FEP37 Essence Adventures with David Dalton

Show Notes:

Rochana and Kathleen interview David Dalton, a pioneering flower essence producer, practitioner, educator, founder of Delta Gardens, and author of Stars of the Meadow – Exploring Medicinal Herbs as Flower Essences. 

David has been making flower essences in his research gardens and in natural habitats around the world for over thirty years. In this episode, we hear about his flower essence research, practice, and some of his interesting adventures along the way. 

Audio:

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Flower Essences discussed during the show:

Resources

Show Transcript

Rochana Felde: [00:00:39] Welcome, friends. Today on The Flower Essence podcast, we have a very special guest, our friend and teacher, David Dalton. David is a pioneering flower essence producer, practitioner, author, and educator. He’s been making flower essences in New England in his research gardens and in natural habitats throughout the world for over 30 years. In the mid-1980s, he founded Delta Gardens, a center for flower essence research and education, where he and his staff see clients and train practitioners.

David combines his background in behavioral sciences with his deep understanding of the natural world to delve into the mystery and potential of flower essences as a 21st-century complement to medical health care. Since the beginning of his unique flower essence adventure, David has combined clinical thinking, intuition, and a strong relationship with nature to create an extensive collection of products that support emotional, mental, and physical health. He’s also the author of Stars of the Meadow, a book about exploring medicinal herbs as a flower essence. And he’s a valued teacher to both Kathleen and I, who have completed his practitioner training.

Welcome to the podcast, David.

David Dalton: [00:02:00] Thank you. Happy to be here.

Rochana Felde: [00:02:01] Really glad to have you here.

David Dalton: [00:02:02] Thank you.

Rochana Felde: [00:02:03] I just wanted to start out and ask how you got started with flower essences.

David Dalton: [00:02:09] Well, this was 1985, and this impulse hit me to garden, grow things. I’m not sure where it came from and it’s still a mystery to me, but I ended up digging up a quarter acre with a shovel that was kitty-cornered to my house in Newburyport in a neighborhood and started growing things. While this was happening, and this was an adventure all to itself, I was preferring plants that were all weedy or the ones that were very strong because they had a stronger energy.

There was a point later in the ’80s when I started having these altered experiences with the plants. Sometimes they would wake me up in the middle of the night and ask me to go out. And I remember one particular time a BlackBerry plant just appeared over my bed, and this was weird to me because I hadn’t had experiences like this before, and invited me to go out and make an essence under the moon, which I did. Many of the plants would give some kind of either feeling emotion or sometimes very direct communication like they would tell me what they needed, more water, less water, mulch, no mulch, move. And so I began this process of gardening with nature and, well, who was the boss in that particular situation. So that’s a little bit about it. I remember I made my first essence around 1986 or ’87.

Important to mention, I learned about flower essences way before the Bach Essences, but there was a whole new impulse beginning then. Perelandra Flower Essence Society were more public then and you could buy books.

And so I remember making my first essence around 1986 or ’87. It was a Marigold essence and holding the bowl and just asking please release the essence of these flowers into the water. And I had a total out-of-body experience where I was watching my whole– I was watching myself from above, about 30 feet, and I remember I had a next-door gardener, over-the-fence gardener who called me over. I’m watching from above as my body goes over and begins talking to her. And then popped back into my body. That’s a little bit about the beginning. I was very, very excited and enthusiastic about making essences and exploring, well, what exactly is this for? Some of them I made for things that I had read, what they were for, and other things I explored on my own.

Kathleen Aspenns: [00:05:21] And your impulse to start working with essences, I’m kind of guessing that it was like a lot of us where we have struggles and challenges inside and we’re kind of looking for the right plant to meet that need. Were you working with for essences for yourself, for your family, or did people start coming to you and you could start seeing the plants through the lens of the need that people are connecting with you? Does that make sense?

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David Dalton: [00:05:53] Probably the most landmark thing that happened was my daughter, Miranda, who was about five years old, developed this Eczema in the crux of her arms and behind her knees, which we spent a lot of time and energy and we went to homeopaths. We went allergy testing and used Cortisol and there was no relief. And so I remember reading in a book called Flower essences and Vibrational Remedies by Gurudas, three flowers that could affect Eczema. One was Banana, Saguaro Cactus, and Loofah, maybe four, Redwood. And I ordered all of those from Pegasus Products back then. That was one of the three places you could buy essences back then. And we gave them to her and put her on her arms and it went away. Eczema went away and never came back.

