Searching for Remedies

An unlikely aid to a person in spiritual crisis

A companion piece will shortly be published with some personal notes on my experiences with Bach’s Remedies, in case they’re helpful.

“Rest assured that whatever station of life we are placed, princely or lowly, it contains the lessons and experiences necessary at the moment for our evolution, and gives us the best advantage for the development of ourselves.”

--Edward Bach, Heal Thyself

This quote resonates with me because my “evolution” began without much preparation on my side; in fact, I didn’t even realize it at the time so I don’t know how I could have prepared. Ten weeks before my world shifted, I sat alone on my apartment couch, wondering if this would be the time that life would finally break me. Then, transitioning suddenly to unexpected bliss, I saw them – geometric shapes in soft, neon colors, floating and rotating in the air, shimmering softly.

Maybe it was the feeling of relief I had at the time, but I didn't attribute much value to the shapes. I was used to my head being a dark and scary place, increasingly so over the years. Strange things happened there – when things were good people would remark on my “quirks” or mood swings, but life was difficult for me in countless ways I could never begin to explain and most didn’t see.

Professionally, I was close to burning out. In earlier times I had been involved in several products and initiatives in financial services, playing a leading role in some of the infrastructure upon which our global derivative and fixed income products rely for their daily operations.

Yet, by my mid-forties, after two marriages, one divorce and financial ups and downs, I struggled to function, increasingly estranged from those around me. I released each diminishing relationship grimly, telling myself that it wasn’t fair to bring my pain and dysfunction to anyone who wasn’t asking for it.

On March 11, 2020, four days after my second wife announced our divorce, the shapes returned. Events soon lent a surreal overlay to my visions and other experiences: the world began to lock down in the grip of fear over Covid, and my imminent divorce was placed on indefinite hold.

I often lost control of my consciousness, my mind taking rambling, weaving mental journeys filled with wonder, more bliss, and often-profound insights. It was such a welcome change from the harsh, exacting logic and repetition that usually filled my head in quiet times. My mind was now absorbed with far more interesting content than the podcasts I used to listen to during the long nights, traffic rumbling quietly in the dark Manhattan streets eight stories below.

I journaled the following thought sequence in the early days. “…and as I realized that what I was feeling was love for myself, I just began to bask in wonder at the feeling – so new, so wonderful, such a relief! … I began to know I had better times ahead because I was wonderful, I knew I wouldn’t be alone forever because I was a great guy...” This loving lesson had surely not come from my own mind, such words and feelings did not exist there.

I soon began to experience other aspects of this strange phenomenon, which I believed were connected because they often happened at the same time as I saw the shapes. I would sometimes be charged with energy, shaking, burning, dizzy, nauseous, unable to eat for long stretches, and sometimes unable to leave the bathroom either.

After a few weeks the different types of experiences began happening independently more often, and the physical symptoms happened increasingly as well. I’m not sure what would have happened in ordinary times, but I was fortunate that everyone around me was distracted because I was not able to keep my accustomed work schedule.

With the benefit of hindsight, I can also induce that some obstacle between my conscious mind and my broader awareness and memory must have started to dissolve. I was blessed with a new peace and happiness, but at the same time I felt a darkness inside chasing me more intensely – and closely.

Dealing with this rush of new information was confusing, especially because my intellect was undiminished in many regards. All of life’s familiar patterns were breaking down of their own accord – I should have felt more scared but I’d been so unhappy for so long.

It’s been five years, and things are a little clearer today. I speak to you as someone slightly on the autism spectrum who was abused as a child. I developed chronic dissociation to avoid becoming consciously aware of the abuse, and my dissociation held and expanded so that I also was unaware as I developed PTSD.

My mind masked the PTSD episodes from my awareness somehow, one of those strange things you see in a bad movie. I considered myself high-stress and that’s what everyone else told me. Someone might ask me why I was shaking and I would have no idea what they were talking about, then we would both stare at my hands trembling without explanation.

My mind and emotions were undergoing a mostly-positive transformation, but my body and all of its systems felt like they were getting chewed up and I needed help. I did what I had always done when I was confused – I read. I went where the information took me, pursuing as many angles simultaneously as possible so as not to exclude anything. Things I’d previously either ignored or derided shortly became the only viable answers to questions that I asked every day.

When the likely options have been explored, we must explore the unlikely. These experiences – visions, bliss, and physical symptoms – felt connected. I began exploring gentle yoga, crystals, and chakra work, practices I once dismissed as nonsense. They helped, but only understanding would settle my uncertainty.

Richard Gerber’s Vibrational Medicine offered a historical survey of energy-based healing, suggesting that unseen forces—energies or entities—exist within and around us, influencing our health. This idea, once absurd to me, now felt like the only explanation for what I was experiencing. Most of the therapeutic treatments the book presented are aimed at bringing or applying energy into the body to balance it somehow.

The best answer I could find through more traditional channels had been Religious or Spiritual Problem in the DSM V, the international handbook of psychiatric disorders, specifically V-Code 62.89. While not a diagnosis of illness, this is a category for spiritual experiences causing distress.

While doing some light research in this area, I saw several of my symptoms there as well but didn’t find many helpful answers. I have willingly embraced the label of mental illness in my life, but this didn’t feel like that. I knew this foreign affliction to be far more rational and positive for me personally than my prior thinking. It felt healthy, and I was happier – even though it didn’t make any sense.

