As with all the mixes born here, this one was not created in a vacuum. The support you asked for, your stories, and what I was trying to figure out in my own life created a synchronicity of events that suggested it was time for a new mix. When I asked the upstairs staff if this was so, they kicked in immediately with this mix to support us.

I love your stories and I am lucky to hear a lot of them. Right now, many of your stories hold a common thread revealing a common struggle a lot of us are having. Right now, many of you describe feeling deeply tired of your ideas about life. It isn’t that you are tired with your life, but you are tired of your approach to your life and your view of your life.

You note that your ideas feel like confining thought loops that cut you off from genuine experience. The specifics thought loops leaving you exhausted and numb are deeply varied. Many of you describe being weary of ideas about how much you have to do to feel like enough. Many are weary of a belief system that leaves you feeling anxious and afraid. Others of you are tired with your ideas about what success looks like. Some of you want to be done with the pervasive notion that you must rush yourselves through life as if it is a race to the finish. Others mention being weary of patterns of relentlessly judging both your own and other peoples’ confusions and decisions with a values system that no longer feels right. You describe being sick of shoulds built on convictions and opinions that feel claustrophobic and limiting. I hear a collective weariness with the limitations of our own points of view and the ways we each respond from within these views.

One commonality in your stories is the depths of your weariness with long held core beliefs that suddenly feel wrong. You describe a wrenching emotional process to own these feelings of discomfort with long held ideas. You recognize these long held ideas are constricting, even claustrophobic filters keeping out the world and narrowing your experience of life. They are inhibiting your ability to see and binding you from genuine experiences of being here now. You agree it is discard time, but how?

At first I considered each confining thought pattern you mentioned and offered specific Flower Essence suggestions for the specific binding. As I heard a flood of stories about this pervasive weariness with old frames of reference, I realized it was the whole pattern of holding onto thoughts as right, true, or important that is the gist of the difficulty. Yes, it was important to support the release of specific ideas with specific Flower Essences, but it also felt important to support the dynamic of releasing long held beliefs in general. This is really what Carry Less is about.

A few years ago, in the middle of some difficulty, the Angels told me that I needed to decide between picking through my trash as I threw it overboard or simply throwing it ALL overboard. Ah yes, what a habit us humans have made of holding onto our garbage. But lately there seems to be a collective desire to throw it all overboard in one swift motion. And without sorting! This remedy will help us with this process of efficiently dumping it all, hence the Angels’ name for this remedy, Carry Less.

My habits of picking over the garbage on its way to the dumpster leaves me wondering why this dumping feels so necessary right now. I really don’t know, but it appears to be a pressing need. So many of you have connected with us to speak of uncovering core ideas that are strangling the lifeblood out of you and your lives right now. Perhaps the rising vibration of this beautiful planet makes thoughts that might have fit our lives not very long ago feel downright uncomfortable now. Perhaps there is an entirely different reason why so many feel an urgent need to let go of their burdensome ideas right now. All I know for certain is that the discomfort felt by so many of us galvanized me to want to make a new mix and when I went to ask the Angels what to include in the mix, I was given the formula for Carry Less with a clarity and speed that made it apparent that this remedy’s time was now.

CARRY LESS AND SANSKARA RELEASE
Sanskara is a word used to describe these filters clouding our experience of reality, the filters that Carry Less offers support to unbind and release.

Sanskaras are imprints left on the subconscious mind by experiences from this or previous lives. They influence our nature, behavior, responses, state of mind, and experience of life. According to Meher Baba, sanskaras are impressions or trace memories accumulated through evolution and over the course of the evolution of consciousness in human reincarnations. They are not a substance nor a force or energy but are best understood in more psychological terms. For Meher Baba, consciousness, not matter or energy, is the intrinsic substance of reality. Thus sanskaras, as the smallest building blocks of consciousness, could be described as ways of experiencing.

By their very nature sanskaras narrow our ability to experience fully, being themselves a kind of filter limiting full perception. It is not that sanskaras limit reality so much as they limit our experience of reality.

This is because sanskaras, once acquired and accumulated, form a sort of multilayered lens through which we perceive our experiences. They are filters that block us from experiencing what really IS in this now. Sanskaras are useful in that they create a bridge to consciousness, but then they serve no further purpose. They are actually a hindrance to full consciousness and God realization. The goal for humans is to be rid of our sanskaras through a process of unwinding them from our consciousnesses. Life experiences can unwind sanskaras as does contact with perfect God realized teachers, but often life experiences add, rather than remove, sanskaras.

