Learn coping strategies for holiday travel and gatherings. Flower essences can help sensitives with the stress of travel and navigating airports and planes. You can also support your inner sense of groundedness and stability, and strengthen your boundaries as you interact with your family members.

Flower Essences discussed during the show:

• Five Flower Formula, Healing Herbs
• YES Yarrow Environmental Solution, FES
• Travel Ease, Alaskan Essences
• Black Tourmaline, Alaskan Essences
• Covellite, Alaskan Essences
• Smoky Quartz, Alaskan Essences
• Yarrow, Alaskan Essences and FES
• White Violet, Alaskan Essences
• Guardian, Alaskan Essences
• Beech, Healing Herbs
• Holly, Healing Herbs
• Star of Bethlehem, Healing Herbs
• Yulan Magnolia, Flora of Asia
• Soul Support, Alaskan Essences
• Mimulus, Healing Herbs
• Clematis, Healing Herbs
• Protection Blend, Delta Gardens
• Angelica, Delta Gardens
• Veil of Light, Jane Bell Essences
• Sea Turtle, Jane Bell Essences
• Golden Yarrow, FES
• Pink Yarrow, FES
• Lavender Yarrow, Alaskan Essences

Suggestions:

• The Highly Sensitive Person – How to thrive when the world overwhelms you by Dr Elaine Aron, PhD
• Quiet: The power of introverts in a world that can’t stop talking by Susan Cain

Show Transcript

Rochana Felde [00:00:40] Greetings flower essence friends. I’m Rochana Felde, and in this episode, Kathleen Aspenns and I discuss more holiday coping strategies with flower and gem essences, this time focused on holiday travel and socializing. Traveling can be stressful at any time of the year, but the holiday season adds extra stress even for the most experienced jet setters. And if you are a highly sensitive person, HSP for short, introvert, or empath, holiday travel and social situations can be extra tricky and really take their toll. So let’s just dive right in, Kathleen. In our previous Emergency Essences episode, we talked about some off the shelf formulas like the Five Flower Rescue Remedy and the YES Yarrow Environmental Solution as being excellent for some of these concerns. But I know that there’s specific travel formulas. Would you like to get started talking about some of those? 

Kathleen Aspenns [00:01:49] Absolutely. I’m really happy to do that. The one that I think of the most is Travel Ease from Alaskan Essences. And that was designed for all of the challenges, electromagnetic stress, stress from crowding, and having your boundaries smooshed into a little tiny box in order to get into a plane. All of these things are part of travel and the Travel Ease formula is extremely helpful for helping you deal with them. I really recommend if you’re taking a longer flight or anything, not your normal sort of traveling, is to think about starting your taking these essences ahead of your travel, up to a week can be really useful, especially if you’re traveling across multiple time zones or you’re doing international travel. There is a level of geopathic stress that occurs just from crossing that many miles because our bodies are just not designed for that and it takes a toll on you. And one of those things that can show up is that your sleep gets disrupted or you feel really jet lagged or out of your body. And part of that is geopathic stress just from going over that many that many thousands of miles in such a short period of time. Using the Travel Ease flower essence in drops: Put it in your water and go ahead and keep putting it in your water as you travel and as you return. And then also the spray version is incredibly helpful for you to use as you’re traveling. Fortunately, it’s available in a two ounce size and so it travels well. And I’ll just keep misting over my heart as I’m in my seat. And usually that’s just fine to do. And it’s something nice that helps you remember to breathe, helps you remember to kind of center yourself and be in your own space as you’re enduring the challenges of travel. 

Rochana Felde [00:03:44] And what’s in the Travel Ease? Do you want to talk a little bit about some of the components. I know one aspect is the Black Tourmaline, which I love for electromagnetic protection, but also protection from other people’s energies and negativity. 

Kathleen Aspenns [00:04:05] Yeah, for sure. Some of the big components of Travel Ease are these gem elixirs. And gem elixirs are really stabilizing and helpful in your energy field of your body. Having these essences onboard as you travel can be really helpful to help keep your boundaries really, really strong and help you keep from absorbing the energetic stresses, whether those are geopathic, or whether it is other people’s stuff. Like you say, Black Tourmaline really throws off the crud, throws off the energetic toxins. Covellite is a really great gem essence for your boundaries. It’s this really neat, dark blue crystal, well more of a stone really than a crystal, I think. And it has these qualities of strengthening your field, your etheric field so that nothing can get through that you don’t want to get through. Smoky Quartz also as part of the formula is really helpful for that energetic toxicity as well how it really helps to clear your energetic field. So those are the gems that form the heart of the Travel Ease formula. And then there’s the flower part of it that really speaks to your boundaries and helping you feel safe and secure even as you’re dealing with, you know, all the crowding when you’re getting jammed into a little tiny seat. And the energy is really funky. So Yarrow is an incredibly important essence for travel. Just in general, anytime you’re in an environment that’s not your own and you’re not really well supported, the Yarrows, all the different kinds of Yarrows are useful. This is a white Yarrow that’s included in this formula. And then White Violet is another one that’s very, very helpful. I remember Steve Johnson talking about this formula and how he created it. He was doing a lot of international travel to teach about essences. And he talked about one trip that he took to Japan. I think he said he had the incredible bad luck of finding himself in a middle seat. And he sat there, just jammed in there for hours and hours. He wasn’t a little guy, you know.  And he said there were children, there were crying babies, sort of strategically placed around the plane. And it was just really stressful. He was a very sensitive person, very energetically sensitive person, as you would probably expect for a Flower Essence maker like both of us. And he said White Violet just helped him to just have a sense of space, no matter all this stuff is going on, I still am in my space and I’m protected in that. Are you familiar with the Violets? Have you used them? 

