Bach Flower Remedies

Bach Flower Remedies: Form and Function

In the 1920s, the physician and homeopath Dr. Edward Bach made his great discovery of the healing effects of various flower essences. Intense and revelatory, his experiences in nature resulted in thirty-eight “flower remedies.” He describes these as bringing courage to the fearful, peace to the anguished, and strength to the weak. But the therapeutic effects of the remedies were never limited to emotional states. They are equally effective in the treatment of physical disorders.

Barnard begins the process of explaining this phenomenon. He describes how Bach made his discoveries and examines the living qualities of the plants in their context and how the remedies are actually produced. The result is remarkable. The author recounts his observations so that readers can experience, in a living way, the complex ways in which the remedy plants grow—their gestures and qualities, ecology, botany, and behavior.

C O N T E N T S:

Author’s Preface
Preface to the American Edition
Introduction

1. A Growing Sensitivity
2. Down by the Riverside
3. The Sun Method
4. Heal Thyself—Free Thyself
5. Not the Right Remedy
6. Cromer
7. The Last of the First Twelve
8. The Architecture of the Twelve Healers
9. The Four Helpers
10. The Seven Helpers
11. The first of the Second Nineteen
12. The Boiling Method
13. Holding Back from Involvement in Life
14. Finding Fault with the World around Us
15. What Has Got into You?
16. The Coming of the Light
17. Making the Pattern, Breaking the Pattern
18. Apathy Depression and Despair
19. The Pattern in Practice

APPENDICES:

1. The Story of the Travelers
2. Twelve Ways of Being Unwell
3. Which Plants Come from Where?
4. Homeopathy, dilutions, and a Numbers Game
5. Chronology from 1886 to 2002
6. Building a Repertory of Plant Gestures

Notes
Index

About the Author

Julian Barnard has lived and worked in Walterstone on the Welsh border for the past twenty years. Born in the Thames Valley in 1947 to a family with connections to the great English botanists John Henslow and Joseph Hooker, he was brought up with a love of plants. He went to school at Oxford and trained at the Architectural Association in London. Finding a copy of The Twelve Healers led to a training in herbal medicine with Dorothy Hall in Australia. The author of a series of books about Dr. Bach’s flower remedies, including The Healing Herbs of Edward Bach: An Illustrated Guide to the Flower Remedies, he has also edited and published the Collected Writings of Edward Bach, the first complete edition of Bach’s works. In 1986 he was instrumental in establishing the Bach Educational Program to bring flower remedies to a wider public. Still actively engaged in education, he has given talks and workshops in more than a dozen countries in Europe and the Americas.