Show Notes:

On this episode, Rochana and Kathleen welcome Nicholas Pearson back to the podcast to talk about his new book, Flower Essences from the Witch’s Garden—Plant Spirits in Magickal Herbalism.

We love the way he combines the building blocks of plant spirit herbalism with flower essence therapy, alchemical principles, traditional lore, and modern magickal practice.

Join us for a fascinating discussion touching on these topics and more. There is something for everyone!

Audio:

FEP45 Plant Spirit Magick with Nicholas Pearson

FEP45 Plant Spirit Magick with Nicholas Pearson

Video:

Flower Essences discussed during the show:

• Datura
• Rescue Remedy aka Five Flower Formula
• Clematis – Healing Herbs
• Star of Bethlehem – Healing Herbs
• Foxglove – Alaskan
• Lemon Balm – Delta Gardens
• Stinging Nettle – Alaskan, Delta Gardens
• Periwinkle – Pacific
• Potato – Alaskan, Delta Gardens
• Walnut – Healing Herbs
• Yarrow – FES, Alaskan
• Yew
• Rue – FES
• Star Magnolia – Chalice Well, Flora of Asia
• Southern Magnolia
• Night Blooming Cereus – Jane Bell Essences

Resources:

Nicholas Pearson’s new book Flower Essences from the Witch’s Garden

www.theluminouspearl.com/contact/

https://www.innertraditions.com/books/flower-essences-from-the-witch-s-garden

www.linktr.ee/theluminouspearl

www.facebook.com/TheLuminousPearl

www.instagram.com/TheLuminousPearl

Christopher Penczak’s book Plant Spirit Familiar

Show Transcript

Rochana Felde: [00:00:38] Welcome flower friends and essence lovers. We are thrilled to have Nicholas Pearson back on the podcast. He joined us last year to talk about gem elixirs on Episode 35 and he just released an amazing new book, Flower Essences from the Witch’s Garden: Plant Spirits in Magickal Herbalism. Nicholas is a Flower Essence practitioner and researcher whose love for plants grew alongside his love for the mineral kingdom. Best known for his work with Crystal Healing and Reiki, Nicholas is also a practicing witch and a cultist. He’s an internationally acclaimed presenter and an author of several books, including Crystals for Karmic Healing and Crystal Basics. Nicholas lives in Orlando, Florida. Welcome back to the podcast, Nicholas.

Nicholas Pearson: [00:01:30] Thank you so much to both of you for having me back. I’ve been so excited for today,

Kathleen Aspenns: [00:01:36] Us too. We’re really glad to have you on the show again.

Rochana Felde: [00:01:39] Yeah. And just to start out, so this book is just an incredible compilation of so many elements bringing together, not just witchcraft, the building blocks for working with plant spirits. And I wanted to maybe just start off talking about that a little bit more. What do we mean by some of the terms: witch, Wicca and working with plant spirits. And who is this for? So who would get the most out of reading this book?

Nicholas Pearson: [00:02:15] That’s a great place to get started, and I want to start with that little last piece like, who is this book for? Because I’m imagining maybe the primary audience for The Flower Essence podcast might go, Witchcraft isn’t my thing, but let’s think about what this book has as far as tools and toolbox go. It is written in such a way that my own personal practice sees and feels a great sense of continuity between flower essence therapy and traditions of alchemy and occult herbalism and indigenous medicine. And these are all kind of, we’ll say, like little tributaries to the great big stream that is plant medicine, plant spirit medicine, herbalism as a whole. And if we look at them in context, we start to build relationship with our plants in a new way. So, yes, of course, the book is written for, we’ll say, a witchy audience, but it’s also written for people who practice all kinds of plant healing, plant medicine, and, of course, flower essence therapy.

So, the word witch means a lot of different things to a lot of different people, and I’m sure there’s no soundbite I can give that satisfies everybody. But for me, just speaking as Nicholas, a witch is someone who walks between worlds, someone who is a bender and shaper of realities, someone who is consciously seeking a relationship with the spirit world, and someone who performs intentional acts of co-creation with that spirit world to enact change in the world around them. And from a really broad definition like that, we might feel more identified with the term witch than we might have imagined. So, there are lots of traditions that have very narrow definitions. For some, witchcraft is a religion. For others, it is just a kind of set of tools in your spiritual toolbox. And for others, it can be a little bit of both at the same time. One of my teachers describes it as an art, a science, and a spiritual path all rolled into one. So, those are all things that I think about when I think of words like witch.