And at that point, I had read about was interest, I got on the flower essence bandwagon at that point and thought, well, wow, if this can affect a physical body and an illness, then what else can they do?

Kathleen Aspenns: [00:07:18] And a lot of your practice and your work, if I’m still current with where you’re at, has very much been about, unlike a lot of other flower essence leaders where there’s a lot more conversation about soul development and working from that angle, but a lot of your work is looking through the lens of the body and through the lens of illness and essences that can help shift those circumstances that created fertile ground for that. Is that right?

David Dalton: [00:07:52] We’ll never abandon the box paradigm that if there is illness in the body, there’s something wrong in the personality, that the imbalance in the personality causes that, and so we’re always working with the personality, working with the vibration, working with stress in people’s lives, and then we found many essences that directly affect the physical. And we will use those in combination with. So flower essences will never become a kind of stop in and fix your rash, kind of thing. There are other things in a person’s life, especially as they get older, that need to be rebalanced.

Rochana Felde: [00:08:38] Yeah, and I think that really speaks to the biopsychosocial medicine, the studies, and the learnings that are starting to happen in that mind-body medicine field finally. And you were working with that since the 1980s and you’ve continued to do that this whole time, it sounds like, right?

David Dalton: [00:09:03] Right. We do full-time.

Rochana Felde: [00:09:05] And your clinic– yes, so you have a busy practice and clinic with practitioners?

David Dalton: [00:09:12] Very busy. Right. We see, I don’t know, maybe 50 people a week with various things. There are three practitioners currently seeing people, and well, since the pandemic, there’s been a little bit of a shift. We do most everything remotely now, but that’s about to change.

Kathleen Aspenns: [00:09:40] And one of the things that you’re well-known for in your work has been in pioneering nuisances, in taking– we’re standing on the shoulders of Bach and all the others who’ve been creating essences over the years and creating a whole series. I mean, you’ve been very prolific in your career of creating new essences. Can you share with us a little bit about the process that you use to– when you’re feeling drawn to start a new line, such as it is, or a lot of them have been travel essences where you’ve gone to other countries to work.

David Dalton: [00:10:17] Right, right. Well, the process begins by observation. Where does the plant grow? What’s its cycle, how does it act and react with the environment around it? What are its friends? What are its enemies? We get a kind of picture of its personality through its shape and color and then put that aside.

We also use our intuitive faculties and some processes where we go into meditation and we begin to commune with the plants and the plant’s energy and find out. We ask, what are the healing qualities? Once we make the essence, we take the essence and do the same thing. We’ll have several of us involved in this process and we look at what are the similarities in what we found?

Next thing we do is we give this to a whole bunch of people. Before we take our deductive or intuitive information for granted, we see what happens. Sometimes it’s very consistent and sometimes it’s surprisingly diverse. And so then what we have is we have the task of assimilating, putting things together. So, for instance, there are a couple of essences like Borage that 99-point-something percent of the people that take it will feel calm or relaxed. The same with Angelica flower essence. We’ll feel this overwhelming kind of nice downward ease, chill out, kind of feeling. And yet there’ll be a couple of people and a group of 30. Well, I used to do these groups. I would pay people to come together and take the essence and they would all write down what they experienced and then we would go through it, focus groups.

So what we do then is compare and contrast. So for instance with this Angelica and Borage, I remember one class I did there were 30 people in the class and 28 of them had that feeling and 2 of them felt enormously disturbed, just the opposite. And we found that across the board, a number of people feel that. And so the question was, well, what does that have to do with this other impulse that we’re feeling in the flower, which is to relax, to calm?

And so what we then look at the individual and we see that when a person is calm, sometimes stuff comes up, sometimes the emotional body is triggered and disturbances can come up. So that’s an example of how our picture got larger. The same thing happens, but different people might have a different reaction depending on where they are in their process. 

Rochana Felde: [00:13:34] Would you liken that to sort of like an emotional detox? 

