Most of our combination Flower Essences are mixed from individual Flower Essences. The exceptions are combinations made from Flowers in specific gardens like the different Venus Gardens and the Arbor Garden. The mixes from these gardens are made right there in the gardens. With other combination Flower Essences, like those in the Animal Wellness Collection, we must mix them in our room of mother Flower Essence stock.

Today, we were low on many of the Animal Wellness Collection Flower Essences so I volunteered to start replenishing our inventory by mixing Flee Free.

Making combination Flower Essences is always a happy job. To get reacquainted with the ingredients in a combination Flower Essences is to appreciate all over again the wonderful layered strengths of the mix.

Combination Flower Essences work like braids: They offer electrical information that weaves together to give us complex support in a harmonious way. This is similar to how musical instruments work together in an orchestra to create a unified piece of music that is powerful in its layered beauty. While I know I switched metaphors in midstream from weaving to music, both are apt. The vibration of each Flower Essences literally is music, and when combined, Flower Essences weave their unique songs together to become something greater than their individual parts.

Someone emailed this morning to ask for something to add to Immune Support to support her through flu season. We suggested Golden Armor as it offers great support for keeping our energy system clear of viruses. Had she emailed an hour later, I would have made the suggestion she consider Flee Free too. This remedy never ceases to amaze me, and certainly I was struck again by its wisdom as I mixed it this morning.

The principle behind Flee Free is that when our electrical systems are vibrant and strong, we naturally rebuff things like fleas and ticks. This means the ingredients in this mix are intended to support us to make our electrical systems vibrant and strong. What I remembered today as I mixed Flee Free was that when our electrical systems are vibrant and strong, we also rebuff things like flu bugs.

Before looking at the ingredient list, it’s worth saying again that even the most complex Flower Essence mix is not too much for our electrical system to learn from. All Flower Essences are information not chemical, songs to inspire not substances to hinder our electrical systems. Often the sounds of the Flowers are so beautiful that our vibrations can rise almost effortlessly in response to their music.

So mix your Flower Essences together with joy and confidence. You never know what gem of a mix you are making or how what you learn will inform the work all of us on the planet are doing as we dive more deeply into the gifts of Flower Essences.

I encourage you to feel confident in part because of my own struggles with confidence.

When all this began, I had never imagined myself running a business. This meant that in the early years, I often tried to put on the brakes when my Angel partners wanted me to start a new project or simply let things blossom and expand. I wasn’t sure I could do it. Yes, I could love Flowers and Flower Essences with all my heart, but share them through a business? Gulp!

Such was the case in the early 90’s when the Angels wanted us to create the Animal Wellness Collection. The Angels had been asking me to expand our offerings for animals from Animal Emergency Care and Flee Free to a larger collection. I had been gnashing my teeth about my ability to birth this set into the world. Now this collection seems like a no-brainer and one of the things I am most glad we created. I LOVE this collection so much. It has helped literally millions of animals and people.

But back to me gnashing my teeth. One day an animal practitioner called to ask us to make this collection for the animals. I told her, “I don’t know if we can do it. We are not exactly sitting around eating BonBons.” As I got off the phone, there was a knock on the door. It was a young friend of the family bringing us an ENORMOUS box of…..chocolates!

Hmmmmmm. So we WERE eating BonBons!

This little syncronicity had the Angels fingerprints ALL over it, so I tossed out to them, “Okay, okay, I will do this collection but I need more staff.”

The phone rang. The voice at the other end said, “ My Angels just told me to call you. I would like to work at the farm. Are you looking for staff?”

Hmmmmmm. There really IS no place to hide when you work with Angels!

And so I dove into the project of making the Animal Wellness Collection.  Mostly this involved wonderful conversations with the Angels.  Once we got rolling, they never left me alone to fret over what the mixes to create or how to make them. They chose the issues each mix would support. They chose the name of each mix. They chose the ingredients in each mix.  And as each year passes, they keep on re-explaining them and pointing out to us how they can be used in circumstances we hadn’t considered before. Every day they encourage us onwards.

