FEP56 Coming Home to Earth
Show Notes:
We welcome Ruth Toledo Altschuler back to the podcast as we record a session for our upcoming Flower Essence Alchemy event.
The three of us share our early life experiences in trying to access emotional sanity by connecting to the plants, animals, and the elements of Nature.
Using the analogy of “reforesting ourselves” after processes of internal deforestation have happened, we explore the concept of re-bonding with the earth so that we can become more fully whole and embodied beings. And we share the flower, tree, and gem essences that are key for this grounding re-connection.
Flower Essence Alchemy begins April 17th! 🌎🌬️🔥💦✨🌸
This Earth Week, explore the elemental forces of flower essences and vibrational remedies and their regenerative influence on essence creation, formulation, and potent self-care.
Flower Essence Alchemy is an illuminating online event with flower essence experts sharing deep wisdom on the relationship between the elements, the essences, and ourselves.
📅 Starts April 17 | LIVE Panels on April 22, 2023
Register before April 17 for 30% off!
Check out the website for all the details and to register.
Audio:
Video:
Flower Essences discussed during the show:
Green Tourmaline/Smoky Quartz – Alaskan Essences
Grove Sandwort – Alaskan Essences
Smoky Quartz – Alaskan Essences
Jadeite Jade – Alaskan Essences
Bog environmental essence – Alaskan Essences
Kousa Dogwood Bud – Flora of Asia
Resources:
Flower Essence Alchemy Earth Week Intensive
Lorena Shakini
“To create fixed ideas, it is necessary to cut down the forests of diversity that we have within us.
From children full of creativity, gifts and talents, we are gradually transforming ourselves into deforested adults, fragmented people who cultivate only what they were taught would be right.
Based on a lot of pesticides, they cultivate exhausting work, destructive habits, a life of appearances, little by little making infertile the interior soil that was once inhabited by so many living creatures.
It is the interior deforestation, the devaluation of the nature that inhabits us in the name of a life separated from the whole, a life of a Modern Human Animal who thinks that the Human Being is something more special than the Living Being.
Almost everyone goes through this deforestation. In the times we live in, it is very difficult to find someone who was created to be a Forest.
Most of us are raised to be open fields where monoculture can exist.
But the Forest resists in me and in many of us. A wild call inhabits our hearts and from time to time it howls. I’m listening to my inner forest and I’ve already stopped clearing what’s left of it.
Now I work to reforest what I allowed to be destroyed in the name of trying to fit into a broken lifestyle.
Only Nature can save us.
Reforestation is necessary.
Abandon fixed ideas, understand that the dear people who taught you to live that way were also deforested by other people who had also lost their internal forests.
To reforest the inner life is to break an entire vicious cycle.
It’s opening new doors for your ancestry to heal through you.
It’s allowing your descendants to have much more freedom and awareness than you can have in this lifetime.
It’s discovering a life with more purpose and joy.
Those who reforest themselves, reforest the world. The spirit of the forest is alive in you. May you hear the call.”
The Inner Fish documentary
Botanical Families in Flower Essence Therapy course
Show Transcript
Kathleen Aspenns: [00:00:10] Welcome back, flower family. It is really good to be with you here today. Today is a special episode of the podcast. Ruth Toledo Altschuler, Rochana, and I are going to be sharing our presentation from the Flower Essence Alchemy of Intensive. This event begins April 17th and we will be having beautiful content all that week and then having live interactive panels on April 22nd. We are really hoping that you join us as we are exploring this elemental forces of flower essences and vibrational remedies. Today we’ll be sharing our personal experiences of sustaining emotional sanity and vitality through connection with nature and our vision of this for the future. How can we as human species re-encounter intimacy with nature for re-creating and co-creating our direction into the future?
I have a little excerpt of a piece by Lorena Shakini, and this is translated from Brazilian Portuguese, and I’ll have the full text of this in the show notes and in the general notes. But I wanted to read a little piece of this which will set the tone for what we’re going to be talking about today. “To create fixed ideas, it is necessary to cut down the forests of diversity that we have within us. From children full of creativity, gifts and talents, we are gradually transforming ourselves into deforested adults, fragmented people who cultivate only what they were taught would be right. It is the interior deforestation, the devaluation of the nature that inhabits us in the name of a life separated from the whole. A life of a modern human animal who thinks that the human being is something more special than the living being. To reforest the inner life is to break an entire vicious cycle. Those who reforest themselves reforest the world. The spirit of the forest is alive in you. May you hear the call.”
