FEP61 The Flower Essence Renaissance with Ruth Toledo Altschuler
Show Notes:
Ever wonder how we got from Dr. Bach’s research to where we are today? In the late 1970s and 80s there was a simultaneous explosion of new flower essences being discovered, researched, and produced around the world. Yet, this “second wave” of producers didn’t initially know about one another until the first international conference was held.
Ruth Toledo Altschuler came on the scene just as these gatherings began to happen, and she became a major importer of essences into Brazil at that time. In this episode, we have the honor of hearing her stories and adventures — how she met the people and visited the places of the FES, Alaskan, Australian essences, and more, in these early days of the post-Bach flower essence renaissance.
Join us for this rare treat and glimpse into the modern history of flower essences.
Audio:
Video:
Flower Essence makers and companies discussed during the show:
- The Flower Essence Society, Richard Katz and Patricia Kaminsky
- Pacific Essences, Sabina Pettitt
- Living Essences, Vasudeva and Kadambii Barnoo
- Spirit In Nature, Lila Devi
- Perelandra, Machaelle Small Wright
- Alaskan Essences, Steve Johnson, Shabd-Sangeet Khalsa
- Desert Alchemy, Cynthia Kemp
- Bush Essences, Ian White
- Delta Gardens, David Dalton
- Bloesem Remedies, Bram Zaalberg
- Philippe Deroide
- Dr Rupa Shah
Suggestions:
Bonus for listeners!
Recently, we’ve been reflecting on how much we appreciate all you listeners out there, and we decided to create a bonus video for you. This video is a recording on flower essences for stress and anxiety, and we hope you’ll benefit from it in these very anxious times.
Simply go to floweressencestudies.com/podbonus to claim your listener bonus!
Upcoming Practitioner Program
Registration is OPEN for the Flower Essence Practitioner Certification Program 🎉
Many of you have been eagerly awaiting this news!
We’re honored and excited that our co-founder Ruth Toledo Altschuler has brought her online FES Practitioner Certification Training Program to the School for Flower Essence Studies.
We’ve partnered together to expand the already amazing content and bring even more support to students.
Whether you’re an aspiring enthusiast looking to begin a practice, or a seasoned practitioner wanting to expand your knowledge, Ruth teaches in-depth flower essence therapy and optionally qualifies you for certification by the Flower Essence Society.
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Check out the registration page for the curriculum, schedule, pricing, and all the details.
Show Transcript
Rochana Felde: [00:00:42] Welcome back to The Flower Essence Podcast. This is Rochana, and I’m here with Kathleen Aspenns and Ruth Toledo Altschuler, and we have been working on a new Practitioner Certification Program for our school, The School for Flower Essence Studies. And as we’ve been developing content, we had a really interesting conversation together, the three of us about the sort of explosion of modern flower essences that seem to simultaneously sprout up around the world about the same time in the late ’70s and early ’80s. And we started hearing some stories from Ruth who has been around in this industry since this explosion. And we really wanted to capture her stories and hear this history of how we got where we are today and all of the players that you may have heard of in the flower essence industry and their lines, and you may use some of their lines, but I just find it really fascinating how it all came about. And so we wanted to get Ruth on, and we’re welcoming her back to the podcast.
So for those who aren’t familiar with Ruth’s work, she is a certified flower essence practitioner, an educator, and a mentor in practice for over three decades. She has a unique combination of experience unparalleled in the field. Originally from Brazil, Ruth was instrumental in developing flower essence therapy as a widely accepted modality in that country. She’s an authorized instructor for the FES Practitioner Certification Program, the creator of Essence Mentoring and Essence Circles, and of course, our co-founder in The School for Flower Essence Studies. Welcome, Ruth.
