I would like you to meet Bleeding Heart, one of the new essences in my Spirit of Woman Australian Wild Flower Essence range being launched on 21st June, 2009.

Bleeding Heart
Omalanthus populifolius (Queensland Poplar)
A fast-growing, rainforest tree belonging to the family Euphorbiaceae. It has leaves shaped like hearts. As they are dying, the leaves turn red, thus the name.
The minute, cream flowers grow in dense, terminal, slender racemes.
It pops up everywhere in perfect weather conditions, but wilts and dies quickly once ‘the heat is on.’
Doctrine of Signatures
This tree is extremely fast growing as if it is in a hurry, like those who fall in and out of love at the drop of a hat, desperately seeking what they feel a relationship should be offering them.
The leaves are distinctly heart-shaped and just before they fall off the tree, they turn to a brilliant and dramatic red colour. Called Bleeding Heart, the tree’s growing habit reminds one of the drama and intensity that goes with the break-up of a relationship — painful memories, hurt and grief, making the heart bleed.
The numerous tiny flowers located on a slender raceme seem to be reaching out as if desperately seeking for acceptance and love or for a need to be met. The abundance of the flowers suggests although the affairs have been numerous, none have yet satisfied the need. The smallness of the flowers suggests that the person feels small and not worthy of notice and what is so desperately being sought is a feeling of self-worth.
Dying For Love
This is the person who seeks outside of herself for validation and a sense of being worthy. She seeks love in every encounter, and feels validated and alive if she is in the intense honeymoon period of a love affair.
Often this person is ‘dying for love,’ and can sabotage her own desire for a relationship by wearing her heart on her sleeve and actually pushing away a prospective partner with her intensity.
Or sometimes this type of person will fall in love with the unattainable — the clergy, a married man, etc. — thus subconsciously fulfilling her own prophecy of never finding the right partner.
These women romanticize love, holding it up as an ideal and are often unable to sustain a relationship when the person turns out to be ‘ordinary.’ Because of their idealized view of love, they put their lover or spouse on a pedestal, then wonder why they are disappointed when he turns out to be human and not ‘superhuman’ after all.
Many women put romantic expectations on their lover or spouse, and when he doesn’t deliver they lose their loving feeling. They may fantasize about leaving the present relationship and finding one where they will ‘truly be loved.’
A Wall Around the Heart
Some women cut themselves off from the rest of the world because they are partnered. Their unreal expectations that their partner will fulfill all of their needs — physical, social, emotional, sexual, security and friendship — puts a heavy strain on the relationship. The woman will feel sad when her partner can’t deliver and find that she is isolated and lonely.
Some women put a wall around their heart because they don’t want it to bleed again, having been hurt in the past by a love relationship gone wrong. These women experience great pain because in their deepest heart, they want to love again, but they are too scared to reach out.
Love is a Natural State
This essence attunes one to the feeling that one is worthy of experiencing true love that endures in a state of grace, delicacy and gentleness. It helps one to recognize that love can be constant and enduring and does not falter when the chips are down. It allows one to see that true love is unconditional and not focused on only what one is receiving, but also what one is giving. This love does not control, but rather lets things be the way they are based in the profound heart wisdom that everything is unfolding perfectly as it should.
Bleeding Heart helps a woman to recognize affinity as attraction to a significant other, and when that magnetism is felt, there is genuinely something there. It helps to put into perspective the notion that touching and being touched is a demonstration of the power of feeling between them and not simply an end in itself.
Love is a natural state between all living things. Love radiates throughout all existence, including human beings and the plant, animal and mineral kingdoms.
Live to Love and Love to Live
The cry of a ‘warrior of the heart’ is live to love again. When we stay open to love, we become more loving and consequently attract love to us. This is the healing energy of Bleeding Heart.
Your Healing Challenges

• For those who wear their heart on their sleeve.
• For those who pine for love.
• For those who fall in love with the unattainable.
• For those who put a wall around the heart.
• For co-dependency.
• For those who feel they can’t live without love.

Your Healing Outcomes

• Brings discernment in selecting a partner.
• Quiets the hungry heart.
• Opens the heart to true love.
• Encourages individuality within a relationship.
• Enables love of the self.
• Helps one to take a risk.
• Works on the first, second and fourth chakras.