Ruth Toledo Altschuler: [00:02:53] And so I think I’m the one to begin today. And I will be talking at first about a part of me that I feel and I know in my cells that has always stayed wild, that has remained wild. But just before I talk more extensively about that, I’m going to just give you a little snippet of why this was so important and why this was a lifeline for me. I did experience birth trauma when I was born and a very difficult bonding situation. And I was one of those kids that was born in the early 1950s where children were not supposed to be held, only when they were going to be fed. And so I was kept in a dark room crying for hours and hours, and I couldn’t sleep. So I was kind of a traumatized child, very shy, who had a lot of difficulty making friends. And only in my early adolescence, I began finding my way around socializing more easily and all of that. So this part of me that stayed wild was really a lifeline. It was something that I feel really saved my life.
And I want to tell you a little bit about that because ever since I was a child, I really wanted to be in water. And actually, more recently, I watched a documentary called The Inner Fish, and I totally identify with that. And so what happened was that I had these grandparents who really loved providing opportunities for us to do sports and do physical activity in nature. And they were very close when I was growing up in the beginning, in the first years, and they would take me to this place that was a beach where they created this little house that my father actually helped to design and build, including solar panels that he built there as well. That was the kind of person my father was at the time. But they created this house that was right in front of the beach near the Atlantic Forest. And this beach was very unexplored and undeveloped at the time and it was very safe. And so shortly before that time, I had learned how to swim in the swimming pool right in front of the house where we lived. And I was really able and capable to be safe in water. And so my grandparents trusted me and they knew that I was okay, that they could let me walk and they could let me go into the ocean. I remember my grandfather watching me with his binoculars, but they would let me go on my own and I would spend hours dancing in the water and swimming. But also when I wasn’t in the water, I would walk through that beach all the way to the end. And at that time it was safe. I don’t think it would be these days, but I spent a lot of time alone in nature and I loved looking at the plants. There was that Mimosa Pudica that you touched and it would close and some other plants that I was totally passionate about, but mostly being in the water and experiencing merging with the water element and being totally at one with water. And so this was really a lifeline because it kept me also in my body and I trusted my body and it kept me really sane because I had that. And you will know more about that as we go along. But that’s the piece that I wanted to start off with.
Kathleen Aspenns: [00:07:21] I’ve spoken about my crazy childhood before. I was born into a fundamentalist doomsday cult. And one of the main tenets among many other craziness was really the repression of women for sure, but the repression of anything that wasn’t this experience of by full obedience to authority. It was supposed to bring you some level of happiness. It’s like you were supposed to know that by being obedient to God’s laws and the hierarchy as it traveled down, it was supposed to bring you some level of peace. And growing up, I could always feel even before I could even understand, that there was this profound disconnect between people’s faces, their masks and their actual interior experience. My father, when he would come home, was a very, very different person from the person I saw at church. He was very sociable and very friendly and very outgoing. And he would come home and the wall would come down and his anger would emerge and he’d isolate. And so there was this profound disconnect in how we were supposed to be acting and what was really going on. And nobody would talk about it. There was no conversation about it, no discussion about the emotional state.
And being outside in the garden was really the survival strategy. To just be– we had a pretty big garden, not really a garden, really more of a yard. My dad did like to grow fruit trees, so we had fruit trees and there were some nice, beautiful old trees there. And that was a place of sanity for me. That was a place where I could be sort of outside of the realm of control and obedience and really feel like myself. And at some point I really realized how much animals also created that experience for me, to be around animals, to be with them. And when I started to get a little bit older, pre-adolescent, I became the absolute typical horse-crazy girl. I collected the little models with my babysitting money and I was just desperate to be around them for reasons I couldn’t explain. And when I got a little bit older, I saved my money and purchased a few riding lessons and I thought my whole world would change, but it was just a few riding lessons. But just being with them was so beneficial. And I ended up sort of weaseling my way into cleaning stalls and hanging around the barn. And there was a pony there who had been outgrown who I got to spend time with. And that experience of being in the heart place of a horse, when you are in your body and they are always in their bodies, and together you are completely in the moment, embodied in the moment, but exquisitely sensitive to the experience of the world around you, to awareness of what’s going on around. And that was a way for me to start to find a way into my body.
And many years passed when I wasn’t able to be with horses for a lot of reasons, and in my mid-twenties, a new friend told me about a horse who was in desperate need of rescue. It was a really terrible situation. And I just felt so compelled to get involved. And so I rescued Ali and in just a few months of spending time with that great spirit mare and being with horse again and being in that union place, it helped me remember a part of who I was. I was able to reconnect to a memory of somebody that I knew I could be. And her great heart and great– she gave me such courage that I was able to get out of an abusive relationship. And that was such a gift. I mean, she rescued me. I can’t say it in any other way than that. And the connection to animals has always been a source of rescue for me.