David Dalton: [00:13:38] Yes, yes, I mean, all of us are at some point in that process, I think we go through cycles. This is just my opinion, this part, where stuff from the past comes up and sometimes it comes up because something from the outside stimulates and sometimes it just is a matter of a cycle, like in the autumn, a lot of people’s stuff comes up and that’s what we get. Then, what people do is jam that whole process and get depressed. So everyone’s different. Everyone is different and that cycle and that process is different for everyone.

Rochana Felde: [00:14:18] And when you go to other countries to make these essences, so you make essences both from your gardens and also around the world, so– and I know that you’ve gone to a lot of different countries to make these essences. How does that work? How do you go to another country and connect with the land and the plants and get into relationship to co-create with them?

David Dalton: [00:14:55] My first– I learned a lot about this over the years and over the eight or nine different countries that I’ve been to. I started off going to Thailand and the reason I went to Thailand was someone gave me these flower books of all of these beautiful orchids, which are, by the way, my favorite type of flower. And it just would name the different places which are in the north part of Thailand. So I went thinking that I was going to rent a jeep and drive around and find these.

Anyways, that didn’t happen that way. First of all, Thailand is kind of overrun by tourism. There are 9 million people that go there every year. It’s about the size of Texas. Their economy depends on it. So most of the natural resources are either bought and owned or they’re destroyed. And so I went to Chiang Mai initially and found also that driving in Thailand was going to be an impossibility. All the street signs are in Thai. Everything winds around. And so I began looking for help, and that’s the most important thing. So by the time I had gotten to my third country, I learned that make sure you have a guide who could take you to these places.

So I did find maybe five orchids on my own by going way, way away from the cities. This is how I do it. I would go to a remote village and I would rent a motor scooter, and I would drive in a straight line from the city until it got rural, until there were plants, until there were parks, and until there were trees, until there were no cars. That way, I didn’t get lost and connecting–

So your question was like, how do you connect with the people and the energy of the plants? That’s not a problem. Connecting with people is a lot more difficult than with plants. By this time when I see a plant, I see a friend. Some of the hardships I’ve had in some of the countries got relieved as soon as I saw one of the things that I was there looking for. Probably the most difficult thing next to finding the flowers, imagine landing in Logan Airport and asking somebody, “Where are the flowers?” “Well, they’re either in somebody’s garden or you better get way, way, way away from here.”

So the most difficult thing was how do you get the essences back? And so I started off in Thailand with these six-ounce bottles that were fairly large. I was able to purchase them bare, which was wonderful, and then send them back in groups of six or eight. And so every country has their– well, there are laws about what goes out, and I remember the first eight essences– remember, I’ve kind of like taken a whole month or six weeks and I’ve gone to make these essences, and I’ve been sponsored. People have basically bought the essences before they’re made to pay for the trip. So I remember going to DHL and the woman opening the box and taking out these bottles and she asked me what was in the bottles and I said, “Well, flower essences.” And she was like– she didn’t know what that was, but she decided just right then that was okay. It could have gone either way. After that, I made sure that I saw the same person. I waited until she was working. And I’d say, “I’ve got two wooden elephants and t-shirts and, oh, yeah, six flower essences.” She goes, “Oh, you’re the flower essence guy.”

Other countries, it wasn’t so easy. If you go to Peru, they don’t allow you to ship anything liquid, so you need a little bit luck or another resource.

Kathleen Aspenns: [00:19:40] Yeah, it sounds really edge of the knife of being able to complete that process of bringing those essences back home, just sounds kind of terrifying to have spent all this energy. I mean Ro and I, both, we make flower essences, so we know the emotional investments when you are spending that time and energy and connection with the plant and something so cool just happened. And then, ugh, not to be sure that you can get it back. Is that something that you’re able to sort of research on the way out, or is this just like, “Universe, okay, just set it up and help me figure this out on the way back?”

David Dalton: [00:20:18] Well, I recommend that people research all of that beforehand. I kind of– it’s just my nature to just kind of like, well, let’s go see what happens. And I learned that, well, check out beforehand how you can find the essences, find the flowers that you need. So remember, you make an essence, you are there for three hours with a plant. And so it’s hard to do that without attracting attention.