FLOWER ESSENCES AND SANSKARAS
Flower Essences unwind sanskaras. By their very nature they ARE about sanskara release. While so many things and experiences clutter our consciousness with more obscuring data, creating more sanskaras, Essences unburden us and set us on a course to simply BE. Each Flower Essence supports a release of a specific illusion or sanskara. Each release moves us towards an experience of self beyond bindings.

Over the years we have created combination mixes that pool the gifts of many Flower Essences to unbind certain bigger sanskaric themes. For example, your requests for and my need for a remedy that would help unbind us from illusions of tribe and family led to the creation of the family river trio of Bloodroot, Black Currant and Borage. Your requests and my desire to disentangle myself from counter productive bindings to other people, and find freedom from concern about the opinions of others or even the opinions of myself led to the creation of our mix All Ego Contracts Null & Void.

The need to unbind and release emotional scars led to the creation of Abandonment & Abuse. Many of the combination remedies of the Animal Wellness collection as well as the other combination remedies were created to support the unbinding of specific groups of sanskaras.

Fro example, each Venus Garden concerns itself with a shedding of a group of sanskaras. From the first Eight Garden that helped us shed sanskaras about what could be healed to the latest, Don’t Worry Be Happy, that helps free us from the illusion that worry not happiness should be our daily fare, all of the Venus Garden Essences have supported our pursuit of freedom from filters, illusions, in a word, sanskaras.

Carry Less supports the whole dynamic of sanskara release. It helps expedite this release process much like a bowl might make mixing a batch of ingredients together easier or the right tool for the job might make a repair go much faster. Carry Less helps you make the most of the support you are receiving to let go of sanskaras into a greatly expanded experience of self.

I AM my true self revealed

Alfalfa, Batchelor Buttons, Bay Cedar, Bee Balm, Box Briar, Box Elder (Ashleaf Maple), Comfrey, Coralita, Daffodil, Easter Lily Vine, Eyes of Mary, Flowering Quince, Flow Free, Grape, Joe Pye Weed, Lily of the Valley, Love in a Mist, Meadow Rue, Mehera, Orange , Osmanthus, Paper Birch, Pavonia Spinifex, Pink Water Lily, Pumpkin, Purple Leafed Chokecherry, Rosa Glauca, Ruby Moon Hyacinth Bean, Scarlet Pimpernel, Spiderwort, Turk’s Cap Cactus, White Water Lily, Wild Yellow Lily, Yellow Mullein,Yellow Water Lily

The Angels suggested I start our seeds for the season a month earlier than usual. This sounded reasonable during December when we were having 63 degree afternoons and all the crocuses were about to bloom. Now that there is three feet of snow on the ground, it’s a bit more of a stretch of the imagination to think we’ll have an early spring. None the less, I did start a bunch of seeds.

I have flashed you a picture of the flat of tomatoes mid sowing. We grow a lot of different tomatoes in a staggering variety of colors. I did pass on last year’s white tomato variety aptly named “Cream Sausage.” It really looked as unappealing as the name. Frankly, none of us got past the appearance of this tomato enough to even notice if it tasted any good. This year we will just have to suffer through with only purple, pink, yellow, orange, green, striped, and red tomatoes to harvest.

No sooner had I made the most enormous mess in the kitchen sowing all these seeds when our water pump died. I had to melt snow on the stove in order to finish the project and then melt some more to flush the toilets, and clean up all the oil mix everywhere. It is amazing how fast things get complicated without running water.

Because our greenhouse is already full of tropical Flowers, I start the seeds on heating mats outside the greenhouse and then move the tropical plants into the house as I move the flats of germinated plants into the greenhouse. By the time the greenhouse is packed full of seedlings in April and May, the rest of the house and office is full of tropical plants pining for their greenhouse. When summer comes, everyone goes outside and recovers from less than ideal conditions. Another greenhouse remains a project on the horizon.