Rochana Felde: [00:12:06] Thank you both for those stories. And there’s so much that I resonate with. I also was born with some trauma. I was premature by two weeks and so I had to live in the preemie ward cut off from my mother for the first two weeks of my life. It was the late sixties and they allowed her to visit me once a day. So I did get some breast milk, but otherwise it was sugar water from the nurses.
And I grew up in this environment where spirituality was highly valued, but emotions were not. And attention on the body was shameful. And it stemmed from an alternative spiritual organization that my parents joined in the sixties in San Francisco. And the beliefs that filtered their way into our family dynamic, combined with some traditional religious beliefs, ended up really teaching me how to spiritual bypass really well and not value– my emotions were not valued in my house at all. And I remember being chastised for laughing too loud or being too emotional or things like that. And as the oldest child of six kids, it was a very chaotic environment with two neurodivergent parents. And there were a lot of things that just didn’t didn’t make sense to me. What did make sense was physical activity and going outside nature. I loved being on the playground and doing gymnastics and all sorts of crazy stunts and exploring the trees and the plants in the yard where I lived. But I really started to kind of lose that grounding as I got older and the spiritual part got more– as I became a teenager, things became more chaotic and I didn’t understand my parent’s spirituality because everybody in the group was totally messed up. And so there was this constant spiritual elitism that was at play that this was better than anything else, and the only way to connect with God, and etc., etc., and so much of a higher level and yet everyone in that group, somebody was always going through a crisis. The adults that I saw around me were not– it just didn’t mesh, it didn’t seem to make any sense. And so I really rejected that as a teen. But then I kind of quickly got sucked into the new age, the New Age Movement and all of the doctrines that that had. And really, what I’ve learned now through this lifelong process is that I replaced one kind of spiritual bypassing with another kind of spiritual bypassing based on positive affirmations and completely believing all of that for a long time.
And I started working in very mental occupations, becoming a systems analyst and a computer programmer and this male-dominated corporate environment where I, as a neurodivergent person, had to adopt this mask to act like everyone else and to compete. And I really started losing more and more of my connection and any kind of feminine power I might have once had, that was completely suppressed. And I really started losing my soul. So by the time I was 30, I was at the peak of my career doing cutting-edge development work for a firm in San Francisco during the first tech boom Dot-com. But my personal life was a total and complete mess. And within a year from that I was widowed by my husband who was an alcoholic and died of liver failure. And that marked the beginning of a lot of years of just absolutely excruciating grief that I had just no tools to deal with. I just didn’t even know that– I mean, none of the things that I had worked with before were doing anything for me except journaling, which probably saved my life initially.
And then it was the plants. And when I started to reconnect with the plants, and it was more beginning with the herbalism and aromatherapy and then I started hearing more and more of the call. Flower essences, I started dabbling with those, but it was once that I really moved out back into a very natural environment and was able to finally spend time in the country every day and connect with nature in a really deep way that my whole world changed. And I felt it change as I sat with the plants in the process of making essences and doing that attunement with the plant. The attunement part is where the healing really came from for me, not really so much the end result of the essence. It was sitting and attuning and feeling that the plant be its total whole and complete self and it was completely accepting of what it was and there was no worry for the future or bemoaning the past or what it was or what it could have been, or that one part was great and the other part wasn’t. It was a complete integrated whole being the plant and totally just like okay with itself, which to me in the way that I grew up, it felt like a revelation and it was like a revelation every time. And no matter what plant it was, which might have had a different spin on what its message was, it had that same kind of underlying energy of being complete, being whole, being itself, like utterly and completely and truly itself. And when I felt that and could feel that message from the plants, to me, that’s sort of, it’s like my lifelong learning. It still is. I’m not like healed. It’s like it’s an ongoing process. And every time I work more and more with the essences, the plants and the elements, which we can go into more as well, there’s that shedding of those things, all of those beliefs, all of those– that thing that we made up in our head about ourselves that’s not true, being able to chip off another layer of that and get to like the true essence of who we are. And that’s what feels so important to me and why working with nature to me is just– it’s just key. There’s just no other– that’s what it is. Well, that’s what works for me.
Ruth Toledo Altschuler: [00:20:40] I wanted to kind of follow-on on what you said because this whole thing of being in the head was such a strong thing in my journey growing up. I grew up in a family of intellectuals and artists. So my mother was an artist, completely passionate about her art, but she did have a narcissistic personality disorder in the sense that she was really incapable of feeling and sensing the needs of a child. And so she would speak with the child as if it was an adult or as if it wasn’t there because she was so busy with her things. And my father was very devoted to his work as an engineer. So everything was about the head. It was a very mental environment. They were atheists. So there wasn’t any– and my grandfather actually was anti-God. He said that if he met God, he would put the God in the pool and make him drown. So that was the joke that I used to hear. Anyway, so it was– but they did have appreciation for nature. And so we had this a lot of opportunities of being outside. But life for me as a kid was very lonely because we moved many times. My parents get to have jobs in different places. And also we suffered when the military dictatorship came in Brazil that lasted 22 years. I was 14 when that began. And everything that’s happening right now is rippling through me in a very traumatic way as I see in the world, the rise of the autocracy, because I’ve been through very traumatic years related to that since I was 14 for 22 years.
