Bach Flowers Book - Bach Flower Essences & The Patterning of Water - Julian Barnard

This book by Julian Barnard demonstrates that, after four decades of working with Bach Flower Essences, he is still searching for a deeper understanding of what they are and how they work. While some have chosen to honor Dr. Edward Bach by enshrining his discoveries of the 1930s in a rigid orthodoxy, Barnard prefaces his book with a tribute to Bach's call for human freedom, arguing that we are all heirs to Bach's discoveries. We can all be grateful to Julian Barnard, who has made extending Bach's legacy his life's work through teaching, writing, images and videos, and the Bach essences he produces through his company Healing Herbs .

Patterning of Water begins with a brief summary of "form and function," discussed in much greater depth in Barnard's book, Bach Flower Remedies: Form and Function. Barnard addresses the question of how the structure and growth patterns of plants provide clues to their functioning in the human body and psyche. This understanding draws on the alchemical teachings of Paracelsus, known as the "Doctrine of Signatures," which, in its most basic understanding, recognizes that the same living formative (etheric) forces that give rise to plants are also at work within humans. Correspondences therefore exist between what is within us and what we find "outside" in Nature.

However, the main focus of this essay is not so much the plants themselves, but rather how water, as a matrix for flower essences, is able to convey the healing messages of flowers to the human psyche. This is a question that perplexes modern materialists, who take the absence of an active biochemical agent as proof that flower essences can only function as a placebo.

Flower essences are often considered a category of "vibrational medicine," which works through vibrational resonance. (Just as there are healing effects from light or electromagnetic stimulation, the idea is that vibrational medicines transmit a different type of energy, often called "subtle energy," which cannot be directly measured with conventional instruments.

Barnard proposes another paradigm for understanding flower essences: the transmission of information, rather than energy. His hypothesis is based on direct observation of the flower essence production process, both by the sun and boiling methods. For example, he observed, and documented with photographs in the book, how the flower essence water, as it heats, forms bubbles and internal surfaces, and how the water's surface creates patterns surrounding the plant material. Theodor Schwenk, in his book The Basis of Potentization Research, discusses the importance of surfaces in allowing water to be "sensitive" to influences. Barnard describes this process as "imprinting," and how it is particularly powerful for "newly born" spring water emerging from the earth.