The Remedy We Are Excited To Try in the New Year: Flower Essences
What are flower essences?
The goals of flower essence therapy include: ease in accessing higher vibratory states like joy and gratitude; enhanced mind-body-spirit balance, presence, acceptance of emotions and integration of difficult vibratory states; encouraging flow states like creativity; manifesting; supporting balance; expanding awareness of self and the Universe, ancestral connection and healing; and helping us to be of greater service to ourselves, others, and the Earth.
Flower essences work by way of the following:
- synchronicities—helping us connect seemingly unrelated or previously unseen opportunities or happenings
- indirect occurrences—positively affecting different environments and interpersonal dynamics
- insights—supporting mental, emotional, physical, and/or astral awakening; new ideas, solutions, or information may present
- physical changes—bringing up new sensations, shifts in organ/system functioning or in symptoms
- emotional responses—bringing up new feelings or memories; stabilizing or releasing them
- expression—inspiring artistic, verbal, and kinesthetic expression
- dreamtime—bringing about new or recurring dreams, insights, and subconscious resolution
- invoking intention—the more time and space you can offer, the more likely you’ll be able to feel flower essences. For example, taking them with a light meditation, a visualization, while doing yoga or some other kind of bodywork or prayer
How to Select a Flower Essence
Flower essences can be purchased from a quality producer, or you can make your own. Here, I will discuss how to select and apply ready-made flower essence remedies. You can learn how to wildcraft your own flower essences with me in this video.
When you’re starting out with flower essences, it can be overwhelming—so many producers and so many essences! I like to encourage people to remember that it’s your relationship with the plant that is the most important thing in selection. Your relationship with the remedy is the co-creation with that plant. The more you work with flowers, the more you will be able to feel and trust this part of the process.
The following are some ways to begin exploring flower essences:
- Depending on what issue(s) you’d like to address, begin by taking one to three essences that resonate with you. Many producers offer sets of remedies that have a particular focus. You may want to purchase a set to experiment with, such as the FES’s Range of Light, Delta Gardens’ Protection Set, Alaskan Essences, or the Bach Essences.
- Consider flower essences that invite presence, relaxation, protection, and grounding.
- If you want to study the essences more carefully, consider making flashcards or purchasing the flower cards (Alaskan Essences, FES, and Bach make sets).
- If you’re curious to learn more about how a plant might connect with your ancestry, consider doing some research on how it was used historically.
- Perhaps there’s a flower you’re curious about, or have seen in nature. Ask this plant if it would like to work with you.
Here are five basic ways to select a flower essence:
- Intuitively: A flower essence might come to you by way of revealing itself in nature, or appearing in a dream.
- By dowsing: Using a tool of resonance, such a pendulum, to test for essences.
- Through muscle testing: A simple way to muscle test is to make a ring with the index finger and thumb of your nondominant hand. If you would like to test for a yes for an essence, say the name of the plant and flick the circle with your dominant hand. If the circle holds, that’s a yes. If it breaks open, that is a no.
- By consulting reference literature: Books, repertories, or flower affirmation cards.
- Through blind testing: By drawing a card or randomly selecting an essence from a set. This method works well with children.
Any of these methods can be integrated into your ritual. Before making remedies for other people, it’s a good idea to spend some time with the flower essences yourself. The flowers will have much to share with you. Also, the more experience you have with the essences yourself, the better you will understand how the essences will work for others.
This is an excerpt from The Bloom Book: A Flower Essence Guide to Cosmic Balance by Heidi Smith.
Heidi Smith, MA, RH (AHG), is a psychosomatic therapist, registered herbalist, and flower essence practitioner. Within her private practice, Moon & Bloom, Heidi works collaboratively with her clients to empower greater balance, actualization, and soul-level healing within themselves. She is passionate about engaging both the spiritual and scientific dimensions of the plant kingdom, and sees plant medicine and ritual as radical ways to promote individual, collective, and planetary healing. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her partner and two cats. For more, visit moonandbloom.com.
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Tapping 101: Calm Yourself Instantly
Tapping is a technique in which you use your fingers to tap on meridian points in order to relieve stress. We intuitively know, for example, that the key meridian points near the eyebrows, nose, temple, and chest can comfort us, which is why we often unconsciously touch these areas when we are under stress. Tapping lets us access these points in a conscious and deliberate way.
Before you begin, choose an emotional focus you would like to clear from your mind. Then frame it as a phrase, such as, “I am stressed out.” Now insert that phrase into a sentence that ends with “I love and accept myself,” like this, “Even though I am stressed out, I love and accept myself.”