So, one of the things where things out-pictured in the worst way was in my relationships, in my one-to-one relationships. And so the whole history of becoming an adolescent and beginning to engage in relationships with the young men and feeling really so bad about myself and so afraid and so inappropriate. And then I got into relationships in which I suffered so much rejection again and again. And it was really devastating to go through these years. It was many years of that, stories that I don’t even want to get into because it’s a lot.
So at some point, I was lucky enough to have access to therapy. And the therapist that I went to, he was very direct. Just as I analyzed and explained everything that was going on with me, he said, well, the thing is, you’re very much in your mind, but you’re totally disconnected from your emotions. And that’s not going to work. And so I went into therapy. First it was psychodrama. And that was followed. He went to England and he studied Reichian therapy that was based in the body. And he came back bringing these techniques. It was quite intense to go through some of this, but it was very important because it really showed me how so much was stored in my body. And again, I began to learn how to connect with– how to be aware of the emotions that I was having and also how to bring them up and how to do something about them through these years of therapy, guided by this man who had very much this body-oriented approach. Those were times where these experiences could also be sometimes a bit invasive in terms of, I remember one time that I went to this experience of group massage and it was so– for days that energy was in me that I just couldn’t– if I had flower essences at this time, it would have been so helpful. So those were the things that I was exposed. I lived in an environment that was perhaps even too permissive, and so that was also abusive for someone so sensitive and who had a lot of difficulty in the bonding relationships and all of that. So therapy really helped me a lot.
But what helped me even more was my experience with water and dancing. And so I used to put music and dance wildly in the house on my own, always on my own, and I loved it. And it was years of dancing. And then afterwards I had a wonderful dance teacher who was so encouraging, and I learned those Martha Graham movements of modern dance. And this kept me in my body and kept me sane. So I have so much gratitude for these opportunities that I had while going through all these very traumatic experiences in my life.
And so one of the big windows of healing that opened up for me was when I finally was able to settle into a relationship in which I had the opportunity of becoming a mother. And this was so special because that desire of becoming a mother really awakened in me. And I was completely devoted to the pregnancy and to preparing for a natural birth. But I had this experience of embodiment already. So I prepared by swimming every single day. And this is what my daughter is doing now that she’s pregnant as well. She’s swimming every single day. And I think she still remembers she was the first child. And so as my baby was growing in my womb, I continued swimming every day, and the elements of water and my merging with the element of water was really so wonderful. I didn’t have any back pain. I didn’t have any pain in my legs. And I was a photographer. I was a professional photographer. I carried really heavy equipment. So I used my body a lot and I did my work while I was pregnant, almost close to the end. And then I was able to give birth in the way that I had really yearned for. I didn’t want to have a medicated birth. And at the time, I was able to find a doctor who did the Leboyer birth process. And it’s just such an amazing experience when you allow nature to work itself through you, which is how I experienced giving birth. And giving birth was really like allowing myself to be taken by the tidal wave of nature working through my body. I surrender to the workings of nature through me and my children are born through the waters of life. And this was really a very, very, very healing experience. And so healing it was as well the quality of the bonding that I was able to have with my kids as they were growing up. Nurturing that connection, that is still there. We live far away, but we always feel close because that initial bond was really established there and we had a lot of time of sharing that experience within the matrix of nature as well, which has been a wonderful matrix for them to begin growing up.
