This new Flower Essence mix is a tool to help us access our unconscious, know it, retrieve the gift of its emotional content and desires and free ourselves from any constraints to make the shifts towards wholeness and an experience of our authentic self that these newly integrated parts of ourselves encourage.

How do we reclaim our authentic self?  What is our healing path to this experience?

Our culture believes healing is the suppression of anything deemed unacceptable into our shadow or unconscious. This “healing approach” is how we lose our authentic self in the first place.  Actual healing requires us to retrieve these rejected aspects of self, hidden in our unconscious, and bring them to the light of consciousness.  Nothing in our unconscious is bad, it is just unknown. If we reclaim unconscious parts, we become conscious of all that we are.  We experience our wholeness.  We can have an authentic experience of self once again.

Our unconscious or shadow contains aspects of ourselves that we were told were not okay, maybe by our parents, maybe by other people or institutional structures. When told our natural human experiences of self and many of our feelings were not okay, we hid these experiences of self from everyone, including ourselves, deep in our unconscious.

Often our shadow contains banished feelings of sadness and anger, our repressed animal instincts (ours because we are animals and denied because of people’s discomfort with this truth), our thoughts and imaginings deemed unacceptable, our true desires and uniqueness suppressed because of expectations of a patriarchal culture.  Healing is re-owning all these lost pieces of self and bringing them together into the light and into an experience of our authentic and whole self.  

Patriarchal culture is deeply confused about what it is to be human.  Instead of understanding people are born whole and free to think, feel and imagine anything,  patriarchal culture insists we must make people good by editing them, fixing them and shaping them. What results is humans split off from their humanness and the genuine, wondrous, authentic and whole self they were born with.

As we go to retrieve these disowned parts of ourselves held in our shadow, the culture freaks out, confusing feelings with actions. Because we are each immersed in this culture we too may  have a niggling inner voice that says this retrieval work is not safe. If we own our anger, what might we do? Hurtful actions much more often spring from NOT knowing what we feel than knowing what we feel, but we are taught to believe just the opposite.

Owning what lives in our shadow and bringing it into the light is not the same as acting from the shadow. Feeling is not the same as doing.  Feeling is feeling and we are free to feel anything.

Owning our animal selves is also part of our retrieval work.  Our animal instincts help us trust ourselves to feel what we feel.  Our animal instincts help us choose wisely what to do with our feelings.  But we are taught to deny our animal selves as well.  Just consider how women are encultured to shave off all their fur.  Yet our animal instincts are deeply supportive of and inseparable from our authentic self.

It is worth saying again.  To own our shadow is not dangerous.  In fact, it is essential.  When we repress our feelings to the point of not even knowing they are there, we are likely to find out what we feel because of what we unexpectedly do or what happens to us.  When we split off from ourselves and deny our unconscious reality, it will still be expressed, only its expression will seem to come out of the blue because it comes from our unconscious.  Just think of our politicians for endless examples of this.

I got fired up to make this new mix one day when many women shared with us stories of overwork and disregard by their families, colleagues and society at large.  Sadly, there are many days like this, but on this particular day the stories were so over the top there was smoke coming out of my ears. In the heat of the moment, I wanted to make a mix to help women be more bad ass in response to the negative things happening to them.  However the longer I considered how a new Essence could truly serve us, the more I felt it needed to help us go within to heal ourselves, not build tools for external battles. In this instance, the issue is not entirely what people expect of women, but how women believe in these expectations.

I was reminded that when we get embroiled in events in the external world (and who doesn’t?), we are preoccupied by the symptoms not the cause.  Things arise in the external world because our inner world is not known to us and our inner wounds are not healed. Our unconscious holds our inner wounds.  If we do not bring these wounds to consciousness and attend to them, these wounds will pull into our lives difficult experiences to illuminate themselves.  The question becomes what do I really believe about myself and how do I heal the wounds these beliefs have caused not why do other people do what they do to me.

C.G.Jung said, ”The psychological rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside as fate.”  Another way he expressed this truth was, “Until you make your unconscious conscious, it will direct you and you will call it fate.”  If we have felt powerless, Jung’s truth restores us to an understanding of our own power.  We are always free to resolve things internally, and thus we always have power to transform ourselves and how we experience our lives.  To know that external events are life trying to show us inner places to be healed is so different than feeling a victim of chaotic events.

