Show Notes:

In this episode, Kathleen and Rochana navigate the nervous system responses when triggered or emotionally activated. How do we recognize when it’s happening and what are some things we can do immediately to cope? How can we work with these deeply embedded reactions that at minimum feel uncomfortable but often are painful and uncontrollable? We discuss the importance of releasing emotion from the body and using flower essences to assist in creating a safe container for this work, as we strive to increase resilience and regain equilibrium in our lives.

Audio:

FEP70 Getting Triggered! Strategies for Coping and Increasing Resilience

In this episode, Katheen and Rochana navigate the nervous system responses when triggered or emotionally activated. How do we recognize when it’s happening and what are some things we can do immediately to cope? How can we work with these deeply embedded reactions that at minimum feel uncomfortable but often are painful and uncontrollable?

Video:

Flower Essences discussed during the show:

• Rescue Remedy AKA Five Flower Formula – Healing Herbs
• Clematis – Bach or Healing Herbs
• Cherry Plum – Bach or Healing Herbs
• Post Trauma Stabilizer – FES
• Angelica – FES
• Black Tourmaline – Alaskan Essences
• Redwood – FES

Resources:

Lissa Rankin – quote from her recent blog post How Do We Stop Projecting & Start Owning Our Mistakes

Peter Levine, book Awakening the Tiger: Healing Trauma

The School for Flower Essence Studies: Flower Essence Practitioner Training

Show Transcript

Welcome back, flower friends. Today we’re going to talk about a topic that could be a little triggering. So we’ve been experiencing this and we’ve been watching this in the world lately how a lot of people’s reactions have been pretty hot. You don’t have to go too far to look at the news or just interpersonal reactions. And there’s a lot of hot, agitated interactions happening. And we thought this would be a really good opportunity to talk about this process of being triggered and what we can do about it because that’s really the beauty about flower essences is that the essences can come in and unwind some of these triggers in us, and help us find better perspective on our emotions and allow them to flow more smoothly and easily without turning into a rage monster. So we’ll be talking about some things that could be possibly triggering, and we want to talk about some skills that you can develop to help yourself when you do feel triggered. But be gentle with yourself, as always. And if it’s a little too much, take a little break and pop back in. Ro, it’s really good to be in this space with you again.

Rochana Felde: [00:01:56] Yes, as always, this is our 70th podcast. Isn’t that amazing? And what an interesting topic. It is so appropriate for right now, for this time in our collective, and we hear that term triggered a lot these days, right? It’s not something that used to be in the common vocabulary, but it certainly is these days. And I see that it’s used both very specifically in that more traditional psychotherapy term and then also very broadly. And in some cases, some people think that we’re overusing the word. But I think part of that reason is that when people are becoming more aware of their own processes, it also seems to be a more socially acceptable way for people to say that something angered or upset them. And I know for many women, it’s not okay to say, I’m angry about something, or we didn’t grow up with it being okay to acknowledge those kinds of emotions, emit them, or be public about them. And so being triggered has become maybe a more accepted way to say that.

But also in some cases, it’s been used as a way to maybe not take responsibility for one’s emotions. And we’re going to definitely talk a little bit more about that. But what do you think about the more traditional meaning of the word in the way that it’s been used to talk about something that happens in the present that is activating a past experience, especially if it was traumatic, and we have a psychological or emotional reaction. I think that’s really what we’re dealing with when we’re dealing with trauma or PTSD or having that just sudden spark of intense emotion or a physical state, and it just prevents us from being in that present moment, and we can’t think rationally. So that’s where we can start with it and talk more about the other forms of this. What do you think?

Kathleen Aspenns: [00:04:28] I agree because what happens is when you get triggered, and we’re going to keep using that term, there’s possibly other options, but this one I think makes sense to most people at this point, the experience of feeling triggered is in some ways you could look at it as your nervous system becoming overwhelmed. You aren’t able to hold what’s happening. Everyone has different responses to this, and depending on the type of triggering or activation of your nervous system, you might be experiencing different types of nervous system states that are dysregulated, and you might be experiencing what we would term like fight or flight. Those are two real clear options.

