Learning from Flowers —
As a child, I felt a grief in me that was too large to be only my own.
By three-years-old, I realized I could absorb the feelings of others. I recognized this outside of language, of course; it was, instead, a feeling of light, of concave patterns of energy moving from others into me.
I would stand close to my mother and absorb her anger, her loneliness, her worry, and I would replace it with a calmer light.
There wasn’t enough physical space for everything I was taking on and soon these energies calcified at the bottom of me. The bowl of my hips, all of the organs there, carrying the weight and numbness of this sedimentation.
I began to get sick all the time. Aches in my womb, intestines and stomach radiating up into my heart. I thought, to feel better, I needed to protect my heart, which was the door through which I loved, sensed, absorbed and radiated energies. Soon my heart, too, began to calcify, but this time, like the hardened spiral curve of a nautilus shell to shelter the soft, sensing matter within.
In my childhood backyard, in the shadow of a giant fir tree, lived a huge and swaying patch of Bleeding Heart. I would crouch carefully among the curving branches, the hand-like leaves reassuring my skin, and I would look into the pink iridescence of the flowers to find and sip the morning dew gathered in the fringe of the upturned blooms.
This is how I learned about flower essences.
Being with Bleeding Heart in these ways softened, cooled, and untangled the griefs I held. While in those branches, sipping the dew offered by the flowers, my body learned, through the resonance of Bleeding Heart, to clear the grief and open a conduit of communication between my heart, stomach, womb, and the earth.
I did this every spring.
If you reach back into your childhood, you too might have this kind of memory. Maybe a tangle of Honeysuckle, the shaggy face of Dandelion or Marigold, the shocking bloom and berry of Purple Nightshade, or the branch of a Beech tree reached out to offer friendship, magic, gentle reattunements, or wisdom.
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What is a Flower Essence?
Flower essences are the frequency of a plant-being at its most alive moment: in bloom.
When flower essences are made, a plant's unique resonance is alchemically imprinted in water and traditionally preserved in brandy. When we come into contact with this resonance—for example, by ingesting with intention—the essence works to reattune the water within our own bodies, catalyzing profound energetic + emotional transformation.
This occurs through a syncing of resonance — our bodies shift frequencies to meet the frequency of the flowers. And, over time, this process of entrainment is how healing occurs, allowing us to slowly repattern emotional, cognitive, and spiritual misalignments.
This medicine is vibrational, gentle, subtle, and profound.
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Flower essences are particularly powerful when working with chronic emotional patterns and looping cycles of feeling.
Flower essences reattune:
~ Emotional patterns and thought patterns that are negative, limiting, and looping.
~ Trauma, chronic fears, anxiety, grief, shock, disassociation, and the feeling of being stuck.
~ Ancestral wounds hemmed into your DNA and spirit matter.
~ Your connection with your intuition or individual life path.
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Living Intentionally with Flower Essences —
How to take with Intention?
Begin by being present with yourself as you shake the bottle to activate the essence. Sometimes I like to hold an intention or feeling in my heart as I imagine and thank the flower I am about to ingest. And then, put the drops upon or under the tongue. This can all happen in a few seconds time.
Know more is not more with essences. In fact, the fewer drops, the deeper the healing resonance.
This can be hard for the linear mind to understand. I understand in the way that I see the Pleiades in the late autumn sky -- peripherally and at the very edge of my sight and senses. When I look straight on, the misty star cluster seems to disappear, but as soon as I turn my head, the constellation's shape and magnetism flares within me. It is in this way—with my liminal knowing—that I hold this truth about flower essences.
The fewer drops, the deeper the healing resonance.
Use more drops for imbalances manifesting physically or with urgency. Use fewer drops to address deep-seated emotional, ancestral, and spiritual imbalances.
Be sure the glass dropper does not touch your tongue or any surface. If it does, no worries, rinse the dropper with water and return it to the bottle.
After ingesting the essence, gift yourself a moment of quiet receptivity.
How often and for how long should I take my flower essence?
While the potency is not increased by the amount one ingests, it is increased by the frequency.
I suggest 1-4 drops, 3x daily for a period of at least 28-days.
The ritual of introducing the flower's resonance into your body in daily and intentional ways will allow entrainment to occur as the essence works to recalibrate and balance the energetic system.
How will I know it's working?
This is subtle but profound medicine working at the level of your emotional and vibrational bodies. Some may feel immediate shifts or relief. Others may sense a slow transformation. Some experience what is known as a healing crisis where the symptoms that are being addressed with the essence become momentarily heightened. This doesn't happen for everyone, but it is normal! And usually shifts within a day or two. It is your body's way of bringing the energies to the surface. A sign that your body knows this pattern is no longer serving you and is making way for new emotional frequencies to develop. But no matter what, over time, you'll recognize space in your emotional body where before there was none, as the flowers gift you perspective and the resources to creatively respond through and to what before was in your way.
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Every flower-body is profoundly intelligent and holds its own unique resonant gift.
We are within a time of great transmutation. And flowers have chosen to help us reimagine and claim, with greater intention, our roles in this lifetime.
In order to heal, in order to transform ourselves and this world, we must remember to also work at the level of the spirit. Flower essences hold space for us as we do this invisible work, as the frequency of flowers vibrate within us, recalibrating our emotional and spiritual bodies, making way for great personal, societal, and ancestral change.
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Please visit the apothecary where you can learn about the gifts of with/in's flower essences.