FEP76 Psychic Self-Defense with Gemstone & Plant Allies | Nicholas Pearson

Show Notes:

Nicholas Pearson returns to the podcast after the release of his latest book, Crystals for Psychic Self-Defense. Starting with a grounded understanding of the sources of psychic and energetic harm, we discuss the importance of good energy hygiene including grounding, centering, and cleansing. We explore a host of techniques for protecting and shielding ourselves and our spaces with the use of physical gemstones, gemstone elixirs/waters, and flower essences. Join us for this in-depth download from our favorite author and teacher at the intersection of gemstones and plants for vibrational healing and magickal work.

Audio:

Psychic Self-Defense with Gemstones & Essences | Nicholas Pearson
Nicholas Pearson returns to the podcast after the release of his latest book, Crystals for Psychic Self-Defense. Starting with a grounded understanding of the sources of psychic and energetic harm, we discuss the importance of good energy hygiene including grounding, centering, and cleansing.

Video:

Flower Essences discussed during the show:

Resources:

Nicholas Pearson

Website: www.theluminouspearl.com

Books:

Crystals for Psychic Self-Defense
Crystal Basics
Flower Essences from the Witch’s Garden
And more

Previous episodes with Nicholas

FEP45 Plant Spirit Magick with Nicholas Pearson (March 2022)
FEP35 Gem Elixirs with Nicholas Pearson (Apr 2021)

The School for Flower Essence Studies

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Previous Topic: Energetic Hygiene and Alignment – Watch the replay

Show Transcript

Rochana Felde: Welcome back to the podcast. Kathleen and I are here today with Nicholas Pearson, and we’re going to be discussing psychic self-defense with gemstones and flower essences. And we are extremely happy to have Nicholas back on for the third time as a returning guest on the podcast. You may have already heard some of our previous episodes with him. We did Episode 45 about Plant Spirit Magick and Episode 35 about Gem Elixirs. So, welcome back to the podcast, Nicholas.

Nicholas Pearson: Thanks so much for having me. I’ve been looking forward to this. It’s great that we get to hang out for a little while.

Kathleen Aspenns: We are always really enjoying having you on. We really appreciate that you bring such a level of integrity and knowledge to what you bring, as well as this deep spiritual component. So, honestly, we are very impressed with you and very impressed with everything you bring. So, thank you for sharing all of this with us, and we really are eager to hear aspects of how to help support. Our listeners are no doubt at the edge of their seats right now, very interested in learning more about how to protect ourselves.

Rochana Felde: And I’ll just pipe in and say that the inspiration for this topic is because of Nicholas’s latest book, which is Crystals for Psychic Self-Defense. I’m holding up a copy here that recently came out. And it is a lovely, well-done book with color photographs and lots of information about this topic that we thought this would be so great to explore in the content and also in the context of flower essences and how we can incorporate both in this way of defending ourselves from the unseen energies in the world.

Nicholas Pearson: Yeah, it’s a really timely thing. I can’t purport to be clever enough to have planned this in advance for the book to come out when the world is the way it currently is. I actually started writing this book—my estimate is I started the manuscript in 2019 after sending in the final draft of Crystal Basics, which came out in February 2020. And like a lot of things that were planned for 2020, this manuscript got derailed. The great news is I had a really fun time writing my first and so far only book on flower essences that year and the year after. So, that was a phenomenal thing to come out of it, but I kept coming back to Crystals for Psychic Self-Defense, and I’d just play around with it and maybe write a little bit here or dream up some ideas, sit back, and do some reading, and things didn’t quite meet the needs of the current zeitgeist.

And as happens often, I know I’m not the first person to say something like this, but there’s this funny phenomenon that takes place when you even just quietly announce to the universe you want to write a book on a topic. The universe is like, how well do you know this topic? Are you really ready to step into that space of authority by authoring a book? And quite a few things happened in my life where I had to learn some more effective, energetic, and social and emotional boundaries in my life and learn how to maybe navigate a changing world in ways that I didn’t think was going to be quite as necessary. And here we are, life is mostly okay. Myopically, I’m really, really happy that the tools in this book were useful to me, and that’s why I wrote them down. But we live in a world that’s not made for sensitive people, that the default decision makers of the world at large aren’t stopping to go, hmm, I wonder how our highly sensitive folks, our empaths, our psychics, our healers, our people who’ve experienced trauma, our neurodivergent folks, I wonder how they’re going to experience this. Nobody’s really formulating the world with us in mind. So, I think it’s helpful that we have a robust toolkit and that it is a personal toolkit, something that we can customize, that we can personalize to the needs of our individual experience. And that’s why the book covers so much. I threw everything into it that has worked or could work for me in hopes that it might also do the same for others.