And so all of a sudden, you’re interacting with somebody and you don’t even know what sparked them, but now all of a sudden, they’re really upset and they’re confrontational. And you’re like, what even just happened? And they might also have this flight response where they just absent themselves from the conversation. And once again, these things are very internal. And unless someone who you’re interacting with has more awareness of what’s going on inside of them, they may not even know what’s happening. They likely don’t know what’s happening, and they’re just overtaken by their nervous system and they aren’t able to be in the present. Like you said earlier, Ro, it’s this quality of being able to be in this moment and being able to hold space for it all and realize, oh, look at that. That’s coming up. I’m having a really intense experience. But the beautiful thing about essences is that they can help you develop enough spaciousness in yourself to be able to endure that flowing, that flooded emotion with enough spaciousness to hold your ground, to be able to hold your consciousness, your awareness in the moment. And it does get easier and it does get less triggery. So that’s really the beautiful thing is, we’re not talking about an imaginary world where no one ever gets triggered because that’s just not realistic. But we do want to affirm looking forward to a world where everyone’s emotions are valuable and valid, but also they are responsible for them.

Rochana Felde: [00:07:05] Absolutely. And just to reiterate, we might not know that it’s even happening. If it’s that deep, it’s like a subconscious reaction that we just do and are not conscious of it. And I’ve witnessed that quite a lot. And it’s really interesting because other people can see it, but that person can’t in those situations where it is a triggering from a past trauma or experience that is just an immediate nervous system fight or flight. The body just has to react.

I think there’s another kind of being triggered that’s less extreme. Some people call it being activated. And that might be a more appropriate term for these less intense responses. So it doesn’t necessarily tie into a past experience, but something really bothered us or sparked a physical or emotional response and we probably have some level of awareness that it’s happening and even are able to see that cause and that effect, but we might not know what to do about it or be able to stop it or might be unsure of how to work with that. And so that’s again where these flower essences come in so beautifully.

Kathleen Aspenns: [00:08:35] What you’re referring to, I think of it as like a spectrum, the spectrum of the nervous system of being able to contain a little bit, but not if it was heavily triggered. And so each one of us might have these experiences of being completely triggered and having a panic attack versus feeling a little bit upset and frustrated and not really sure exactly what’s happening. And so we don’t necessarily need to have the gigantic reaction in order to benefit from some essences because on some level, I think sometimes we think that we become identified with these experiences and our responses to them and feel like it’s some part of us that it’s just part of our personality or it’s hardwired in. And it isn’t necessarily. We can do a lot of growth around some things.

And somebody who considers themselves to be a hothead might actually not be that much of a hothead. It may be a lot of old stuff that really hasn’t processed through. And for me, that’s really the big thing about that ability to go through these experiences that do come up all the time. We’re in the world with other people or with animals sometimes, and they can push our buttons. And it seems to me that our personal work as humans, as flower essence practitioners, is to explore all of our buttons and to diffuse them as much as we possibly can. Not that we’re trying to brainwash ourselves, but we’re actually trying to release that stuff that got stuck there that time. One time, very long ago, perhaps, that you were overwhelmed and you didn’t have the capacity to experience that experience, and so you had a huge response. You had maybe fight or flight. A very lot of the time, I think you also have a freeze response. And so there’s a lot of people out there whose nervous systems are constantly in freeze, they become dissociated. There’s the freeze, and it’s almost a faint. It’s almost a loss of consciousness. You’re not even sure you’re there. You look like you’re there, but you’re not really there.

And there’s also another one. These are what we call in the TTouch system, we call them the four Fs. So it’s fight and flight, and then there’s freeze and faint, and then there’s fidget. And this is not one that I’ve heard much in the human world talking about, but when somebody is over threshold, they often try to distract themselves. So when we’re working with horses or dogs, they might get really mouthy. They might start grabbing at clothing or grabbing at things around, and they can’t stand still. And for a long time I thought, okay, well, that’s an animal-specific thing, but it’s totally not. We humans do that too, but we have the ability to compensate for our behaviors. And so we go off and we go check to see what’s in the fridge, perhaps, or we light up a cigarette, or we go and engage in some sort of distraction behavior. And that’s like you’re not able to be with that feeling that you’re having. And that is part of this whole process of feeling activated by something that we can’t deal with.

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Rochana Felde: [00:12:09] Interesting about the fidgeting. I would say from a neurodivergent perspective, I mean, that’s definitely something we do to soothe ourselves, to soothe our emotions and our nervous system. I’m squeezing a squeeze ball right now as we do the podcast, and it’s just something that helps keep the rest of my body still because I would be moving all around. So, full disclosure, here I am. But anyway, I hadn’t thought about that in terms of the fight-flight-freeze. And then also there’s fawn, that’s another one.