These mixes have bloomed in our lives for almost three decades. Each day brings new understanding of the significance of these mixes and not just because of what the Angels share. Your sharing is deeply important. Even the re-mixing of a mix is valuable. As I added each Flower Essence to the mix, I am reminded how it shines a light on the mix and, I feel all over again the brilliance of the Angels’ ingredient list.

FLEE FREE

Amaryllis

Blackberry

Broccoli

Chives

Crab Apple

Dandelion

Darrell’s Fleabane- on the additional Essence list

The Eight Garden

Echinacea- on the additional Essence list

Eggplant

Fleabane- on the additional Essence list

Jack in the Pulpit- on the additional Essence list

Jewelweed

Larkspur

Lavender

Lemon

Lilac

Maple

Nasturtium

Old Blush China Rose

Pennyroyal

Radish – on the additional Essence list

Rattlesnake Master

Red Clover

Self Heal

St John’s Wort

Sunflower

Sweet William

Teasel

Thistle

Titan

Trillium

White Yarrow

Wintergreen

Here in this mix are remedies for protecting our energy field (Lavender, St John’s Wort, Thistle, Teasel, Old Blush China Rose, Rattlesnake Master, Broccoli, Darrell’s Fleabane, Fleabane, Pennyroyal, Jewelweed), for balance (Chives, Maple, Jack in the Pulpit), for endocrine health (Blackberry), for knowing it is okay to say no to pests (Wintergreen), for shielding us from technology pollution that weakens our energy fields (White Yarrow), for rooting out negativity deep in our electrical field (Eggplant), for immune system health (Blackberry) , for course correction if our health is going in a counter-productive direction (Larkspur), for protection during fiery times (St. John’s Wort), for amplifying healing from other Essences (Radish), for alignment (Lilac, Sunflower), for self confidence we can be healthy and strong ( Self Heal, Sunflower, Crab Apple, Amaryllis, Sweet William), for blood health (Echinacea), for emotional balance ( Maple, Red Clover, Broccoli, Trillium, Red Clover), for cleansing our electrical field (Lemon, Dandelion, The Eight Garden, Eggplant) and for strength ( Lilac, Sunflower, Teasel, Titan). And this is just the tip of the iceberg of the gifts that these Essences bring to this mix.

And so, if your hand hovers over your Flee Free bottle with the inner nudge that it may be good for you as well as your animal companions, I say yes! You can bet my water has Flee Free in it today!

 

To step into the new year here at the farm means to step into Siberia a cold and snowy world.  Capricorn’s January is always a bit of an  bleak austere harsh glacial inclement month in our world. Sidewalks porches, driveways Trails are accessible only by skiis or snowshoes. Even with crampons and ski poles, walking is an icy challenge and one that sometimes sees me on my backside.  The expansiveness and lavish generosity of previous seasons feel like a hallucination are receding memories. All things grind to a halt, even the cars that won’t start because it’s 20 below zero.

This time of constraint may frequently sometimes make me restless, but when I surrender it as a gift.  In the stillness, small pleasures rise to the surface to be noticed appreciated.  To survive a five minute walk without getting frostbite, to warm cheeks, fingers and toes after a bracing walk, to spend hours drying soggy winter gear by the wood stove,  to watch the full moon light up the snowy landscape, to wait in the cold freezing dark while the dog takes her time going pee,  to feel the cold air in one’s lungs while observing the  the winter sky, to savor the gatherings of people inside together because it’s too cold to go outside, to watch the tow truck guy pull the family car out of a ditch: In the rush of other seasons one can race by these moments, but in winter, there is a chance to drink them in.

All kidding aside, I am grateful for the way winter pares down the sensory input so that things that really are deep pleasures can be reclaimed and cherished. I mean, who thinks about warm toes in July? Winter gives us ample opportunity to go into our heart’s where true expansiveness and solace lives.