Rochana Felde: It’s interesting that you say that about being basically a conscious author, I’ll put it that way, because I don’t know if all authors have that kind of consciousness about making sure that you know the topic, etc. And it feels like to me, as a flower essences practitioner, it’s interesting how sometimes the clients are mirroring what I need to learn for myself. And same with teaching about flower essences, teaching classes, every project that I’m working on, it seemingly comes at a time where I need to do that work. I need to either go deeper and learn more about it, or it’s something new that I need to contemplate as part of my life. And so, I love hearing that about your work as well in writing these books, and then the sort of kismet of the timing of when they come out, because that’s when the world needs it.

Nicholas Pearson: Yeah, very similar phenomenon when it comes to essences. I don’t make a lot of custom blends for clients these days, because I wear too many hats to do any of them full-time, but every time I’m working on a blend, I have to stop and go, is this about me? Is this flower for me, and I’m projecting? And then we got to stop and do, okay, well, let’s take an essence for discernment and make sure that really I’m not putting my own stuff in someone else’s space. And the reverse can also be true, right? We hang around folks who have enough baggage going around, we believe it to be our own, and both of those symptoms of the kind of sensitivity that I’m hopeful we can learn to navigate collectively.

Kathleen Aspenns: For sure. I completely resonate with that concept because part of the process, part of the journey about learning about any of these healing modalities is that you’re walking that road yourself, even though you might be intending to heal the world or to heal somebody you love, and yet, it’s so important to always be checking in, to check in, is this me? Is this my stuff? And it’s so important, as you were saying, for those of us who are sensitive, to start to develop that discernment filter of like, what is my stuff and what is stuff that I am absorbing and taking on?

I know one of my first aha flower essences, and I’d be interested to hear what you might be able to bring in the gem world, but Pink Yarrow, it was so dramatic. When I started to recognize that the things I was feeling, the things that felt so fraught, weren’t actually mine, like, “Oh my God, I don’t actually have to absorb that and process that for everyone? Oh, what a relief.”

Nicholas Pearson: Yeah. I had a similar experience with Labradorite, a crystal ally we were all talking about before we started recording. We’re all wearing some, go figure. Labradorite for me has been a really profound teacher when it comes to understanding the origin of the psychic baggage and psychic harm and energetic, we’ll say, stuff that we’re going to encounter. Its action is so multivalent. There’s so many facets to what it’s doing. On the one hand, it is a gem of extraordinary light. I mean, it just lightens up the whole system. It regenerates and repairs our field of light around us by giving it more of the nourishment it needs, particularly when it is overtaxed, or leaky, or torn, or worn thin, or whatever the case might be.

But in addition to that, when we examine the optical phenomenon that we call Labradorescence, that shimmering iridescent quality, if we examine the mechanism and its crystallography that creates that, we learn a lot about how it interfaces with energy and how it trains us to interface with energy. So, that beautiful flash that we see in nice gemmy pieces of Labradorite is very similar to thin film interference like you get with an oil slick on a puddle. And depending on how thin or thick, how many molecules of oil are floating in a given region, it’s going to diffract a certain kind of light so we see it. There’s no pigment in the oil that makes it pink, or green, or blue, or whatever, just like there’s no pigment in the Labradorite doing the same.