There are many ways to access our unconscious and bring its contents forward to be integrated into our consciousness.  I am partial to the gift of Flower Essences and the gift of dreams.

Flower Essences embody the wisdom of the inside job, because that is their territory. They ring vibrational notes in our energy system bringing our unconscious into the light.  They remind us of who we truly are and show us the way to be that once again.  They have no volition to change us.  We must do this work for ourselves, but they are like a lighthouse in the fog guiding us precisely where to go.

Dreams are another generous gift life gives us.  Every night they bring unconscious material right to our door.   Dreams come from our unconscious and bring communication from this realm to reveal how we really feel and who we really are.  Dreams do not lie. Yes, I know they may seem obscure and nonsensical, but they are the purest information we have about what is really going on in our lives. They do require focus and patience, however the more we consider them, the more gifts they give us. Our efforts to consider what our dreams reveal are vital.  Dreams never tell us something we already know.  They always take us forward towards wholeness. If we think we have healed something, our dreams will give us feedback about whether this is true.  Not only do dreams mirror back to us challenges, they also deepen our awareness that we are sacred beings participating in a sacred experience.

The distress of many women fired this Essence into being so let’s talk about women. Women learn very early, sometimes even from birth, that despite surface rhetoric that we matter, few people or cultures feel this is true.  We get the real message very early. Our job is to take care of everyone at the expense of ourselves.  If we feel anything but joyful about this, it is not okay.  Our natural feelings of anger and overwhelm and our natural desires to express something besides nurturing others get pushed into the shadow where they drain us as any unfelt feeling or desire does.  If we retrieve these feelings and desires and own them as valid and natural, we take back precious life energy used to suppress these feelings.  We find ourselves able to act on the information of our feelings and desires. We can choose to do less and say no. We can choose to express much more of ourselves. Without guilt we can unbind ourselves from cultural constrictions like the societal demand that women always be nice. And to mention dreams one more time, we may assume we no longer believe the culture’s bias but our dreams may tell us differently and once we know how we really feel, we can heal ourselves more fully.

Here are the Flower Essences in Authentic Self with a short take on why they are in the mix.

Ruby Moon Hyacinth Bean– We need an inner life where we are radically free to think and feel and imagine anything. We deserve this freedom. This Flower Essence helps us live in the full expression of this freedom.

Cosmos– If we retrieve our genuine thoughts and feelings from our unconscious, we can choose what we do with this expanded and more authentic sense of self.  Cosmos helps us translate our felt experience of our authentic self  into an explicit verbalization of what we need. Supported by this Flower, we can speak from the heart with the full authority of our being.

Pyrola Elliptica– This beloved Flower helps us access our dreams. Our culture dismisses dreams.  To most people it would just seem odd that people from the ancient world in places like Delphi felt dreams were the key to healing. Let me say once again some reasons dreams are so important.  Dreams show us the unvarnished truth.  Dreams show us how we really feel.  Dreams never waste time telling us something we already know.  They always bring forward aspects of self both unseen and unloved. Dreams help us form a relationship between our consciousness and our unconscious. As we bring the unconscious to the light of consciousness, we retrieve precious lost parts of ourselves and we find greater wholeness and a more integrated and authentic self. 

Eyes of Mary– This beloved helps us see in overview with loving detachment.  It helps us look at external events as galvanizing us to action instead of further disempowering us.  If we see clearly what is going on within us and acknowledge our inner reality’s reflection in the outside world, we know better what we need to do and what we don’t need to do.

Ixora, Carry Less, The Letting Go Flower, Puenta la Reina & Los Arcos– Many times knowing what we need to do is knowing we need to say no.  These beloveds help us say no.  They help us know we are entitled to say no. They work like highlighter pens to show us when and how we need to say no. They help us know we have a right to say no even if it means disappointing people, acting “aggressively” or defying patriarchal authority and “the rules.”

Roses are the perfect amalgam of generous, fragrant, numinous beauty and appropriate boundaries. It feels right that five Roses wanted to help us find this fantastic new amalgam of conscious and unconscious parts which means both numinous beauty and thorns. 

Alex Mackenzie Rose – This Rose helps us have the courage to do what we need to do.

Alchymist Rose– There is alchemy when the unconscious material we have retrieved translates into changes in our lives. This Rose helps us with the metamorphosis.