Ruth Toledo Altschuler: [00:02:48] Thank you so much and thanks so much for the opportunity of telling these stories. It’s something that I always think about. Stories need to be told so that they can be retold as time evolves. And so this is how I was actually first told about the story of how all this let’s say second wave of research on flower essences originated. And it was only perhaps a decade after that I got into the fold and started having a big role in what happened in Brazil. So the reason why I got into this, and I’m actually going to quote from a piece that I wrote that was part of my blog on having history registered, it’s about what happened in Brazil. What happened during those years was truly astonishing on what concerns flower essences. Nothing of this magnitude has happened before or after in any other country that I know of, a passion for flower essences was lighting many hearts. In a contagious intensity between ’87 and around 1994, we watched this passionate enthusiasm taking over. I know how mine felt, how it lit me up and I would recognize it in numerous individuals. Different groups emerged simultaneously. Eventually, we became a big and somewhat interconnected countrywide community. Brazilians were ready and open towards flower essences, while in many other countries in the world the interest on this has been localized and specific, in Brazil at that time, the interest on flower essences spread like quick fire. And this was not only a person-to-person phenomenon or one of restricted to limited circles. During those years I was interviewed for numerous articles in the media. My explanations on what are flower essences and how they could help people got published in magazines, newspapers, TV interviews. They knew their public was eager to know about flower essences. So this was making the news. And there was a landmark. In September 22 and 23 of 1990, the first encounter of Bach essences gathered more than 1,200 participants, an exuberant moment happening on the opening of the Southern Hemisphere spring in 1990, an event organized by two families with a multitude of people registering. So they didn’t have room for everyone. They had rented a room for 8,000. They had to rent an additional room with TV screens. And so that was the kind of explosive interest in flower essences that was brewing in Brazil, and I was part of it. And at that time, I was already a practitioner with a waiting list, and I couldn’t keep up with the clients that I had to see, which is something that continued for many years.
So I got contacted by this woman who was going to open a healing center and I was going to participate in a flower essence conference in Victoria. And then I’m going to tell the rest of the story as we go. But this was going to be the second flower essence international conference, and I was to go there and this woman contacted me and said, “I want you to curate and buy a good amount of flower essences for my store.” She gave me a substantial amount in cash, and she gave me the responsibility of selecting flower essences from the best producers that I decided to choose. And so I landed at this conference to which I had also been invited to be a speaker because I was the only one who applied as a speaker and was from South America and Sabina Pettitt invited me to be a speaker there. And that’s when I started learning about what had happened before. So I was told that a year before for the first time, all these flower essence producers had gathered in France for a first flower essence conference, and as they get together, they find out that almost simultaneously, at the same time, they had all started their research. So the history of the whole thing is that in the late ’70s and early to mid ’80s, almost simultaneously in different places around the Earth, in different ecosystems, these people felt the calling to begin preparing flower essences from flowers that grew around in the places that they lived. And so we had. First around the same time Vasudeva and Kadambii Barnoo in Western Australia, and Richard Katz, soon to be joined by Patricia Kaminski in California. So that was in the late 1970s. And then in the early 1980s, we have a whole succession of people. Well, in around the same time, there was also Lila Devi in California as well. There was Machaelle Small Wright of Perelandra in a different place in the United States. And none of these people knew about each other, but they were all at the same time emerging with their research being called by the plants to prepare flower essences of plants growing close to them. So when we met in that second conference Sabina Pettitt put together a table, a panel that was led by Steve Johnson, the founder of the Alaskan Essences. And he started the second opening of the conference after that keynote speaker, first lecture saying, “The family comes together again.” And this was welling tears on both the ones who were sitting at this panel table and everyone in the audience because there’s something about the calling of the work with flower essences that really brings something, a light within people’s soul. So there’s more to this story, but these are some pieces that I wanted to start off with.
Kathleen Aspenns: [00:11:45] Well, it’s really beautiful to hear how all these threads come together. Even though everybody was working away and nobody knew what anybody else was doing, and yet the call from nature was so strong that everyone felt like, oh, I got to do this even though I don’t even know what it is. And for you to be front and center experiencing and getting to contact and see all these people as they’re all cross-pollinating must have been just really inspiring. Your earliest interactions with essences were probably with the healing herbs and the FES essences or where did that all start?