Labradorite is part of a family of minerals that we call Feldspars. They’re a diverse group of aluminosilicate minerals. They’re really common. They’re the most abundant family of silicates in the Earth. And they often form these just about unmixable combinations. They’re so close, but they can’t quite make a perfect mixture. So, they’ll have these twinned layers that we call laminate, from the word, to laminate, to bond things together in layers. And depending on the relative thinness or thickness of one twinned layer versus the next, exactly which variation in chemistry it is, it’s going to correspond to a given wavelength of light. So, the really, really teeny layers in Labradorite are going to reflect our blues, our violets, our pinks. Our really, really thick layers are going to diffract those orangey-reds and the middle ones, yellow, green, into the blues. And so, the ends of the spectrum, our purples and pinks and our reds and oranges, they’re scarcer because statistically speaking, they happen less frequently. But if it’s just too wide or not wide enough, we don’t get any of those colors either. So, it’s about allowing our energy field to become selectively permeable when we work with Labradorite, either by wearing the crystal and meditating with it, taking it as an essence is really good for this as well, we’re training our energy fields to be able to sort out those wavelengths, those frequencies, those patterns that don’t belong to us, that could potentially disrupt our system. While doing that, though, it’s reflecting them back with grace, with love, with radiance. It’s not a malicious, I’m going to wrap myself in a mirror and let all the harm bounce back at me so it makes someone else’s life miserable. It is a little bit kind of alchemic in the way it works, just maybe not transmuting the energy at a base level, but allowing what comes back to be sent back lovingly, compassionately. And when we come from that space of compassion, then I think we operate under one of my big ethical orientations in any practice in this book, and that’s harm reduction. Sometimes life is really heavy, and we need heavier tools. The goal shouldn’t be just to punch back, it’s to reduce the amount of harm being generated in the world. So, oftentimes, the psychic ick, miasma, junk we’re going to encounter, we take care of it from proactive means, from real foundational things, but on rare occasions, we need some power tools. And it’s the same MO, however, in each one, for me, is coming back to basics and really focusing on that compassionate place of harm reduction.

Rochana Felde: I love that it’s like the non-violent communication form of energy work is what you’re basically talking about. And I found some interesting concepts to your book about Hematite, which is one that I work with a lot as a gem elixir. And because of its mirror finish, it’s used for that bounce-it-all-back, right, in the magical realm anyway. And I hadn’t thought about that causing harm or blowback. I don’t think the gem elixir so much, but using the actual crystal itself, if anyone has seen it, I mean, it looks very reflective like a mirror. And I’ve thought about it that way as carrying the stone in my pocket for protection, like, I’ve got a mirror here, and nothing can touch me. It’s just going to bounce right back. And I didn’t really consider that that could be, I guess, repeating the harm, as happens in generations of abuse. That was a good learning for me. But I think it boils more down to the intention and the way you use it. Is that correct? Would you see it that way?

Nicholas Pearson: Yeah. I mean, a mirror can be angled to bounce light in different directions. So, if we’re conscious of how we’re angling that mirror, what the outcome is meant to be, we can certainly use those kinds of things with sensitivity and grace. I think it also depends on the kind of psychic harm we’re encountering. Some things don’t come from a finite individual source. So, bouncing them off of us isn’t necessarily going to perpetuate further harm. And maybe it would be helpful to break down what some of those potential sources of psychic harm are that we’re going to encounter.

There’s some really predictable things that are in here, other people, other people’s energies, other people’s attitudes, other people’s judgments and expectations, their jealousy, their projections. The more sensitive we are, and that can be really any meaning or significance of that word sensitive, we’re going to experience that in different ways. And for some of us, we’re really good at letting it roll off like water off a duck’s back. I wish I was that person all of the time. I wasn’t raised to be that person, and I’m still training myself not to be that person now. But that’s only one piece of the puzzle. And the truth is that even if we can train ourselves not to pay attention to that, even if we can reinforce our field, our aura, our psyche, not to respond to that, there are plenty of other sources of potential psychic harm. These can be things like our—they’re cliches, but we all know the emotional or energy vampire type in our lives. We might love them as a human being. We don’t like how we feel after we hang out with them. Sometimes we don’t like who we become when we hang out with them. And I think a lot of that is really unconscious. I think it would be a disservice to folks who are aware of their energetic makeup, if you will. Some folks have a surplus of energy and radiate it out, some folks maybe are born with a deficit of it and draw from their environment. Some people do this unconsciously in really healthy terms, from the heavens, from the earth, from food, from exercise. Other folks, we’re like, “Oh, here’s a warm body with a pulse and some joy. I’d like some joy. Please, can I siphon some off of you?” And it’s often not intentional.