Wild Rose– Retrieving our wholeness is a messy project. It’s messy when you take back all parts of you formerly hijacked by a patriarchal inner and outer world. Wild Rose helps us be at ease with the turbulence and stay true to the whole being we have rediscovered.

Henri Martin Rose & Dog Rose– We are animals with instincts that deeply support us.  These two Roses, with their connections to bears and dogs, help us begin to re-own our animal selves.

Moonlight Datura– Our very being roots us in nature. This one helps restore to us our deep connection with the moon and the cycles of the moon, planets and stars.  This empowers us to trust our instincts and our right brain awareness of our connection to all things

Fireweed– Even if we are burnt out and exhausted by all that has gone before, we can restore our inner fire so we are fired up to make the changes we need to make.

Trailing Arbutus– We may feel frail but like this Wildflower, we have a tenacious, irrepressible determination to be true to ourselves and experience our deep and abiding oneness.  Let this tough beauty escort us on our way.

One might accuse me of being a bird witted, ninnyhammer when it comes to waiting for a watched pot to boil, but it’s a vexatious part of a havey cavey business.  I’m talking maple syruping. I’m talking finishing the sap after it’s gotten the old rake down in the outdoor boiling pans and is just about syrup. This process alone can put one in the deuce of a pucker.

While some may be junketing around the countryside enjoying rustication on a spring day, I must to the boiling pans. This often takes me into the suds.  It’s no flummery to boil down forty gallons of sap to just a whisker over a gallon of golden libation. Today’s haul is NINETY gallons of sap to boil down. This sets me up to be Friday faced by day’s end.

But not by a long chalk is this the worst of the matter.  The sap then goes into the house for a final finish boil.  This is a bit of a whisky frisky. This is when the old rumgumption begins, because first nothing happens and nothing happens and nothing happens.  The sap sits in pots on the stove, and it’s as much of a yawn as a proper jaw-me-dead to wait for the boil.

But then, suddenly it’s the worst hobble ever, because one paper skull or pea goose turn away from the pot always occurs JUST when the boil happens.  Then the sap goes all over the stove, the floor and every last frippery in sight.  Smoke alarms, burnt sugar, seething pots- it’s a horrid collation.

To give us petticoats our due, it is a rare hubble bubble of a project even for a pink of the ton. And if the pot fell to the care of  a half sprung shuffler?  Why, I’ve seen the most odious little bounce let a boil go, and sopped up the mess myself, make no mistake.  So, no matter the sure card that is at the stove, a bumble cloth of a boil over is bound to happen. Yes, even when you keep a focus bang up to the nines.

My solution of late? Georgette Heyer and her books about the Regency period in England. With one of her witty tomes perched over the skimble skamble of the boiling pot, I’m never in a quake nor falling into the dismals.  Instead I laugh with a gurgle and keep the watched pot under perfect control. I’m diverted with one eye on the pot and the other on my heroine’s handling of every loose fish in London. So far it hasn’t left me caper witted or flying up into the boughs. So far it’s resulted in some excellent syrup.

It is always fascinating to notice big spikes of interest in a certain Flower Essences.  Each week there will be a couple of Flower Essences that step into the limelight with an unusually large number of requests for these friends.  This week we have been flooded with orders for Honeybees in the White Hawthorn and Baby Blue Eyes.

Honeybees in the White Hawthorn is made when the White Hawthorn tree in the perennial garden blossoms and every Honeybee from miles around comes to partake in its blossoms.  The noise of the Honeybees is so loud that we can hear it from all over the gardens. When we make the Flower Essence each spring, we sit a bowl of White Hawthorn blossoms in water up in the branches of the tree and ask that the vibration of the Honeybees be as much a part of the Flower Essence as the White Hawthorn blossoms.

A shaman from South America told me he slept with a beehive under his pillow so that he could benefit from the healing properties of the Honeybee’s sound vibration.  This was the original impetus for making this Flower and Honeybee moment in the garden into a Flower Essence.

The first time I went to consider the strengths of the Flower Essence, I felt the Essence would help people’s energy systems in the same way that Honeybees serve the land they work. 

Honeybees do essential work to balance the energies on land.  There is nothing random about where Honeybees go or why they go there.  Yes, it often concerns collecting nectar and pollen but it is also more than that.  Just as they will sting someone to release a fear, anger or intense emotion, they go to places on land where the energy is low and work to raise its vibration with their light.