Ruth Toledo Altschuler: [00:12:31] Yeah, it started with the Bach essences. I actually got a kit of the Bach essences after I was given a brochure on Dr. Bach’s work. And then there was a friend who was coming from the Netherlands to visit, and I asked for my first kit, and then I immediately started using it. And then there was this man who was– I heard about the FES essences and I bought the early version of the repertoire. It was a very thin book at the time, and I just couldn’t stop looking at it and using it for my own work with the pendulum. And it was very helpful for the journey of big transformation and change that I was going through in my own life but I didn’t have the essences yet. And then I contacted this man who was bringing to Brazil crystals and also astrology program calculators, and I asked him if he could bring me a kit of the California essences. And he did. And while he brought the kit, he also brought the news that this conference was going to happen in Canada in the next few months and that Richard Katz was being asked about distribution in Brazil. So it was all kind of happening at the same time. I got my first California kit. I started actually being able to have the essences and take them, not only use them from the book, and I was already working with all these people who were coming to me. It was all happening at the same time.
And so then when I went to this conference I got to meet these people. But the most important thing, and that’s something that I would really like to underscore here was that on each presentation that I watched presented by these producers, they were bringing the forces of nature and the presence of the archetypes of the plants with them. And I could feel that in the experience of each one of these lectures in what was happening in the room with all of us. And so I won’t forget how with Patricia Kaminski, she was bringing in the depth of the alchemical work with the essences, the profound changes, but at the same time the vibrancy of the plants. Cynthia Kemp with her beautiful presentations with amazing photography and music, she was bringing the presence of the desert environment and all these unique plants. And the most moving for me was really Steve Johnson and at the time Shabd-Sangeet Khalsa who was working alongside and presenting alongside with him and he was really bringing the power of the environment of Alaska and the archetypal force of each one of these plants like Fireweed. And this really struck me because I learned to respect and honor that connection with nature and that connection with the plant that the flower essence producers need to have for that work to really have the substance, the integrity and the aliveness. And this stayed with me as a core criteria that directs my work in so many ways and also my teaching work as well. Yeah.
Rochana Felde: [00:17:33] It really fills me with joy to hear the story and the very beginnings of flower essence producers and practitioners and enthusiasts coming together in those first conferences. I mean, this is the days before anything was online, and like you said, nobody really knew about each other or what other people were doing in other parts of the country and the world, and to come in together and be in the same room and to get that energy from the plants and the people working with the plants, I mean, I’m getting chills putting myself there mentally, and it just must have been a really amazing experience.
Ruth Toledo Altschuler: [00:18:16] Yeah, it was really something that I think had never happened before. It also had that strength of soul recognition, like people really feeling that kinship and also feeling the presence of the plants and the diva of these environments coming with them. So it was really something very remarkable. Thank you for underscoring that.
Rochana Felde: [00:18:53] Yeah. And even today, I mean, the flower essence community, we’re a small community. And it wasn’t until I started working seriously with flower essences that I realized that most of these producers, I mean, obviously the big ones that you hear about, but there’s so many others that have been around for a long time that I have continuously been learning about only in the last probably few years really, the extent of the people who have been working with essences and the details about what those essences bring and the energies that they have. So for people, yeah, to back then in the early ’90s, the late ’80s, it must have felt like really an awakening, an awakening of plant consciousness happening on a lot of different levels.
Ruth Toledo Altschuler: [00:19:57] Yeah, absolutely. And the one thing that followed that I mean was being able to bring each one of these teachers to Brazil to teach classes that would really bring that awareness and the understanding of the forces in their environment and all of that. And each one of these teachers was asked to develop a class for a very craving audience because people were really wanting to learn. They didn’t want the superficial stuff. They wanted like three days, four days intensive workshops, and they wanted to go deep. And so over a period of many years, we got to hear these teachers share in ways that they weren’t even used to sharing because they didn’t usually meet audiences such as the one that we had developed in Brazil. And I got the privilege of not only helping these teachers outline the programs that they wanted to present by interacting with them and asking them, okay, here you can expand or this is great, etc., but also to be their translator all the time throughout these classes. And then later taking groups of Brazilians to their environments to learn within the ecosystem where the essences were prepared as well.