And for me, magic is the toolset that we use to enact that change. I think Aleister Crowley said it best when he described magic as the art and science of causing change to occur in conformity with will. And that’s a really big mouthful way to say, it’s partnering with those natural forces, those natural energies or currents that are within us, around us, above and below us at all times, to manifest or create change or enact the power of healing. Traditionally, witches were the midwives, they were the healers, they were the layer out of the dead. They were the first one you went to in the village. They were the ones who sat kind of on the edge and had a foot in both worlds at the same time. And I think a lot of people drawn to the healing arts field, more broadly speaking, probably find themselves in a role that is at least somewhat analogous to that traditional role of the village healer or village witch. So, I don’t want anyone to feel kind of put off by the W word in the title because it’s really just a lens for looking at the same things we’re practicing and then extending the toolbox a little bit more, giving you more options, more approaches to working with flower essences, even in therapeutic contexts that we might not have learned in our general training.

Rochana Felde: [00:05:40] It brings to mind that there’s the saying that, magic is indistinguishable– or science is indistinguishable from magic, I forget how it goes, but if you don’t know– if you don’t have the understanding or have the tools to understand what’s happening and you look at the beginnings of science, and it firmly started with alchemy, and that’s part of what’s in your book. So, I think that anyone who works with flower essences can intuitively know that there’s something magical about them. I mean, we try to describe them from our experiential and our empirical standpoint of how they–we work with clients and how the clients have benefitted from them, and people document that. And that’s sort of how we push the practice of flower essence therapy along on its path and it being a newer modality in complementary medicine. But remembering that– and so we don’t talk about the magic as much, right? And maybe even some are kind of hesitant to even have that as part of the vocabulary about flower essences. But I think we all feel it when we are working with these plants and these vibrational energies. So I love kind of bringing it back around to that part, that kind of root of plant medicine.

Nicholas Pearson: [00:07:15] Absolutely, and let’s face it, if we want to try to explain the science behind flower essence therapy, we can’t. We can demonstrate effects. We can demonstrate that there are results, they are repeatable, they are consistent, there is robust peer-reviewed studies, that evidence is this. But if you ask any of these hard scientists what it is in this dropper bottle that’s creating that change, they don’t know. We can’t quite isolate that.

Now, I think we use scientific and pseudoscientific models to describe what might be happening. We don’t have hard evidence to prove that just yet, but there is plenty of evidence that tell us that there’s something beyond the measurable taking place and that anyone who’s ever made a flower essence, even anyone who’s worked with a single essence long enough to get to know it very intimately will tell you that there is something beyond just the material aspect of it. It is more than just something in water, and there is consciousness, there is presence, there is a spirit to that plant that is kind of stored almost holographically in that liquid. And when we take a couple drops of it, we are in partnership with this spirit or the consciousness, the diva, the oversoul, the angel, whatever words we’re using, it’s pointing to the same kind of thing. And that is the real magic of working with flower essences. The science and the scientific models are helpful for explaining to others, but the raw experience we have every single time is spirit-driven. Even when we’re not aware of it, that’s what’s happening. And we can even look at Dr. Bach’s writings, from nearly a century ago, and they point to the spiritual underpinning, himself, a man of science, a physician,  bacteriologist, and homeopath. Like, he had a very clinical kind of brain, but he describes the effects of his remedies as flooding the soul with the virtues of these plants and uplifting our consciousness. And what is that, if not a spiritual experience?

Kathleen Aspenns: [00:09:19] Exactly. Can you share with our listeners a little bit more about where this path of yours intersected, where the flower essences and the magical path have come together because you’re really bringing forth a new type of work and framing flower essences in a new way? And I’m really interested in hearing how these seeds landed and developed into this garden of this new book.

Nicholas Pearson: [00:09:47] Thank you. I’ve always liked plants. From our last conversation, it was really evident that I always liked rocks, but I’ve been totally fascinated by all parts of nature since I was really young. And my grandmother was an avid gardener. And if it didn’t produce fragrant or at least brightly colored flowers, she wasn’t interested, really. So I grew up with things like Tibouchina and Frangipani and Gardenia and all these really resplendent kinds of flowers and just totally fascinated. When I was a teenager, I kind of– I didn’t grow up in a particularly religious household. My father was a recovering Catholic, so I wasn’t anything. And when other families did church on weekends, we did the library. So, some weeks it might be rocks and minerals or earth science, but a lot of times it was folklore and fairy tales and world history and religion and mythology. And so I found out that there were people in the modern day who still lived and breathed and practiced these things, who worked with those themes and archetypes and deities. And I had to learn more. So, I found myself perusing the occult section of bookstores very surreptitiously as a kid, because you don’t want to be found out in a small town. And then I found out there were lots of people who actually think this way.