Speaking of projects, we tapped the maple trees last Sunday. The sap didn’t run much this week, but we went out yesterday to collect what was there and stomp down paths to our buckets. Where the plow had piled snow it was not unusual to sink in almost to our hips. After entirely too much time indoors this winter I am completely thrilled to be outside with something to do! Yahoo for sugaring!

I am not much of a rules girl. For all the fact that I grew up in a family with so many iron clad rules that members of the clan saw it as a call to arms if someone suggested using a different brand of mayonnaise than Hellman’s, well the graft didn’t take very well.

And when I threw off the family rules in a smooth twenty five forty fifty year ongoing process of soul searching, tears, journal writing, manure shoveling, and messy choices, I did my best to throw off the idea of rules in any form as well. I am not talking “its okay to steal a car because I want to” sort of break out from rules. I am just saying that my only way forward to escape the tyranny of my family’s rules was to learn to trust my own heart over their rules and this led to trusting my heart over other people’s rules as well.

Once you conquer the big enchilada of throwing off tribal rules, it’s downhill from there and a natural progression to trust your own heart’s voice over the voice of anyone else.

And one more caveat before today’s growl about one rule in particular. It’s not that I don’t learn from other people’s ideas, because I do or that I don’t like groups, because that’s not true either. It’s just that I prefer groups brought together by love or curiosity. I just am not crazy about groups brought together by rules, such as ideological groups that want to impose their rules on everyone in the group and everyone else besides.

This reluctance to be a rules girl with family rules or any other set of rules set me up well for my life and work with Flower Essences because as far as I am concerned FLOWER ESSENCES ARE NOT ABOUT RULES!

Hence begins today’s growl.

On Monday, I got an email from a lovely woman who is teaching a series of classes about Flower Essences to a gathering of healers in Georgia. Those gathered wondered why some companies had iron clad rules about how many Flower Essences to work with at a time and she wondered what I thought about this. She also wondered if the fact that Green Hope Farm literature said the more Flower Essences the merrier while other literature from other lines said just three or just seven reflected a difference in strength.

When Janice’s email arrived, I was in a bit of an ornery mood due to all my technology learning lessons so when I answered her I wasn’t perhaps as politic as I sometimes am. The bottom line, and this is what I told her, is that this “too much” rule is my biggest bone to pick with information presented about Flower Essences by other people.

THIS KIND OF RULE, make that ANY KIND OF RULE, about how to work with Flower Essences is UNNECESSARY and COUNTERPRODUCTIVE!

If we were talking about dosages of weapons grade plutonium or even a chemical remedy like aspirin, rules would be vital. But FLOWER ESSENCES ARE NOT CHEMICAL! FLOWER ESSENCES ARE INFORMATION!

In truth, I simply do not understand why people continue to SCARE people about Flower Essences with this illusionary idea about “too much.”

Yes, I am a broken record about this, but it bears saying again and again. Flower Essences are vibrational information. They are something your electrical system reads then decides for itself whether to use the pertinent guidance. Any change made after working with Flower Essences is a change your electrical system initiates. Flower Essences do nothing. They can only offer your electrical system possible solutions to it’s difficulties.

They are not chemicals imposed upon your body chemistry like all the Febreeze being sprayed around America. They are information offered to your electrical system in a completely “take it or leave it manner.” Your electrical system decides what to do with the information of Flower Essences. Yes, your wise, life affirming, health seeking, electrical system makes its OWN decisions about what to do with the data of Flower Essences.

The same could not be said of a close encounter with Febreeze.

Okay, so I am also having a moment of growling about Febreeze too, but isn’t anyone else worried that if the EPA says that 80-90% of human cancer is caused by exposure to toxins in our environment, then maybe it’s not such a hot idea to spray so many toxic chemicals about the house?

This makes the fear mongering about a product made from a member of the mint family, vinegar, water and the electrical pattern of a Flower and one that doesn’t have to be ingested to share its helpful information all the more bizarre.

Here is my email to the lovely woman in Georgia,

“This is how I have come to explain WHY I DISAGREE with the old guard; All day long we are exposed to good, bad, and indifferent electrical information in people, places, things, nature.

For example, as we pass people on the street we get exposed to a lot of the information of their electrical system and often we read all this data even as we just walk by them. This is because we are always on a search for good data for our electrical system to learn from. WHY? Because our electrical system is wired to seek upgrades, improvements, and better health. Our electrical systems want to read and learn from everything we are exposed to.