Kathleen Aspenns: [00:21:53] And this educational foundation that you were creating for the practice of flower essence therapy in Brazil is coming sort of as a second result of bringing in these essences into Brazil. So you’ve been involved in the selection and the importing so that they’re available in Brazil. And then it was so important to you that practitioners be really well-versed in these essences so that you encourage the producers to create great content so that the practitioners were incredibly well-trained and incredibly experienced as they began or as the field grew in Brazil.
Ruth Toledo Altschuler: [00:22:37] Absolutely. And I have to underscore the fact that this was really very much the approach that was asked for by FES. When they were contacted about having a distributor in Brazil, one of the conditions that they gave to whomever was to become the distributor, and that was before I came into the picture, was that there was a strong educational component as part of the distribution and in parallel to the distribution. And this is really very much how they see this work getting anchored and growing. And this is one of the reasons why I have so much appreciation and respect for the educational material that they’ve developed over the decades which is part of the Practitioner Training that we’re going to be offering. So for them, there was not one thing without the other. You had to have the selling of the essences and well-anchored and good quality educational offerings. And these would have to be happening at the same time. Yeah. And so bringing them into Brazil to teach the first class in I think ’92 it was, was one of the first big experiences as well. But then that followed with many of the other teachers that we brought over a period of many years. Yeah.
Rochana Felde: [00:24:34] And how did you meet Steve Johnson and begin importing Alaskan Essences?
Ruth Toledo Altschuler: [00:24:40] Well, that was of course in that Victoria conference in 1991. He was one of the presenters there. And what happened was I had been given this task of curating a collection of essences for a woman who was going to open a store, and she gave me in cash $8,000 to buy whatever essences I thought were really great quality and of interest. And she said, “Don’t bring the California because I’m buying directly from them. But whatever else you find that you really choose, I trust you, I trust your criteria and just have them shipped to my warehouse in Florida.” So she made it very simple and easy for them. And when I was watching these presentations in Victoria, I was really moved by the work that Steve Johnson was doing and by the Alaskan Essences and these kits that he had, they were at the time 1 dram kits, they were tiny kits, and they were absolutely precious. And the power of each one of these essences and the messages of these plants really spoke so deeply to me. So when having to make the decision of how I was going to invest the money that was given to me to buy for this woman, I decided I was going to give half of the amount for all the other lines that I chose and the other half I was going to buy only Alaskan Essences, Alaskan Essence kits. So that was $4,000 in cash as a big purchase of his essences right there on the spot. And I know that this really changed the direction of his life because at the time he had started the Alaskan Flower Essence project, but he was also working as a firefighter for survival. And flower essences didn’t sell all that much, so he couldn’t really go totally towards that work. And that moment really helped him decide, okay, now I’m going to step out of my work as a firefighter. That was really very taxing on him physically, and I’m going to devote my life to this work with the flower essences. So we became friends since that time, and I became his distributor eventually in Brazil as well and brought him to teach many courses. And it was just the beginning of the story.
Kathleen Aspenns: [00:27:55] And as a lifelong friend, you have had many experiences also at visiting Alaska and walking with him and experiencing the plants first-hand. So your experience with these essences is not exclusively second-hand. You have a lot of first-hand experiences with the Alaskan Essences as well as so many of the other lines as well.
Ruth Toledo Altschuler: [00:28:23] Absolutely. And of course one of the things that I always tell and that for me is a core part of the stories that I like to share is that the first time that flower essences really came alive for me beyond the books and the bottles was when I went to take my first practitioner training at FES. It was just a couple months after that conference that I flew back to Brazil and back to California. And learning in the garden with Patricia and Richard and just being there with the plants and then going to some places in the Sierra Nevada and visiting the plants in the wild and doing my first plant study right there with the spreading Phlox, which is an essence for connecting with your soul, family, and community, this really changed everything and really brought flower essence work to life with roots and to a true connection with the plants and their healing power.
Rochana Felde: [00:29:48] Are there any other early producers or people that you crossed paths with that you’d like to highlight or tell us about in these early days?