And so I kind of started with like the pop Wicca in witchcraft that was accessible in the ’90s, in the early 2000s. And I really enjoyed the idea of magical herbalism using plants and magic and spellcraft and manifestation. And around the same time, I was starting to explore this and planted my very first herb garden ever. I was also developing signs of an anxiety disorder which had probably been underlying for a long time, but was really coming to head with the pressing changes of going away to school and all the other things we do as young adults when we’re supposed to have our lives figured out. And a very close friend of mine who ran a local metaphysical store offered to give me a blend of flower essences. And I’d never heard of this. And immediately I’m thinking like everyone else does. So is it like aromatherapy? She’s like, no, no, no, think of it as like, it’s almost like homeopathic medicine. It’s like tuning forks for your emotions, for your mental state. I’m like, okay, I can dig that. It’s kind of like what I do with crystals. Everything’s good. So, we sat there and she had like the little fold-out questionnaire like so many of us start with, with the Bach remedies. And I got this little bottle and I started taking it immediately and magic started to happen. There is a powerful medicine in that little brown dropper model, and every time I’d come back to my hometown between semesters or for summer break, she’d load me up with a new blend to take away to school, to last me the month I’d be away.

And I worked with Bach remedies for years that way. And it was quite a long time before I really thought to do anything other than just use those or keep a bottle of Rescue Remedy with me. But some years back, I was really fascinated by the ethnobotany of the region I’m in. I really wanted to learn more about the historic and indigenous and more ritual uses of plants here in Florida. And there’s not a lot of very accessible information about it.

So here I was, trying to collect little bits of lore and learn my landscape and really get to know the flowers, especially of this landscape. It just dawned on me one day, why don’t I make essences from them? If I can’t find the information about how they were used in the past, why don’t I work with these plants and ask them what they’re for? Why don’t I let the plants teach me? And some of the things I started doing with them were a little less traditional when compared to regular aspects of flower essence therapy. And one of my occult teachers is actually a trained herbalist and flower essence therapist and has experience in homeopathy and lots of other things. The man is brilliant, Christopher Penczak, who wrote the foreword to the book and he actually teaches the making and use of flower essences and the mysteries school program in the organization founded called the Temple of Witchcraft. So he also teaches classes on using baneful flower essences made from poison plants. And it kind of planted these seeds. And I started to notice that there were other witchy and occult people who were also trained healers, and so they were familiar with flower essences, and they might use essences in ways that were a little nontraditional, but there was no manual for it. No one had a training guide to teach you what to do other than create a little dosage bottle and take it with you throughout your day. So I started experimenting and working with the spirits of the plants to find other ways that we can make magic because at the end of the day, just like it isn’t the liquid in the dropper bottle that’s making you better, it’s the spirit of that plant. When you are compounding your own incense or dressing a candle with an essential oil, it’s not the material part of the plant that’s doing it, but it’s the animating presence, the animating force that you’re connecting with and drawing through that power. So if flower essences are like a concentrated way to just have that direct access to plant spirit wisdom, why use anything else? If I’ve got that right there and I’ve got a big collection of them, why can’t I use that in my magical herbalism too? And that just was this huge aha moment. And then one day in the shower, I’m like, I should write a book about this. No one’s done it. Why don’t we write a book about this? So I did.

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Rochana Felde: [00:15:18] That absolutely makes so much sense. I know in my library I have a collection of books on magical herbalism and, most of them are compendiums or encyclopedias and what the plant might have been used, in what kind of charm or spell in the Middle Ages, and really there’s not a lot out there that really brings it together with the newer workaround connecting with plant spirits and with the work that flower essences have done in that regard. So I mean, this is right up my alley, I have to say. And maybe we could just talk a little bit about, what’s in the book because– and before we get too specific, there’s a lot of sections that cover a lot of areas. And I mean, it’s very comprehensive. I mean, there’s information in here that I learned in flower essence practitioner training, that I learned in advanced herbalism classes, with the spagyric and alchemical pieces. And it really covers a lot of ground. So, maybe we could just kind of summarize what this book is all about?

Nicholas Pearson: [00:16:44] For sure. So you’re right, it does cover a lot of ground because I realized that for witchy people unfamiliar with flower essences who’ve got a good grasp on magical herbalism, I was going to be talking about substances they may never have worked with. And similarly, for people with a flower essence background who might have not done much more than bought a bottle from a store shelf, maybe they haven’t had the ability to make their own and blend their own and seeing how that kind of fits into the context of plant spirit medicine as a whole. So I wrote the book for everybody, for all of these interested parties, so it’s got a little bit in there for everyone and then a whole bunch more.