So there’s all sorts of coping mechanisms that we have developed, all of us. Whatever personality type we are and whatever kind of upbringing we’ve had, I mean, we go through life, we grow up and we develop coping mechanisms. And what’s interesting is,  and I come to terms with this every day, I’m in my 50s, and here all of a sudden, I’ve got some childhood experience coming up to be worked on. All of a sudden I’m having a response to something happening, and it’s bringing this up, and I’m like, wow, why is this coming up now in my life? And I feel like when we’re on a healing journey, when we’ve been working through things, healing things, the more that we do, the more things are ready to come up. So we may have suppressed them for decades for our lifetime, we may have come up with such good coping strategies that we didn’t have to deal with facing them, and once we start to peel back those layers in any kind of healing process, those things can start to come up again. And they come up for healing. So as you said, I mean, these things that are happening, these triggers, they’re showing us something, they’re telling us something, and giving us a really good clue into what’s going on that we might want to work with.

Kathleen Aspenns: [00:14:32] I completely resonate with everything you said. And we are all perfectly imperfect, working through our processes. So I don’t think either of us is going to stand up and say, I have completely worked through all of my stuff. No, that’s not how it works. But you have worked through a lot, and we’ve both worked through a lot in our own journeys. And we can also see how much more there is to do. And that’s the beauty of life, is there’s always something more to do. But also, as a practitioner, I have had the total lived experience of these triggers melting away and no longer experiencing these huge, overwhelming emotional storms that I used to have when I was triggered or something. It is such an extraordinary relief to no longer get hijacked on a multi-times-a-day basis. And this does bring me to something that I do see out quite a lot where there’s trigger warnings on things and that’s totally appropriate. I know that I have to manage certain things, like I’m interested in listening to people talking about cult recovery because this is something I’ve experienced and work with, but I can’t listen to or read endless amounts of that without getting a little overwhelmed. And so I have to modulate. I have to realize, okay, that’s a little too much for me today. But I’ve learned how to work with it and to engage with it on a certain level and maintain my center, and to realize when I’m starting to slip off center. So for me, it’s about I’m in charge of creating my own internal safe space rather than the world is responsible for making it for me. And that’s part of the personal responsibility, which is such a heavy word, but it’s our own way of living our own internal lives and allowing the world to do what it does and being able to realize, okay, I can’t control all of that, but I can control my own experience. And if I need to absent myself from a space or if I need to do something different, then I go ahead and do that because this trigger is mine, it’s my experience. And now I’m not speaking to somebody who is in physical danger or anything or is being actively abused. That is a different story. But what I’m talking about is triggers that are coming from my experiences from maybe old stories, old histories that I have embedded in my cells. And they are mine, and they are mine to work with and mine to be responsible for my emotions and to hold those spaces for myself so that I don’t project them onto other people.

Rochana Felde: [00:17:44] So important, be responsible for the energy that you bring in too, because when we’re in that mode, we spill out, our emotions spill out, our trauma spills out of us into the room to the conversation with other people, and it can be really damaging. So, it’s an art. It’s a fine line. I mean, you have to protect yourself, you have to remove yourself when it’s not healthy, but also, we are here to learn about ourselves and to grow and we want to make the world a safe place for ourselves and everybody, absolutely. And we should all be striving to do that, but we don’t want to do it to the extent that we have a utopian dream that there’s no more challenges. We want to become resilient to those challenges. I think that’s really the key because for human survival, we have to be in community. We can’t survive by ourselves. We have to be in community. That community is going to contain other people with different viewpoints and opinions, and somebody might inadvertently say or do something that is not pleasant for us. And we really do have to learn how to become resilient so that we can stay together in our community and to survive. I don’t know, that’s how I see it. What do you think?

Kathleen Aspenns: [00:19:37] 100%. The ideal of the frictionless social interaction, it’s unrealistic. For me, I have this mental image of, we’re all rocks in a tumbler, and we’re all rotating around, knocking edges off, interacting with one another, and it’s clunky and it can be messy having real relationships, having interactions with real-life humans that, like you say, sometimes they’ll say things we don’t like to hear. And what do we do about that, and how do we keep engaging? Because we do need community, we do need people in our lives, and they’re not always going to agree with us 100% of the time, and they’re not always going to say things really gracefully. And I know I’m not always saying things really gracefully.