Ruth Toledo Altschuler: [00:30:01] Yeah. I think Sabina Pettitt who has been part of the conference that we organized at The School for Flower Essence Studies, she has been a remarkable person because of her passion and enthusiasm and her great connection and her ability to bring the family together as organizer of that conference. And she is really someone to be honored also because she’s an acupuncturist, and she has made all this bridge between flower essences and Chinese medicine. Ian White, it’s been great to learn about the unique environment of Australia with him and being invited into those places and those very different plants was just such a great experience to learn through the presence of those plants and to learn by walking with him in the bush. Of course, at the time I also met, when I took my practitioner training at FES, David Dalton was there and he was already making his essences. So I met him as a colleague there. I also, at the same time in ’91, got to meet Bram Zaalberg, the researcher of flower essences from the Netherlands, and he was a really very attuned teacher, very interesting teacher of flower essences. I remember he went out to the garden, he picked up a bunch of Shasta Daisies. He gave everyone a Daisy. And we were sitting there and looking, observing that Daisy, but then also experiencing how that Daisy would help us to kind of sense all that information that we were coming in contact with during that course and feeling all of that universe of pieces, and then gathering all these pieces into a more coherent whole and owning what we could hold within ourselves in an organized way. So he said, “Just let go of what’s not something you can really incorporate, and embody the information that can be alive in you.” And so alongside with that flower that he picked and gave to each one of us, we had that experience of the Shasta Daisy healing. I also know that in the year before, that was in 1990, there was this man in France, Philippe Deroide, whom I never got to meet, and he had organized the first flower essence conference. So he had been another one of those pioneers having a research that was not so much his original research. He kind of made the Bach essences and some essences that were similar to others. So there was a woman from India, Dr. Rupa Shah, and her husband, who were medical doctors from India, were also at that conference. I’m sure there were more people there, but those were the ones that I remember. So I don’t want anyone to take this history as being the only history. And of course, there’s a period after in the early 1990s where a lot of other producers began doing their work as well.
Kathleen Aspenns: [00:34:25] And in addition to your firsthand experience of meeting these producers and teachers and transmitting this knowledge of these flower essences through you to the students, you’ve been to these ecosystems. And as a teacher, as an instructor, you bring through this direct transmission of experience with the plants. In addition, with your experience and great talent in photography and in helping the plants speak to the students, I’d love to hear about how you see the photography being able to help people connect really on a very deep level through the imagery.
Ruth Toledo Altschuler: [00:35:11] Yeah. I love this question. Yeah, I think it was not by chance that I ended up eventually marrying and moving to California and having many opportunities to go to the mountains where the flowers of the essences that I worked with were growing and also to other ecosystems. And my way of approaching these plants, one of my favorite ways has been through bringing in my camera and getting very close to them and kneeling or lying with my belly on the ground and looking up at the level of the flower and really being there for a long time with those flowers, taking these pictures with this kind of resonance with them, and then bringing these pictures back and then discovering more of what the flowers reveal to me through the macro photo enlarged and then editing and preparing the slideshows. And each time I dive in to the memory of these places that stayed alive with me and then these images, there’s so much that comes into my awareness in terms of the presence of each one of these plant archetypes, and I feel that’s a very important contribution of my teaching work as an educator. Yeah. And of course, thanks to the fact that my first career was as a photographer. So I really learned to master this technique early on.
Rochana Felde: [00:37:22] Your photography is so beautiful and we are just so lucky to have that as well as you in our joint ventures with Flower Essence Education because it brings so much, that visual. The visuals bring so much and helping people who’ve never met the plant or been to those environments to kind of be there and meet the plant in the next best way of not being there in person.
Ruth Toledo Altschuler: [00:37:52] Yeah, I know it does that to me because even being so familiar when I revisit, it’s just so healing as an experience to be with how the plants communicate through their images. I guess that’s probably because flowers are attractors and they’re attractors of other species. So we are just drawn to them and they communicate with us and they’re really great communicators on behalf of the plants.