So, those are potential sources of psychic harm. But there’s also the stuff that’s just in the environment. You walk into a room where an argument has taken place, where people have had a strong emotional response, doesn’t have to be a so-called negative emotion or an unpleasant one, we could say, to remove the moral, philosophical debate of good energy versus bad energy. We can experience disruptive telluric forces, energies from the earth. The Earth is a very, very big organism compared to us, just like we are really big relative to ants. When I walk through my garden, my goal is not to mash as many ants as possible, but I’m sure it happens from time to time because I’m just not paying attention to them at their level, by the same token, the bigger movements of energy in the planet and in the universe at large, they can feel disruptive to us because they’re not aimed at us, they’re not about us, but we can still be sensitive to them. So, this could be geopathic stress. This could be even our own electromagnetic pollution from our own human activities. We’re occasionally going to come across some spiritual entities, the things that go bump in the night. I think most spirits, and we’ll use that term very loosely, are pretty ambivalent about humans. Again, I don’t stop and contemplate every insect in my garden. I know they’re there, and they just do their thing, they know we’re here, and they just let us do our thing, too, but every now and then, one is like a hornet, it’ll stop and sting us or whatever the case might be.

But ultimately, the most important kind of thing that we are subject to day in and day out, the number one round-the-clock source of psychic harm is ourselves. We really have to be mindful of the role we play in our energetic health and well-being. And I say that not from the law of attraction, you’re experiencing terrible things in life because you thought terrible things, not that kind of victim-blaming at all, and I know this is not the platform for that kind of thing either. It’s very much, how many judgments do we project onto ourselves? How many thoughts and behaviors and beliefs have we inherited from our family that we perpetuate that maybe aren’t the best internal narrative for our joy, for our success? And sometimes it’s really subtle. I bump into a wall, great job, Nicholas, so graceful. It doesn’t really mean anything, but do I have to have that thought, or could I go, oh, maybe I’m going to look up and not walk into as many walls. I’m almost 40, I still haven’t learned that, but here we are.

So, when we talk about psychic self-defense, when we talk about protection tools, when we talk about any of these things, whether it’s working with physical crystals or gem elixirs or flower essences, which are phenomenal for this as well, it’s about matching the tool to our individual situation as best as possible. I mean, I think this is one of the best concepts that I’ve taken from flower essence therapy, ultimately rooted in the nature of homeopathic provings as well, knowing that Dr. Bach was, of course, a brilliant homeopath. It’s the personalized, individual, full-story picture of things. It’s not prescriptive, this rock fixes this problem in your life. It’s really painting that diverse portrait of all the things that are symptomatic of the experience you’re going on, and even the things you don’t think are symptomatic, and fine-tuning and matching it there. Yes, any tool is going to move you probably in the right direction, but the right tool is going to do so much more for you.

Kathleen Aspenns: I appreciate how you’re bringing in this idea of the right tool for the job because one of the things that I think about a lot is our cultural emphasis and desire for the most powerful, the most whatever, like extra strength, ultra-improved, this is the newest, fabulous, most powerful thing. And powerful is useful when the circumstance requires it, but a lot of circumstances, power is not the right tool. And so being able to meter and judge, I think of our planet, these tools, more as allies rather than things for me to bash with. What allies am I calling in to support me, to help me in this? And a lot of times, they’re very gentle, and the gentleness is a lot of times what we need as sensitive people. A really powerful thing can knock us over. We really want something to help us lift up and hold us together and help us move forward in our process.

Nicholas Pearson: Yeah. This is an ongoing experience I have in my life as an educator is trying to break down this concept of the superlative, the best, the most powerful, the number one. When someone, oh—and when I’m on Instagram doing my live Q&A once a week, probably two or three times in a given session of that, let alone in an actual course, what is the best crystal for blank? What is the most powerful crystal for blank? And it’s always the most powerful for whom at what time under what circumstances, because the most powerful for me right now in this position is different than what you require. And it’s not about the most anything except the most tailored to where you are. And if we could start thinking about maybe the most specific versus the most powerful, it’d be a game-changer. It wouldn’t be looking at a list of essences or crystals or gem elixirs on a meme and going, oh, this one’s for this, I’m going to use it. It’s thinking about, “Okay, I feel oversensitive. What are the experiences that I have that are telling me that? Where is that coming from? Where do I feel the most vulnerable? Where do I feel the most powerful?” And then finding the ally that is going to help you with your particular obstacles in that situation.