So how do we create enough spaciousness and enough grace for each other and ourselves that we can continue to work together on this process of life? I was reading Lissa Rankin’s newsletter this morning, and she wrote something really useful. She’s doing some work on relationship interactions, and one of her models is the internal family systems. And so I’m just going to read a short piece from her newsletter. She talks about, “Owning your emotions means recognizing that your feelings are yours, and you’re entitled to your feelings. But just because you’re having a feeling doesn’t mean someone else is. While your partner’s actions may trigger certain emotions, the root of those emotions often lies within you. This is where radical responsibility comes in, the willingness to take full ownership of your emotional experience. When you feel triggered, take a moment to reflect on the emotion. Where is it coming from? What past experiences or beliefs might be influencing your reaction? By taking ownership of your emotions, you empower yourself to heal the underlying issues rather than projecting them onto your partner. This doesn’t mean ignoring or dismissing your partner’s behavior if it’s genuinely harmful. Rather, it’s about recognizing the interplay between your inner world and your external experiences. By taking responsibility for your emotions, you can approach conflicts from a place of clarity and empowerment rather than from a reactive projected space.” And isn’t that the goal that we reach out to our world, and we take the posture of being the hero of our life story and not the victim of our life story? That’s where the essences can come in and make that switch for you.

Rochana Felde: [00:22:25] Yeah. And also taking responsibility for our emotions doesn’t mean not having emotions. So that’s the biggest thing that is jumping out at me right now. It’s absolutely okay and desired to have emotions. That’s what we do as human beings. And so yeah, it absolutely does not mean not to have them. It doesn’t mean to suppress them. It doesn’t mean that the ones that you have aren’t valid. They are absolutely 100% valid at all times. So that is not what we’re saying by taking responsibility. I think it’s more about owning them, like knowing that they came from me, they came from within me, these emotions. Maybe the situation didn’t come from me, maybe the horrible thing that I’m seeing or hearing that’s triggering me, that doesn’t come from me, but how I respond and how I react is coming from me. And that doesn’t necessarily mean either that we are blaming ourselves. We’re not doing that. We’re not blaming ourselves. We are not being hard on ourselves for having them. And that’s the flip side of taking responsibility. And the flip side that I know I personally have gone too far in, in feeling down on myself and feeling like a flawed human being because I reacted in some way. That’s over-responsibility. So definitely that’s not the place to go either.

Kathleen Aspenns: [00:24:05] It is quite a balancing act, being a human. What you’re saying also about the emotions, emotions need to flow freely in order for them to leave their messages, to provide the messages to us about what’s going on in our experience and then they can be done. The minute we try to yell, shut up, shut up, shut up to an important message, it has nowhere to go and it gets stuck. And then they just get louder and more distorted and more stressful because we’re just so busy telling them to shut up. Whether it’s our inability to experience anger or whether it’s our inability to whatever, whatever emotions that we have not allowed, not permitted, they get distorted and stuck and then they just can’t do what they’re supposed to do, which is to move. So having emotions is part of human experience, totally appropriate. And how do we help some of these stuck emotions move on so that we can now have fresh new appropriate ones or appropriate to the moment rather than old replays that just never quite got through.

Rochana Felde: [00:25:26] Yeah, I think it’s about time to bring some flower essences into this, don’t you? And the very first thing, I mean, I think when something is happening, when we’re feeling that trigger moment, when we’re upset is to get back to the present moment. I think that’s just the key first step in all of these possible scenarios. And of course, our good old friend Rescue Remedy or Five-Flower Formula is the perfect thing to have with you for these moments and to use when something like this happens as an immediate thing.

Kathleen Aspenns: [00:26:10] It is a basic formula that really should be in everyone’s handbag or on their desk or whatever because things come up in a moment and you may not be able to have enough resources to really think about it or think about, well, this is more related to this essence. So having a Rescue Remedy formula on hand is a really good starting place.

You could go through each one of these five flowers and talk about it from the perspective of the different emotions that it’d be working with, just to start with Clematis. Clematis is the freeze response. It’s the faint. It’s like I’m not present in this moment. And having Clematis come back in to help you come back embody your body and be back in this moment. Sometimes you need to move your body also if you can. Taking some Rescue Remedy and just trying to gut it through. Sometimes moving around a little bit is helpful just to come back into your body because when you have a triggered experience, a lot of us leave. We’re up and out, or we can’t contain it. So being able to go and feel your feet on the floor, even if you can’t leave your space, feeling your feet on the floor is a really good way to get yourself more grounded. Taking your Rescue, feeling your feet on the floor, feeling your sit bones in your chair, and if you can walk around a little bit, it helps to move the energy because when we get triggered, when we get reactive, the energy tends not to be moving. It tends to be really old content that has come up and doesn’t know where to go.

