FEP34 Flower Essence 101 Rescue Remedy

Show Notes:

Rescue Remedy, Dr Bach’s calming essence for stress, emergencies and trauma, is often the first experience with flower essences. In this episode we share everything you need to know about when, why and how to use Rescue Remedy, also known as Five-Flower Formula. You will learn about formulations available for adults, kids and pets, and how to give them. Kathleen and Rochana dive deep into the components of the formula, discussing each individual flower and how it helps with restoring balance after a stressful experience or trauma.

Audio

Video

Flower Essences discussed during the show:

Show Transcript

Greetings, flower lovers. It’s really great to have you back on The Flower Essence podcast today.

Today, we are going to be talking about the entryway essence for a lot of us, Rescue Remedy, and Rescue Remedy is a brand name of what Dr. Bach called Five-Flower Formula. And it is a really useful formula that I think everybody should know about and everybody should have in their purse or in their glove box or in their medicine cabinet. It’s a really important essence. We really wanted to dive into kind of the one-on-one level about Rescue Remedy today and then give you some more details on it because I think it’s a really interesting formula, and there’s a lot to talk about with each individual essence and how it relates to, say, trauma response or a stress response. So let’s dive in, shall we? It’s really good to be back with you, Ro.

Rochana Felde: [00:01:33] Hey, Kathleen, great to be here, as always.

Kathleen Aspenns: [00:01:36] Yeah, it’s going to be fun talking about Rescue Remedy, and I know from your experience that you– both of us, I’m sure, all the time recommend Rescue Remedy to people or all the different options of Rescue Remedy. Do you want to kind of talk a little bit about some of those possibilities that exist out there in the market?

Rochana Felde: [00:01:56] Sure, yeah. I mean, it’s definitely been a great entry point for me.
I used it extensively before I learned anything else about flower essences really or used them and figured out how to combine my own formulas. The Rescue Remedy, which is that trademarked name made initially by, I think, yeah, that’s it. Kathleen’s holding it up on the video, and it is now made by Nelson’s Homoeopathic in Great Britain. There’s another one, and that’s by Healing Herbs, right? And that’s the one that is distributed here in the US by FES or one of our favorite suppliers that we talk about a lot, the flower essence services, and it’s the same Five-Flowers. And then, you’ll see a lot of other makers also making that same Five-Flower Formula. That’s the recipe that Dr. Bach handed down to us.

Kathleen Aspenns: [00:03:11] Yeah, I just think it’s useful to talk about that Rescue Remedy, the name is a branded owned thing by Nelson’s. So you can get the same formula, but under the original name that Dr. Bach created, which is Five-Flower Formula. It’s just Nelson’s done a really good job of publicizing it as Rescue Remedy, and it makes sense that way. But just so you know, you can get it in the marketplace under a couple of different– or under two different names, really, Five-Flower Formula. So we’ll use those two names interchangeably even when we’re maybe not talking about the branded Nelson’s product.

Rochana Felde: [00:03:46] Yeah, and I mean, the tradition– I don’t know if you want to go into the ways that why you would use it or the ways that you would use it at this point?

Kathleen Aspenns: [00:03:57] Yeah, I think let’s talk about why we would recommend it to someone,   when it’s really handy, when it’s really useful because it is a crisis formula. And I know that you’ve recommended it a lot for people in extreme states of stress. I think about it for different types of anxiety, like plane, like flying, or going to the dentist, doctor visits. For animals, a lot of times traveling is stressful, going to the vet, that kind of thing. Those are the times that I recommend  Rescue Remedy. But I know that you have other circumstances as well that I’m sure you can think of that you recommend it for.

Rochana Felde: [00:04:36] Absolutely. So I mean, known as a crisis formula for emergencies, you think about it, like the extreme example is, you get in a car accident and there’s that immediate shock. That’s the perfect example of exactly the right time to use it. So keep it in your car. But the other thing is, well, how many times when you’re driving, and somebody pulls in front of you, there’s all these little micro crises that can happen throughout the day. And so it’s for that time, those little shocks, anything that gets your heart to just skip a beat or jump, that, to me, is the exact indication for a using Rescue formula.