People are so focused on outcome, they ignore mechanism. And the challenge is that the same mechanism applied to two different life circumstances does not yield the same outcome. And that’s why we also see the reverse happening. Many things are listed as having the same outcome. How many flower essences are there that are supposed to be really good for anxiety or worry? How many out there are supposed to be really good for grounding? I mean, I don’t have time to list them all in a week, let alone in an episode, so I’m not going to. So, it’s about finding, okay, what is my particular situation like? And I’m famous for answering questions with questions when people bring this kind of thing to me, because it’s about doing the inner work to go, it’s not just the outcome, what is my roadblock to that outcome? What is it about where I’m at that needs help? And then what ally symbolizes that the most to me?

And when we give people the agency to think in terms of what means that for me, it’s really powerful to see people have those light-bulb moments, and what they choose and what I choose might not be the same. And if I have time to sit down with someone and we do that storytelling, the unraveling of all layers of the onion to find that core issue, I’m happy to let them know what I think, but also I want to hear what they think, because that is, I think, where we need to get started. There’s too much trying to outsource our own agency and authority already, and that will probably unintentionally increase over the next few years, if you catch my drift, the idea of our own personal sovereignty is already being challenged plenty in the world, and I don’t anticipate that getting better immediately. So, we need to start practicing having autonomy in those times. And that’s actually really good training for psychic self-defense as well, because we can, in many cases, in the micro, maybe not in the macro, but in many cases, we can choose to unplug and say, actually, I don’t want to participate in this. And then we suddenly find ourselves not needing the psychic shield and not needing the extra psychic hygiene and not needing the extra restorative experiences afterwards because we’re just not in that space. We’re not in the mental space, emotional space, we’re also not in the thick of it in the world. And I’m still learning this. I understand it with my head better than my heart, but this is one of those ways that, flower essences in particular, just learning the system of flower essence therapy has changed so much else that I do over the years. And it’s hard to put a finger on when exactly it happened because it’s been a gradual process, but I think it’s a good change in the long run.

Kathleen Aspenns: This question that you’re presenting about what we might call spiritual hygiene. When we are constantly in the mindset of need to push things away and to create a boundary, all of that, like you’re saying, it’s like, what in us is creating the circumstances that are allowing this constant feeling of being invaded? What can we do to build it up from the inside out? And are there things that we should be thinking about to maintain our hygiene so that we are not so subject to all of these intrusions, invasions of energy? Can you give us some thoughts on that?

Nicholas Pearson: Yeah. So, in just about every instance where someone feels the need for greater protection, greater psychic self-defense, we can remediate a majority of circumstances with good psychic hygiene and a couple of easy preventive measures in addition to that.

And for me, psychic or spiritual hygiene is a multi-pronged approach. First, can we be grounded and centered, not just in a mental sense? When I stop and think about what those terms mean for me from an energetics stance, grounding is completing a circuit between our energy field and that of the earth. It’s like our big appliances here in the States, at least, there’s a grounding prong. It’s that third little prong that goes into the outlet to prevent against short-circuiting and other harm that can happen when a surplus of energy is suddenly in there. It’s not about whether that electricity is good electricity or bad electricity, it’s the same free flow of electrons. It is morally, philosophically neither good nor bad. The reason we do this is not because there is good energy or bad energy, but because our circuits get fried. It’s just that simple. And when we are grounded, we have a safe, effective reciprocal outlet for that surplus of energy. Whether we generate it or experience it, it doesn’t matter, there’s a safe place for it to go. So, grounding is so important.