Rochana Felde: [00:27:48] Yeah, that part of it is so common and the hardest one to recognize, when you disassociate, when somebody disassociates because if somebody is hitting a fight or a flight response, it’s pretty easy to see in other people and to see in yourself, but the disassociation part is one that’s harder to observe, and it can happen in such a minor way. We might just space out for a few minutes. Might not be that big of a deal really. So it doesn’t really clue us in to that something– unless we’re very aware of ourselves, we might not recognize that something happened that made us disassociate for a few moments. And that’s where the Clematis comes in.

So the other flowers in the Five-Flower too, they each work on those different pieces. Cherry Plum for that feeling like you can’t handle it, like you’re going to go nuts, it’s too much, that worry that you’re just going crazy is the Cherry Plum essence. And there’s more. But the Five-Flower Formula, which is the same five flowers as Rescue Remedy in this two different brands are absolutely critical to keep with you for these things.

But I also like Soul Support by Alaskan Essences. It works a little bit differently. It does work in the moment, but it’s also a nice one to just have moving forward as you’re integrating the experience.

Kathleen Aspenns: [00:29:41] That’s when I tend to use Soul Support more, when it’s something that has happened or it’s currently happening, and you just need that containment and structure around you in order to be able to keep moving through it. So they’re both really good Rescue formulas, and we just use them a little bit differently. But use the one you’ve got. If you’ve got Rescue, if you’ve got Soul Support, use either one, and you will be in a much better state than if you didn’t have one on hand at all.

Rochana Felde: [00:30:10] What I love about Soul Support is the spray which also has this amazing Lavender essential oil in it. So the Lavender has that calming effect, and it can really help with just taking it down a notch on a mental, physical level that you get with an herb or an essential oil that it’s very welcome in that moment. So, I think you can use both at the same time. It’s definitely no rules. I like to have both of those in my car, in case I’m out and about, they’re perfect emergency formulas to have.

Kathleen Aspenns: [00:31:03] The next step– maybe next step, I don’t know, if that’s exactly the way I’d term it, but the Post-Trauma Stabilizer is another one that I do like very much for perhaps more intense reactions, more intense trauma responses. So if somebody has had a panic attack or has had a reaction, it’s Post-Trauma Stabilizer. So for anyone who has experienced and continues to experience these traumatic responses, say they’ve been in a car accident or something like that where the trigger is going to just keep coming up because that’s life and things are going to keep coming into your awareness, I’d definitely recommend using Post-Trauma Stabilizer for a relatively long period of time to help bring you back together, to help you process some of that information that got stuck in your body at the time. It’s so interesting reading some information from Levine about, he has a book called Awakening the Tiger. Maybe I don’t have that correct, but really talking about the process of how trauma gets stuck in the body, how the traumatic experience gets stuck in the body, and one of the ways that it gets stuck is when we can’t move and shake it off. It’s a natural thing for any animal, once they’ve escaped the tiger, they should be able to run and run and run and run and just shake it off, shake it out of the nervous system. And that’s one of the reasons why I really do recommend you move your body too because moving your body helps you to come back in your body, helps that trauma response to start to go out. Certainly, a lot of these traumatic experiences were connected to being immobilized, whether that was a physical holding or whether it was you socially weren’t allowed to go run off. And so the Post-Trauma Stabilizer is one that I really think of a lot when the trauma has gone pretty deep. And just for everyone, if you haven’t used it, this is from the Flower Essence Society. It has all the components of Five-Flower or Rescue Remedy in it, with some additional elements that I think add a nice extra layer to it.

Rochana Felde: [00:33:28] 100% agree on that one. I really rely on that formula. It comes up over and over again for so many scenarios. I’ve used it in the last few years. I can say some ways that I’ve used it. And after the fires in Northern California, I would get really triggered by smelling smoke. And I live in a forest where there are people who heat their house with wood stoves. So you’re going to smell smoke. It’s just a part of life in this area. And I would take walks and be just like, I could feel it doing something to my body. I mean, I could really feel that response, that physiological response of, oh my God, the same feeling that I had to have when I had to evacuate and go through all of the stress that we went through. So I really relied on that to start to bring me back to myself.