This brings me in my usual round about fashion to the topic of Abundance. When the Angels assembled their Angel Sets  I was struck that they chose Gratitude  for the Abundance Angel Set.  The Angels are lateral thinkers. They solve problems in unexpected ways.  With the choice of Gratitude they suggest that the way to feeling like we have enough is to look more clearly at what we already have.

Here is how they explain Gratitude  on the website, “The alchemy of gratitude is that it lifts us out of our mind ideas of less than into an experience of life as an immeasurable blessing. It sweeps us out of the doldrums of restless disatisfaction into a primal experience of joy. Gratitude is a very high vibration state of being. It is a state in which we use our free will to give back to God the love our Creator has poured into us. This moves us into an energetic circuit that brings us closer to oneness with God.”

I love that feeling in the flow of abundance doesn’t always have to be about receiving more, but sometimes can simply mean experiencing the blessings that we already have.

For many months, I have had this desire to talk a bit about the experience of being disinherited by my family of origin.  This is not an experience I would wish on anyone, but it did teach me a lot.  It is still teaching me a lot. Certainly it helped me break free of my ideas about abundance or where abundance comes from.

I was not fully  prepared for this experience even though the Angels had been trying to get me ready for many years.  Sometimes I get what feel like very random and bizarre Angelic messages, and very early in my work with the Angels, like 30 years ago, I received a message that I would not get anything from my family of origin.

I could not really wrap my head around this information.  It was a very clear message but also so strange and out of the blue that I decided that perhaps I had heard wrong or perhaps there was some way to understand this message as not about being personally cut off from what I had always expected would be rightfully mine one day.  I wondered if there was going to be a fire or some event that would destroy my family’s home. I even wondered if global warming was going to flood my parents’ Connecticut home. I couldn’t begin to grasp that the extended family’s camp in the Adirondacks was in this category of coming loss, and so my husband went on to spend several summers building a four bedroom cabin for the place, a building we would never see again.

Even though I had never felt my mother liked me at all, I just couldn’t grasp this kind of action being taken against me.  I put the message aside, but I would think of it again and again as the years unfolded and events increasingly suggested that this was not a far-fetched thing to prepare for.

If you have read this blog from the early days, you may remember that I had a very troubled younger brother who wanted to kill me and my children.  For reasons I do not fully understand, other members of my family of origin including my parents, my other siblings and my extended family chose to minimize my brother’s death threats and see me as overreacting to the situation.

I had always been in charge of this brother from a very early age.  My parents were so wrapped up in their own struggles with alcohol by the time my brother was born that it fell to me to look after him.  Sadly this meant events like taking him to the emergency room to have his stomach pumped from alcohol poisoning when he was 10 and I was 17.  I continued to try to keep him from hurting himself throughout his young adulthood, but I didn’t really understand what I was up against.  As the years went by, he grew increasingly unstable.   When he began to threaten to kill us in order to try and extort money from my parents, I took his threats seriously because I had been with him in very violent and scary circumstances.

For reasons, once again, I didn’t understand,  my husband, my children and I were left on our own to deal with my brother’s escalating threats and violent behavior.  Even when examining the disintegrating course of events years later, it’s hard to understand how the threats ended up isolating us and casting us into the role of the problem in the family, but that happened. And it happened with a strange feeling of inevitability.  Everyone outside our immediate family backed away, and we too stopped looking to them for support of any kind but saved what energy we had to deal with the immediate threats on our life.   In the end, after more than a decade of threats and sorrowful dramas,  my brother died of a drug overdose, and we no longer had any connective relationships with any of my family of origin.

In so many ways, my brother was like an enormous light exposing  the hidden truths in my family or origin.   When push came to shove, members of my family of origin each wanted something else more than they wanted to help me or my immediate family feel safe from my brother’s violence.