There are so many wonderful allies for grounding. I mean, first and foremost, if it came from the earth, it’s grounding. To work with flower essences is to, at least in the long run, learn to be more grounded. To work with gem essences, same idea, in the long run at least, to become grounded. Are there allies that really hit the nail on the head? Yes. I’m thinking maybe Aragonite, Black Tourmaline, Hematite. Think of the heft of that iron oxide that is Hematite. It has this weight to it, this presence, this immediacy in terms of its grounding influence. I love Aragonite because it awakens within our energy field a remembrance of what it’s like to be in constant communion with the earth. It reminds us that we’ve never actually been separate. We just forgot. And by establishing that conduit, it becomes a subconscious, autonomic grounding in the long run. It’s also really good for clearing things that are stuck. So, maybe that grounding prong, we can’t jam it into the wall because there’s something stuck in the socket. So, Aragonite’s a good one for clearing that stuff out.

In terms of plants, any tree is grounding. I mean, just pick one. Go to your Bach flowers and pick any tree, and you’re good to go. Any system, pick a tree. But are there some that are particularly grounding? Yes. I mean, Oak is a really great example, especially if we’re in the midst of long-term issues, longstanding stuff, we’re trying to unlearn the pattern of not being functionally grounded. Yew is one of my favorites, not one of the Bach Remedies, but still such a powerful ally for grounding. And those are a couple that I would think of.

In tandem with that, we’ve also got centering. Centering for me is two things simultaneously. There’s two layers to it. In some of the Western esoteric magical practice, centering is a lot about getting our orientation to the universe. Can we find our axes, so to speak, so we’re not just connected to the earth, but we know that we’re upright from the earth to the heavens, that we’re in this space of the intermediary.

The other part of centering for me is, in esoteric terms, it’s mediating a conversation between the center and the periphery. Can all the parts and pieces of you be in touch with one another? Are they all plugged into the core of who you are? In medical astrology terms, this is a very solar influence. It relates to our physical heart as well as our spiritual heart. It nourishes the center of us. In fact, the word core, which means our middle, comes from Latin, core, which means heart. So, a lot of our very heart-centered essences are very centering. The entire Rose family is a great example of this, and they mediate this expression between the center and the periphery. I mean, just imagine your most beautiful, exotic, hybrid Rose, and right there in the middle of the high pantheon, where you’ve got all those beautiful anthers, and then those concentric rings of petals radiating out in perfect symmetry, theoretically at least, there’s this just wonderful relationship between the outer bits and the inner bits. And that’s what centering does for us. And from there, then we can start to look at, okay, now that I’m plugged in, now that I’m not spread too thin or scrunched up, now that my energy is in movement, in communion with itself, now I can start to evaluate, do I need thorough cleansing? Do I need to nourish my energy field? Do I need to maybe put up some boundaries, some walls, some selectively permeable membranes? But if we don’t do those initial bits, the rest of it doesn’t matter too much. If I immediately go to the place of erecting a barrier, a boundary around my energy field, and I’m ungrounded, and I’m uncentered, and I haven’t cleansed, I’m full of other people’s ick, then it’s like sealing yourself in that. A really good example, you buy a sealed package of any green, we’ll use spinach, it’s always spinach, right, and you don’t unseal it, it stays hermetically sealed, and you put it in the drawer and you forget about it. And because it can’t breathe, because nothing can come or go easily, two weeks later, you no longer have spinach, you have a pool of slime in there because there’s already stuff in there that’s going to make it go bad, just how it’s going to happen. It needs to breathe, it needs to be able to exhale waste and inhale nourishment.

And when we start to think about psychic self-defense from those kinds of terms, I think that does a lot more for us. Yeah, cleansing is a universal thing. I mean, 2020, I think, taught us all about physical hygiene. I’m hoping some of us also learned a thing or two about social, psychic, and spiritual hygiene to go with that. I know I sure did. And that’s why it’s such a big piece of the book, learning to effectively cleanse ourselves, our spaces, our tools, because when you come home, you’re going to be carrying stuff with you, just like when you’re baking brownies, you’re going to get batter on your fingertips. And before you go pick up your phone in a doom scroll, you want to wash your hands. It’s not because the brownie batter is morally or philosophically harmful, bad, evil, it just doesn’t belong on your phone screen. And being able to separate ourselves from those potential sources of psychic harm, so we’re not projecting good energy, bad energy, and just, is it helpful or is it harmful, because the same electricity allowing us to talk is really harmful if I plug my finger into the outlet. It’s the same electricity. And when we come from that space of good fundamentals of grounding and centering, consistent, regular, hopefully frequent, psychic hygiene with the cleansing bit, and then also our preemptive care with just general shielding, we’re going to have all of our bases covered. We’re not going to be worried about the good versus the bad. We’re going to come from a space, hopefully, of being a little less attached, and that allows us to not maybe trigger so many responses out in the field. When we do those things, you’re going to find things that aren’t pleasant. So, if we come from that calm space, that unattached space, it gives us so much more bandwidth in the long run, too.