Kathleen Aspenns: [00:29:39] That’s such a beautiful experience of being able to go through and heal a very traumatic infancy into cycling through. I knew from the very beginning I did not want to be a mother. I never had any interest in it whatsoever. And like you, Ruth, I had a very similar babyhood experience of– and maybe from a different place. I’m really not sure where this came from. My father, from the time I was born, when I was two weeks old, he told my mother that she was not allowed to go into the room when I was crying. It was the same sort of thing, like if they weren’t hungry or they weren’t wet, there– and just that desolation that I can feel even just remembering what that must have been like for an infant to feel so abandoned and so alone. And there was an additional overlay in there of the religious thing that there was a belief that if the baby was crying and they weren’t hungry or wet, they were actually being willful and it was Satan working through them. So it required some punishment, which is completely bonkers, completely bonkers. And so this wound inside of me, I was like, no, I’m not going to do that. I’m not going to become a mother. And yet becoming an animal mom is a way that I’ve been able to work with that. And my husband and I when we got our girl, Kate, our dog Kate, when she was about four years old, we decided, we’d kind of always had the thought that we might breed her and she’s of very good bloodlines and all of that. And we did the research and we talked to our breeder and we picked a good sire for her. And that whole experience went very well and smoothly. And when her baby was born and she just had one puppy, when her baby was born, for me to be able to experience a completely natural response to the cry of an infant, the moment he made the tiniest peep, the moment Mickey made the tiniest little peep, she’d go running over and cuddle him and nurse him and comfort him. And to watch that was so healing and to be able to be supportive of her motherhood in that way. My mother was not supported. I see mothers everywhere not being supported by their community, by their families. They have to do it all alone. And it just comes out of nowhere. They have nothing left for themselves. And I think that was another reason I didn’t want to become a mother because I didn’t want to give up so much of myself. And just to be able to re-experience that, heal this place, I for years carried this, this mortifying part of myself that when I would see– we’d just be out and about and see children being treated really kindly, I would feel kind of angry about it, kind of bitter of like, oh, those stupid babies, they’re getting their needs met and it’s mortifying. And yet that was inside of me. And having this experience of having a really healthy model of what a mom and baby should look like and being able to be part of that and support that and help that grow into a healthy, well-adjusted, happy little puppy was so profoundly healing for that part of me. And that’s been a really important process of healing that inner child part of myself.
Rochana Felde: [00:33:35] I love these stories that I’m hearing. This feels so cathartic, this conversation that we’re having. And my own reason for not becoming a mother, really I kind of love this little– this piece that we’re on. But I was burned out on mothering by the time I was 15 because I was the oldest of six children. And that is what I spent my childhood doing, changing diapers and putting kids to sleep and driving them to school as soon as I got my license and all of that stuff. So, I never really wanted to do that. In fact, in my twenties, I kind of like, okay, now I can party because I finally don’t have all those responsibilities.
But bringing it back around to that nature, healing, and the elements, I was reminded, when I was talking about the time sitting with plants and when I first started doing that and I lived in this place that had a daily cycle of strong wind coming from the coast through the valley. And it’s a very specific kind of– there’s a name for it and it’s now a wine appelation and all of that. But it’s a very specific, strong wind that comes through every afternoon from the west, from the Pacific Ocean, and as I would take my walks and work with the plants and I was doing plant spirit shamanism intensive weekends, I had an experience where I really felt the wind, the air element come through my body and clear me. When you hear that term being like a hollow bone, which I had known about, but this was the first time I really experienced it. And it’s a sense of being just completely cleared away and yet at the same time being present. So there could be that experience of surrendering, that sort of detached from the body. But this was just the dichotomous feeling of both being in the body and being kind of completely clear, that I felt the gift of the wind when I would go on my walks, this strong afternoon wind. And I look at it now, like this was that beginning part of my journey with coming back to nature and the elements. And I always loved water as well. Ruth, I love your stories about water. Living near the Pacific Ocean, it’s always been a part of my life growing up, but the wind really, I felt it come through me and sort of catalyzed that process. And I now live in a forest. So that transition from these kind of wide open spaces with all this wind coming through and out being enclosed more, like embraced by the trees of the forest is a completely different experience on this healing journey and one that is both like simultaneously I feel kind of held by nature. Like when I’m driving home from some urban place back to my forest home, I have this feeling of this coming home, but also simultaneously a feeling because you’re kind of entering the darkness. You go through these groves of tall Redwood trees, hundreds of feet tall, and the shadows and there’s darkness and it’s kind of scary, especially if you’re not used to it. So I’ve always felt this sense of it’s not just going like deep into a forest. It’s like going deep into myself. And what this environment is teaching me is being more connected to the Earth and being able to look inside more and excavate more and face more of that shadow of, this is where I’m encountering it. And the fire is a part of that. So if you bring in, so we’ve talked about the different elements in this conference and the fire is a big part of living in a forest. That’s part of the scary part too, the out-of-control wildfires and coming to terms with that as well. And the regeneration that I’m seeing and being taught about through this process.
Ruth Toledo Altschuler: [00:39:03] Yes. So regeneration is the word that we are looking at when we think about the reforestation, the internal reforestation, but also the regeneration of Gaia, of the body of the earth. How can we become aligned in a way that we can serve the regeneration of Gaia is one of the themes that has been really occupying my focus and has been a big part of why this whole event is coming together on my piece in it.