And one thing I wanted to say too, is that we’re not psychotherapists, but my understanding is that when they work with people with PTSD and things like that, there are techniques for, what’s the word, but it’s for immersion therapy, like desensitization. So it’s not about taking away that trigger. It’s about coming to terms with it in whatever way they work, and of course, we’re not working with those same techniques at all, but the thought is that, I can’t live. I can’t lock myself in my house in a bubble without smelling smoke ever again. I have to figure out a way to deal with it and to make it so that it doesn’t cause that reaction anymore. And so that’s one that I used very much for that challenge. And there’s more examples. But I definitely think that it’s a really key one and one of my favorite out of the pre-formulated formulas that the Flower Essence Society has come up with. I think it’s their best one. I really do think that this one is just a critical one to have in your cabinet for so many scenarios.

Kathleen Aspenns: [00:36:11] It is one that goes out the door a lot. It’s one that I recommend for a lot of people. And a lot of times it’s a really good starting place for working with somebody if they’re really currently activated and really have a hard time, even be coming in the moment, it’s a first aid formula. It’s like, okay, let’s take this for a while and then we’ll see what maybe more specific or unpack the conversation of what’s underneath this current response because sometimes when you’re just so stressed and so overwhelmed, you can’t think well enough and you can’t process well enough. You need a, it’s not a band-aid, but you need some first aid. And then you can get into starting to rebuild your nervous system into a sense of safety. And that really is a good first step is to realize that you can start to develop a strong enough grounding, and you can release some of this old content that’s been stuck in your system so that you can have a better life because, like you were saying, Ro, trying to live in a world where there’s no smoke is like, it’s just never going to happen. I don’t know where you’re going to go. Certainly, in the North Bay, it’s like, this is just part of the world is that there’s going to be smells of smoke periodically, and that’s just one trigger. Some people, a car backfiring, if they’ve experienced gun violence, there are sudden noises that happen and there are sudden things that happen, and getting in a car if you’ve had a car accident, sometimes that can be really stressful. And to live your life in that constant state of low-grade traumatic response is exhausting, for one thing. And it’s just suffering. It is a life of suffering. And it’s so sad that not more people know about the flower essences because they can really help your life be less like that, fewer days, fewer hours. That way you can get better. You don’t have to delete your life down into one spot that you can tolerate. You can actually develop a broader ability to tolerate your experience.

Rochana Felde: [00:38:47] Yeah, flower essences, all of them, the beautiful thing that they do is help give us perspective. No matter what essence that you’re working with, that’s the wisdom and gifts of the plants and nature is in some way helping us with perspective. And so, I don’t want to make it sound like, here, take Post-Trauma Stabilizer and your trauma will go away like a magic remedy. It doesn’t work that way. It’s a process. It takes time. Sometimes that process is too big and too scary to work on yourself and you definitely need help from somebody else. And sometimes if it is something that you want to work with, it’s part of that self-development where you’re really being cognizant of what’s happening as you’re doing that work. And in that case of me with the smoke triggers and having asthma and panic attacks when I smelled wood smoke from a neighbor’s wood stove, I realized that I really needed to re-develop my relationship with fire. And that was an interesting process for me. I decided to make some fires in my wood stove, which I never use, and sit with it and be with it and smell it and watch it and learn from it. And that was an amazing experience because from that time on, I really didn’t have that reaction anymore.

So what brought me to that was that journey of taking the flower essences, getting perspective, calming the nervous system, and then kind of feeling out, where do I need to go with this? What can I do to change my relationship to this thing or to the way that I react to it? This is the journey that we go through for all the things we work with, with flower essences. So really, this is no different. It just can be a bit scarier.

Kathleen Aspenns: [00:41:16] What you’re sharing about changing your relationship with fire, it sounds so much like the way that I might think about changing our relationship to emotions because at least in the New Age communities that a lot of us have experienced or been part of, there’s good emotions and then there’s bad emotions, and some emotions are the negative emotions, the anger or jealousy or what have you are not acceptable to have, and so they’re stuffed down. And so everybody wants to feel all the joy and wonderful all the time, but learning to experience all of our emotions in the containment of the spaciousness of our stability is important.