I remember in Uganda, I had a driver who was also very helpful. So I would make an essence, I would put the bowl down with the flowers in it. And before 30 minutes, there would be, oh, I don’t know, 50 to 100 people just like, “Well, what are you doing, and what’s going on here? And looks like something’s going on. And so my driver would go around and he would tell people, “Stay back. This is an important doctor from the States and he’s making medicines here to–” like whatever he told people, it kept them away. So it’s not easy to find the flowers, to find the privacy, to find the way back home.

In Uganda, I sent the essences in groups, I think groups of 10. So I sent three different waves out and I had a little difficulty. They thought they were drugs and they were going to hold them up. And they said, “Well, we don’t hold them up. They won’t let them in, but we’ll send them out.” When I got home, I get a phone call the very next day saying, “We have these bottles for you. What’s in them?” And I said, “Well, those are flower essence.” “Can you explain what a flower essence is?” Then there’s this silence. Do you have anything written on flower essences? So apparently what I said was just like Greek, Swahili, Chinese, just another language. I said–so I said and they said, “Okay, we’re letting them come.” I said, “What would have happened if I wasn’t here?” Because all three of these mailings were there are all at once. She said, “We would have sent them back.” So that was another stroke of luck.

Kathleen Aspenns: [00:22:56] Wow. I’m so glad that Universe conspired that you could be there at the phone to be able to get that through. I know that I’ve used your Ugandan essences a couple of times to really dramatic results. In particular, I was working with a troupe of vervet monkeys for a zoo where I was doing rounds and those were the essences that met them, and that’s one of the things that I’ve learned from working with wild animals, or particularly when they’re from a place to be able to meet them with something that seems like from their own ecosystem, even if it’s not precise, something that reaches them. And the issues that come up in your Ugandan series were issues that they were experiencing. And the turnaround for them for that group was dramatic.

And so I’m really glad that you were able to make that happen and bring those essences back because they’re so on point for some of the real struggles that– yeah, and I don’t know if there’s like a summary of your Ugandan series, but I remember a lot of the topics in there were really difficult for war and displacement and real ancestral and current traumas. So those were really on point and have common point for a few clients since then for me.

David Dalton: [00:24:29] Right.

Kathleen Aspenns: [00:24:30] I really appreciate that you put your skin in that game because I know that that was not necessarily an easy trip.

Speaker5: [00:24:37] No, the Uganda trip was probably the most dangerous and difficult. I chose Uganda– I chose these places in different ways, but I chose Uganda because it’s located– it’s right at the source of the Nile and it’s on a volcano bad. So just I was looking that whole area, East Africa, Kenya, and the Sudan, and then there’s the Congo to the west and then to the south, Rwanda. And it was the most safe. And that’s kind of why I picked it out of all of those.

But when I was on the plane going there and I think I landed about 11:30 at night, I looked around and everyone else on the plane was in groups. They were either missionary or salespeople and they were– and so for the first time, I thought, like, “Oh, oh.” There was an election going on at that time. The current president, whose name was Museveni, he was the one that deposed Khomeini back in the 80s. He had promised the people that after being there 20 years, they could have an election. And then he changed his mind and he said, “Yeah, you can have an election, but I’m running too.” And he wanted people to feel like he fixed the election up, but there was that fever and I remember getting in the taxi and the first thing I noticed at night was how many people there are. There are just many, many people walking around at night, a lot of people, armed guards with guns and all of the gas stations and I realized, “Now, this is not going to be easy.” Not only that, like my– the bottles that I had sent six weeks before never got there. The bowl that I brought broke, someone stole the camera that I had in the airport in Amsterdam. So there were a lot of things. Oh, and then none of my credit cards worked. So there are a lot of things that made this not just dangerous, but scary.

And then so, somehow, a lot of series of miracles, I was able to make the essences, traveled around fairly freely, finally found a driver who could speak fluent English and was very helpful. And yeah, it was– and I remember the election happened the day before I left, and so on the day that I left we’re driving to the airport and there’s shooting happening near the Capitol and guns going off and people running this way and that. And I was like, I don’t think I’m coming back here.

Rochana Felde: [00:27:48] Were you drawn to Uganda for certain plants or flowers, or was it more of that place on the planet because of its proximity to the mouth of the Nile? What was the driver that really made you want to go there and do that?