So, we start with a discussion of what essences are, and what is my story, and then what is the world story of flower essences? How do we end up with modern flower essence therapy? How does it sit in relationship to things like indigenous practices of herbalism? How do we be mindful of where it sits in context to those things? And what are those forces or consciousnesses in the plants really all about? So it kind of does a breakdown of what plant divas or plant spirits are, what the spirits of the landscape are like, and how we can commune with them and attune to our plants to learn directly from them. There’s a how-to on how to make your own essences, a chapter devoted to the doctrine of signatures. So if you’re making an essence from a plant and you can’t find anything about that essence in the literature, the plant will tell you, the codes are right there. It’s just hidden in plain sight. And then how to prepare dosage bottles and dilute them and preserve them and lots of different ways to use them, that flower essence therapists are already going to know. But then there’s this kind of magical component, like what are our extended techniques? How can we use them to kind of diffuse their energy in space for ritual or meditation? How can we use them to consecrate things or make sacred space? How do we work with plant essences to manifest a particular intention? So you’re going to find blends and formularies and more ceremonial aspects to working with them. And then there’s that alchemical bit at the end that talks about kind of creating this new kind of remedy that unites the physical part of the plant, maybe a tincture, with the flower essence and enlivens it with that extract of essential oil, the volatile kind of airy component and creates this other way of working with them altogether. So all that’s in there.

And then there’s a guide to 100 different essences, and every one of those entries is going to bring the botany, the folklore, and kind of more mystical uses of it alongside flower essence therapy. And I tried very hard to like, for every one of those entries, find the common thread. And so there are some where it’s really evident. You can see from the traditional uses of Yarrow, the medicinal uses of Yarrow, and the flower essence uses of Yarrow, there are really common themes there that relate to things like boundary and protection. And some of the others, it’s a little bit more elusive and you’ve got to unravel that thread a little farther. So I had a lot of fun doing that kind of investigative work with all 100 plants in the directory.

Kathleen Aspenns: [00:19:57] I really appreciated the comprehensive qualities of that directory as well. And I wanted to ask you, I was looking through one of– just a little bit before that where you’re talking about the Bach essences and how you’ve classified them into this magical sort of three-fold of the balms, the banes, and the trees. And I thought, well, that’s the first time I’ve ever heard that framing. I’m really curious to hear kind of, you tell a little bit more about that and explain how those categories work.

Nicholas Pearson: [00:20:28] Yeah, thank you. So I can’t take credit for coming up with the idea of this threefold classification. I’d love to, but it belongs to another brilliant human being, Christopher Penczak. He wrote this book called The Green Spirit Familiar– I should know that off the top of my head, The Plant Spirit Familiar. And in it, he talks about, through personal notes, as he’s developed a way of understanding the fundamental qualities that a plant spirit has. They’ve, generally speaking, often fall into these three groups of being the balms, the healing herbs, the banes, which are like the plants of poison or plants of power, and then you’ve also got the trees who serve as kind of like the intermediaries between the celestial and terrestrial world, the upper and the lower world. And like us, they act as a kind of high priests or priestesses of the plant kingdom, like we do here in the human kingdom, and that verticality kind of bridges things. So, every one of those kinds of plant spirits has its own personality. So, if we look at our traditional, really nourishing kinds of healing herbs and their corresponding flower essences, Mint and Lavender and Rosemary, and the list goes on and on, we notice that there are nourishing qualities to all of these. There are qualities that seek to flood our system with the healing virtues that Dr. Bach was describing. If we look at the poisonous plants and things that are, we’ll say, kind of poison-adjacent, maybe they’re just really well-defended or thorny or challenging in some other way, they tend to work more on like the deep underbelly of our subconscious. They dredge things up from the subconscious mind. They can be really good for shadow work and transforming trauma. And then when we look at trees, I mean, you can look at an actual tree in the landscape and see that it is rooted, supported, and anchored to the world below and still has this upreaching quality. And they help us find that same kind of firm ground, that same inner stability for the transformational work.

So as I was kind of going through the book and learning as much as I could about Dr. Bach, he talks very specifically about the kinds of plants he was seeking, and they had to be those plants with the medicinal virtues and sort of beneficent gift to offer humankind. And he proceeds to describe other categories of plants that he didn’t find adequate for essence-making, which he describes to be the plants of lower order, which were mostly poisonous things, but also cacti. And then the food-producing plants. So, he thought those lower-order plants didn’t have a high enough vibration to uplift us, and that those that were food-producing plants were already level with us. So they didn’t have that lifting up kind of quality. And I thought his threefold classification certainly didn’t fit the plants he picked perfectly because some of them are toxic. I mean, you eat the bulb of Star of Bethlehem or chew on some Clematis and you’re going to have a really bad day, maybe no more days if you eat enough of it. So, there were poisonous plants in his system, and plenty of them have been cultivated for food or wildcrafted for food, and some don’t have any recorded medicinal quality ever. So, there’s some other kind of medicine he’s talking about there. And if we examine the 38 remedies he’s created through that lens, that filter of the banes, the balms, and the trees, we see patterns emerge. You can look at the seven groups of the essences that he created over sensitivity and despondency and fear and so on and so forth. And you start to see from the ratios of which of those three kinds of plants are in those groups, what kinds of themes emerge. You start to see the ability for trees to bring us into the present moment, to maybe help us be a little less fearful, and other patterns emerge, too.