But there’s so many other ways that it can help, and that is with these little daily stressful events, things that typically promote anxiety. Now, anxiety is something that I’ve struggled with my whole life and definitely was having that, and, well, I’ll say that I was not so much addicted, as totally dependent on antianxiety medication and pills for a while. It’s kind of started after my first husband died and somebody gave me an Ativan, and oh, my God, that was– well, it was heaven for me at the time going through that much grief and pain.

And over the years, I kind of just turned to pills as a way to, whenever I just got to a point where I couldn’t, I just seemingly couldn’t face what was going on, or something was throwing me outside of myself, and I didn’t have any tools. I didn’t have flower essences. I didn’t have other energetic and emotional tools to deal with that stuff. And so just getting a pill, even a very small, light dose pill, that became a habit for me.

And what I started doing when I decided to get off of those, there were other things in my toolbox, including herbs, but I decided to use the Pastilles that Bach makes, that Nelson’s makes, the Rescue Pastilles. And that not only gave me the flower essences as a way to stop the cycle when the cycle started happening, to just kind of break that cycle, that circular anxiety cycle, but also as an oral thing because you’re opening up a tin and you’re getting a Pastille and putting in your mouth. And whenever you want to change a habit, I find replacing it with something similar is a really helpful way to do that, to get out of that habit. So Rescue Pastilles, not by themselves, but as part of a larger program, and learning to deal with anxiety was so helpful for me in getting off of those antianxiety medications.

Kathleen Aspenns: [00:07:59] That’s an awesome story, and you can really see how learning a new way to bridge, learning something to do with that feeling that you’re feeling and what do I do about it? And a lot of us, it is a normal mammalian thing to be oral, right? When you’re born, the very first thing that needs to happen is you need to have a suck reflex. You need to be able to nurse, right? Otherwise, you’re not going to be around for very long.

And so I look at this a lot with animals because this is certainly something that we talk about when we deal with animals is this quality of the tension being held in the mouth. And in TTouch, we do a lot of work around the mouth. We do a lot of work to release tension around the mouth. And you see the changes like that with the animals is how they can relax. So humans, we do also just the same number and the same– we maybe get more creative with our oral behaviors. But there’s smoking, there’s eating. There’s all sorts of things that we do with our mouths. And I love that you learned a new skill, something changing, changing out that habit, and it is soothing. It is something that you’re doing that soothes. And then, you’re layering in all the goodness of the flower essences as well to help bring down that anxiety level. That’s really cool.

I mean, it comes in those Pastilles which are so easy to give to kids. They are really good for anyone, kids of any age, let’s say. And then, it also comes in drops. And you can also get it with the spray top. The drops are preserved, as are most flower essences, with a brandy. And that preservative is just there and just for that reason. It’s not part of the medicine per se. It’s just there to keep the bottle from spoiling. And that is certainly something that a lot of people are concerned about using the essences. They look at the back and it says, how many percentage alcohol. And yet, you recognize that you’re taking a drop or two drops or very small amounts. So it’s really a very small amount of alcohol. If you’re concerned about that, you can mitigate that by putting some drops in a glass of water, stir well, and just take sips off of that. And you’re getting the same– you’re getting the same dose of energy. You’re getting the same release of essences. So you can use flower essences even if you are concerned about alcohol, or of course, there are now availabilities of you can get Rescue Remedy or Five-Flower Formula in a glycerin base. And I know you use a lot of glycerides in your practice. And definitely for animals and for children and for kitties, those are good options.

To see the full transcript, please subscribe to any tier of our Patreon membership. Thank you!
Liked it? Join our community on Patreon!
Become a patron at Patreon!