Rochana Felde: [00:38:43] They did some Japanese studies a while ago testing the presence of flowers in the classroom and how it could reduce stress and anxiety for people in the room. And they did it with fresh flowers which got a really good response. And they also tried it with pictures of flowers and that also was better than– it was also good, not as good as the live, but it also was scientifically shown that pictures of flowers can reduce stress and anxiety. So I believe it. And then adding into it the intention and the connection on that level, that flower essence level, that healing level is to me even more so it is a beautiful melding of your talents.
Ruth Toledo Altschuler: [00:39:37] Yeah. And one thing that we have found is that when you invite people to an experience with a plant, you can begin with the image only, and then you can also bring the flower essences. So for people who are elsewhere and don’t have access to some of these flower essences, and if you listen to this podcast and you say, “Oh, I wish I could have access to this flower essence, but I can’t,” just know that through the image there’s a lot of what that plant can impart for you in terms of its healing power.
[/ppp_patron_only]Kathleen Aspenns: [00:40:23] And as an educator for so many years training practitioners in Brazil in real-life experiences, you are finding it elegantly available to train people online and that you’re bringing this education to somebody anywhere they might happen to be without having to travel, without having to drop their lives so that they can participate in Practitioner Training. I’d love to hear a little bit about how you see the value of learning to be a practitioner through an online experience.
Ruth Toledo Altschuler: [00:41:07] Yeah, I would say that it’s wonderful if you can go to the ecosystem where the plants grow and if you can be with the plants that are being taught about and I highly recommend that as well. But I have to say that the online experience, because we don’t have to spend time traveling and with all the preparation and all the logistics, etc., and we’re totally focused in learning from and with each plant, this brings an ability for us to focus and to be together in that experience and to examine the images of these plants with a lot of attention, but it also allows us to have access to those recordings and go back and listen again and again. And that’s one of the things that I have been finding that the students who have taken these trainings that I’ve offered, the really dedicated ones, they keep going through the recordings and watching and looking at the slides again and observing, and they get so much from it. So that’s the other side that even though a lot of people say, oh, I don’t like to be on the computer too much, but there are some gifts and some blessings that are being offered through this technology that we have access to these days. And I think the fact that we can transmit even the soulful messaging through this live transmission at a distance is a reality. It really does happen. Some people might think, oh, you can’t really do it through this technology, but I can assure you that it touches us very deeply, and the experience that we can have is very powerful as well, both in terms of learning as well as in terms of our own healing journey.
Rochana Felde: [00:43:46] This has been a fantastic conversation and we are just so thrilled to be partnered with you, Ruth. I know I’ve already said it, but I’m saying it again, and really excited to bring your Practitioner Training course to The School for Flower Essence Studies. And it’s coming in January 2024, so we have more information coming on that soon. But if you’re interested, sign up for our mailing list at floweressencestudies.com and you will be notified when that’s open for registration.
Ruth Toledo Altschuler: [00:44:30] Thank you so much. And I can’t say just how thrilled I am to be doing this work in collaboration with the two of us. It just makes a world of difference to me and it just makes me so much happier. So, thank you.
Kathleen Aspenns: [00:44:51] We’re doing this, all of us flower lovers are bringing this together to help this work spread as it’s kind of been a little dormant in the US for some time. And now you’re here living in the US and bringing all that energy and enthusiasm and experience so that we can benefit from it and build a really well-trained and heartful group of practitioners into the United States and beyond because your students, they’re coming in from everywhere. So we’re all over as flower essence people. Come join us at the next training. And we’d like to throw a little bonus in for listeners. Thank you, thank you, thank you so much for being a part of the podcast, of listening and telling us how much you enjoy the podcast and sharing it with your friends. We wanted to send you a little thank you. So we have a little bonus video available. It’s a recording on essences for stress and anxiety. I’m sure that’s probably a coherent topic for right now. A lot of us are feeling a lot of stress and anxiety about the world, so simply go to floweressencestudies.com/podbonus and you can get that and watch the video. We’d love to hear what you think.
Rochana Felde: [00:46:17] Yeah. And its Podbonus, P-O-D-B-O-N-U-S, all one word, floweressencestudies.com/podbonus and get your gift. Thank you, everyone.
Kathleen Aspenns: [00:46:32] Thanks for being with us, Ruth. Bye-bye now.
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.