So, it was just kind of a fun little assignment that actually one of my other flower essence instructors invited me to take a look at to find that pattern. And then I just kept refining and refining and refining until I felt that it really matched Bach’s vision to use this kind of threefold system and that this system very closely echoes the one that he wrote about as well.

Rochana Felde: [00:25:04] What are some of the baneful plants that you like to work with?

Nicholas Pearson: [00:25:09] So Datura is definitely one of them. I took some just before we started the show. I’ve got some right here on the desk for me, and Datura was probably the first baneful essence I ever went on a longer kind of journey with. That being said, I mean, anyone who has used Rescue Remedy has used baneful plants, like Clematis and Star of Bethlehem, but maybe not realizing they were. So there are some I’d worked with long-term, but not specifically for being beautiful plants, and Datura was really the one that I just fell in love with. There’s something so seductive about this flower. Its fragrance, the sharpness even to the edges of the Corolla just wants to, like, kind of grab you in and bring you into the fold. And although there’s not a lot of Western European lore, because it’s not indigenous to that area, there is a lot of very magical, we’ll say, folklore attributed to it from other places associated with things like soul flight and spirit journeying. We can use it as an essence to aid meditation or aid in our dreaming kind of work. Medicinally, it was once used to induce the twilight sleep that was very popular mid-century in childbirth to let people get through the pain of it with no memory afterwards. And so it can also help us maybe get through the pain of trauma and birth our new whole restored self without having to be hung up on the painful details of what created that trauma in the first place. So, if we’re having difficulty kind of sifting through those painful bits and pieces, it can, I don’t just say numb us, but help us remember what the bigger picture is and get us to that space.

And as a Nightshade, Nightshades are these incredible doorways for consciousness. The Nightshade family as a whole tends to exhibit this five-fold symmetry in its flowers, and of course, there are exceptions, but that seems to be the dominant theme, botanically speaking. And think of the five-fold nature of our hand holding up to stop something or to wave it forwards. We can beckon something towards us or maybe push something away, and it represents the spirit’s ability to go above and beyond, or maybe below and within the material plane. So, it’s this doorway into other states of reality that I think is really good for exploring what we need to do in times of uncertainty, in times of fear, during periods of overwhelm. So although I wouldn’t call it a calming essence by any means, I think it can be a really powerful essence for those states of overwhelm and uncertainty. And surely has been an essence for me the last couple of years during the writing of this book. I mean, I started writing it right around the time the pandemic started, and we were all so uncertain and fearful, and it just felt like a really appropriate ally to have with me at that time. And it’s really the only baneful plant I’ve successfully been able to grow long-term as well. So that’s certainly part of my love for her. She’s almost always in the garden.

Rochana Felde: [00:28:14] It definitely has a tendency to pop up in yards, gardens, sides of the road, wherever there’s been, not just physical disturbance, but sort of psychic disturbance. And it’s really known for that. So it’s an interesting one to work with.

I want to reiterate to people that we’re talking about the flower essence, which has no plant material. So we’re not dosing ourselves with anything illegal or that’s going to poison us. But when making a flower essence from a plant that has toxicity, and not all toxicity is the same. I mean, I’ve actually made an essence with Poison Hemlock, and that required extreme precautions. And other essences have toxicity, maybe in different parts of the plant, the flower might be, or the root might be, toxic, but the flower isn’t. So it’s just a matter– it’s really a matter of doing the research to really understand what that toxicity is before trying to really do anything with a plant. Wouldn’t you agree?

Nicholas Pearson: [00:29:28] Absolutely. And because of that, I’ve got some guidelines for making essences indirectly. There’s a big trend in flower essence-making, just kind of big picture where people are making, what they call, living essences and making them indirectly, either because something is toxic or because they don’t want to disturb the plant or because it is a protected species or in the case of like a beautiful Orchid essences that are made in South America, because they grow 100 feet up in the canopy and you just can’t reach them, so there are ways to effectively work with plant spirits that it might not be good to cut and put in your water and then consume said water. And I want to make sure that that is very evident. We are not ingesting these plants.  I’m not condemning or condoning it. I’m just saying that’s not what we’re doing here. And you won’t catch me doing it.

