Ruth shares her insights and wisdom from decades of practice of flower essence therapy and education. Her focus is on the Soul Journey and helps her clients harmonize their inner feminine and masculine qualities, known as the Inner Marriage.

Apologies for the sound issues with Kathleen’s mic on this episode….we care about providing good sound quality and made a mistake. Sorry!

Flower Essences discussed during the show:

• Mariposa Lily – FES
• Mimulus – Healing Herbs
• Sunflower – FES

References:

Ruth Toledo Altschuler – learn more about her work at EssenceMentoring.com and Voice Dialogue

Rick Hanson

Attachment theory: book The Power of Attachment by Dianne Poole Heller, also available in audiobook version

IFS Internal Family Systems

The Overstory book by Richard Powers

Show Transcript

Kathleen Aspenns [00:00:43] Hi, everyone, welcome to the Flower Essence Podcast again, I am really delighted because today is an interview show with one of my favorite people, Ruth Toledo Altschuler. Ro and I will be interviewing her on a topic that is very dear to her heart, the Inner Marriage, and how flower essence therapy can help with that. So I’ll start by just introducing Ruth. If you don’t know her, you should. Her practice focuses on the soul journey and she guides her clients through initiations, challenges, thresholds and transformations. She’s a flower essence therapy practitioner certified by the Flower Essence Society and has three decades of experience in the field as an entrepreneur, educator and mentor. In Brazil, she founded flower essence education and distribution company, offering in-depth courses that, over decades, built the foundations of flower essence therapy as a modality with high credibility and public demand. She now lives in the United States and combines her ease with technology, her skills as a photographer and designer, with her deep connection to the healing archetypes of plants and flowers. Her offerings include online consultations, courses and mentoring for English and Portuguese speakers around the world. Thank you so much for being with us Ruth. 

Ruth Toledo Altschuler [00:02:04] Oh, it is my joy and thank you so much for this initiative. 

Kathleen Aspenns [00:02:11] We are really enjoying sharing the messages of the flower essences with the world in this format and we’re really just delighted to have you here. You’re one of my mentors and I am just so appreciative for everything I’ve learned from you and just delighted that you’re here. 

Rochana Felde [00:02:28] Yeah, and it’s great to talk to you again, Ruth. We’ve had some really wonderful conversations in the past, so I’m very excited to get started on this one with you. 

Ruth Toledo Altschuler [00:02:40] Yeah. And I’m really looking forward to your questions. 

Rochana Felde [00:02:45] So you have so many offerings and experience, but I’m wondering if you can tell us a little bit about what brings people to your practice. 

Ruth Toledo Altschuler [00:02:56] Yeah. That is such an interesting point and something that I really watch carefully. And right now I am watching this phenomena that has happened again and again of people coming to me with very specific topics and issues that are so directly related to what I have been studying in a deep way. Also deeply related to my own personal healing journey and what has brought me into this work, and so wherever I am somewhat more advanced on my own healing journey. Having already embodied certain things that I’ve learned because of the healing that I needed myself, I am at a point that I know some more about this and that I have conquered some of the steps and then clients come meeting those steps that I have been walking for a long time myself. And for me, one of the topics that’s been very present in my practice has to do with deep healing of the wounded child with pain and deep healing of patterns of relationship. And so that’s been a recurrent theme that my clients bring and that I’ve been going deeper and deeper into doing the inner work with them. 

Kathleen Aspenns [00:04:46] The inner child work is essential. There are so many wounded children running around the world wearing adult clothes. It’s one of the best things the flower essences can do, isn’t it, that it can work with those wounds that no one else can see and very little else can really touch and the essences can absolutely hold that child part and heal that child part with you. 

Ruth Toledo Altschuler [00:05:11] Absolutely, and one of the things that I’m really fascinated with is how different areas of research are now beginning to meet. And so I’m seeing, for instance, the new versions of the very rich research on attachment patterns, attachment modes and attachment wounds and how that is being combined also with somatic therapy approaches and trauma. The understanding of the whole neurophysiology of trauma and how our work with the essences can meet this knowledge and this awareness to take this work to very deep levels of transformational power. 