And so the regeneration, one of the things that I’ve been looking at and hearing in these discussions, these fascinating discussions, we’ll post some links for you to check is that regeneration, if you cut the roots of a plant, it can continue a life like when you cut flowers and you bring into a vase, but it won’t regenerate. For regeneration, everything needs to have roots, but also be interconnected and entering that place of exchange and healthy exchange and belonging. My journey of the deepest healing that I have gone through has been when I started working with the flower essences, and that was exactly in the period that I was separating from the father of my two kids. It was a period that was very painful on many levels. It was a period of looking deeply into my shadow. So I used the Flower Essence Repertory, the FES Repertory that at the time was very thin and I would go with my pendulum and that would help me become aware of some of my emotions. And I would begin taking these essences once I had access to them. And that started a whole process of true alchemy and transmutation, beginning with a deeper healing of the whole issue around the wounds around relationship that were still there and really being so painful in this moment of separating and losing another dream, having to bury another dream of having a healthy relationship with the father of my kids.
So I started working with my own emotional healing but at the same time, very soon people started to come to me for the essences, and I started giving the essences at first for free, informally for anyone who wanted. And people started flocking to me for the essences. I was working on something else at the time. I had my own business. I had a clothes designing business and people were coming to me for the essences and I was taking the essences. And then there was this transition that I started really working with the essences full time and became a distributor in Brazil for many of the essence companies. And what happened was that I really learned with Patricia Kaminski, Richard Katz, Steve Johnson as my main teachers, but with the whole study of flower essence therapy, I learned so much about the importance of us being in our bodies, progressively being able to be more in our bodies. And what happens is that when we start coming more into our bodies, we start feeling the emotions that were there, that we wanted to dissociate from. And so it’s not so safe or it’s not comfortable. So we tend to go back to these survival patterns that we tend to have.
And so I would notice, for instance, how working with people with essences such as Shooting Star that would help them come more into their bodies, how that would change, or for instance, essences such as Scarlet Monkey-flower, that’s an essence for when you cannot really master strong emotions and anger, so you tend to suppress them, but that makes you not have enough vitality as a result. And so working with the essences, with people, I could see them having more color, more tonus, more vitality and of course, more presence, more embodiment. And this already was something that I really noticed on how flower essences really helped us align and become more embodied in such a way that we can experience the fullness of presence with life.
But one thing that I didn’t know yet, and that’s a very recent thing that has been coming up in my practice in a really significant way is that not only it’s important for us to be working on our emotional patterns and kind of transforming and transmuting these emotional patterns and being able to be lighter around that emotional charge, that emotional burden that we carry, while at the same time we still know and keep the memory of what happened but we get discharged of that intensity, of that density.
But now over the last especially two, three years, what I’ve been finding is that there is a real need for us to work more deeply in our sense of belonging to the Earth, to the body of the Earth, even for many of us choosing to bond, like a healing mothering bond with the body of the Earth. And so one of the very significant pieces of my own healing that I’m now so capable of seeing the need for that and following up with people as they go– with my clients, as they go through these process and also sharing with you and all the students that I work with, is the possibility of creating this, it’s almost like that ground wire that you have for electricity in some ways for discharging towards the Earth that you want to release, and also to be able to be open to the cosmic energies. So this ability to discharge to the Earth is one of the things for which I find that the gem elixirs have been so useful and so important. And one of the ones that I use the most, it’s just very often coming up in the formulas is the Green Tourmaline/Smoky Quartz from the Alaskan Gem Elixirs. It’s a combined gem where the Green Tourmaline helps with this exchange of energy with the Earth and with the living Earth, with the living web of life. Whereas the Smoky Quartz really helps that release, that grounding and that release. And along with that, essences such as the Grove Sandwort from the Alaskan essences that we can feel the bonding, we can heal the bonding, but in this case, we can actually create a special bond with the mother that sustain us, that is Gaia, Mother Earth. And also Lady’s Mantle with its green flowers and its ability to convey that message that, come, I’m embracing you, I’m supporting you, I’m holding you, and you can also be an agent for the regeneration of the body of this Earth as you surrender into this connectedness, this interconnectedness. And at this time, I truly find that this is a very important point in the process of working with my clients, this whole connection with the Earth and connection with their bodies and this ability to re-bond and align and come back to Earth as home, which is really difficult at this time that we’re living where there’s so much conflict and polarization and all of that. But we are very lucky that we have this connection with the plants. That really helps us have a light of sanity through all of this that we’re going through at this time.