Kathleen Aspenns: [00:30:22] Yeah, I appreciate the warning. In the same way that when we talked about gem essences, you brought up that concern that there are certain gems not safe to put in your water. So that was one of the things that drew me to essences to start with, in the first place, was just you couldn’t do any harm. And so continuing that premise, that feeling a draw, feeling an attraction to a plant that has this touch-me-not character, there are ways of working with it, and the essences are a wonderful way to work with a plant that might have some repercussions.

Nicholas Pearson: [00:31:00] For sure. They’re just so– even for the powerful medicines, the most poisonous of physical plants who can have very fast-acting energies and plant spirits, the essences are still overall the gentlest form, the least invasive form, the least interactive, they’re not going to affect the other things we’re doing in our wellness routine or our health routines. We don’t have to worry about that kind of biochemical activity because it’s not biochemical in nature, it’s vibrational.

Rochana Felde: [00:31:32] I’d love to hear you talk, you have a portion of the book that also has some recipes, and the first one is called, you call it, Witchy Rescue Remedy, and I love that. And I’d love to hear you talk about that.

Nicholas Pearson: [00:31:46] So, this was the most fun part of the book to write, very admittedly, like I got to be my own mad scientist in the laboratory. And part of it is things that I’ve learned from teachers and experience from flower essence therapy. And I’ve taken a whole bunch of trainings over the past several years. Studied with Deborah Craydon, who is on your podcast, and Loey Colebeck, who is also on your podcast, and some other really fabulous people like Sue Lilly and Christopher Penczak and my teacher from the Florida School of Holistic Living. So there’s been a lot of traditional flower essence therapy in there. So I’ve gotten to work with compounding and blending formulas for myself and clients and loved ones. But then thinking about things from this kind of, I dare say, prescriptive approach, but definitely, a formulary for someone who wants some recipes above and beyond just the therapeutics. So I wanted to look at them as materia magicas, as ingredients we can use for manifestation or for spellcraft if we want to call it that. And so there are going to be some recipes in there that are chosen very consciously, not just for the therapeutic benefits, but for maybe some of the folklore involved.

But the first thing I wanted to do was, do-it-yourself kind of Witchy Rescue Remedy with plant spirits that had a lot of lore to them, that comes from more of like the magical traditions. You can find Foxglove, Lemon Balm, Nettle, Periwinkle, and Potato in there. And they’ve all kind of got their own way of bringing us back into balance, just like Dr. Bach’s Rescue Remedy does or any of the other kinds of emergency formulas that you find in a new line. And the synergy of those five essences, I find really balancing, and you’ve got a couple in there that we consider to be balms, and then the rest are more baneful spirits. Lemon Balm and Nettle, powerful medicines often used in medicinal herbalism, but even Potato is a Nightshade and you chew on the wrong parts and bad stuff happens. Of course, we don’t have to worry about any of that as flower essence, but it still kind of works as that baneful spirit. And when the five come together, they get us really rooted in the body. They help us be more in touch with our surroundings. They open the heart and help with processing feelings of overwhelm. So, I had to fine-tune it. But really, those five just kind of came up. There was a short-list that volunteered when I was working on this plant spirits, they’re like, Hey, try me, try me, and these are the five that really worked out well together.

And that’s how a lot of it went. So, there’s a protection blend in there. And some of those are some of my favorite plant allies for feeling less vulnerable in the world. You’re going to find some that are pretty common in flower essence therapy like Walnut and Yarrow, and some that are maybe a little less common, like Yew or Rue. And they’re all great protective plants. You’re going to find a blend for purification, a blend for, if you just feel cut off from nature, some for manifesting love or abundance. There’s a blend for your garden because I love the garden, but I don’t always have the staying power, so sometimes I need to help it out a little, and flower essences in the garden is a really great way to go. So, I try to get really creative with the formulas that are in there. And there’s a special section in that chapter about making, what are called, flying essences that are derived from the formulas that are sometimes called like the Witch’s Ointment or Flying Ointments or the unguentum sabbatis, the ointment to get you to the sabbat, so to speak. And they are blends that are designed to help, on the one hand, with achieving altered states of consciousness, and, again, not because we’re ingesting the plants, but because the spirit, the qualities that are in that essence, are really good for getting us to that unfettered state where the mind can travel, or the spirit can travel, where it can be more visionary, where you can be in that sort of imaginal space.