David Dalton: [00:28:09] Honestly, I don’t remember. I don’t remember. I remember looking on the map, and I might have even taken my pendulum and pointed at different places and stuff or it’s just like somehow Uganda came right into focus. So it was like, “Okay, I’m going to Uganda,” and I started looking in guidebooks. And oh, the other thing was, I did find somebody who was supposed to help me there. He was somebody that worked in the consulate and he totally disappeared. He wasn’t there. Yeah. So I was– so imagine, I showed up at night and none of my credit cards were taken because they only took Visa and I had MasterCard. And I had a whole bunch of 20s and I remember the woman at the desk going through the 20s and she says, you can’t take any 20 before 1999. Was not taken because they had a counterfeiting problem back then. So I basically had no money and money for maybe four nights in the hotel and a little for food and taxi after that. And this is back– this was 1996. There wasn’t the sophisticated Internet back then. I had to go into an Internet cafe, put up and wait and we finally found a place that took MasterCard that would give me cash advances and I went and they said, “No, sorry, this card is closed.” And then, I called home and found out that, well, they just got a call from MasterCard saying someone from Africa tried to use your card, but don’t worry, we shut it down and we’re sending you a new one. I was like, “Ah.”

Anyway, I lived. I made 30 essences, got them back home, and it’s all just a– it’s a great story. The story is just such an adventure that I wrote the story. It’s about a 30-page story. It’s on the website.

Kathleen Aspenns: [00:30:27] We’ll be sure to link to that because I’m sure that a lot of our listeners would enjoy listening to that story. And I know we both are also interested in the Uganda series in itself, but also in the Animal essences that you made there. So there’s a leap from making flower essences to making animal, I guess, maybe Spirit essences. I’d love to hear your philosophy and how you felt inspired to do that and sort of a little of the process and maybe some of the healing qualities of those essences.

David Dalton: [00:31:04] Well, I’m glad you used the word leap because I think in this work you have to be ready for leaps. Sometimes you think you know the process for determining something and then something else happens. You think that because of your exploration of a flower and the abduction of it, it might be for something and then something else shows up. So this is a strange story, but I had a very near-death experience in Uganda where I was lying. Well, it’s a long story, but after the– well, my heart stopped and this is after some prolonged anxiety, the first 10 days, they’re about money and safety and sleeplessness. There was this bum, bum, bum, bum, and then I started going through this tunnel. They talk about the tunnel and there were people on each side who I couldn’t see. And I’m going like, “Oh, this is how it’s going to happen.” Anyway, that stopped and this voice came in, sounded kind of like Barry White, a very deep voice, and said, “You’re not going to die, and you didn’t come here by mistake, and just listen to the voice and it will tell you what to do.” And so that was how things started going. well, “Where could I buy– get a bowl? Where could I get bottles? Who should I talk to? Where should I sit?”

And so everything started going just perfectly, and I found a driver and someone to share expenses to go to the game parks in the western part where the flowers that I was looking for were. During that time in the game park, we had really very interesting experiences with the animals. Usually, in these parks, they send out guides and the guides come back and they say 6:00 in the morning, everybody gets up. The guides say, “Here’s where the lions are. Here’s where the elephants are,” and people go out in their cars. And so everybody was headed in one direction and I’m with my driver. And I said, “Let’s go the other way.” So we went the other way and this kept happening to us. And it happens so often that people started following us. We would run into a pride of lions or elephants, hyenas. One time an eagle landed on the roof of the car. Just landed. One time an elephant must have missed us by, oh, inches. And so during that time, Barry was telling me that I was being imprinted, which I didn’t understand what that meant.

When I got back– the following full moon, when I got back, Barry said it’s time to make the imprinted essences and I understood. So I made a jar for each one of the animals and I put it in a circle. It was the full moon. And these wild turkeys came just adjacent to the property and they all started making noise. So there was this wonderful, enchanting kind of experience. And so around midnight, I came back and I brought the essences in, and I would hold each one going like, “Ah, let’s see what animal this might be,” and I would guess that I was wrong. So I went to bed and the person who I was living with at the time woke up in the morning and said– she knew nothing about what I was doing. She said, “Did you–? I had all of these dreams about animals last night and there was this one.” And then she named all of the animals in the set.

What I did next was I would bring a single essence to a class and say to the people, “This is an animal. It’s one of these eight animals. Take the essence and kind of go inside for five minutes and see what happens.” And at least nine out of ten people would know what it was. Some people would– so I remember when it was the eagle, someone felt wings flapping and someone just felt visions sharpening.

