Show Notes:

Lindsay Fauntleroy joins us in exploring creative methods of formulating potent flower essence blends. Lindsay is a medicine maker, acupuncturist, author, educator, and founder of The Spirit Seed.

This recording was excerpted from a live community event held for students of the School for Flower Essence Studies and students of Lindsay’s school.

We had a fascinating discussion about various approaches for creating potent blends, including formulation frameworks borrowed from eastern and western herbalism, perfumery, numerology, and sacred geometry.  

Lindsay’s new course, Archetypal Flower Essence Formula Design, begins June 3rd, 2024. Use code FESTUDIES for a nice discount.  

To get notified about future live community chats hosted by the School for Flower Essence Studies, sign up for our newsletter.

Audio:

FEP67 Creating Potent Flower Essences Formulas with Lindsay Fauntleroy

Lindsay Fauntleroy joins us in exploring creative methods of formulating potent flower essence blends. Lindsay is a medicine maker, acupuncturist, author, educator, and founder of The Spirit Seed. This recording was excerpted from a live community event held for students of the School for Flower Essence Studies and students of Lindsay’s school.

Video:

Flower Essences discussed during the show:

• Yarrow
• Pink Yarrow
• Golden Yarrow
• Black Tourmaline
• Angelica

Show Transcript

Rochana Felde: [00:00:10] Welcome to The Flower Essence Podcast and join us on an exploration of the healing wisdom of flowers.

Kathleen Aspenns: [00:00:17] With combined decades of experience in the study and practice of flower essence therapy, I, Kathleen Aspenns, and co-host, Rochana Felde guide you to reconnect to nature with these potent vibrational remedies. Welcome everyone. We are so excited to have another opportunity to gather together. Today our topic is formulation creation with flower essences and how we blend, how we formulate, how we structure our formulas as we work, in formulas that we make for ourselves or for clients, depending on who you serve. And we’re really delighted to be joined with Lindsay Fauntleroy, our friend and the head of Spirit Seed. And she has her own school where she teaches flower essence therapy. And we are so excited to be pals and partners. And we like to share her ideas because she’s coming from a different place and more ideas, more perspectives are better. So we are really excited to start this conversation. We’re going to throw the ball around between us. Rochana Felde is here also with her own great insights on formulation. And Lindsay, if you don’t mind just kicking us off.

Lindsay Fauntleroy: [00:01:43] Where to start with formula making. Well, one of the things that I’ll say is that the approach that we use and how we’ve built it out over time really started with my training with Patricia and Richard at FES, at the Flower Essence Society. And so in doing their certification training, they really teach this, the principles of how you use sacred geometry in your formula-making process. And so when I founded the Spirit Seed and I was thinking about the curriculum for the Spirit Seed and how I wanted to break the different parts of the certification into meaningful bits, and of course, reaching out to Patricia and Richard and throwing some ideas around, I knew that I wanted to bring that part forward because it is so powerful, it’s so potent, it’s such a different way of thinking about combining herbs and plant medicines. And the piece that I’ve added is really bringing in the sensibility of how we think about formulation in Chinese medicine. I come to this as an acupuncturist– flower essence practitioner first, then an acupuncturist, and now bringing those worlds together and thinking about how do we look at herbs in East Asian medicine in terms of formulas and how in each of those formulas, each herb has a role. So there’s this personification that happens that I felt was really useful, and also in line with how we think about this community of flowers. And that’s really what I’d like to bring to this idea of formula-making is that plants are people too. So how do we think about how these flowers are relating to each other in the formula, and then how that community of flowers is relating to the person that’s taking them? So that’s kind of the window. And then everything else is just layering in the specifics and the logistics and the protocols around, how do we facilitate that conversation.