I also find that the environmental essences that you will hear a lot more about in Judith’s talk are very good because they bring the movement of the elements to activate the processes and really help these processes of release and transformation and transmutation to happen with more energy and power. And I feel that the more we are able to have a fully embodied connection with this living world that we live, we become equipped in our alignment to think through and co-create, to feel through and co-create our path into the future, because without this fully embodied interconnectedness, we’re going to come from the head and we’re going to come from fragmentation and separation. And that’s not going to bring the solutions that are in true honoring and integration with the living being of Earth.
Rochana Felde: [00:50:03] I’m seeing that as well, Ruth, more and more this need to re-bond to the Earth. And one of the environmental essences I’ve been using more lately and love is the Bog Environmental Essence, which is it’s made in one of the bogs in Alaska where a lot of those really grounding flowers and flower essences are made. But it’s just the energy of the whole bog and that kind of just feeling of just being completely nurtured by the Earth. And I agree as well with the Smoky Quartz and the Tourmaline gem essences as being so valuable for that. And I also like Jadeite Jade as a really nice one for grounding and that heart resonance. It helps like re-synchronize the heart with the body and Mother Earth and people. And so I love adding the Jadeite Jade with that, a very relaxing, calming effect that it brings to that process. And of course the tree essences and the Redwood, and the Redwood being such an amazing ambassador for this planet.
And kind of building off of what you were saying with, what do we mean by like re-bonding and re-connecting any way, right, with the Earth and it’s a little bit hard to break it down. But I felt that when I journeyed with Redwood and I asked, in sort of prayer, Gaia to help me connect with Redwood. And then what happened in my experience was the opposite, where the Redwood connected me with the spirit of Gaia. Like I felt myself go down into the belly of the Earth with the vertical energy of the Coastal Sequoia Redwood. And the experience that I had connected me to Earth, in this case, the entity of Gaia as not sort of a goddess to be worshipped from afar or anything like that, or any of the ways that we might see that representation of Gaia. It was more like a kin, like I felt kinship. I felt like she was my sister. And I felt my whole being like fill my whole soul, like I was a planet and she was a planet and we were sisters. Like, that’s sort of the family feeling that I felt in that collective experience. And then there’s a lot of other layers and aspects, that mothering feeling from Earth and that caring and that nurturing peace and I don’t know– like, I feel like there’s just something about Earth that we’re here to experience. We’re here to experience being in a body, being in this three-dimensional reality with this planet. And while so many of us talk about ascension and whatever, we want to escape and maybe think of this as like a lower level experience because we’re in 3D, I don’t believe that anymore. I believe that we’re here to have this experience. And so why try to escape it? It’s not to be escaped. We’re here and that Earth helps ground us into this experience.
And so the Redwood with all of its mycorrhizal network and its roots that spread out far and wide and its connection to all the elements so strongly, its tall height connected to air with its deep forest scent and how it purifies the air, how it has the fire, its adapted to living in a fire ecology, how it is connected with water, how it loves the water, it drinks fog and makes its own atmosphere and sort of a rainforest process. And all of those pieces of this very special kind of ambassador plant of the Earth is such a teacher for us to be resilient, to look at where we are, where our feet are on the ground and look at what’s around us in our community that we’re connected to like physically. Even if we don’t agree with the belief systems of our neighbor, in a crisis, this is who we have. And that’s such an important teaching and that’s how we will survive. And this is a lesson I learned living in the forest with the wildfire threat and storms and trees coming down and neighbors with chainsaws. And emergency responders are us. We can’t do it by ourselves. We need our community. And that is the teaching from Redwood that I hear so much more as we go through these trials and tribulations that we’re in, in our modern world today with everything going on. I don’t know if any of that connected or made sense. I feel like I’m rambling at this point, but.
Ruth Toledo Altschuler: [00:56:46] No, it totally does because I think for me, when I took my first practitioner training, ’91 was when I first met the Redwoods. And I know that that encounter really helped me find my purpose as a forest practitioner. It was there that I found my soul family as well. I found my community and I can’t forget the first time that I was stepping into Redwood National Park and I saw a diagram of how the Redwood’s roots support one another, and that’s how these very, very tall trees are able to stay standing because they’re interwoven and supporting one another. And now we know more about the whole network underground as well. So, that really kind of lightened my calling in a very strong way, and it never changed since then.
Kathleen Aspenns: [00:57:51] There’s that piece about coming home to Earth that’s the whole focus here. It’s not about, like you were saying, I too experience the new age thing of, we want to be out, we want to be done with this thing. This is just something to be endured and to get through and to be done with. And yet every time we step outside, nature encourages us to be in the moment, to notice things, to notice the dew and the wind and the rain and the stones and the earth under our feet. And to be able to be in this body, in this moment, there’s this level of peace that comes and we can forget that so easily in our modern lives and experiences. And like you too, Ruth, I’m seeing so much with clients, this huge need for coming back into the home of the body. And the gems and environmental essences are so important to that process.