The side effect of working with these powerful blends, which are usually made from poisonous plants, is that they’re also really great for clearing up trauma. There are a lot of poisonous plants that are really good for bioremediation of toxic chemicals and other things out in the landscape. And they’ve got that same ability to kind of spiritually remediate the toxins we keep at the psychic level. So, we can work with them in the more ritualized sense, or we can use them to do deep processing. And I came up with a few that were inspired by teachers and a whole bunch of others that were just through trial and error. And it’s all right there in the flower essence formulary.

Kathleen Aspenns: [00:36:23] I appreciate the blends that you’re offering and how you’ve created them with that eye to support, let’s say. A lot of times when somebody might be starting to experiment with this, they want to go into the most intense stuff right away. Like I want the most– the hardest, core, the most powerful, so to speak, which we’re so in love with, but that you bring them along and you marry them with some essences that are more of the tonic type, the herbal, the balms, right? And so that you can work with whatever you want to work with, but doing it within this envelope of safety and of support, that’s a really interesting approach to me.

Nicholas Pearson: [00:37:08] Well, thank you. I think that is just the common sense way to go. And gem therapy, it’s the same thing, like nourish before release, ground after everything else you’ve got to integrate things as you go. Otherwise, you have rapid change and nothing that it can stick around with. You don’t get a mighty Oak tree unless it grows equally mighty roots. So, we have to have those grounding, those stabilizing, those nourishing kind of qualities, or we burn out. And even though flower essences are exceedingly gentle, I know plenty of very sensitive people who have such profound experiences with them. We talk about, there’s no harm that ever comes from flower essences. I mean, if you work with clients long enough, you see people get spaced out, you see people have, we’ll call it, the healing crisis that even Dr. Bach himself experienced and worked with his clients on. So we see strong effects are possible, though not the norm, for most of us, just because most of us aren’t that vibrationally sensitive. So, I wanted to really be mindful of that.

And so, there is a certain amount of practiced caution in these blends because I have been through phases of hypersensitivity to that kind of psychic or spiritual realm. And these days, I’m pretty grounded. It takes a lot to knock me off kilter, vibrationally speaking. But I wasn’t always this way. And so I’d like for someone not to have to learn the lessons the hard way like I did.

Rochana Felde: [00:38:41] Yes, that’s so important and so important with flower essence therapy, and when we work with clients to always start from that grounded foundation before going too deep with any of the vibrationally stronger flower essences. So, I’m really glad that you brought that up. And you tend to exercise this care and comprehensiveness in your books now that I’ve read a couple of them, and I love that you brought that to this one, like you did with the Crystal Basics book. So it’s really well-rounded. I would really see a lot of people using this book and using it as a reference.

I wondered if we might just touch on the Alchemy chapter for a minute, because just that term, being an alchemist and flower alchemy is used a lot these days. And it doesn’t always mean what it means here or what it used to mean. And maybe you could talk a little bit about that, what alchemy is?

Nicholas Pearson: [00:39:59] Well, this would be a great one where I get to come up with a soundbite that makes everyone happy, right? So alchemy for me is the transmutation or transubstantiation of raw material into its highest potential. So we could be talking about inner alchemy, like we’ve gotten the alchemical Taoist arts, Nei gong, the internal work, which is energetic, spiritual, psychological in nature. And we have outer alchemy where we’re transmuting one substance or breaking down, refining, and reuniting a substance into something more potent. So traditional laboratory-style alchemy kind of finds its pinnacle at the production of medicines that they call spagyrics, which comes from two Greek words, spáō, to break down or divide, and ageírō to put back together. So it’s like Solvet et Coagula to dissolve and to conjoin. And it’s where you take something, kind of break it down into its three component forces, three component ingredients, which are poetically referred to as the salt, the sulfur, and mercury, which kind of represent like the body, mind, and spirit of a plant and then bring them back together in their most purified state. And I’m not a practicing laboratory alchemist. I don’t have a still and an alembic system set up here in my office to do this. But I noticed that their ingredients many of us have on hand that are already kind of related to those three primes or three primal forces, flower essences are the kind of spirit of things, we’ve got essential oils, which are that kind of volatile mercury, the mental kind of state of it, and then the material body, which could be an infusion, a tincture, anything else like that made from the physical plant is the soma or the salt of it.

So, if we are working with plants that are safe to consume in, we’ll say, intelligible dosages, you can take those three components and bring them together to create a kind of vibrational remedy that is also rich in phytonutrients at the same time. And I’m real cautious in the book not to tell you what you should put in your body because I am not qualified to do that in most instances. But some plants, Mint is a great example, are relatively safe. A very small amount of Mint essential oil, diluted in a one-ounce dropper bottle is not going to cause any harm. And certainly, you can make a tincture or a glyceride or something along those lines and then add the flour essence to it. And when we add the flower essence to these other substances that are kind of biochemically active, we really enliven the resulting elixir. So, it really achieves its effects on all the levels of us, body, mind, and spirit at once. And that was kind of the idea I had for working the alchemical tradition into modern flower essence therapy without us having to be practicing lab alchemists.

