Courtesy of the Bach Centre
“Those who without apparently sufficient reason become resigned to all that happens, and just glide through life, take it as it is, without any effort to improve things and find some joy. They have surrendered to the struggle of life without complaint.”
Dr Edward Bach, The Twelve Healers & Other Remedies, 1936
Indications
Wild Rose is probably one of the most iconic of the Bach remedy flowers, mainly because it was chosen as a product logo back in the days when the Centre was making and distributing its own remedies. The flowers can be white or a deep rose pink, and appear on the thorny shrub between June and August each year.
The key words associated with a negative Wild Rose state are resignation and apathy – but a more positive spin would be to say that Wild Rose people are happy-go-lucky and accepting. In this state we are happy enough to drift through our days – and true Wild Rose types may in fact drift through years, even whole lifetimes. To an extent this is fine – taking life as it comes and not being too unhappy whatever is thrown at us are generally considered good qualities. The case for using the remedy comes when we start accepting things that we could easily change (and improve), and when being happy-go-lucky starts to mean we miss opportunities to grow and live more fully. Life only offers each of us a limited number of chance to really live, and if we shrug as each one comes up and make no effort to seize it, we can feel, looking back, that we never really lived at all.
The aim of taking Wild Rose is to help us feel more alive, here, vibrant, and give us the enthusiasm and sense of connection we need to take hold of life.
Comparisons
Wild Rose/Clematis: Clematis and Wild Rose types may both appear to drift through life and lack a lively interest in current events. The essential difference is that Wild Rose people, despite their apathy, do live in the present. In their more positive state, they accept and feel content with the way things are; in a negative frame of mind, they find it mundane and boring, but don’t necessarily look ahead to anything better or have the ambition to make changes. Clematis people, on the other hand, are usually anything but content with the present day, living very much in fantasies or dreams of future happiness.
Wild Rose/Gorse: Both can seem accepting and apathetic, as the Gorse person too will say “there is nothing to do – I just have to live with it.” The difference is that the Gorse state is based on pessimism. It’s a negative view of life and of a situation, and typically it comes with a feeling of hopelessness that can shade into true despair: people in a Gorse state are not content. Wild Rose, on the other hand, is based more on an absence of feeling about things. Wild Rose people do feel hope – vague and unformed as it might be – and their problem is that they are too content with whatever their current circumstances might be.