When we first sent Honeybees in the White Hawthorn into the world, we felt it would help people and animals balance their inner energetic landscape much as Honeybees balance land. That proved to be an understatement.  This Essence bears so many gifts and helps us in such profound ways.  To see it fly out of here in such numbers is deeply heartening because it means people are being called to balance their inner landscapes in this time of outer turmoil. 

Our inner landscape is the only territory we have the volition and ability to deeply affect.  I can think of no more powerful way to approach the chaos of these times than to harness the vibrational model of the Honeybee to heal and balance our inner landscape.  The White Hawthorn Flower adds a deep note of healing the heart chakra which makes this combination of support from this Flower and the Honeybees an incredible healing duo.

To begin with I was puzzled by the flood of Baby Blue Eyes orders.  On the face of it, the Sovereignty Set seemed to offer similar support to Baby Blue Eyes, but obviously that wasn’t so because in addition to the Sovereignty Set, many were clamoring for Baby Blue Eyes too. What is going on that requires the extra support of Baby Blue Eyes? What is Baby Blue Eyes’ unique gift that dovetails with the Sovereignty set right now?

Here is the description from the website.

Baby Blue Eyes , Veronica chamaedrys

Spiritual resilience, knowing our value

Baby Blue Eyes helps us find a kind of spiritual toughness. This spiritual toughness is not to be confused with defensiveness. Instead, Baby Blue Eyes promotes the flexible, resilient, and detached energy of knowing who we are, knowing our own value and being able to experience what happens to us without taking any of it personally.

-Children LOVE this Flower Essence because it addresses a specific situation children repeatedly face; the experience of having their inner wisdom discounted.

Reading this illuminated why we might need Baby Blue Eyes so much right now.  We are bone weary.  We have been through a rough couple of years. We would like a rest, but instead events around us speed up and require more of us than ever before.  Daily patterns, institutions, people and other things we thought of as ordinary unwavering realities that we could depend on have fallen away or apart. We can’t lean on them.  More things fall apart every day.  We have to find a way to ground ourselves, but not to societal structures we once counted on because they are going, going, gone.

Then to what do we ground?

Baby Blue Eyes offers a way forward.  The Angels choice of vocabulary in all the Essence definitions is so intentional.  Here they articulate the territory of Baby Blue Eyes support- Spiritual Resilience.  They note this is toughness without defensiveness.  We won’t easily get through this time if we defensively dig into what was.  For one thing, those structures and self concepts are no longer there for us to dig into. 

So we need detachment, to literally let go of structures we thought would always be there or ideas about who we are that have proven limited or false.  Various forces try to pull us back into defunct self definitions, but we can’t go back there.  The terrain where those things seemed true doesn’t exist anymore and always was a distortion of ourselves.  It is time for an expanded experience of ourselves that knows who we are, and grounded in this truth, doesn’t take what others do or say personally.

We have to cross over from thinking we are confined by the limits of what appears to be going on to take our place as so much more.

What we call reality is just stage set earth. The roles we play are just a small sliver of who we are.  We are so much bigger than the parts we play.  Dear Baby Blue Eyes helps us ground in this new radically bigger self definition of self as Divinity in a sea of Divinity.  Baby Blue Eyes helps us hold onto this truth and not let go when others would try and pull us back into the old, tired and dead game.

I am so grateful for all you requesting these two Flower Essences this week.  What a gift to be called back to these two beloved Flower Essences and work with them during this time.  I salute all who listened to the call of these two Flower Essences and go forward seeking an expanded self definition. I say Bravo to all of you!

In ancient Rome, according to Jungian analyst Joseph Lee, if someone was exiled and sent from the city never to be allowed to return, it was the equivalent of a death sentence. Outside the safety of the city, one was unlikely to survive. To be exiled or ostracized remains an extremely violent experience on the inner and outer level.

As we recover from the confusions and fears of the last few years, I hope we will examine what happened and decide not to repeat some of the societal choices we made to exile and ostracize others. Should anyone making a free will choice be subject to death threats and extreme shunning? Should we ostracize friends and family because they see a situation differently than us? Why would we ever pick up the weapons of ostracism and exile to use against fellow humans who exist in an energetic matrix which renders us all one energy field? Not only are all beings needed and valuable but all of us are actually an indivisible whole.