Rochana Felde [00:06:56] I do, and I love all the Violets as well for any kind of being sensitive to the environment and the energies around you. It brings in that personal sanctuary feeling, there’s a coolness to them. 

Kathleen Aspenns [00:07:12] Yeah, that’s right. They’re part of that very early spring energetic and so they do have that quality of coming out before all the trees leaf out and so they’re able to take that sunlight and transform it into the flowering. They are such delicate little flowers that you only notice after you’ve passed them. They have that fugitive little fragrance and they’re they’re so small and delicate, so close to the ground. And yet they really hold their own space. So anytime you spend time with them, you feel like it’s OK to just be you. You can be small and in the corner, but you’re safe where you are. 

Rochana Felde [00:07:53] Yeah. And the violets… I have worked with the flowers. They have their heads under the leaves. A lot of times you don’t even see that it’s flowering until you sort of brush aside the big round heart shaped leaf, which is also part of its signature, that gentle, loving, supportive, heart focused, heart based energy. And it’s really protected by that. So I kind of look at it as being protected by its own sensitivity, which is sort of an oxymoron. But it’s using its love aura to give itself the boundaries and protection that it needs. 

Kathleen Aspenns [00:08:38] I like what you’re saying, because I think that’s been my experience. Also is that it has such a sense of presence, even though compared to us, it’s really tiny, but it’s just safe in its own space. And it has this quality that it grows in these lovely little drifts. But they all have their own space. They’re not crowded. And they have plenty of space and they’re just safe in their own little area that they grow. And I think you’re right about that quality, that creates a sense of spaciousness within you, even if you may not be in a literally spacious place at all. 

Rochana Felde [00:09:16] Right. And then also there’s the Yarrow, as you mentioned. And I’ve phrased that before as being like an energetic bubble wrap. I always think about the white Yarrow that way. So I think that’s perfect in this situation. And as you were saying, you know, when you’re sitting crammed into public transportation of any kind, but especially an airplane where you have nowhere to go, you’re just subject to the whims of fate as far as who you’re sitting next to, and if there’s crying babies…Whatever you may encounter on public transportation when you think of, you know, our personal space, your aura. There’s different schools of thought about how far that goes out from our body. But it does go out from our body. And definitely we’re overlapping auras with the people that we’re with in these tight, cramped spaces. You know, you don’t have to be physically touching, but energetically, we’re basically up in each other’s grills. And it can be so very uncomfortable if you’re not resonating with that person’s energy. For whatever reason, it could be a perfectly fine individual, but you’re not resonating with that energy and it’s uncomfortable to be that close to them. 

Kathleen Aspenns [00:10:40] Oh, yeah, yeah. And that’s the wonderful blender that is the airport. You run into all sorts of energetics that are just not ones that you would intentionally run into. They’re not a good energetic match for you, and you need help supporting yourself as you do that, because that’s just reality. That’s just part of the process. These formulas that help create this sense of containment and purity of your own field, I guess I would use that word because it’s just your field. And even though it bumps up against other fields, you can keep your field from being overwhelmed by their field. I think that’s kind of an energetic that makes some sense to me as the stronger your field is, the less likely it is to feel that someone is invading your field. 

Rochana Felde [00:11:29] I absolutely agree. I think that’s good advice. In general, when you know you’re feeling like you need more protection because you’re being bombarded with other energies. A good place to start is just to ground yourself and to feel your own core energy solidifying. So that is the basic first step to really have any effective protection. And to not need as much protection as well. 

Kathleen Aspenns [00:12:02] Yeah, even just recognizing the need for grounding. I think that traveling is is kind of an inherently ungrounded experience. You know, it’s just kind of how it is, you know, especially if you’re flying. You could not be less grounded, but when you land or even before you leave, just to sort of notice your feet, even if they’re in shoes on concrete or whatever, you know, noticing the action of your feet and imagining pretending that your feet have little rootlets, and that your little rootlets can get down into the ground, no matter how far they have to travel through this concrete, or whatever it is underneath your feet, and helping to remind yourself that you belong to the earth, that you belong where you are. It can help bring you back into groundedness when you’re… it’s the opposite of that ungroundedness. When you’re all up in your head and you’re distracted and anxious and jittery. Remind yourself, I am a creature of the earth. My feet touch the earth. Even if there’s some obstacles in the way. I’m still part of gravity here. I’m still connected to the planet. And that can help to change that dynamic where you can get really spun out.