And so we have these eight essences. And what they do is they help people kind of attune to a certain vibration that may be helpful. So the Lion essence is very good for people who are meek and withdrawn and not assertive and have trouble with boundaries. And the Elephant seems to be good for people who aren’t quite in their bodies. And so we were still exploring those. I mean, they’re kind of not the main essence that we pay attention to or use. They’re kind of like a little aside. The essences and their use, as we evolve, we begin to know more about them. We know more about essences now than Bach did. The essences that we use now are more for us and our more evolved, developed state.

For instance, Bach– this is a little bit of a tangent. Should I go on the tangent here, the Bach tangent? 

Rochana Felde: [00:37:04] Yeah, go on. Go on.

David Dalton: [00:37:07] So Bach, all of his essences, because of the thinking at the time was the person– you had a personality and all of his essences were to help balance extremes in the personality. So now, we know that the personality is something that’s built on life experiences. Early and traumatic experiences feel, they register significantly. So we have essences for removing trauma where in Bach’s day that was not even a– not even a thought. But the thoughts that he did have that something in the personality is making people sick, that’s so far advanced. People today are just kind of like getting that, just kind of get that.

Rochana Felde: [00:38:01] Yeah. And I just wanted to comment, though, about back on the Uganda essences and your testing of them. I mean, that’s– I mean, so the people who were taking these essences and guessing which animal, I mean I think that’s pretty profound. These aren’t professional psychics. They’re just your regular people, right? Yeah.

David Dalton: [00:38:25] No, neither are the essences that you can explain the way you explain traditional essences. So at least there’s something physical is a flower and there’s sun and people go, Okay, well, there’s something in there. Here, it’s like, well, this is a little bit of a leap. Even for me, this is a little bit of a leap. But where I was in the garden with these jars and Barry had saved my life. So I– and he stopped talking to me when I got back until that particular night, so I paid attention. 

Rochana Felde: [00:38:59] Wow. And the other set of– you have quite a large set of medicinal plant essences, and that’s one of the things that attracted me to your work initially because of my study of herbs. And you not only were working a lot with flower essences made from herbs and medicinal plants and weeds, so to speak, but you wrote a book about it, The Stars of the Meadow. So early on when you were talking about your origins of noticing the strong energy of weedy plants, Kathleen and I were just speaking about this kind of recently that just it feels like medicinal plants and weeds and plants that have been used by– have a known use of medicinal action with humanity for many, many eons seem to have a stronger energy. Would you agree with that? What are your thoughts on that as compared to some of the more delicate Woodland flowers or things like that?

David Dalton: [00:40:14] I began preferring weeds and medicinal plants, herbs because their energy was stronger and I could hear them more clearly. And so I wasn’t an herbalist, but suddenly I have a garden filled with herbs, and it’s filled with herbs because, well, some of the other, the flowers that are more domesticated had just not much, they weren’t giving much. In the Woodland, by the way, those very delicate flowers, when they’re in the woodland, it’s the whole woodland that resounds and their energy. And so you take something like those plants on the forest floor they developed after years of there being pines and spruces that didn’t drop their leaves and gave no light, so there was no light on the forest floor, and then over time, these things, as they get bigger, their bottom rots, they fall over. And then the other trees that have leaves and the leaves drop and there’s light. So now there’s light on the forest floor. And in that light, these things.

So it’s like millions of years worth of evolution that these little tiny Woodland plants and so they have a very strong energy also.

Rochana Felde: [00:41:51] Yeah, I would agree. And I agree that the environment is a big part of that. There’s this Orchid in the woods where I live and you can’t transplant it. It only grows in the soil in the Redwood understory. It has a very specific mycorrhizal environment that it’s part of. It’s really– there’s just so much more that is part of those Woodland essences like you say.

And the medicinal herbs, some of them especially, that are weedy, if you think about some of the thistles, for example, yeah, I definitely feel like they– it’s easier. Maybe it’s just easier for us to hear them. Not necessarily that they’re a stronger essence medicine, that makes a lot of sense because we, as humans– and my own little theory is just that we humans have evolved with them medicinally for so much longer.

