FEP51 Energetic & Emotional Detox with Flower Essences
Show Notes:
Are you feeling weighed down by the energy of others, the constant bombardment of information, or the emotional drama and violence that pervades our media in these times? Mental stress and anxiousness are especially common during this time of year as the energy of the fall season is one of pulling in.
Kathleen and Rochana talk about helpful flower essences to clear the mental and emotional clutter that has accumulated in and around us — to discern what’s not ours, to release what’s not serving us, and to strengthen our energy field.
Audio:
Video:
Flower Essences discussed during the show:
- Purification Combination formula and spray – Alaskan Essences
- Clearing blend – Delta Gardens
- Clean Sweep – Jane Bell Essences
- Red Clover – FES
- Portage Glacier – Alaskan Essences
- Crab Apple – Healing Herbs
- Smoky Quartz – Alaskan Essences
- Black Tourmaline – Alaskan Essences
- Yarrow – FES, Alaskan Essences, Delta Gardens
- Pink Yarrow – FES
- Lavender Yarrow – Alaskan Essences
Resources:
Ayurveda and the Mind, the Healing of Consciousness by David Frawley
“Pigpen” character in the Peanuts comic strip by Charles M. Shultz
Show Transcript
Kathleen Aspenns: [00:00:18] Welcome back, flower friends.
Rochana and I today are looking to explore the topic of energetic detoxing. We’ve been talking about this a little bit and it fits in really nicely with the season of fall. This whole, what are we letting go of? What sorts of inputs have we taken in over our lifetime or over the year? And that with the fall, it gives us an opportunity to look at everything and decide what we’re ready to release. Just like the trees, releasing their leaves to be composted and returned into nutrients, we can also have the opportunity to decide what we’re ready to release and let go of and what we do want to hold on to and integrate into ourselves. So that’s the type of season that we’re looking at and we’re looking at the energetic toxins, maybe the emotional toxins that we’ve taken in and how we can go about releasing them. The season is one where the energy is drawing inward, and so if we have any little field injuries or field openings, things will enter and that will give us an opportunity to go, oh, there’s a little spot there that I could be healing. And then also how do we get rid of what may have entered? We’re going to jump into this topic a little bit. I think you’ll find it interesting and useful. And first, I just wanted to say, hey, Ro, checking in with you. What have you been up to lately?
Rochana Felde: [00:02:15] Hi, Kathleen. Oh, yeah, there’s always something going on with the School for Flower Essence Studies lately that we are both founding members. And I know you’re going to talk about what you’re working on with the classes. And I can tell people that we’ve just released some bundles from the conference that was earlier this year, and we’ve taken and curated some of the topic-focused sessions and created a bundle, one for trauma-informed flower essence therapy and another bundle for the sessions supporting empaths and sensitives with flower essences. And so they’re just nice– more of a bite-size, smaller amount of information for a lower cost, and we thought that would make it more accessible for people who might not have had the time, money, or energy to intake the entire conference, even though it was so full of such amazing speakers and sessions. There’s some really important work, I think, that was uncovered by that conference and we wanted to make it more accessible. So those have just been released at the School for Flower Essence Studies and I’m working on more things to be announced in the future. But that’s the latest.
Kathleen Aspenns: [00:03:46] Yeah, there’s a lot going on in the background all the time, and it is nice to have those bundles out because the whole conference was maybe a little bit much for some people and you want to take it in little chunks. So we’re trying to make it accessible for folks. And then we’ve started the Botanical Studies for Flower Essence Therapy where we’re talking about– this is an ongoing course that Ruth Toledo Altschuler and I are teaching on the botanical definings that help us organize our flower essence practices and help us organize our thinking about how flower essences work. This last week we were diving deep into one of my favorite families, the Ericaceae, which is the family with Heather and Bog Rosemary and Bog Blueberry, different essences from the Alaskan Essence series. So it’s such an important family. As a practitioner, I am really deeply involved in this family because I find it to be healing on such primary levels of attachment and bonding and also our ability to connect into the Earth for the support that the Earth wants to offer us. So that’s what we’ve been up to. And we wanted to jump in to this topic of the energetic detox because it certainly seems to be coming up. Ro, do you want to talk about some of the aspects that come up when you are maybe energetically toxic?
