Intellectual v Intuitive

Words are often inadequate to describe the difference of timbre, pitch and harmonic between essences which may have similar descriptions but differing depths and emphasis of action. In Britain we have a handful of words that describe snow - but Eskimos are said to have over thirty.

Does it matter, as long as the words fit? At a basic level of treatment, probably not. The emergency combinations in Rescue Remedy, Five Flower Remedy, Emergency Essence, Crisis Combination, Terra and all the other systems broadly work for everybody with similarly acute emotional trauma. However, once you move more deeply into the nuances of treatment, it does start to matter.

You can get a long way in emotional healing with the remedies of one producer or system, but there comes a time when you reach the buffers. And if you happen to have several hundred essences to choose from, how can you do that accurately and swiftly? You probably can't do so on a purely intellectual level.

The intellectual approach can take you a long way on the journey of healing, especially as you gain familiarity and experience with your essences. An experienced practitioner with counselling skills can probably take you further again. But sooner or later you reach the point where you know there is still work that needs to be done but just can't figure out what it is or how to go about it.

An obvious example is in relation to unresolved emotions from early childhood. These are notoriously difficult to ferret out, even if you know they are there. And what if they are long-forgotten, or suppressed in the unconscious because they are too painful to remember? May I give you a personal story?

Despite having three daughters who are keen and confident swimmers, until recently I would always avoid a family swim and make excuses, though I didn't know why. If pushed, I would join the swim, but grudgingly. Taking Larch transformed my attitude to that of a keen swimmer who would take myself off to the pool alone - something unheard of in the family. Larch catalysed the change, which I was then able to see stemmed from a blockage of confidence which started at the age of eight, when I had learned to swim at boarding school under duress, unhappy and unconfident in a cold outdoor pool. That blockage had coloured my attitude to swimming at a subconscious level for 30 years until dissolved by a few weeks' treatment with Larch.

One of the most rewarding moments I have seen with flower essences was this one:

Sarah is 39. She had always appeared sad and edgy, unsure of herself. Then one day, glowing with confidence, she breezed into the surgery in a state of self-assuredness I had never seen before. We dealt with her presenting problem. Intrigued, I asked why she felt different. Sarah told me that she had taken the Australian Sexuality Essence for two months. She was thrilled because she could now cuddle and hug her children, her mother and other relatives. This had been impossible before. Sarah, like many women, had suffered sexual abuse in her childhood. Despite counselling, she had not felt good about herself and her own sexuality. She was overjoyed to share the change with me, and hoped that many other women might also benefit. Certainly, to take a course of Relationship Essence, followed by Sexuality Essence, can have profound effects on the psyche. For Sarah, just the one helped enormously.

Taking certain essences for a period of time can actually help reveal long-forgotten memories and allow them to be processed and healed. But to do this just in hope of hitting the right combination for the right length of time in the right sequence is hit-and-miss, to say the least. Practitioners using the intellectual/counselling approach know that when a course of one essence combination has been taken, then more often than not different issues surface and need to be dealt with. It's a bit like peeling away the skins of an onion - there's always another layer!

The intellectual reasoning method of choice can take you a long way and is the method that should be mastered before adopting the complementary intuitive approach. A sound knowledge of structure and procedure is essential. Such knowledge can avoid some elementary mistakes. However, the intellect cannot always clearly perceive the nature of the journey.

Imagine starting a journey without a map or a clear idea of destination. The weather is cold and foggy, the ground underfoot uneven and boggy. The journey soon becomes chaotic. One step forward, one to the side, two back, without any certainty of whether or not the direction is correct. If you were to travel in this way you would never be sure whether you were facing north, south, east or west.

Now imagine that not only is the destination unclear and no map is available, but also that you are sitting, blindfolded, on a horse. What is worse, nobody told you it was a horse, nor have you ever learned to ride. A recipe for disaster? Not exactly, but there are painful parallels to be drawn with the journey we call life. The majority of us have no clear view of the destination. We take one step forward, one back, two sideways. If we reach any destination, let alone the correct one, it is likely to be more by luck than by good judgement.

In childhood we all put on the blindfolds and denied ourselves the riding lessons. We ignored the development of our intuitive right-brain skills and concentrated on left-brain reasoning and physical world skills. We did this because everybody else did it and none of us knew any different.

Young children have a great ability to day-dream. This is a right-brain activity that acts to refresh them. As adults we tend to shirk this activity, because we are 'too busy'. The result is that we deny ourselves valuable skills to help us with life's problems and challenges. How often have we tussled with a problem to distraction, seeing no rational solution? Then we relax, put the problem aside and after a little while the answer just pops into our minds!

It seems that, sometimes, the harder we concentrate on the rational-analytical approach to a problem, the further we drive the solution away. If we allow our intuition or gut feelings to help us with the answer and then use the reasoning intellect to guide us safely to the known destination, driving carefully, stopping at red lights, and so on, then the journey will go smoothly. Too intuitive an approach results in a vague disconnected feeling and the temptation to ignore cosmically unimportant elements such as traffic lights and speed limits. Too rigid an intellectual stance results in a pedantic, excessively rigid journey where everything is done by the rule book, but the traffic jam wins out, because the little inner voice saying 'Go this way today, for a change' was ignored.

The coach-and-horses is a famous analogy from the philosopher Gurdjieff. The coach is the physical body, the horses the emotions, the coachman the intellect and the person inside is the intuitive driving force or soul. All facets need to be in balance for the journey to go smoothly.

Permit me a personal example. At school I studied Greek, Latin, Ancient History and Economics. These are not the usual entry subjects for Medical School! Fortunately, Guy's Hospital ran a preliminary year of appropriate sciences. Physics practicals were designed to last from 2pm to 5pm on a Tuesday. Out of a class of twenty, four of us had a little familiarity with physics, or so we liked to think. We felt this because usually we had worked out the answer by 2.10pm and, allowing some 'errors' in the working, still managed to leave by the indecently early time of 2.25pm at the latest.

Looking back now, I am certain that what really happened was that we read the question, intuited the answer using right-brain skills and then used the left-brain counterpart to get from A to B with the minimum of effort. Naturally this approach freed up a lot of time and energy for the more pressing engagements that medical students seem to acquire!

In a similar way a homing pigeon doesn't need to learn where to fly. It just does it. And have you ever watched a flock of a thousand starlings wheeling around at dusk and wondered how they don't all bump into each other? Do they have to think about it?

Whether you choose intellectually or intuitively, I urge you to use both faculties to check your answers. If well-chosen remedies don't 'feel right' there may be a good reason. If intuited remedies do not fit with the known facts, then either there is something going on that you haven't considered, or your intuition is off-beam, eg. you are over-tired, ignoring hunger, or responding to other needs more pressing than looking at remedies.