Despite record colds here at the farm, the greenhouse continues to bloom as if its spring in Bermuda and for that we are most grateful!
As I begin this blog post, I wanted to encourage you to skip the long backstory if you just would like Flower Essence suggestions for the throat chakra. As I look for recipes online, I often want to just skip to the recipe without the long introduction so please feel free to skip this intro and jump down to the Flower suggestions at the end!
BACKSTORY
When I was a young teenager I had many arguments with my maternal grandfather about the Equal Rights Amendment. This amendment was designed to guarantee legal protection for women from gender discrimination. In 1972, after passing in both houses of Congress, the amendment failed to be ratified by the necessary 38 states.
My grandfather liked to see himself as a progressive New Deal Democrat, but he maintained the ERA was an unnecessary bit of legal business, and he was adamantly against the amendment. Women, he maintained, already had equal rights and that was the story he told in the US History textbooks he wrote for high schools across America. His career wasn’t limited to penning textbooks but also included a stint as Ambassador to Chile for the United States under JFK as well as the presidency of Amherst College. Comfortable using the power perks of his jobs, he never paused to consider the backs on which his brilliant career was built.
One back belonged to my long suffering grandmother whose own creative and career aspirations were entirely swallowed by his constant need for her to play hostess at an endless parade of cocktail parties, dinner parties and other social functions that glued together the world he moved in.
My grandmother made one bid for freedom in her late twenties. She wrote and got published a detective story. I recently read a biography of Agatha Christie. She was just a bit older than my grandmother. Like my grandmother, she was shielded from any ideas of having a career or perception of herself as accomplished. In fact, even after writing eighty books, Christie described herself as a homemaker. During the 1930’s when Christie was sharpening Hercules Poirot’s ability to spot a poison, my grandmother joined her with her book, “I’m Afraid I’ll Live.” Set in Paris, a city my grndmother knew and loved, her book is so cynical, bitter and dark that I have always had a hard time connecting it to my warm and vivacious grandmother After reading the Christie autobiography I understand her book better. Women like Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers and my grandmother found themselves in a a world that had shifted on its axis after World War I. In Britain a third of an entire generation of men were dead. No one could tell the women to wait in the parlor for Mr. Right to arrive because he was dead. Plunged into the working world when the men were at war, post war there was no going back. The women had seen death, sometimes as close up as the men in the trenches, and the blush was off the Rose. Yet an integrated shift in life goals doesn’t actually happen fast or seamlessly even when world politics have brought radical change. There were still a lot of mixed messages about what women were supposed to do. My grandmother’s career faltered after this first book. She had expressed some of her angst as well as her diverse ambitions in this detective story, but there were inner and outer forces that narrowed her self articulation and defined her worth only in relation to being the consummate hostess and helpmate to a golden husband.
And then in the 1970’s when my grandmother had entertained ten thousand guests for my grandfather, he still couldn’t see the power imbalance in his own marriage nor could he see that there needed to be structures to bring equal rights and equal power to women on a national scale.
And how pray tell does this connect with the throat chakra and Flower Essences? The third chakra orients around issues of our personal power in the world, but to me the fifth chakra, the throat chakra, is the heart of the matter. It’s the seat from which we speak and live our truth, the meeting place of head and heart. It’s the arena in which we work out the alignment process between what is expected of us and what we genuinely feel called to do. It’s where we figure out what we want to do and what we don’t want to do. It is a chakra that takes the hit when we are silenced by powerful forces outside ourselves and lingering conflicts within us, and it is one of the chakras that suffers when we do too much for other people because of ingrained cultural expectations.
It came as no shock to me when someone told me 85% of women in America have a thyroid imbalance ie challenges in their throat chakra. As women, we are frequently in less powerful positions and therefore in situations where we are either not listened to when we speak our truth or inhibited from speaking our truth because of the extreme consequences if we do speak up. We are also expected to do too much. Of course this is going to impact the health of organs in our throat chakra.