David Dalton: [00:42:56] The other thing about medicinal herbs is there’s already research, centuries of it on what they can do for the physical. So when we begin to research the flower essence and find the emotional or energetic or mental construct, we can put those two together. So for instance, Milk Thistle is something for the liver, cleansing the liver, and as a flower essence, what it does is it moves anger through the system. So we begin to then splice together these pieces of information, “Oh, anger and the liver,” and then a little more when we repress anger, we’re stopping the movement of energy that rises up when we feel anger. And what happens is the amount of energy running through the liver diminishes and it can become heavy. So that’s just one example.

And so there are dozens of others. So that was another, I guess, plus, another fun thing, another benefit of exploring the medicinal herbs is to be able to put those things together.

Kathleen Aspenns: [00:44:20] And it has been great to see the bridging that you’ve created between sort of the classic Western herbalism and how those particular herbs interact with the energy body as flower essences. I really appreciate that you’ve been able to do that work that brings those two thoughts of healing together.

David Dalton: [00:44:44] Right. We try to put pieces together. We’re making a puzzle. And today, we try to put a person’s past, their history, the trauma, the condition of their body, how it feels, pain, sleep, eating habits, all of those things, the stress in somebody’s life, and the present, the way energy moves through their body, put all of those things together.

Kathleen Aspenns: [00:45:18] We’re really glad that you’ve been able to spend this time with us today. How would somebody find out more about you and your practice and the essences and where would they find you?

David Dalton: [00:45:30] Best thing is just go on the website, which is deltagardens.com and second best thing is to sign up for the newsletter and the newsletter plugs you into events. So, for instance, we have something that I call Devic Healing Temple, which is a free healing with flower essences over Zoom once or twice a month. So there are a lot of things and sales.

Rochana Felde: [00:46:01] Now, are you still teaching, doing practitioner trainings?

David Dalton: [00:46:07] That’s all online right now. We have 15 modules. We’ve broken it up into modules and then people interact with me after they do a module and they do the project that’s associated with it. So we’re going to be changing that. The world’s changing again. And so we’ll be changing the format for that pretty soon. I also have– every other year we’ve had an event where practitioners from all over the country kind of come together and you have different people presenting different things. We didn’t do that last year. Not sure if we’ll do it this year, but we’ll do it definitely by next.

Kathleen Aspenns: [00:46:55] Well, I really was delighted to have the privilege of studying with you in-person. There’s something lovely about being in presence with you and with the teaching because it comes through in an additional way, but certainly, there’s also a great value in being able to do things without having to fly across country or that traveling thing is also a problem. So it’s, I think, probably that blended model might be the future of things where we have certain things in-person and certain things done remotely. But like today, we’re really glad that we were able to do this remotely. Thank you, Zoom, for allowing this. Yeah.

David Dalton: [00:47:34] Happy to do it. 

Kathleen Aspenns: [00:47:34] So it’s been really great spending this time with you and learning a little bit more about your work and your essences and the pioneering work that you’ve done for the world of flower essences, so thank you.

Rochana Felde: [00:47:47] Yeah. Thank you. It’s been a real treat.

David Dalton: [00:47:50] Thank you. Thank you. It’s been a pleasure.

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Kathleen Aspenns: [00:47:52] All right. Well, until next time, flower lovers. We will look forward to seeing you with our next episode, which will come up soon, I’m sure, and we’ll be letting you know news and exciting things that are happening with us. See you soon.

Hi, flower lovers. For the last two years, Rochana and I have been sharing practical insights and our professional experience working with flower essences on The Flower Essence podcast. There is so much more to come. Even after nearly 40 episodes, we find that we have many more topics and guests we’d love to introduce. In service of this project to connect people with plant wisdom and healing, we invite you to join us in building our Patreon community.

There are some costs that come with creating a podcast, and we thought it would be really great for people that want to help us to be able to do it in this way. Patreón is such a great platform that helps creative people finance their projects and allows us to give you some perks for doing it. We’re offering early access to episodes, full transcripts, a flower essence QuickStart guide, and more good stuff in the future. We’re excited to build this flower essence community with you as a critical part of it. And we thank you so much for helping to support us and our mission to spread the wisdom of nature around the world.
Kathleen Aspenns: [00:49:20] 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.

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