Rochana Felde: [00:05:25] Yeah, well, there’s a few pieces. I think that you can kind of– what does it really mean to have a sense of energetic or emotional toxicity around you? What is that doing? How would you know? And one of the ways I like to look at it is if there’s these chronic feelings of anxiousness, agitation, and low mood, that it goes with a feeling of being overburdened, that there’s so much incoming information, emotions, energy of others, that it’s it feels overburdening and really contributes to this sort of mental stress and heaviness and this feeling of needing clarity. We can tend to hold on to stuff. And that’s where the toxicity comes from, is when there’s so much coming at us, we haven’t had– maybe we’ve been in survival mode and we haven’t had the capacity to deal with it, and so it kind of can stick in our bodies or stick in our energy field. That’s how I tend to see it. Is that how you look at it, Kathleen?
Kathleen Aspenns: [00:06:45] Like everything, it’s complex. I totally agree that having the space and energy to process incoming data, incoming sensations, imprints, there needs to be that slower downtime so that you can process through it. And any energy that was too much to process can be toxic, right? It’s just too much. Any sort of flow needs to continue. And when there’s a backup, a buildup of impressions, of input, of thoughts, feelings, emotions, everything, when it gets stuck, it gets stagnant, and then it can be perceived as toxic. It sort of becomes that way just because it needs to move. So I completely agree that our lives are, just generally speaking, so kind of overwhelmingly overmuch. There’s so much input coming in all the time that we need to create these experiences in our life where we can slow down and drop and release things and process through things so that they don’t become that sort of stagnation.
I think that this season gives us a very strong push to do this work. We’ve come out of a summertime where the energies are– and this is from the Chinese medicine’s perspective, the energies are up and out and it’s sunshine and warmth and joy and connection and activity and all of the things that are happening in the summer. And then we get into the fall season and the energy sort of starts drawing down and in. It’s the tide moving back in and we start bringing things in. And so if we have still unprocessed stuff from the summer that we haven’t had time to release, now we have more stuff coming on top and that can really create a significant amount of overwhelm over everything. So I would definitely like to talk about some sort of digestion essences that would be useful for that. And also that anxiousness, I think, is one of the hallmarks of that energy coming into you, because you start to feel like, oh, it’s too much and you just kind of have your nerves getting fired and it feels like anxiety. Is that your experience?
Rochana Felde: [00:09:20] Yeah, you’ve touched on a couple of things that really tie in as well to the Ayurvedic framework, and in the mental space, there’s everything that you were saying with impressions. And that’s the word used a lot in Ayurveda and the Mind by David Frawley is a really great book that describes this, and I haven’t seen it laid out like this in any other place. But he really goes into detail about how the different impressions that come in through our sensory system, all of our senses, what we see, what we hear, and how that impacts our mind, our mental state, our emotional state, and our physical state. And that the first thing to do when wanting to cleanse this from this overburdening is to stop the impressions coming in too. And that’s what you would do if you were going to go on a dietary cleanse. And you know, it’s interesting, too, that the best times of the year for dietary cleanses are spring and fall. I just want to make a note, though, before I go on, because detox and cleanse, they’re real buzzwords and they’re used a lot. And after having worked at an herb store and having hundreds and hundreds of people coming in and ask, how they can detox their liver or things like that, I want to just point out that we naturally detox, our body naturally detoxes, our liver, that’s its job. And what we can do to help it is to stop the bombardment with toxic foods, drinks, drugs, whatever all the things are that are putting a heavy burden on it. And that’s like the first step rather than going to some kind of hard-core cleansing agent. And so that’s, I think, the healthy approach from an herbal perspective, but also from a flower essence perspective, is to start there, is to start with what are all the things coming in, what are all the impressions that you’re taking in? Are you watching a lot of violent movies? Are you doomscrolling on social media? Are you eating a lot of junk food or things that are just not doing well for you? Let’s take a breath, take a beat, and see where we can pull back on some of those things and that it makes a huge impact on the whole body-mind complex.
So, there’s that piece of it. And then with the fall, as you said, the other correlation with Ayurveda is this is now we’ve moved into the Vata time of year and the Vata time of year is when people tend to get more anxious and there’s more of a nervous system dryness. And so it’s so funny to always compare this with you. This is why I love having these conversations with your lens and then my lens and comparing it.
Rochana Felde: [00:44:53] And to add to that, as I think a final word, the best impression we can give ourselves is nature. Nature is the most healing, calming, clearing thing we can do when we go out and we walk in nature or we be with nature.
Kathleen Aspenns: [00:45:13] 100%. You cannot do better as a clearing agent to just go outside. And if you can put your feet on the ground, great. If you can put your palms on a tree, if you can bring your heart field into a tree, if you can just spend some time in nature, any way you can, it’s going to do you a great benefit.
Rochana Felde: [00:45:33] So happy fall clearing, everybody.
Kathleen Aspenns: [00:45:36] Indeed. And we’ll see you next time. 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.