THEREFORE on any given day, we read a lot of electrical information. In fact, this is the primary way we learn. The Angels often remind me that 75 % of what happens in any situation is an exchange of vibrational data done silently. For example, a spiritual teacher with a great vibration can read the phone book to an audience and the audience can learn a lot. Whereas a spiritual teacher with a low vibration could read the wisdom of the ages and not as much would get accomplished as with the telephone book exchange.

Flower Essences are excellent, high vibration spiritual teachers! When we choose to work with Flower Essences we are self selecting GOOD electrical data. We are setting ourselves up to read good and possibly extremely helpful information for our health and spiritual wellbeing.

I have NEVER had an Angel say that a lot of good electrical information is TOO MUCH. I also have never experienced that in myself or with someone using a lot of Flower Essences. NEVER!

If we were unable to process tons of electrical data each day of all kinds we would have to live in isolation from community. We actually would not be able to be in a body!

I have never understood people creating fear in others about working with many Flower Essences and all their good data at once. Frankly, I think the times call for it and our electrical systems are up to it.

And as far as whether other companies Flower Essences are “stronger.” I am sure people can answer that question for themselves! Our bodies know what we hanker to tune into and learn from! I need make no comment here for the truth of this to be self evident. I trust each person working with Essences to KNOW the answer to this for themselves!

The whole discussion is a RED HERRING that I simply do not understand people sticking with!

Sorry to be so heated but you can well imagine how often I have to work to dismantle this idea in the world!”

Thus did I answer this email. Thus do I tilt at the windmill of this rule in the world.

The brain trust met. This would be calm eyed Ben, calm eyed Jim, and wild eyed me. We summed up our technology problems succinctly. After we upgraded one computer in our network to the latest Mac OS X version 10.4.8, none of the other computers could communicate across the network. The disconnects left us losing our minds and our files. Due consideration was given to your input which could best be described as a greek chorus chanting in unison, “You need to upgrade all the computers”. It was not too late to listen to the greek chorus. I still had my hair. A few brain cells remained alive and swirling in my cranium.

The IMacs that looked so snazzy five, six, and seven years ago are off line and will soon be on their way to the local computer recycle center where a lone man roams in a behemoth warehouse full of abandoned machines. Our new babies sit in a row, silent and pristine. They are the height of technology fashion. Their screens are the size of my childhood television. And they actually talk to each other.

Not that I would know, because one of my consuming side projects right now is taking all the documents I saved on these various obsolete machines and translating them to a format that can be opened on one of the new machines.

Yes, yes after so many crashes over the year we back up daily, weekly, monthly, sometimes it seems even hourly. We back up all the pertinent files like our mailing list, but stuff like the emails I save, well I though putting them in a file on my desktop was enough. It was not.

Now I need to take all those records from each of these old computers and take each record through a seven step process to upgrade each to a “word document” The file I am working on right now is one of four enormous files on one of the three dinosaur machines. This file alone has 900 email records in it. That’s 6300 clicks with my mouse to save what’s in this file. I haven’t done a head count on the other files, but I am thinking this is going to take awhile. The lone man at the recycle facility may have to wait a little bit longer before he gets our machines.

On the bright side, as the files go by I have to laugh at the funny stuff in these emails. I will see a sentence as I click like ” I will never scrub her toilet again” from one of you working with “All Ego Contracts Null and Void.” When I see one that says, “What was I thinking when I decided to make cupcakes for a living?”, I pause in my clicking and reread the email to recall the whole cupcake debacle that one of you beloveds shared with me. This rereading is why I saved these emails in the first place, though I didn’t expect to be perusing them now because of technology issues. They were supposed to be something I chortled over years from now while writing my twelve volume autobiography.

But life has its own plan and right now this late night mouse clicking is proving to have its benefits. I get to remember so many things I have learned about Essences from you and from asking the Angels for you, I get to remember so many problems figured out in lots of back and forth emails. And I get to remember how many things were funnier once they were shared with one of you! Thank you!

As we sat in the kitchen one recent evening, one of the kids read aloud an end page commentary she had found in a weekly news magazine. It was one woman’s tale about getting a gun and learning to shoot it so she could blow to kingdom come a cardinal bird that was relentlessly tapping on her windows. Her victory was the bird’s death.