A younger Molly who had found it hard to imagine being disinherited had become someone who had learned that family sometimes did the most horrible things to one another and not because anyone deserved it.

I had also become someone who found that solace and a sense of tranquility could be found in terrible situations if one was willing to stop looking outside oneself for solutions but surrender to the journey into one’s heart to anchor in the Divinity that lives within all of us.  An abundance of peace, of love, of comfort was all there within when I stopped looking for it from without.

So this wintry period of our family’s life showed us our own inner resources and their infinite nature.  We got stopped in our tracks by circumstances beyond out control, and in that quiet found unexpected inner strength and love.

By the time I learned that the Angels had been telling me the truth and I had been disinherited by my mother, I had discovered that the resources I actually needed were already within me.  Yes, it hurt to have someone, my own earth mother, clearly indicate she hated me so much that she wanted her last interaction with me to be this act of disinheritance. However, in all the years of loss- loss of external safety systems, loss of people, places and things, loss of how I had viewed what life was about- I had found things I hadn’t known were there.  I knew things about myself that I wouldn’t have known otherwise.

More importantly, I knew that Divinity would never disinherit me.  Divinity’s love is with all of us always. That is abundance, the only real abundance.  Divinity’s Love is with us always.

 

There are so many ways to find Flower Essences that will offer support to you in any situation you would like support with.

One thing to know as you begin your search is to know that it can be a relaxed and unpressured one. Why? Because Flower Essences are wonderfully versatile in their strengths and most choices are going to offer some support. And if you get a Flower Essence that doesn’t have relevant information, it won’t hurt you because Flower Essences are electrical information not chemical remedies.

However we know that sometimes it is wonderful to get the Flower Essences that will help very precisely and efficiently.  To find very specific Flower Essence suggestions for specific concerns, there are a lot of ways to proceed.

Some of you dear people find supportive Flower Essences by looking at photos of Flowers to see what catches your attention.  Others look to specific geographical collections, following the bead of a place that calls to you.

The Rose Garden Essences aren’t a specific geographical collection, but they often call to people too as different kinds of Flowers can also call to us.

Back in the day when our Guidebook was more central to people’s process with Flower Essences, many of you would open the book “at random” and then read the description of the Essence or Essences on that page.  The Essences described on the page were often precisely what you were looking for.  The Guidebook is still available.  I love this book and am grateful the Angels asked me to write it.

So many of you listen to your dreams and intuition and will call or email us asking for a certain Flower because of this inner knowing.  I love how often people have dreams about FLOWERS!

A very concrete tool is our Flower Essences for Common Concerns document on our Resources page.  It is SUCH a great resource for finding exactly what you are looking for.

We have been working on this document for thirty years. All of us on the staff refer to it every day.  We also update it on a very regular basis as new topics of concerns are brought to our attention (Yes, there is a reason it’s 121 pages long and growing!).

Whenever you request a Flower Essence for a certain situation, if there is not a category for this concern in this document, we address the concern by getting back to you with our suggestions then editing the Common Concerns document with what we have learned.  To gather suggestions, we try and recall situations where we have addressed this issue. Your feedback is often very helpful in this search for suggestions.  We also  ask the Angels for their suggestions.

Take for example this morning when a mother  wrote about her concerns for her young child, adopted by her after 15 months in a orphanage.  Her child’s therapist had suggested she check with us for Flower Essences for his attachment disorder with presenting symptoms of fear, anger and aggression.

Many Flower Essence suggestions came to mind, and the Angels had their own suggestions and way they wanted to organize the information.   We suggested a custom mix of Flower Essences for this young child and gave his mom our Flower Essence suggestions organized based on the Angels’ input.

The reason we suggested a mix is that it allows us to cover lots of different concerns within the general concern and also is a very easy way to offer a small child Flower Essences.