Kathleen Aspenns: [00:03:52] Yeah, fascinating. And I really love how you’ve been able to create a bridge between the sacred geometry approach and then the Chinese medicine approach, which is coming from very different worldviews but can be harmonious and it can inform each other. One of my primary ways that I see formulation is I’m looking through the lens of the botanical family. And it’s really fun that we all have these different ways and different approaches that enrich the process of essence formulation and client work. So there’s not only one way to do it. And it’s really fun that you’ve been able to create this way, a way of looking at your formulation. So for me, when I’m looking at a client formula, if I’m sort of going, okay, their primary issue resides within the topics brought forth by the Rosaceae, their primary challenge is with relationships and with the realm of interconnection. And so I’m really drawing on that family, but then I’m also looking at other families as well to sort of go, okay, where is more structure here, or where is more support for the center? So it’s kind of interesting to hear about the way that you’re bringing it forth. Ro, do you want to pop in with some– we’re just going to start this with some ideas about how you bring.

Rochana Felde: [00:05:19] Yeah, I’m really eclectic. I bring in lots of different lenses, from numerology to perfumery and the Alaskan three-part system is something that’s influenced me a lot, so I’m so curious to know more, Lindsay, about how you’re combining the East Asian medicine and the sacred geometries. That’s going to be really cool to hear more about. What’s interesting is after I started thinking about it and looking at all of the things that I think inform me, I realized that natural perfumery, since that was the first plant medicine making I really learned, I mean, I did some herbalism, but the concept of the top, middle, and base notes that is used in creating aromatic structures, and then the concept of chords is something that always really struck me, and that’s grouping two or more together that have this harmony like a musical chord. And I didn’t even realize I was doing that in my formulas for years. And then I started looking at what I was doing and the way that I would have all my essences on the table, and I’d start grouping them in these ways, and I started to realize it was very similar to that. I was creating these chords, these little mini groupings that I would then put together to create the overall harmonious blend. And when you look at the language of natural perfumery, and it talks about horizontal chords and vertical chords, there’s different concepts in the aromatic world that I think translate really interestingly if you just translate it, instead of aromatics, it’s energetics.

Lindsay Fauntleroy: [00:07:09] Yeah, what strikes me as you both are sharing is that– and we opened our pre-conversation was a little bit about this, this rationality, linearity, and that’s one way of understanding a thing. And then there’s this intuitive sense that taps into a larger current. And the way that I see it, that current flows through East Asian medicine, that current flows through perfumery, that current flows through the families because they’re all essentially talking about relationships. And so whether we call them in our– in the system that we use, we call them allies, but I could see how that aligns with what you’re saying about chords, it’s about resonance. It’s like, how do these two flowers support one another in this formula? How do we create this internal sense of harmony and relationship, whether we do that numerically or whether we do that through another language, whatever language we give to it, that’s essentially what we’re looking at. We’re looking at, how do these energies work together? And I find that math is one of the oldest languages of archetypes. So that’s one way, right? That’s one way of thinking about it and how it shows up in music and how it shows up in these different systems. But I think essentially we’re all looking at, how do we create cohesiveness and harmony in the way that we’re putting these flowers together? And those of you who are practitioners know that you can be sitting with a client and there might be 8 or 9 or 25 or 100 flowers that are all speaking to you at the same time. And obviously you’re not going to just throw all 100 of those essences into the bottle. So what is the process that you go through to narrow that down and to be really clear and coherent in your formula-making, I think that’s what we’re all speaking to and getting at.

Kathleen Aspenns: [00:09:08] Both the platonic ideas of geometry, of the inherent geometries that are present as they express into the realm of the physical, I mean, that’s my understanding of the origins of these geometric patterns was is that it was seen as a way that the spirit realm, to put a word on it, that’s probably not the right word, expresses into nature, into life, but also they’re in part of that same philosophy, talked about the harmonies and the music of the spheres, right? I mean, I think that’s all part of that same flow line of philosophy. So there is something to be said with the way that you’re talking about it, Ro, where you’re talking about these chords and then also with the geometries. Can you talk, Lindsay, a little bit more about how you see geometry intersecting in the practice of flower essence blending?