All of us were both horrified for the bird and sorry for this woman.

Families have unique vocabularies referencing shared events. My grandmother always referred to something that was not worth wasting time on as “bad crab meat.” She coined the phrase when her mother said that watching bad television was like eating bad crab meat . From there, the whole family took up Grandma’s phrase as a shorthand way to sum up something not worth doing. Nicknames are part of family vocabularies too. My sister and I used to call my father “Banana Slippers” referencing an April Fool’s Day moment when we put peeled bananas in his slippers. When he stepped into the slippers on that fateful morning, he went, well, bananas. Another banana nickname helped a friend when she couldn’t figure out how to resolve a fight with her sister. Since she and her sister had called each other “Banana Face” as kids, she decided to send her sister a card saying “I Love you Banana Face.” With that card, the fight was behind them.

So why were we appalled by the woman who shot the cardinal bird and then saw it as an act of self empowerment and glory? Nicknames, unique slang, and shared symbols are blessings born when people live, work, or play together. Additionally, the smallest things can be experienced as blessings when we open to see the world around us as significant not accidental. Specifically, for all of us at Green Hope Farm, cardinal birds have been a major symbol referencing the loving presence of God in our lives.

Jim’s dad died unexpectedly in a car accident right after we moved to Green Hope Farm. He had helped us to build our house and yet, no sooner had we moved in, than he was gone. In the months after his death, we noticed a cardinal bird almost every day sitting in the oak tree we had planted in Jim’s dad’s honor. It felt like the cardinal bird had come to remind us that Mel was still with us. Later we came to feel the cardinal bird was also reminding us that God was there with us as well.

In the wild summer of 1993, the summer when the gardens were open, we had hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of visitors instead of the three or four we expected. I had my own encounter with a window tapping cardinal bird that made the summer possible for me.

There were four of us humans maintaining the gardens, giving garden tours, answering questions about our process of gardening with the Angels and Elementals and running the shop of garden Flowers, vegetables, and Flower Essences. We were overwhelmed with things to do and started to squabble about who was to do what. One day we realized we had to surrender our individual agendas in order to handle the unexpected flow of people. One wonderful thing we decided to do was to begin each day with a group silent meditation. This is something we have continued to this day, as from the first meditation, we found it an incredible tool to help us let go and let God.

The other thing that happened was that a cardinal bird began to tap on my bedroom window at five each morning. Despite being someone who usually likes to sleep a bit later, I found myself wide awake at five. Not only that, I found myself bursting with the desire to go down to the first of many computers to type a message as best I could from the spiritual beings working with us and the God within me.

This happened every day. The cardinal bird would come at five. I would leap from my bed and go type for a couple of hours. Then I would share whatever I had written with anyone who wanted to read it. We put the guidance out in the shop for visitors to read and we all soaked in the humorous, practical, and profound support of these messages. With the cardinal bird arriving at five each morning as regular as clockwork, all of us began to write down questions to ask the next day. This guidance combined with the meditation carried us through the great adventure of 1993 and on into the future of Green Hope Farm.

After the summer season, the cardinal bird stopped tapping, but I remained focused on getting guidance for our rapidly expanding enterprise. It wasn’t always at five in the morning that I received help, but no matter how things changed, I always associated the cardinal bird as the beginning, a divine call to listen, to receive, and to know that God was with us.

For all of us in the family and in the office, cardinal birds have become a wonderful symbol for the truths that God loves us, God is supporting us, God is nudging us this way or that, or simply the truth God is. We mention to each other whenever a cardinal bird is at the feeder or whenever we encounter one in the woods or on our journey out into the world. Various animals and birds have encouraged each of us in various ways to keep on keeping on, because at the bottom, all of us have come to think there are no ordinary moments, no insignificant encounters and in this big fantastic experience of life, everything is a kiss from the divine.

I am so very grateful that for whatever reasons I was able to experience the tapping of the cardinal bird as a gift not something that had to be stopped. So much of what has happened here is because of that cardinal bird. Those encounters with that cardinal bird make me pay attention to most everything more carefully because the gifts that arrive in our lives aren’t always wrapped with ribbons and bows. Sometimes they come tapping on our windows all dressed in red.

Papa cardinal at the feeder yesterday. Mama cardinal, also beloved, in a nearby shrub.