I heard recently of a medical conference being held to discuss the link between depression and heart disease. Hailed as a first in the industry, it appears to be a real ground-breaker, challenging the old Cartesian notion, which is the basis of modern medicine and emphasizes the split between Mind and Body. And not before time!

Born in 1596, Rene Descartes had a primary influence on thinking in his day, and through his book, Discourse on Method, his philosophy went on to influence the development of the underlying principles of the emerging medical model. Descartes distinguished between the res cogitans and the res extensa. The former referred to the soul or mind and was said to be essentially "a thing which thinks." The latter was the material stuff of the body, characterised primarily by the fact that it occupied space and was therefore amenable to measurement.

Descartes was a pretty smart fellow who established several patterns for modern Europe to follow: he laid down the idea that the thinking mind was somehow more real than the body in which it is housed (this is called the Cartesian mind-body split); and that emotions were due to the overall nature of the character of the individual–called Cartesian affect (i.e., emotion) theory.

From that point onwards in European culture, subjective truth would hold a higher and more important epistemological place than objective truth, skepticism would be built into every inquiry, method would hold a higher place than practice, and the mind would be separated from the body.

In recent years neuroscientists and cognitive psychologists have argued that this ontological separation of mind and body is no longer tenable.

Upheld by some of the mind-boggling discoveries concerning the interactive nature of energy and matter described in New Physics, we are charging into the new millennium knowing the ‘energy and matter are dual expressions of the same primary substance’.

So Mind and Body are interconnected after all, and Descartes was wrong.

No wonder modern medicine, with its emphasis on the split between what we think and how our body responds, is losing followers in droves – many people, these days, are more informed about the true nature of how we function as living human beings than medical doctors, who are supposed to be the experts on health and well-being.

The Mind-Body split developed in mainstream medicine as separate disciplines, each robustly defending the boundaries of their own job description. Physicians treated the body, while psychiatrists treated the mind and ‘ne’er the twain shall meet’. In fact, to emphasis the split, psychiatrists are not licensed to touch the body.

I was discussing this very topic yesterday with an ex-nurse. She said that when she was training they were told that when treating patients, any procedure or strategy that would cause their patients to close their eyes was not allowed – because such practice belongs to the realm of psychiatry, not physical medicine!

So, as practitioner myself, the notion that I would be not allowed to reach out and touch a client empathetically, during an ‘emotional storm’, is abhorrent. Touch is such a reassuring comfort, for a person who is ‘beside themselves’ with emotional distress, evoking a sense of connection and safety that assists in healing the wound for them.

True healing involves healing the mind of inconsistencies and distortions, at the same time as correcting the body function that has gone out of balance in resonance. Often we do not recognize the attitudes and mind fixations that negatively affect us, until we have them mirrored back to us by someone outside of ourselves – that is the nature of Mind – it can always defend its own position. But when some disturbing physical symptom appears to come out of nowhere, that is the time to turn inwards for a moment and reflect on what messages we have been giving our body and what parts of our lives we have been neglecting, that have resulted in dis-ease.

The Body is a reflection of the Mind – a healthy Mind results in a healthy Body and vice versa – energy and matter are dual expressions of the same primary substance. And what is that primary substance? It is the Vital Force or energy (Qi) that animates all life and is expressed through the Body-Mind as body, mind and spirit.

So pleased to know that mainstream medicine is finally getting it, as evidenced by psychiatrists and physicians getting together at this conference to discuss the connection between heart disease and depression! It stands to reason that a depressed person will not have a happy heart.

In energy medicine we say that ‘when the heart is unhappy, the organs tremble’

A book on treating cancer that grabbed my attention, when researching this post looks interesting. Let me pass it on to you:

Healing the Mind/Body Split: Bringing the Patient Back Into Oncology
Steven Greer, MD, FRCPsych
St. Raphael’s Hospice, Surrey, United Kingdom
The effect on oncology of the doctrine of Cartesian dualism is examined. It is argued that this doctrine continues to exert a baneful (though unacknowledged) influence on the practice of oncology, Descartes’s doctrine of a mind/ body split is mistaken, and mind and body (brain) are inextricably interwoven. A biopsychosocial model of disease is advocated. The role of psychooncology in healing the mind/ body split by focusing research attention on the patient is outlined.

