Under the Moon
by Simon France
I started making flower remedies under moonlight 17 years ago. I was inspired to use the Moon to potentise essences, instead of the traditional Sun method, through my knowledge and practice of astrology. The Moon symbolises the past, memory and reflection. When looking at a horoscope from a karmic perspective the present Moon sign was an extremely influential factor in the most recent previous life, perhaps the Sun or ascending sign.
The Moon Flowers, the collection of over 40 flower remedies and environmental essences that I have so far documented, are for healing the wounds we carry through from the past, be that in this or a previous life. Initially the making and documentation of the Moon Flowers came very easily to me, as if I were drawing upon past life knowledge. After a break of several years, in which I pursued the making of different sets of essences, I returned to the project dedicating myself once more to the Moon. I found myself being drawn almost exclusively to using the Full Moon and also becoming much more emotionally bound up with the energies of the remedies I was creating, rather like Dr. Bach in his final year of work. What I present below is my emotional landscape, the inside track so to speak, of two of the most recent remedies I have made under moonlight.
I have been in dispute with my neighbour for several months. When we pass in the street she stone-walls me. I find this very uncomfortable and yet I also find it insulting since we were good friends: our children used to play together; we baby-sat for each other; we supported and looked out for each other in many ways. When I wished her a happy new year this January she spat on the street as she hurried by. I told her that she didn’t have to spit her dummy out on my account. It’s all very immature and although I find it amusing, she is deadly serious, to the point of paying someone to come and menace me after I spat in her face when she refused to pay me for work I had done for her.
Of course the ‘I did this to you because you did that to me’ cycle is only how the dysfunction in our relationship manifests on the surface, beneath is a dysfunction based on love. There was a lot of love between us. There probably still is but now it has become blocked, twisted and distorted and comes out as anger, pain and hatred. She wanted more than the brother/sister relationship we agreed to operate within and when she was confronted head on by her desire for me, her heart-protector kicked in and she told me to ‘fuck off’. The way that she deals with love for male friends is based on a deeper dysfunction created in her childhood: an abusive family situation that when she confided in made my toes curl.
She has a deeply, deeply wounded inner child whom I now confront on the street every time we pass. Yet beneath is another dysfunctional layer, karmic in nature. She chose to incarnate through a mother who would become a drug addict and eventually commit suicide after cursing her daughter for reporting sexual abuse in the family. Was her soul draw into this life time to learn from the painful lessons her crazy, mixed up family would provide, or was it that her wounded soul was simply drawn to familiar patterns encountered in a past life? These are questions that interest me and as an astrologer I have studied and worked for many years with karmic energies within the natal horoscopes of my clients and myself. This information has formed the foundation for my work with the Moon Flowers.
Relationships are of course two way and so I have searched my own heart and soul to try and discover what it is within me that drove me to court the love of my neighbour. This was not the first time that I developed a non sexual loving relationship with another woman and somehow I can not imagine it will be the last. It has been in many respects a carbon copy of the previous one, with a woman called Izzie, that ended in similar fashion five years ago.
Since I have so blatantly repeated the patterns but failed to learn the lesson, and some of our deepest lessons come to us through love, I thought I would visit Izzie on the Full Moon to find out why she broke off our relationship and what she went through and whether, with hindsight, it was worth it, or could we have worked it out and come through the other side. Izzie was a former flower essence student of mine who then joined the business. She also became a family friend. Surely, I thought, she won’t still be mad at me after five years? A Full Moon with lots of emotions and memories – prefect for making a remedy; I wasn’t going to leave my flower remedy making kit behind.
Approaching her house was like being on a giant roller coaster, as I drew close to the house the car had been cranked to the very top of the ride. As I knocked on the door the car reached the bottom – my stomach churned and my legs were like jelly. The house was empty and had been, a neighbour told me, for a few months. Reality is seldom like the Hollywood films. However, I continued to chase ghosts by the Full Moon, walking along the river path she would have walked, sitting on the benches she would have used. Being so late in the year there was really no choice as to which flower to lunarise, white bindweed was the only plant still with a profusion of flowers holding out against the first but heavy autumn frosts. Beside the swollen river Dart I floated the trumpet like flowers in my bowl of water. Leaving it under the Full Moon I went for a long walk.
Five years of life is quite a lot of water under the bridge yet slowly the memories came back of our times together, the things we said to each other, her mannerisms. I walked into my pain and I walked into my anger. How could she do that to me? She aborted our relationship. She cut me off without any concern for my feelings. I had done nothing to deserve such treatment. I cared for her, I loved her, I wanted her to flower within the business, I restructured the business to make space for her, trained her and treated her as an equal and yet she bottled out, threw in the towel, fell at the first hurdle. I kept coming back to the fact that she aborted our relationship, the bitch, the bitch, the bitch! And then the penny dropped, it took about two minutes, but I felt it go down, almost as if the Full Moon was sinking down to the horizon, and I walked out of the haze of my anger into the understanding of the remedy I was making.