Rochana Felde: I really resonate with all of that, and I do really appreciate the time you spent in your book on that, and going back to your points about vibrational medicine in general not being what’s the most powerful, but what’s the most specific, is such a good reframe. And of course, in all vibrational medicine, we have the same challenges with people coming at it from a maybe heroic medicine perspective, or just really the nature of our society, Western society. Bigger, better, faster, more has been the trajectory we’ve been on for such a long time that many people don’t know anything different. That’s what they know, and it’s reinforced by everything. It’s reinforced by Western medicine, and that going right to the most powerful medicine for an ailment rather than maybe stopping and thinking, okay, well, what’s in the person’s diet? How is their sleep? What are these other holistic factors that could be playing into the situation, rather than going right to surgery? Let’s just take a pause and see what the unique combination of factors are that are to this person, instead of a one-size-fits-all, everything is a nail because you’re a hammer approach.

So, loving that, and the thoughts about grounding and centering and cleansing, I really appreciate what you said about all of that, Black Tourmaline being one of my favorites for both the grounding and that cleansing. That’s why it’s in so many of my flower—as an elixir. It’s in so many of my personal remedies and formulas for clients because it has that constantly releasing what’s not needed and bringing in the new, fresh energy. So, it has that double duty to it.

But I’d love to go into a little bit more about the shielding. So, you mentioned shielding and there’s various reasons for needing to go to that place of wanting to have extra protection going into certain situations, or you’re going to be perhaps with family members that you’re going to be in a situation where you know you’re going to need an extra boost, extra allies, and maybe more specific protection. And what can you say about that?

Nicholas Pearson: An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. I know it’s one of those sayings that’s out there, but it’s really true. If I have to leave the house in any meaningful capacity, which could be as simple as going to the post office some days, then I would much rather shield up before I leave and not need it than get there and the perfect storm unfold of the line that’s 45 people long and every one of them hasn’t filled out a form correctly. And I’m sitting there just waiting to pick up a parcel, that’s all I need to do, and my finite amount of time is drying up, and I get more anxious and agitated, and I’m in a bad place. If I go in already primed to not pick up other people’s stuff, I’m still going to wait, but I’m going to be less agitated about it.

So, when it comes to shielding, in the book I go through, I don’t know, maybe about 10 different crystals that we can partner with to create shields. I’ve got some that use the imagery of Quartz, and we imagine a sphere or a prism of Quartz encapsulating our energy fields to reflect and refract those incoming energies. There’s one that takes that reflective quality from Hematite, and we envision that. My favorite one predictably is Labradorite because it fortifies the aura, it stabilizes the aura, it nourishes it with light while also teaching it to have those selectively permeable filters in place.

And when we do this kind of psychic shielding work, we can work with it in several steps. We can have the physical stone and carry or wear it. If you ever see me out in public fiddling with a Labradorite bracelet on my wrist, it’s so I can reinforce my boundaries. That tactile touchstone is a really good reminder for me to do the energetic work with it, and usually, it’s not a reflection of the people around me. 95 times out of 100, it has nothing to do specifically with the person I’m talking to, but 5 out of 100 times—

The other thing that we could do is if we love working with physical crystals, we could make grids or layouts and place them on or around the body, sit within them for meditation. If we work with the essences, the elixirs, whether we’re making them ourselves or, for example, the Alaskan Essences, fabulous line, great variety, we can take those while we also create this imagery of the shield, and then we can reinforce it throughout the day. So, the book has a bunch of those meditations in there that people can experiment with and find the one that works for a different situation at a different time.