We also added  Attachment Disorder to our categories on the Flower Essences for Common Concerns list with the Angels’ Flower Essence suggestions listed per their topics.  The Angels’ way of presenting their suggestions via topics reminded me that anger is rarely the bottom emotion but often the one covering sadness beneath.  This child may well be suffering the wound of the original loss of a secure caretaker figure resulting in a sadness that is permeating his current life in a loving household.

Last night I had a dream in which I found myself taking the SATs again.  It was a classic anxiety dream.  I was at the test center trying to psych myself up to take the test but not doing a very good job. After all I have been out of college for 39 years.  Was it really necessary to take these tests again?  Apparently it was, and I needed to kill it.  Meanwhile I felt unprepared and bewildered that I was expected to sit down AGAIN with a #2 pencil and get filling in those bubbles.

When I awoke, I thought about the last time I took the SATs at the age of 17.  I wondered what I would I tell young Molly if I could talk to her after she left the test?

Would I tell her, well, your first boyfriend is going to dump you next week, but don’t worry, you’ll be okay.  It’s a good thing. There really ARE other fish in the sea.

Would I tell her that during that same week she was going to get rejected from her first choice college to which she had applied early decision, but that too would be okay. She would eventually be VERY glad she didn’t go there.

Would I tell her she also was going to flunk her driver’s test that week, but that too would be okay as she would pass the second time.

To top off all this cheery news, would I also mention that the night her boyfriend dumped her she was going to be home alone babysitting her little brothers, one of whom was going to throw up all over his bedroom all night long? And I mean ALL NIGHT LONG!

Hmmmmm.  Maybe not.

Maybe I would just tell her that no matter what happened, she was going to be okay, and that she would not miss her life. Maybe I’d just give her a hug and remind her she was loved.  Maybe not by that dirtbag boyfriend, but still, she was loved.

And so the dream was a good reminder to me to stop worrying about current concerns.  All those screwball Mercury retrograde/ snow storm/computer snafus that occurred yesterday?  It will be okay.  We’ll untangle all the tangles.

And that crowd coming for many, many, many meals over the next holiday stretch? They will be fine no matter what I serve them, so maybe its NOT time to resuscitate the Vegan/ Meat Fest Thanksgiving menu, that meal that almost killed me in its complexity.

And when I get off balance about the bigger picture stuff? Something about that dream reminded me it’s not about “doing it right” that matters, but just being there with an open heart towards myself and everyone else in our moments of suffering, big and little. It’s the only way forward.  Things go wrong.  Mistakes are made.  But if we are gentle with ourselves and each other in all these circumstances, it will be okay. We’ll figure it out.

The Flower Essences that I find myself reaching for a lot right now are the Wildflower Essences.  They really know how to endure and even thrive in very tough conditions.  They adapt to challenging even extreme circumstances and never miss a beat.  They are also surprisingly kind.  They welcome us as we are and offer their complete undivided support. They are very wise because they have followed the bead of their own evolution with such complete focus, but they are more than happy to bring that wisdom back to us and share it completely.  Who could ask for more?

We have a wall of individual bottles of all our Essences for us to use in our daily water bottles.  I’ve found myself reaching for many Wildflowers each day including Fragrant Ladies Tresses, Niella, Silver-rod, Bottle Gentian and Pearly Everlasting.

I suggested the Pearly Everlasting to a spry octogenarian yesterday, but she didn’t want to identify with a Flower Essence that described itself as being there to help older folks.  I had to appreciate her sass in not putting herself in the category of senior citizen.  I’ve always felt very old even when I was 17 (both before and after that particular week from hell).  I appreciate that Pearly Everlasting wants to reach out to those of us that don’t have the electrical circuit boards of younger generations.  I want to stay here for the adventure of what lies ahead and appreciate that this Flower Essence and so many others are helping me be able to do so.

I come back to the truth that we all need help right now whether we get it from Flower Essences or in other ways.  It takes a village right now of Flowers and Angels and animals and kind friends and kind strangers. I feel grateful to have so many beloveds to travel along this road with.