Lunar Bindweed
Lunar Bindweed is for souls who have in a previous life been aborted by their mothers from the womb.
In the vast majority of cases, the soul is drawn to the womb through love. This aspect of love contains intense qualities of trust, honour and respect. The newly incarnating soul needs these qualities in order to be nourished and nurtured in the womb. If, for whatever reason, the mother abandons these qualities, rejects the love of her child and aborts the pregnancy, a deep wound is created on the souls of both parties.
Those souls who have been aborted in a previous life may well have severe difficulties in close and intimate relationships. These may manifest as feelings of intense anger, fear, rejection, guilt or vulnerability. Such feelings may arise out of relationship conflicts yet may equally be present for no apparent reason. Such souls may be unable to fully trust those that they love, be more prone to abuse love and possibly reject too easily the love they so badly need.
These are just some examples of how this karmic wound can manifest in the present incarnation.
Lunar Bindweed may also benefit those who have in their present life aborted a child.
So I did not get to meet Izzie but I believe she gave me some answers to some of my questions. I courted the love of my neighbour, as I had done with her, because I wanted to be loved. My need for love has not come from a lack of love in this life time, I was a very wanted child, but from a previous life when I was aborted from the womb. This goes very deep within me, as it must do in a lot of folk, and affects a great deal more than just my relationship with the woman/lover/mother.
I have had close female friends throughout my adult life, alongside my committed relationships. I see them as kindred spirits, souls from the same spiritual family encountering each other on the Earth. None have stayed the distance yet through the pain of each one I have progressed, become more conscious of what drives me into these relationships and got closer to making them work. I also have bonds of love with men but I don’t fancy them so it’s much easier.
When Izzie said, “Our relationship is too complicated, I don’t want anything else to do with you or Aquarius Flower Remedies,” at least we lived in different towns, so we never saw each other again. With this last relationship our close proximity has resulted in us rubbing salt into each other’s wounds.
I looked at the energetic link between us with the view to doing some cutting of ties.I knew there was deep love but when I saw a huge trunk linking our hearts I wasn’t prepared to cut it with a chainsaw; that would have been too traumatic. Another way was needed so I looked for a vibrational essence.
Have you ever been to a party where the revellers leave, the music stops but you just want to keep on dancing? That is what my first season of Moon Flower making was like. I started early with Lunar Snowdrop which is given to heal the deepest wounds society has inflicted upon the soul in previous incarnations. It can be used when the soul has been alienated from society, spurned or rejected in some fashion. It treats any form of past life abuse meted out by society. I reached number 12 when the thistle was in flower. Lunar Thistle is for past life imprisonment, where the soul has been confined in small spaces, separated from loved ones and denied its freedom. That was the last of the flowers for the season but I was still up for making some more remedies - so I did, without the flowers, and captured different qualities of moonlight in the water; these I call Environmental Essences.
Moon Rush
This environmental essence was made at the winter solstice 2007, the night before full moon. The bowl of water was placed in a clump of field rushes so that their shadows fell into the lunarising water.
This essence helps the soul separate from promises, commitments, vows, contracts, covenants and oaths of honour that have been made with other souls in either previous lives or whilst in spirit. Such promises etc. will have been forged on deep bonds of eternal love, this creates a powerful sense of obligation in the present life that has more than likely already been carried through a whole series of past incarnations. Such commitments can become incompatible within the present life, outworn or outgrown. Possibly the contracts between souls can not be honoured in the present incarnation because the physical restrictions and limitations of this plane of reality are too great to allow the love contained in the soul commitments to be expressed. Whatever the reason for being unable to honour such vows, Moon Rush dissolves them energetically, freeing the soul from what have become inappropriate and painful connections.
That tree trunk was much more than just my feelings for my rude neighbour, it was also my desire to help her in her role as an impoverished single mum and the deep connections I had made to her children. We were for a while very much like an extended family that was joined through this energetic channel. I did not take Moon Rush, I had no need for making the essence was sufficient to wither this bond to the size of a branch I could then cut with a pruning saw. I’m sure I will need to revisit these essences over the next few months as more pain emerges.
I would say that half of the healing that issues from the Moon Flowers comes through greater awareness of these deepest of wounds. The other half comes from Nature, through the vibrational energies contained in the remedies. Some experience profound changes through the use of these essences, since they work at such a deep level, many comment on how strong they are. It’s not always obvious at first which one(s) to choose. An example is of one woman, who suffered from a creative block. She used Lunar White Clover to great effect. This remedy is for those souls who have in a previous life been enslaved or in other forms of forced or demeaning labour.
Another example is of a child who ate too much. He was given Lunar Hawksbeard, which is for those souls who have been caught up in a national or racial disaster. He was, in his previous incarnation, starved to death in a Nazi concentration camp.
Your own repeating patterns of negativity could well be connected to a wounding on your soul, a dysfunctional energetic pattern carried through from a previous life on the immortal aspect of your being. Check out the list on our website and see if any of the descriptions ring that bell deep down inside of you.
