Talking with Trilliums

One of the joys of making my own flower essences is the opportunity to learn from the flowers themselves how they should be used. If you tune into the flowers at an energetic, intuitive level as they are busy making their essence, you get glimpses and insights into the "personality" of their life energies. By observing within my own body the effects of this energy, I receive a gut level impression of the changes this flower can produce in a therapeutic setting. In effect, the flower is telling me who it is and what it can do.

Compared to homeopathy, with its two centuries of remedy provings, flower essence therapy is still a young and immature field. The field has no well defined means, comparable to provings, for defining "remedy profiles." A profile is a description of the personality imbalances that can be treated with the remedy and the more balanced states it produces -- a working picture of how this remedy's energies work in the body. The Bach Flowers have been around long enough (since the 1930's) for some consensus to develop on their profiles, but many of the profiles for more recent remedies seem on shaky grounds, in my opinion. I'm surprised how often one book will describe a flower in terms that bear no resemblance to the next book. Researchers often rely on "intuitive means" to understand a flower (I certainly do), but I've begun to suspect that many descriptions are little more than free associations based on the name or appearance of the plant. If there's going to be as much "science" as "art" in this kind of therapy, a good place to start is with our remedy profiles.

I've never been satisfied with the description of Trillium in the Flower Essence Repertory. They recommend it for a person who's stuck at the first chakra, sometimes called the base chakra or Muladhara. This "stuckedness" shows up as a preoccupation with the material plane, especially a lust or greed for power or material possessions, in order to feel secure. While I found it a good first chakra remedy in my practice, most of this image never "clicked" for me. It seemed too simplistic to me, especially since it ignores Trillium's usage in herbalism as a powerful female remedy (one of its common names is "Birthroot" or "Bethroot"). Also, I've frequently found the important emotion was fear, not greed.

Needless to say, I looked forward to making an essence of this beautiful springtime flower of the north woods. I stepped within the aura of the flowers floating in my essence pan numerous times that bright, sunny morning, opening myself up to any insights they might offer. In time, we fell into quite a "conversation" on the inner planes.

My first impression of the energy field of Trillium was an awesome feeling of purity and innocence (a common feeling with white colored flowers) that invited me to move closer. Sitting on the grass next to the pan, I felt energy stirring in my body. It very distinctively entered through the top of my head and descended to my tailbone (the site of the first chakra in the physical body), lighting up other chakras along the way (especially the heart and solar plexus). I was "told" that this is the process of embodiment, drawing the energies of the soul down into the body. Imbalances in this process of becoming a fully embodied spiritual being are of two main types. If the focus is on the upper chakras, leaving out the lower ones, there's a sense of not being connected with the body and the material world, as though you feel out of place or not at home in the physical world. The other is too strong a focus on the lower chakras, leading to a loss of connection with the spiritual plane. Common emotions related to these imbalances are fear, insecurity and a kind of spaciness. To be fully effective in this world, one's true, inner self must be fully connected with the physical body.

I asked about the remarkable three-fold symmetry of the leaves and flowers of the Trillium. I was told to think of them as body, psyche and spirit. Without a harmony and balance between these three levels, the process of embodiment will go awry as the person gets stuck in one realm and ignores another.

When I thought about how Trillium is used herbally to aid childbirth, I realized this "drawing down of energy" is a perfect image of how giving birth is aiding another soul to become embodied. This drawing down sensation in the pelvis (often accompanied by bleeding) is a well known symptom of Trillium for homeopaths. Further, Trillium can be used to draw down the baby when labor is stalled out.

Since making this essence, I've used it with a depth and confidence I didn't have before. The lessons in how spirit enters the physical plane and the experience of how this remedy draws down energy to the most concrete level have guided me in helping others with Trillium. It's become a major remedy for me lately, especially since becoming an embodied spirit is such a problem for people in their spiritual growth these days. Obviously, this brief profile doesn't completely describe this remedy. However, I'm grateful for the chance to learn so much about embodiment from a true master -- the Spirit of Trillium itself! Who else could possibly know so much about this lovely flower?