Looking for more great reads?
Excerpted from Kicking Sick by Amy Kurtz.
Amy Kurtz is a wellness expert, an AADP-certified Holistic Health Coach, speaker, and a regular contributor on popular wellness websites such as mindbodygreen and Yoganonymous. She lives in New York City. For more information, visit amykurtz.com.
Letting Go of Shame, with Rick Hanson
For many, shame is one of the most difficult emotions to work with. It is so pervasive in contemporary life, yet it is often hidden underneath layers of more “obvious” sorts of feelings and emotions like rage, sadness, anger, and despair. Sounds True author and dear friend Dr. Rick Hanson, organizer of The Compassionate Brain free online video series, has spent decades studying shame, self-worth, and self-acceptance, as a neuropsychologist and as a psychotherapist working with clients.
Additionally, Rick is the author of a number of audio learning programs, each of which offers simple guided meditations to open you to your true nature – that of a happy, content, aware, alive, and loving human being.
To help you begin to let go of the shame you may be carrying, Rick has put together the following simple, yet very effective guided exercise. We hope that you find it helpful. If you’d like to read more about Rick’s work in the area of shame and self-acceptance, you are welcome to read his article, “From Shame to Self-Worth.”
Guided Exercise – Letting Go of Shame
Imagine that you are sitting beside a powerful river on a beautiful sunny day. You feel safe and contented and strong.
Imagine that sitting with you is a wise and supportive being. Perhaps someone you know personally, perhaps a historical figure, perhaps a guardian angel, etc. Know in your heart that this is a very wise and honest and caring being.
Imagine a small boat tied to the bank of the river, there near you. Imagine an empty and open box in the boat that you can reach easily. Alright.
Now, continuing to be centered in feelings of worth and well-being, bring to mind lightly something you are ashamed of. Represent it, whatever it is, as a small object on the ground in front of you.
Imagine that the being is telling you, or that you are telling the being, some of the many causes and conditions that led to that thing you are ashamed of. You don’t need the whole story; often a few seconds in your imagination can summarize the heart of the matter.
With that summary of the causes of the shame, see if you can feel a letting go inside.
If you like, in your imagination, bow to the object representing the shame: it exists, it is what it is.
Then put the object in the box, and let it go as much as you can.
Now bring to mind, lightly, something else you are ashamed of. Represent it, whatever it is, as a small object on the ground in front of you.
I’ll be repeating the instructions, and feel free to go at your own pace, slowing down to dwell on certain parts, or speeding up to get through them to additional things you’d like to put in the boat.
[Repeat as many times as you like.]
The Purpose of Life is to Love
Within all of the great wisdom traditions we find an emphasis on love, kindness, and opening our heart to others. It is quite natural to open in this way to our family and friends, but what the great traditions teach is that this reservoir of love inside us is unlimited, extends to all living beings, and even to the universe itself. This reality of love is not an abstract experience, notes respected meditation teacher Reggie Ray, but something that is alive the core of who and what we are. One way to envision the spiritual journey is as a pathway which unlocks the love in our hearts, thereby enabling us to become fully human.
Please enjoy this short video from Reggie on the unfolding of love.
The Future of Spirituality – audio sessions with Ken Wilber
Have you had a chance to listen to The Future of Spirituality with Ken Wilber and Tami Simon? These historic audio sessions have been edited down into around 6.5 hours and feature a fascinating conversation regarding the evolution of spirituality, the ever-evolving ways the formless is pouring through form, and the always, already awakened nature of consciousness. The sessions are available in CDs or as digital downloads.
If the Buddha, Saint Teresa, or an enlightened shaman walked into the room today, would they find themselves in need of some serious spiritual catching up? The surprising answer, says Ken Wilber, is yes.
Integral evolutionary thinkers today are seeing a burst of accelerating shifts in human consciousness: in our emotional and cognitive lines of intelligence, our creative and moral capacities, our sense of self, and more. And as this landscape of knowledge grows, so does the potential of our own spiritual lives-in ways that even meditation and other inward practices alone cannot provide.
What is the evidence for this upward spiral in our spiritual intelligence? And if it’s true, how do we experience these shifts directly, within ourselves? The Future of Spirituality explores these emerging possibilities to help you discover their profound influences in your own life and in the world around you.
“The enlightened persons of today and of 2,000 years ago are equally free,” says Wilber. But now, for the first time in human history, we have the potential for a far more expansive, fuller spiritual experience than ever before possible. This is the territory that you are invited to explore, with The Future of Spirituality.