I found myself looking for some way to test the concepts presented in this book, something that would address the biggest gap that I had to cross. For much of my life I had told myself and others on several occasions that I simply couldn’t believe in anything or anyone, let alone a god. That was the gap for me now, I needed some form of evidence to believe what I was reading and starting to think. Increasingly I felt myself approaching some intellectual-existential crisis, unable to reconcile my own knowledge and beliefs with events that I directly experienced.

Over a smattering of pages deep inside Vibrational Medicine, I found myself drawn to the simplicity of something known as the Bach Flower Remedies, and the story of a man named Edward Bach. These seemed an ideal place to start experimenting on my own: the straightforward application of a few drops of Remedy under my tongue was all it would take to test the idea.

From a biomechanical perspective, I couldn’t see how it could work. These are solutions with common English plants soaked and diluted in brandy. I was shortly quite surprised when I noticed a difference in how I felt after trying some. My own direct experience was leading me to conclude that, indeed, something-not-entirely-rational was happening. Prioritizing my own direct experience as my ultimate source of truth over what I have learned from reading and research has made all the difference for me on this journey.

“But look at how things are now. The rational things are the only ones that have lost that sense of attraction – of convergence. Only there do we not see that intermingling. But however much they try to avoid it, there’s no escaping. Nature is stronger. As you can see if you look closely.
Concrete objects can pull free of the earth more easily than humans can escape humanity.”

--Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, tr. Gregory Hays

Long after Marcus Aurelius and several countries away, Edward Bach was a brilliant surgeon who worked with bacteria during World War I and faced a diagnosis of spleen cancer at 31. He received a grim prognosis following surgery of just three months to live. Instead Bach found himself energized by his work and went on to pioneer therapies in traditional and homeopathic medicine. During his recovery, he observed that his passion seemed to bolster his physical strength, later reflecting in his writings, "I had the knowledge that there was still work for me to do, and with that knowledge came the power to live."

I have never known what to make of stories like that. I read them and I want to believe, but everything we know about how the world works suggests these stories are pure, unadulterated fantasy. And it always feels that the author is demanding we believe something. We can’t just take the facts – we also have to accept a narrative. I loathed these stories at the same time they brought me to tears sometimes, and I never knew why.

In The Twelve Healers and Other Remedies (1936), Bach described how he would wander the countryside to which he retreated, hold a flower, and sense its emotional resonance –feeling the specific mood or state it could heal, such as fear, despair, or indecision. Nora Weeks, his assistant and biographer, wrote in The Medical Discoveries of Edward Bach, Physician (1940) that Bach could feel the vibrations and power of the plants, suggesting a sensitivity beyond ordinary perception.

If you’re wondering what I think about all of that… In the spectrum of things I have directly experienced in the last five years, the abilities Bach apparently demonstrated are remarkable more for their sensitivity and precision than their existence in the first place.

In addition to the rotating shapes, I’ve seen colors, auras and what I’m guessing are ghosts or spirits while walking the parks of Manhattan during the lockdown. I was one of the earlier ones who fled the island during the Covid lockdown – everyone’s fear of human interaction struck me as decidedly unnatural.

Wandering the forests of North Carolina, I saw the souls of countless trees alongside their physical manifestations and communed with many of them. I’ve been very reluctant to intrude on or disturb them and I still don’t quite know what they are, but my wonder has been too great. I feel more than see energies in and around the ocean I live near now, and been a part of dozens of mystical and magical things I would never have previously believed during this time.

I’ve also felt the Remedies work. And at that point, I decided that I had enough evidence for my mind to start to take the first, small steps away from my well-reasoned beliefs about the world. The new energy inside me was undeniable, and I knew there was nothing in my experience or capabilities to create these thoughts and experiences. It had to be outside me as well, for it was the only way Bach’s Remedies could possibly have worked.

Bach believed that that energy inside us was our true self, that we’re all here for a reason. That reason is partly personal, our karmic purpose if you will, but it is also communal – to contribute to the whole. When we depart from those loftier goals our spirit suffers, and that is revealed through emotional or physical illness. The best and most permanent remedy, Bach believed, was treatment of the soul – and that is what his Essences purport to do.

What’s happening here is an extension of the mind-body connection; Bach proposes a mind-body-spirit connection, in essence saying that 1) our souls are our primary essence that 2) enlivens our bodies and, by extension, our minds, and 3) that when our souls are not doing what they should 4) our bodies and minds will diminish. As Gerber wrote, “What Bach was doing with his vibrational essences was working to increase the host resistance of his patients by creating internal harmony and an amplification of the higher energetic systems that connect human beings to their higher selves.”

I don’t want to get ahead of myself. This is the story of how I demonstrated to myself that I was something other than a mechanical being, and that this is something other than a coldly rational world. I started an implausible journey once I let go of what I knew to be true. It’s also the story of someone else who had some crazy stories, and how I connected through the experiences of Bach and others to a journey it seems many of us take.

I don't think it's important what you call this elusive, ethereal thing, at least as I think about it. What I do think is that it's terribly urgent that we all stop denying it exists and acknowledge our shared experiences. We seem to have a shared connection to this vast unknown, which means it's not that unknown after all. We’ve become Marcus Aurelius’s rational things, until we choose not to be.

There’s a wonderful quote I ran across at some point along these lines: religion is about other people’s relationships with the divine, and spirituality is about my relationship with it. Whatever you want to call it, I am a spiritual person and I have a relationship with it.

“The cause of all our troubles is self and separateness, and it vanishes as soon as Love and the knowledge of the great Unity become part of our natures.”

--Edward Bach, Heal Thyself