Can we swing the pendulum back from these acts of separation to acknowledge our oneness and act from unity consciousness? I believe we can and will.

Ostracism is a subject close to my heart since my childhood and early adulthood community all went along with my mother when she chose to disinherit me and throw me out. It was disorienting in the extreme to abruptly lose all connection with the people and places that had filled my life. The loss of a beloved place in the Adirondacks was particularly devastating.

Green Hope Farm staff has always been a surprisingly multi-cultural group for northern New England. I wonder if part of this is that my own wounds of exile that I work so hard to accomodate and heal call out energetically to others who also have been exiled from their homelands.

If I have been there to help other exiles heal, they have been there to help me heal. Take for example Thembi.

Thembi arrived from Zimbabwe with four little boys. Her husband had to flee when he found himself on Mugabe’s hit list. Eventually Thembi found refuge in the United States too. Thembi was no stranger to nature as she had a much loved grandmother who lived on a farm, but Thembi was a city girl. She grew up and flourished in Harare, Zimbabwe’s capital city. When she came to America she left family, friends, jobs and a vibrant network of joyful interconnection to find herself in an alien landscape of trees and grass and in a culture so incredibly unlike her own.

Exile can make one bitter. There is just so much lost. Thembi suffered her losses and accommodated them deep in her heart without bitterness. She inspired me with her pluck and sass. She’d comment with zesty humor about the danceless even joyless community she now found herself in, but she got on with it. She worked at Green Hope Farm, but she also got her degree from a local college in hospitality management. When her house burned down and her family lost everything from their old life as well as their new one, she picked herself up and rebuilt. Now she is running two very successful businesses while still raising 5 boys. Yes, she had another child after arriving in America! Her beautiful home was created on a tiny budget but looks like something out of a magazine. When we visit, the conversations are refreshingly honest but devoid of cynicism. So much about her new world still puzzles her and makes her laugh, but everywhere Thembi has gone, people have come to respect her incredible work ethic, innovative problem solving and enormous heart.

She didn’t die when exiled from her homeland, but she is a rare person of great courage and fortitude. It’s a wounding journey to be ostracized or exiled and requires immense determination to overcome. Some might say that exile was the making of Themibi, but I’m sure deep in her heart she’d like to still know the embrace of her family and friends. Who wants to be on the receiving end of these kinds of losses?

And so I hope as we move forward as a culture, we consider the ramifications of our choices to throw people away. It’s taken me over twenty years to somewhat accommodate the losses of exile and learn to live with the wound. I hope I have been as plucky as Thembi, but I know it has come at a cost.

I often get very mad at people who hurt me, especially when the hurt echoes the original wound of exile. But because of my experience of ostracism, I try really hard to find my center and wait until I’m calm enough not to be reactive. I try to get to a place where I can send back love. I try not to bring exile or ostracism to anyone else. I’ve struggled with forgiveness but continue to work hard on it. I remind myself that for so many reasons, forgiving others is forgiving myself. Even when I don’t fully experience it, I hold in my heart the truth that we are all one. Isn’t it time to leave the whole patriarchal dynamic of judgement and shunning behind and recognize this?

In closing here are a few Flower Essences that help us with this task.

Agnes Rose– This precious Rose Flower Essence friend helps us know, “You and I are not we but one.”

Corn– Corn helps us access the wisdom of cooperative community, a vibration where we live as peacefully and harmoniously as kernels of corn growing on the cob.

Sweet Pea and Carouby de Maussane Pea– Last night I dreamed I was planting several big garden plots of peas. I awoke thinking how pea Flower Essences support peace in community. There is more than a little energetic significance to the peas in a pod idea.

Arbor Garden– A gift of harmony and oneness, offering a timeless experience of ourselves as love in an ocean of love.

Maltese Cross– If you have been exiled or ostracized, Maltese Cross helps heal from the violence of this experience.

The Three Phacelia Sisters– Breaking the inner and outer dynamic of ostracism and exile. This one helps us heal the wounds of our own self exile.

Osteospermum– Helps us remain serene and unaffected by others judgments, criticisms or betrayals of us. This one helped me so much in the early years of my experience of ostracism.

Wound Healing– Don’t we all need some of this? I certainly do!

Maple– It’s maple sugaring season here, so Maple is on my mind. Maple’s Flowers bring an incredible energy of balance and sweetness, the middle way but the zesty middle way like Thembi.