I’d like to bring in something that is part of my thought process when I’m working with clients, is to be looking at it from the Chinese medicine perspective of the spirits. And the spirit that’s particular to this topic is the spirit of the corporeal soul. And in Western thinking, there’s sort of one spirit that leaves the body when we die and maybe reincarnates, depending on what you think. And in this model, there are multiple spirits, and this is the spirit of the body that emerges or develops on conception. And when we die, it returns back to the Earth. This is the corporeal soul and this is housed in the lungs. And so this is our Earth soul, our Earth spirit that is to be nurtured and cared for with our bodies. This spirit is in charge of all of our autonomic nervous system processes, our digestion, our heartbeat, our breath. This is the spirit that keeps us alive and to be here. And when we lose this connection to our Earth spirit, when we lose this connection to our bodies, we feel grief. We feel this sense of aloneness, that we aren’t part of life, that we aren’t part of the world. There’s this existential lack of meaning, like life has no purpose and I just don’t know. This seems like this is the injury of the moment. This is the wound of the time. We do not have such a mental health crisis and we do not have such high proportions of humans on earth needing antidepressants for no reason. This is this need to come home to our bodies, to come home to the Earth and recognize that we belong here. This is our home. We’re here. And when this spirit is disrupted, the physical systems don’t work as well. And also, you see this lack of ability to move the body. Well, there’s a lack of proprioception. There’s a lack of fluidity in the movement. And we’re also really lacking in presence. The mind is very scattered and you don’t really know where you’re standing. And for me, when I see this, it breaks my heart and also, I’m like, there’s something for this. We can help this. And the essences that come primarily to mind for me for this particular injury are the Dogwood family and the essences from the Cornaceae. And I’ve been so loving the work that we’ve been doing together, Ruth, on the botanical families and helping for flower essence practitioners and for the field of flower essence therapy to develop and to being able to see multiple things from a different angle rather than just this essences for this and this, essences for this, but to see these correlations in the families. And the first Dogwood, the one from FES is this, exactly this. It’s this lack of grace in the body. It’s this, whatever the injury was, it may have been a traumatic injury, and I think a lot of times it’s a traumatic injury of bonding, early developmental bonding like a lot of us experienced, to not be in our bodies, to lose that connection to our bodies and the Dogwood helps to bring that back, it helps to bring back this sense of being at home in our bodies and at one. And then the Bunchberry from Alaskan essences is a low-growing, not a beautiful, graceful, elegant tree, but a low-growing ground cover. And it has this ability to help us remember where our feet are. When we don’t have this sense of where we stand, we’re very scattered, we can’t think straight, we can’t focus. And the Bunchberry goes, be right with us, be here in your feet, in the Earth right now. And an essence that I’ve made, the Kousa Dogwood Bud I made with Jane Bell, my primary teacher. And we made this essence together. And this is a white flowering Dogwood tree but in the bud stage, in the green stage. And this quality that this essence brings is of knowing that you belong to the Earth, of knowing that you are loved by Gaia, that you are meant to be here, and that your incarnation in this moment has purpose. You are supported, you are loved and cared for by the Earth. This family is so special to me and so important in my practice. I use these essences with my human clients and my animal clients, and a lot of my clients are animal people and we all need this quality of coming back home to Earth.
Rochana Felde: [01:04:22] This has been incredible. I feel like this might be a good place to end. It feels so very complete to me and I feel so much more connected to you both through this sharing. And I hope that people watching and our listeners will connect to some elements of these stories and know that nature is here for you as Kathleen was just saying. We love our flower essences and they are such helpers on this journey, but also the bigger picture of nature and the elements is part of that journey, I think it’s a critical part, and so I hope that you find where it can help you in your journey.
Kathleen Aspenns: [01:05:21] If you have a parting thought, Ruth, I would love to hear it.
Speaker4: [01:05:24] Yeah. I really feel that from fragmentation, we can all eventually start reconnecting into wholeness. And that’s going to be the time when we’re able to rethink the project of the human species, because the way it’s going, it’s really self-destructive and self-annihilating really. So it requires a population of whole beings that can resonate that wholeness with one another. So I really invite everyone to go into this deep journey of healing for themselves and always feeling how wonderful it is to re-encounter this sense of re-integration, belonging, and wholeness. So I really encourage you to be part of this and to spread the message, because a lot of people are doing this work out of a very intellectual approach, and that makes us much more like we’re still fragmenting, we’re still dividing, we’re not creating wholeness. And so it’s only from more wholeness within that we can help create more unity and integration in the world.
Kathleen Aspenns: [01:06:58] This has been beautiful. Completely agree. Thank you.
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.