Rochana Felde [00:06:10] That sounds wonderful. Can you talk a little bit more about how you incorporate the flower essences into that work? 

Ruth Toledo Altschuler [00:06:17] Yeah. And so one of the things that I have found with my own process and my own studies and my own research and application of the use of the essences is that there are levels of change that can only happen when you were able to bring a felt sense of what that change is like and when you’re able to embody the feelings of that changed stage. However. Just to feel it for a moment, which is what you can when you have like a beautiful guided journey and an experience is good because you get the feeling of change. But to actually install that, as Rick Hanson uses the word, transforming a state. Taking it to the level of becoming a trait, you actually need to bring in a new habit. You actually need to almost go through a training of the process and the flower essences. 

[00:07:44] Let’s think, for instance, of that tremendous feeling of abandonment, of feeling unlovable, of lack of love that so many inner children carry deep within. When we have that within us, how can we really access that place and bring that love into these recesses within us? So there are some ways that involve guided journeys, guided meditation, inner parenting, being really gentle and loving with the child part within you. And when you also bring the flower essences to this journey that takes it to a whole other level of embodiment of these feelings and of these states and the fact that we use the essences rhythmically, repetitively. Every day, we’re actually focusing on that feeling and we’re bringing the actual information of that plant into our system. That brings an added layer of power and depth that allows for effective transformation that really gets embodied. 

Rochana Felde [00:09:29] I really resonate with that a lot. I love what you said about embodying the feelings of the change state as well and how the flower essences help us do that and give us that constant reminder when we use them with repetition. 

Ruth Toledo Altschuler [00:09:47] Yeah and the flower essences also… That’s one of the things that I find in my practice that they are an amazing path for perceiving the pattern that we hold inside with more clarity. So I was going to say, I was going to use the word diagnosis, but I don’t think that word says enough about the understanding of the patterns and the systems involved and the archetypal workings that are at play and the flower essences as an oracle tool, what say, they are amazing in terms of how precisely they’re able to inform us about the specificity or the patterns that the person holds. 

Kathleen Aspenns [00:10:52] Perhaps we can ground that into a specific archetype. Is there a particular flower that you’re thinking of? So it’ll help us to really see that as a smaller picture into a larger picture. This holographic information that the flowers bring to us that talks to that entire archetype. 

Ruth Toledo Altschuler [00:11:10] Yeah. And let’s think, for example, that we have an issue with the inner child that is related to a sense of lack of warmth. And that issue actually becomes correlated with a fear of being seen for who you really are. Because there is a sense that if people find out who you really are, they’re not going to love you. And so then there is this need to create some kind of persona that’s always very nice to people and that’s always saying yes to everything. And so when we understand through the essences that show up in our reading that that person needs the Mariposa Lily for those deep feelings of not having received the love that they needed. And yet there’s also this pattern of always being very nice. And then on another level, another essence informs us that there are areas of held in anger that couldn’t be expressed because that would bring in the situations of not being loved. So that shows us another piece of the pattern. So now we have the feeling sort of abandonment that the needing to be the nice people pleaser person and needing to hold in the feelings of anger. And yet they’re there and piece by piece. You begin to see the survival strategy pattern. They’re revealed to us by the conversation with the client and the essences that showed up. And when we treat them together, that really helps us to treat the overall pattern of survival that the person has developed throughout their lives, bringing in the balance, bringing in the other possibilities, bringing in the healing, bringing in the transformation and change. But that also happens based on the possibility of the system healing itself from its own inner intelligence, and that’s one of the things that the flower essences do in such a beautiful way, because they help awaken that in their wisdom, the inner intelligence that knows what the healthy mode of operating can be. 

[00:47:16] 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 health care practitioner regarding the suggestions and recommendations made by the hosts and guests of the Flower Essence podcast.