew sparkling on the petals, he was drawn to lick it off, as he remembered doing as a child. Being the sensitive he was, he realised that the impatience he had been feeling a moment ago was gone. Whatever had been guiding him suggested he should see if this effect could be reproduced by doing the same thing the next day. Presumably it was, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Bach realised that the water that had sat on the flowers soaked in some sort of energy from the flowers that could have an effect on his emotions. Just as the Impatiens helped dispell impatience and irritability, he discovered that Mimulus could calm everyday fears. As he worked with the flowers, characterising the effects they could have on emotions, he discovered that if he could give the right flower essence to lessen the predominant emotion that was disturbing a person's peace, certain physical ailments they suffered from could also be relieved.
Bach died very young, but in his lifetime, he characterised the healing energies of thirty eight plants. These remedies are detailed at the homepage of The Dr Edward Bach Centre in Mount Vernon, England.
Since Bach's death, the study of flower essences has exploded. People from all over the world have made a point of studying the healing energies of their native flora. There are companies making essences in Hawaii, Alaska, Ariazona, Australia, California, British Columbia, India, South America...and probably many more places I haven't yet heard about.
It is beyond the scope of this site to list all the essences that are available, and could well infringe copyright, but I have links to many sites where more information is offered.

The essences contain the healing energies of the flowers from which they are made. In the words of Dr Bach, they "cure by flooding our bodies with beautiful vibrations of Higher Nature which melt dis-ease like snow in the sunshine."
Bach's theory is that we are born perfect, but life stresses make us develop defences and ways of coping, and these pull us out of alignment with our spirit. Distress at the level of spirit is translated into physical dis-ease: Bach saw disease as a way that our spirit tells us how our behaviour or attitudes are getting in the way of our health. By healing our unhealthy patterns, we can relieve any physical dis-ease we have collected. Unhealthy emotional patterns can cause tightness or even scarring that blocks the natural flow of energies in our bodies, and so parts of us cease to vibrate in harmony with the whole.
The flower essences fill our auras with the vibration they contain, and help loosen any energy blockages that keep us from vibrating at our natural frequency. Once such blocks are removed, and our energy bodies are vibrating freely, the physical ailments caused by the energy blockages will resolve.
Bach taught that if we help people to emotional harmony, they will be healthy. The essences target emotional pattern s that we pick up as defence mechanisms on our way through life. Bach demonstrated that two people who experience debilitating fear may have different physical ailments, but a remedy that helps this fear will heal the ailments of both. Similarly two people with (for example) similar cases of eczema but different emotions disturbing their peace can both have their eczema healed by taking remedies appropriate to their emotional symptoms. Time and time again he demonstrated cures for those suffering serious physical diseases using his remedies in this way.
(For more information about energy bodies and how they effect health and dis-ease processes, please see the discussion of personal energy management in the Wicca 101 section.)

There is virtually no physical, chemical plant material in the essences, so there is almost no risk of allergies or adverse effects. Brandy is used in the essences as a preservative, but as a dose is only four drops, and these can be administered in warm water, the alcohol can be evaporated before the remedy is taken. For someone sensitive to brandy, the essences can be prepared in another preservative like glycerine or vinegar.
These remedies have the advantage of being completely safe. They contain little if any organic material to cause physical ill-effects. All of the energies involved are positive, and if an inappropriate remedy is chosen, the effect wears off quickly. Therefore, self prescription can do no harm, as long as serious conditions that need medical attention are not ignored. One can learn about the effects of the essences by trying them out without taking any risk. I suppose that an overdose of lovingness might induce one to do something s/he might regret later...so I advise strongly against taking more than the suggested dose of four drops at a time.
Unlike homeopathic remedies, flower essences are not effected by aromatics such as coffee or mint; they can be taken with food or any other substance and be effective. Their benefits for the emotions are not based on any sort of physical effect on the nervous system so they are non-addictive.
Because of the dilution process outlined below, one bowlfull of flowers can make enough flower essence for several million individual doses. It is an extremely efficient way to use biological material, and one way to avoid the danger of extinction that is threatening some popular herbs in the wild.
However, flower essences work on the emotions and spirit, and their effects can take some time to manifest on a physcial level. If one is open to change, their effect can be dramatic indeed, but if one resists the nudge they give the emotions, they may have little visible effect in the short run.