Choosing remedies

Intellectual and Intuitive Skills

Just as we have two sides to our brain and two ways of approaching life's problems, so there are also two approaches that can be used in choosing flower remedies. The mind has left-brain and right-brain talents. Both are important in leading a balanced and fulfilled life.

The left-brain, analytical, physical world skills are balanced by right-brain, intuitive, spiritual talents. Right-brain talents include knowing, healing, loving and creating. Left-brain talents include calculation, planning and rational approaches. Ideally, whatever our own personal make-up, our left-brain talents should be in balance with our right-brain ones.

Naturally people vary tremendously in their make-up. Some of us are more left-brain and prefer to take a rational approach; some of us are right-brain and automatically adopt an intuitive or instinctual approach. It used to be easy to make the generalisation that most men were more left-brain and most women more right-brain. This generalisation is no longer true, and anyway it's a very sexist remark. So I haven't made it!

It is often forgotten that we have all grown up in a left-brain society, whose leftward drift started with the beginnings of modern science in the Renaissance. Before that time the skilled right-brainers were the wise women and healers of society. But science and religion came to find the intuitive approach to knowledge a threat to the march of rational inquiry and the drift became a cruelly conscious step, with the persecution of hundreds of thousands of so-called witches and heretics. Sometimes mystics, alchemists and craftspeople, all of whom used their right-brain talents, might escape; sometimes they might be persecuted.

So today we all have a pronounced bias to the left-brain! We favour rational approaches above intuition. Authority figures (government, scientists, lawyers, doctors and so on) make, or presume to make, decisions on the basis of reason, not gut feeling. Or so they would claim publicly.

Yet many major scientific discoveries have been intuitive, leap-frogging a barrier of reason which allowed no further progress in a given direction. As children we all had substantially more right-brain awareness than we do as adults. No small child needs to be told how to pick something up or run. It does it perfectly happily and instinctively. A child exposed to foreign languages early enough will pick them up naturally - the spoken language (right-brain) that is, not the grammar (left-brain). But if you saw fairies or 'imaginary' friends as a three-year-old, you had probably lost that talent by the age of five. It was shut down by the cold climate of peers or adults who disapproved, didn't believe in, or rubbished, your abilities.

Instead we all learned our left-brain skills in what society considered to be important, eg. maths, grammar and other intellectual skills. Of course art, music and flower-arranging exercise the creative intuitive faculty, but only to a limited degree when compared to the phenomenal potential available. A recent experiment on a class of primary school children showed all 35 to be able to dowse (a highly developed right-brain skill).