Maybe that would have been the most important thing to say to young Molly that day, “You are not alone.”

Many of you ask us how to get the most from Flower Essences.

As I consider this question, it occurs to me to look at the two groups that make the most of Flower Essences. These two groups are children and animals.

Children and animals have a particular knack for letting Flower Essences help them heal completely, swiftly and painlessly.  In fact, many of you come to us for Flower Essences for yourselves after seeing the results with your animals.

This is the story we hear again and again- You arrive home to find a relaxed animal friend sprawled on top of the box of Flower Essences from us, clearly feeling better- and this is just the beginning of his or her return to health and well-being.

What is it about animals and children that allows them to get so much from Flower Essences?

Neither animals or children have any defensiveness about what Flower Essences offer.  Instead they seem to recognize Flower Essences as familiar old friends that bring them exactly what they need to get better.

Perhaps this open hearted trust is because their connection to the natural world is more intact than for many of us. This leaves them free to recognize these gift from nature immediately.

Perhaps this welcoming attitude is because they have not been made cynical by people or products that promise the moon and don’t deliver.

Whatever the case, it is an enviable open-heartedness.

For children and animals, working with Flower Essences is a simple exchange. They go out to greet the incoming energy of the Flower Essences with a sense of this being the way things are meant to be.

Children that cannot read and haven’t even had Flower Essences explained to them will confidently pick a Flower Essence from a group of bottles and say, “This is the one for me.”

May we all return to this state of recognition about what we need and our right to have this support.

That is another thing difference between animals and children and most of the rest of us. They usually do not have the filter that suggests they do not deserve to heal unless they move mountains and/or suffer deeply beforehand.  No, it is even more simple than that. They don’t have the filter that they don’t deserve to heal.

For way too many of us, we don’t feel deserving of healing. If you feel that you might in any way believe that you don’t deserve to heal, consider giving this idea to the Flower Essences as a concern you want the Essences to help you release. We do deserve health and well-being. Period.

It is also wonderful to ask the Angels to work with the Flower Essences to release ideas like this.  So many unhelpful ideas can lie within us  without us knowing these ideas are there or why we might cling so tenaciously to them. I like how the Flower Essences and the Angels help us dump inner garbage without us having to pick through the garbage on its way to the dump!

As the Angels have reminded me for thirty years, it’s the ASKING for help and the WILLINGNESS TO RECEIVE THE HELP that matters.  They remind us all to not get caught up inner arguments about deserving but to just let go.  This is the natural flow for a child or animal who has not yet been hurt by the world. Nothing impedes the flow of asking for what is needed. Nothing impedes the flow of receiving what is asked for.

May we all find our way back to this state of grace.

On a more practical note, if a Flower Essence is not doing what you hoped it would do for you, put it in a spritzer bottle with some water (the proportions here do not matter!)  and spritz around and over yourself frequently. This REALLY improves efficacy for more reasons than I could possibly know or explain.

And for goodness sake, drink more water!  That also helps the energy of the Flower Essences to move through your system.

One last thought- A Green Hope Farm recently sent me a transcribed conversation she had with an Angel named Aine. This Angel wants to work with more people to help them get the most from Flower Essences. I hope today, by mentioning Aine, more people will ask to work with her.

Aine also expressed a concern shared by the Angels here: As more light floods the planet, the animals have the double burden of making their own energetic shifts PLUS fulfilling their job to help us make our energetic shifts. The animals are weighed down by these two jobs. Especially right now as all of us scramble to keep up with enormous energy shifts, they need Flower Essences very badly.

Angel Aine is focused on helping us help the animals. If we want to call to her when we are choosing Flower Essences for our beloved companions or using the Essences with the animals in our life, she will help us. Thank you Lois Hartwick for sharing this information about Aine.

Here are the original children and animal that taught me so much about Flower Essences.  Thank you Emily, Benjamin, Cody and Elizabeth.