Kathleen Aspenns: [00:42:56] It’s a clever idea of how to bring that forward, because, like you say, the technology isn’t part of all of our kitchens. I would like to just see if there are any plants that are really coming forward for you in this moment. We’re in a very strange period with political upheaval and war. And is there anybody coming forward right now that you’re experiencing that you want to bring into this conversation, any plant spirits?

Nicholas Pearson: [00:43:24] I mean, one that I work with on an ongoing basis that I know you particularly have an affinity for, is Magnolia. I work with a lot of Magnolia essences. Right now, I’m using a Star Magnolia essence from Chalice Well. But I’m also a big fan of just Magnolia grandiflora, the Southern Magnolia, which is one of my personal plant spirit allies. It is my most intimate tree teacher. And when things get uncertain and we’re not sure how it’s going to pan out for the future, the whole Magnolia family has been here so long, it has weathered more uncertainties than we can count. It has seen troubles that we have no words for. It knows pains that the human race has never had to witness, and yet it’s still here.

So, I find Magnolia really reassuring during times of change. It reminds us to honor the past, to acknowledge the inertia of the ages, but to continue reaching forward. And when we look at the outline of the Southern Magnolia, you see it right there. You’ve got those wide-reaching roots, nice upright trunk, but if it’s not neatly pruned like so many of them are part of the landscape here in suburbia, they kind of have this really tall, elongated, pyramidal shape where they spread out, but then they really want to focus on reaching out, and it’s a gradual taper, and they help us do just that, reach upwards. We’ve got to be rooted in the past. We can’t forget it. There is tradition, there is history, there’s baggage we’ve got. But if we process it effectively, we can stay rooted enough to continue reaching upwards. So I find it really, really timely.

And I think just with the overall kind of fear and uncertainty in the world, you can’t go wrong with something like Walnut to deal with the transition. We certainly could work with any of our favorite rescue or emergency formulas.

I’ve been really drawn to working with My Flower Of The Week. Actually, I do this kind of ongoing series on Instagram, but I’ve been working with Night-blooming Cereus to take action in spite of fear. When fear feels paralyzing, you just got to take a leap some time, and it doesn’t come from being fearless. It comes from being willing to listen to the voice underneath that fear within us, to have the receptivity, putting out the right kinds of feelers. You watch the dance of this flower open, and you see its relationship with sensitivity and its ability to either help us be sensitive enough to hear or help us not be so oversensitive that we’re paralyzed. It’s that kind of mediating force that flower essences have to balance between polar opposites. That’s another really timely one, too. I mean, I could go on and on, but I think definitely Magnolia, the whole Magnolia family is such a really important ally for where we’re at currently.

Rochana Felde: [00:46:17] I think that’s a great place to sign off, unless there’s anything else that you’d like to bring forward or talk about what’s coming up and how people can get a hold of you?

Nicholas Pearson: [00:46:32] Sure. So, for anyone who wants to learn more about the book, you can certainly get it everywhere books are sold. The official release date here is going to be April 5th, but I know some orders are starting to ship early, so I’m really happy to see that coming into the world.

And then I’m going to be planning a bunch of really fun and exciting events going forward related to flower essences. So by the time this comes out, I might be in the space where I will have announced this six-week course that I have on plant spirit alchemy and magical flower essences that I’ll be doing with the College of Psychic Studies. So I’ll have links in the very new future that I can share.

And then I’m pretty active on Instagram with a Flower Of The Week, most weeks where we take a kind of a deep dive and do a brief, little informal plant spirit attunement and also work with the companion gem for every essence. So it’s a way to kind of tie two of my loves together. And yeah, I’m just happy to share all that with all of you. And if you’re looking for me on social media, I’m at Theluminouspearl in most places, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok. And my website is also www.theluminouspearl.com. It’s in need of some work, but it’s there, and you can find me.

Kathleen Aspenns: [00:47:44] Well, thank you so much for spending this time with us. It’s been really great hearing your insights on this topic. Thank you.

Rochana Felde: [00:47:52] Thanks again. It’s always a pleasure to have you on, Nicholas, and I’m just thrilled about this new book. Congratulations.

Nicholas Pearson: [00:48:00] Thank you both very much.

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Kathleen Aspenns: [00:48:09] 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.