My grandmother expressed some of her complex feelings in her book, but it wasn’t enough, and she died at 65 right before the ERA went down in defeat. As far as I know, the power politics of her marriage were never discussed or even acknowledged by her or anyone else. I wonder if somewhere within her, she assessed the possible consequences of speaking up then decided it was too risky. I suspect she had no place even within herself to articulate her situation. All I know for sure is that to speak up and challenge the status quo might have brought her relationship losses. I know this because it brought losses for me when I took on some of the same power issues thirty years later.
For so many other women, in addition to relationship losses, financial pressures also drive the silence. Sometimes the pressures to stuff our feelings and our dreams go beyond that into life or death concerns.
My grandfather as a person of power and privilege had an obligation to share power with those less powerful i.e. women and other disenfranchised people. His complete failure to see power imbalances in his personal life or the life of the nation left a damaging legacy.
When my unstable and violent brother wanted to kill me and my children during my forties, my family of origin was still anchored in the values of my grandfather. They did not acknowledge that my children, Jim and I were in a less powerful position than my brother or that their decision to ostracize us for calling attention to our “embarrassing” crisis was a move of power politics. They did not see that they needed to help right the power imbalances and work with me and my husband, Jim, to protect us. When I failed to fall in with their world view that these death threats were unmentionable and something to be accepted or ignored even if we got killed, they pulled the relationship plug and removed me from their orbit.
The group had no perception of the situation as an unequal power balance. My own throat chakra took the hit as I felt unheard, felt full of fear and felt the sorrow of being unable to live as I wished in sanctuary with my children. In even standing separate from the view of the powerbrokers in my family, I had been cast off and this too caused grief in my throat chakra.
My grandfather’s sense of the world permeated everything that happened. And this is what so many disempowered folks face today. The views of earlier generations of power brokers still support the privileged few and leave way too many powerless and with throat chakras of stuck energy.
But we can change that, one empowered throat chakra at a time!
FLOWER ESSENCE SUGGESTIONS FOR A VIBRANT THROAT CHAKRA
And so, it has always been of great interest to me to seek Flower Essences that support us to move stuck energy in the throat energy- energies of grief, loss, fear, anger, bitterness. In a chakra that can be a sublime expression of love with and for Divinity, these are just a few of the Flower Essences that come out to get things moving, cleared, healing and flowing.
One place to find a complete list of our Flower Essence suggestions for the throat chakra is here. I highlight a few of our suggestions below.
Breathe– If you only want one to support your throat chakra, this might be the one as it combines a great many of our Flower Essences that support the health and well being of the throat chakra.
Flow Free– This is my go to for keeping energy moving. During the peak of the death threats the Angels had me using copious amounts of this remedy. I still use it most every day. It’s not that we should expect ourselves not to feel but that we need support to feel what we feel and then release the energy versus keep it stuck in our energy field. Keeping things Flowing is the profound strength of this dynamo.
Thyme– This magical Flower Essence brings so much healing to any situation in which we need time and a place of sanctuary to sort things out and find our way. I almost always recommend it for anyone with thyroid concerns. Thyme from Crete and also Thyme from Omey Island ( a tidal island in Ireland covered in Thyme) are also dynamos.
Wound Healing- We struggle with generational wounds and need the support of this complex and deeply healing combination remedy to shift the energies and fully find a new way. As I consider this Essence, I recall how very hard I worked to find the Flowers in this mix. For example, up and down goat trails in St John I searched long and hard for the “weed” Christmas Bush. It was worth every effort.
Cosmos– Among the first if not the first Flower Essence I made, this one helps us speak from the heart, a process essential to throat chakra health and finding our true voice in the world
Authentic Self– The Angels call this a Cosmic Unlock. It is an understatement to say it supports the work of the throat chakra is to help us know and articulate our authentic self despite inner and outer pressures to do otherwise. Authentic Self helps us do this.
Baby Blue Eyes– Our issues with the throat chakra often begin in childhood when we are silenced from expressing ourselves and our truth. This brilliant Essence friends empowers child as well as inner child to know her own value inspite of these experiences.