And if you haven’t read my book, The Essence of Woman, you may be interested to follow this topic. It takes one step further, describing how the energy/matter fusion is expressed in the body, in both women and men, with especial emphasis on feminine intelligence (Yin Qi)

Healing the Wound of the Mother

We heal our disconnection with our own feminine nature by consciously connecting to the energy of the Mother.

As a woman, one of the first things we need to do, to move towards our own self-empowerment and love our inherent feminine nature, is to acknowledge the Mother within.

Many women do this is the course of their lives in their day to day interaction with their real-life mother, if they are lucky enough to have her around being an active part of their lives.

But not all women have the luxury or the inclination to work through childhood issues in face-to-face interaction with their mother. For some their mother may be deceased, ill or estranged, or in some other way unavailable, to experience day-to-day updates on old scripts that have never had a chance to be rewritten.

As a child you were unable to separate between what you felt that you needed and what your
mother could provide in the circumstances that prevailed at the time. Remember your perception of her as a person has been prejudiced by your lifetime personal relationship with her.

If she wasn’t always able to fulfill your needs, you will have personalised this experience and taken it on as a negative belief about your self-worth. It is this distorted perception – that your mother does not value you or love you enough – that needs to be healed for you to fully appreciate and acknowledge yourself.

In most cases, it is a misperception that your mother didn’t love you enough. Because of your childhood need for total love and acceptance always, you may have misinterpreted many situations as evidence that your mother didn’t care for you.

As an infant, you would not have been able to discern all the factors that may have contributed to any given situation, in which for example, you may have felt unloved. However, this is precisely the time when your psychological programming was being laid down in your neural network.

Many beliefs about yourself stemming from these early developmental days became hard and fast attitudes as you grew up. By its very nature, this ‘programming’ process leads to faulty beliefs being laid down in the circuitry. Regardless of the best or worst intentions of your parents, significant programming occurred, which was a distortion of reality.

As the child morphs into the woman, and especially when she is moving into the Mother phase in her own life, she needs to re-evaluate her beliefs around her mother and the quality of her own mothering.

Sometimes, there is a long history of misunderstandings, resentments, incongruity and dislike that affects a woman’s present relationship with her mother. If these feelings drive your relationship with your mother, or there are unresolved matters that still hurt, you will experience self-esteem and self-worth issues. These will be passed on to your own child, if there are not resolved.

Asking a woman to simply forgive a lifetime of perceived hurt can be a tall order. Often the relationship with their mother is so toxic that it affects them on all levels of being, including the physical. In naturopathic diagnostics, it is recognised that women with bowel problems commonly have a current toxic relationship with their mother. To heal on the physical level requires a woman to clear the old toxic patterning of hurt and resentment that still dominates her relationship with her mother.

One of the ways that I work is to have a woman tap into her Archetypal Mother (her idealised mother) to bring about the healing that needs to take place in her heart. Once her own negative feelings are resolved by reprogramming her deepest sense of lack of self-worth, she can begin her journey of healing. She may or may not feel like resolving her issues face-to-face with her real-life mother. If she can’t face the prospect, connecting to the Archetypal Mother will bring about a subtle energetic shift between her real-life mother and herself anyway. In a toxic relationship, when one party comes to a healing resolution, the other party always feels the benefit of the change, in the ongoing relationship. That is the nature of energetic healing.

There are many ways to connect with the Archetypal Mother. They all involve taking time for oneself, by embarking on an inner journey of self-nurturing. Some will take the path of journaling – making daily entries into a journal for ten minutes a day. Others will do it through drawing, painting or writingor some other creative pursuit. While others will prefer to enjoy quiet meditations dedicated to healing their ‘mother stuff’.

There is beautiful meditation on ‘Healing the Mother Within’ in my book The Essence of Woman
available at Sowelu Centre, 83 Latrobe Tce, Paddington. You can phone an order in to be speed-posted to you on 07 3367 1950. Just remember to add postage to the retail price of $37.00 or you can click here to order online.

What a superb Mother’s Day present for you, your Mum, and your daughter/s!!