Highlights:
“Spirit wants to evolve”-the core of the integral vision
Emptiness and the evolutionary unfolding of form
How science and Western psychology are transforming spirituality
On freedom and fullness
Waking up and growing up, two distinct and essential processes
If the Divine is formless and infinite, who needs levels and hierarchies?
On reincarnation and life after death
The shape of things to come-emerging stages of consciousness ahead
Are You Suffering from Empathic Distress? How to Reclaim Your Boundaries Compassionately
Are you exhausted, anxious, or overwhelmed? Maybe your life is challenging. Or perhaps the state of the world and others’ suffering feels unbearable. If your life is going well, but you still feel miserable, maybe you have some guilt or shame. You are not alone. You may be suffering from empathic distress.
Most of us have been taught that empathy is wholly positive and should be fostered in children and revered in adults. This idea is partly correct. The absence of empathy is clearly problematic. When the ability to sense or care about others’ feelings or pain is missing, we edge into sociopathy. However, empathy is experiencing another person’s pain as our own. In small doses and for short periods, it allows us a deeper understanding of our fellow beings. But it can also make it harder to help, because the pain is spread around, not diminished. If your friend breaks their leg and you experience genuine empathy, it might feel like your leg is broken too. This makes it harder for you to function and definitely harder for you to help them.
Empathy can make us sick, overwhelmed, and burned out.
Many people feel helpless in the face of the magnitude of suffering in the world today. It can result in what appears to be apathy at first but is actually empathic distress, which means “hurting for others while feeling unable to help.” An op-ed in the New York Times titled “That Numbness You’re Feeling? There’s a Word for It” described this phenomenon and cited some of the research I used to create the Sounds True audio course Shining Bright Without Burning Out: Spiritual Tools for Creating Healthy Energetic Boundaries in an Overconnected World.
The Research
Neuroscientists Olga Klimecki and Tania Singer identified empathy as a contributing factor to burnout, primarily but not exclusively, among healthcare workers and therapists. The older term compassion fatigue is a “misnomer.” Compassion and empathy have distinctly different impacts on our bodies and psyches. Compassion is witnessing and being willing to help when possible and appropriate. Empathy is taking on others’ pain as our own. Empathy often creates “more distress.” It is a huge distinction.
Empathy is overrated and fatiguing. Compassion is what we need. Unfortunately, we often confuse the two. This dynamic is one reason why developing healthy energetic boundaries is essential.
Decreasing Empathic Distress
Being unable to adjust between compassion and empathy is a big reason many people feel drained and overwhelmed. Research about the critical difference between compassion and empathy aligns with many spiritual concepts of energetic boundaries. It also challenges some. One of the ways we inadvertently make things difficult for ourselves is when we believe that to be good, kind, “spiritual” people, we must always be wide open. We must be at one with the universe, be open to everyone, and say yes to everything. There is a paradox here. We are all one on some level, but we need to embrace the ability to differentiate ourselves from others at times to steward our own health.
We have reached a tipping point with empathic distress; it is a crisis within the crises.
Klimecki and Singer focus on how training in compassion meditation can help reduce empathic distress, shifting from an experience of absorbing others’ energy to a state of kindness toward others with clear self-differentiation. The distinction between empathy and compassion is one of the first things we cover in Shining Bright Without Burning Out: Spiritual Tools for Creating Healthy Energetic Boundaries in an Overconnected World. The course also includes a full set of tools for addressing empathic distress from the perspective of energetic boundaries.
Here are a few additional steps you can take today to begin reducing empathic distress:
- Be clear about your direct responsibilities and what is not yours.
- Pause before entering new situations: conversations, appointments with clients, meetings, etc. Take a moment to reset yourself with a breath and an intention for how you want to engage.
- Pay attention to how you feel after interactions with people, places, and media. Note over time when your mood or body feels drained so that you can prepare more thoroughly in the future, consider how to minimize those interactions if they are optional, and take time to reset after engaging.
Mara Bishop
Mara Bishop is a shamanic practitioner, intuitive consultant, teacher, author, and artist. In private practice, she uses her Personal Evolution Counseling™ method to provide an integrated approach to spiritual healing, personal growth, and emotional well-being. Her books Shamanism for Every Day: 365 Journeys and Inner Divinity: Crafting Your Life with Sacred Intelligence are resource guides for spiritual practice. She resides in Durham, North Carolina. For more, visit wholespirit.com.
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