So learning to make friends with fire, it feels to me a lot like– and I’m starting to go into a whole different area which isn’t related to your fire trauma, but anger is a similar fear. Sometimes for some of us, it feels like an extinction terror. We feel like if we got angry, it would be the end of the world. My anger would be so much it would burn down the whole world because we’ve never been allowed to express it or feel it. It’s totally unacceptable. And so sometimes that process of like you’ve done with fires, starting to make friends with it, and starting to realize what control you have over it in controlled space, it’s in your own fireplace, it’s acceptable, this is the appropriate use for it. So sometimes, like playing with our emotions, learning to experience our emotions can be a little bit like that, where we have to learn to model it in a safe space, in an appropriate place of how to let that emotion flow. If you decided to become more friends with fire and you click the lighter and immediately freaked out and ran away, it’s like you’re not going to get very far with getting to the warm spot like, oh, that’s really quite nice, that’s very soothing. So if you had said like fire is always bad, then the clicking of the lighter would freak you out. So, it is interesting how these things can get really stuck and triggery once again to the natural experience of life, of experiencing all of our emotions flowing freely, not without boundaries, not inappropriately, but accepting that that’s part of life and existence in the body.

Rochana Felde: [00:44:08] And that is where I was at when I was at that point of it being a problem in my life is I think I was– like birthday candles. Watching somebody light a birthday candle struck panic in my heart. I mean, we can’t live like that. It saps the joy out of life to have things that happened affect the present, that happened in the past, affect the present in that way. The fact is, is if I can’t enjoy something that the people around me are enjoying in life because of that, then I think that’s where we want to look at working with it.

Kathleen Aspenns: [00:45:02] Mm-hmm. And maybe we want to bring in just one essence each, one that feels really appropriate and helpful and beneficial because we’ve talked about some crisis formulas, and there’s so many ways that we could go in this conversation. But I’ll just throw in one that I might think of in this process. I would bring in Angelica. And Angelica, because it has such a deep taproot, and if you’ve ever smelled the smell of Angelica root, it’s really perfumey. It smells wonderful. And the Angelica plant itself has such a deep root and grows so tall and straight that it has this sensation in your body when you experience it of being rooted but being open to the heavens. And that’s really where our life is, is to be rooted but open. It’s like we’re protected by the realm of spirit, but we’re also really present here on Earth. And the Angelica essence can start to teach you that experience when that hasn’t been part of your experience so far.

Rochana Felde: [00:46:27] That would have been one that I would have picked maybe. It was up there in the top three as you asked that question. But the other one that jumped in to my mind was Black Tourmaline because as a gem essence, it is so good for helping us to release stuck negativity that’s within us. So it has that ability to do that and let us refresh with new positive energy. So I think in a nutshell– there’s so many, we have a list what we’re looking at here. We could go in a lot of different directions. Unfortunately, we’re out of time on the podcast. There’s so many places that flower essences can help in feeling protected and safe and addressing irritability and intolerance and shame and increasing resilience. And Redwood is one that wants to come through very much so for that, for the resilience and moving forward in community being supported, and adding that gem essence of Black Tourmaline might be a great way to help it be taken in by the body and the body really learning from that.

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Kathleen Aspenns: [00:48:03] There is always so much more that we could talk about, and there are always so many more plants that we would love to bring in, but we also don’t want to overwhelm because we don’t know where you are. You’re not in a classroom with us. You might be driving to school or to work or taking a walk. And so we hope that you’ve enjoyed spending this little bit of time with us and talking about this pretty triggering topic. And so thanks for sticking in there. Thanks for being here all the way to the end with us. And we are really looking forward to delving really deeply into this topic, among many others, at our upcoming Flower Essence Society Practitioner Training over at Flower Essence Studies starting this month. And in that context, we go very deeply into many, many flowers to learn to be part of a practitioner kit of essences that we can all get to know well and be able to use. So if you have interest in becoming a practitioner, or maybe if you just are really interested and want to learn more and maybe don’t want to do it as a practitioner, we have people who are here for all sorts of reasons. So you are welcome, and there is still space for you if you wanted to join in. So go over to floweressencestudies.com and have a look. We’ve got that course and many others. So we really do hope that you join us over at that side. And we love sharing information and lots of little tidbits as well as really deep dives.

Rochana Felde: [00:49:42] Great discussion as always, Kathleen. Thank you everybody for listening. We really appreciate you. Take care.

Kathleen Aspenns: [00:49:56] 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.