Kathleen Aspenns: [00:48:21] Can you tell students who are interested or want to know more about the course you’re teaching? We have the link in the chat here, but please tell us more about it.

Lindsay Fauntleroy: [00:48:30] Absolutely. So the class is Archetypal Flower Essence Formula Design. And it is a class where, as I mentioned before, we go through each of the archetypes, we group a couple together that are related, and we look at the archetypal expressions of that number, and then we look at– my favorite part of it is that we look at it through clients. And so we use pop culture as our clients, similar to what we do in our winter class, which is called Into the Depths because oftentimes a Disney character will tell you their whole life story in a three-minute song. So they make for really great practice patients. And so we use these principles that we are learning in the class around sacred geometry, about the different relationships between the flowers, and we’ll have a client, and everyone will make a formula based on that principle of geometry, based on what that client is saying in the song as their intake. And then we share them and we talk about how we created those formulas together. And what’s really beautiful about it is that you’ll see sometimes that there’s one flower that shows up for everyone, but everyone has kind of a unique way of entering into this particular client’s story. And so that’s the class. It starts on June 3rd, if I’m not mistaken. It meets on Monday evenings, and it runs for about five weeks. It’s not consecutive because we put some breathing space in there for folks to experiment and work on some of the projects that are related to what we’re up to. And this class is one of the required classes for our certification program. We’ve strongly encouraged our students to take the Botanical Families class so that they can bring that sensibility into the formula making. But I find that it’s just a really great way and a really fun way to start practicing and getting real-time feedback in community with other practitioners around how to bring formulas together. And we consider you a practitioner, whether you’re practicing on yourself or your friends and family, or whether you have a professional practice.

Kathleen Aspenns: [00:50:48] Sounds great. It’s been really, really cool having you with us. We’ve really enjoyed this conversation and, boy, we can’t wait to have more because there are so many different paths that we could be traveling in these places. And it’s just really fun to be coming together as a community and having these conversations. And we really appreciate those of you who’ve popped into the chat or were bold enough to put your hand up, yay, because we’re all learning together, we are all learning and growing in this garden of community. So we really appreciate that everyone’s with us. And, Lindsay, do you have a parting thought, and Ro, I’ll ask maybe to you too after?

Lindsay Fauntleroy: [00:51:31] I would say just going back to a little bit of what was expressed earlier around feeling like, this is all really new and being in the beginning, and I just want to really say that what I love about this archetypal approach is that it’s already inside of us, right? We already know what spring feels like, we already know what fall feels like, we already know what it feels like to be in union with someone, we know what it feels like– so these are archetypal spaces. And I would say to just really play in that space, and just start working with it in small ways that feel organic and feel intuitive and feel alive or curious for you that we can always layer on more information and knowledge and training. But to really cultivate the practice of being with and being in relationship with this medicine, I think, is one of the most beautiful opportunities that we have.

Rochana Felde: [00:52:38] And ditto to all that. I hope this has been inspirational for everybody. And that was the intention, to spark that fire of creativity and inspiration and open the mind to possibilities. And I know for me, I mean, I’m very inspired. I can’t wait till I make my next formula and think about those geometric structures and what am I already doing that I didn’t realize I was doing or what can I experiment with and do better? So I hope that it has been inspiring for everybody here. And thank you so much for joining us.

Kathleen Aspenns: [00:53:16] Thanks everyone for being with us. It’s been really, really sweet.

Lindsay Fauntleroy: [00:53:19] Thank you, everyone.

Kathleen Aspenns: [00:53:24] This podcast is meant for educational and entertainment purposes only. We are not physicians, and do not diagnose, prescribe, or treat medical conditions. Please consult with your own physician or healthcare practitioner regarding the suggestions and recommendations made by the hosts and guests of The Flower Essence Podcast.