“Our sorrows and wounds are healed only when we touch them with compassion.” That’s a quote often attributed to the Buddha online but I don’t think that is true. Still, the message itself seems true to me. Did you ever feel healed of anything when you were being yelled at or ridiculed or treated in less than a respectful and kind manner?
And yet many people, including myself at times, fall into the pattern of blaming ourselves for our difficulties and either berating ourselves for those failings or feeling bad about ourselves for having the emotional struggles we have in our lives. We want to be different than how we are—it’s understandable! I even used to be part of a peer counseling organization that was attempting to help people get free of the chronic emotional and mental states that held them back by using the unfortunate approach of telling people those patterns, the very ways of being we have always associated with who we are (even though it was something we adopted later), were something terrible that had to be eradicated. They did good work with people on some levels, but eventually I couldn’t go along with that basic premise and left the approach behind. Treating ourselves with a lack of compassion just makes things worse.
Today I know that the emotional patterns and beliefs we find so hard to live with in ourselves are always the result of things we learned in childhood to cope with problems we didn’t know how to handle at the time or had modeled to us by our parents or other significant people in our lives. It wasn’t our fault that we grew up the way we did. And those patterns were originally adopted for positive reasons.
Think of it like a flower that grows up under a fence. It strives to reach towards the sun anyway and bends itself around the wood as best it can. Then one day the fence falls down and the flower struggles on with a strange bend in its stem that looks weird and doesn’t go away easily. That’s what our chronic patterns are like—they served a useful purpose once upon a time. But now they make us look weird and feel worse. We need help to reposition ourselves and learn to stand tall and strong.
And the best way to begin is with compassion for our difficulties and appreciation for having survived in the best way we could figure out at the time—as a child with limited experience and understanding of the world. Hold that child in your mind’s eye as you would any child you love and care for. See them as worthy of love just the way they are! And also capable of growing and letting go of what no longer serves them. What no longer serves you!
Visit my Mama Love Flower Essence shop for compassionate Reiki-infused tools to assist in your growth, self-awareness, and healing. (And if you blame yourself a lot, try Pine Flower Essence as a useful first step.)
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Flower essences are used to assist with mind-body-spirit interactions and individual results may vary. They are extremely dilute which makes them quite safe. But because so little physical substance can be detected in a flower essence solution, these products are presumed to work on an energetic or vibrational level—something that cannot be adequately tested by western scientific methods. Claims made by me, therefore, are based on personal experiences and the evidence of the combined multiple decades of case notes by Dr. Edward Bach as well as Healing Herbs and Flower Essence Services (the companies who make the ingredients I use in my products). This is not, however, accepted medical evidence or substantiated scientific evidence from a modern allopathic point of view. I am not a medical doctor or licensed healthcare practitioner.
Statements made have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. The information provided on my blog, websites or by this company are not a substitute for a face-to-face consultation with a health care provider, and should not be construed as individual medical or mental health advice. Consulting with a health care provider is a must for anyone taking medications or working with a medical or mental health condition, and highly recommended before using any herbal product. Please consult your doctor or health care provider for any possible contraindications and/or interactions with current medications. I trust you to seek the medical guidance you need to use any of my herbal products healthily at your own risk.