But there’s so many approaches to building psychic shields, even in some of my less conventional flower essence training, will say, I learned about shielding with the help of the plant Devas themselves, the plant consciousness. I’m thinking of, for example, Angelica, which invokes this—when we look at the umbel-shaped flowers, it’s in the umbelliferae, the carrot family, so, very typical flowers there of this group, it’s that web of connection that we’ve got to our spiritual allies, that deep tap root that it’s got, the hollow stem, it helps us stay rooted in the moment. It allows us to be a vessel with less attachment, and then gives us that sense of angelic protection. I mean, it’s named after St. Michael the Archangel. And just even if we only think of that as an archetype rather than a being, that can be a really helpful image for a lot of us.

You could think of something like Rue. Rue is one that I go to when I’m in need for deep protection, deep shielding. It has a very solar quality, and Rue is one of those funny plants that it’s used in culinary settings, traditionally, it’s used in medicine, it’s also toxic depending on how much of it we have. So, is it a baneful plant? Is it a medicinal plant? Does it have to be either/or? So, it rides this threshold and can be the nourishing solar radiant light that we need it to be, but it can also be toxic enough. I mean, look at those cross-shaped flowers that it’s got. It’s just like, nope, you can’t cross here. End of story. That’s one that I’ll use to seal the aura as well.

We’ve already mentioned Yarrow. I think if I had to pick a flower essence that had a similar effect to Labradorite, I might choose Yarrow for the way it builds and restores the aura. And maybe St. John’s Wort is a close second because Hypericum perforatum, referring to the little oil glands in the leaves, when you hold it up to the light, it looks like it’s perforated. It looks like light passes through. So, it has that selective diaphaneity, allowing light to pass in some zones, but not others. And those are both really great examples of things that I think are nice and protective that maybe aren’t our big, heavy hitters.

But we’ve got our nightshade family. Sometimes what we need is Atropa belladonna or Datura. Sometimes what we need is something like Water Hemlock, hopefully made by a professional and not at home. That’s a plant you will never catch me making an essence from personally. I respect it too much. I also respect breathing a whole lot, and I’d like to continue doing it. But that’s one that can really, will say, disentangle some heavily-rooted psychic harm from our energy field, and one I’m rarely called to use. It’s sitting on the shelf beside me, but maybe once in my practice, it’s ever come up to be relevant other than me just getting to know the plant spirit.

So, we’ve got so many options for plants that work in a similar fashion. We can look at our poison plants. We can look at our trees, even. The thick bark of so many trees that literally protects them and shields them from the exterior, plus the deep roots that ground them, the way they reach up into the heavens to receive celestial nourishment, I mean, just about any tree is also, I think, a really multifaceted ally for this kind of work.

So, we’ve got options. And given that we’ve been talking about the need to personalize our options, start with the plants and the gems you’re drawn to and see where you can go from there. Look at the ones that are already in your toolkit or your garden or the park you love to walk through, and just explore the relationship there, because oftentimes the medicine we need the most is right in front of us. And I have found that to be true, particularly with plants over and over and over again.

Kathleen Aspenns: It’s always interesting how plants and gems and crystals will start coming forward where you’d never noticed them before, they were just completely not on your radar, and all of a sudden, you just see them everywhere. And that’s usually a sign that they’re raising their hand, going, “Hey, hey, hey, have you heard me yet? I’m somebody that wants to connect with you.” And that’s something that I am always looking for when I’m noticing something that’s new to me, and yet, it’s not new, it’s been there a long time.

Can you share a few ideas on the aspect—and this is, really, it’s such a extrapolation of the personal protection, but in our spaces, in our homes, in our cars, wherever our personal spaces might be, can you share a few ideas on how to bridge that concept of protecting yourself and then to help keep your space clear as well?

Nicholas Pearson: Yeah, this is a big one. So, here’s the analogy I use to explain why this is important. You can put on a suit of armor and wear it around the clock, but if you never lock the door when you go to bed, you’re still vulnerable. So, the personal protection is really important, but it shouldn’t exist in a vacuum. And so, we need that environmental protection, what I sometimes refer to as warding, when it’s about our space versus us. And the same rules apply. Is our space grounded? Is it energetically neat and tidy and orderly? Do not look at the floor of my office because the energetics and the physical don’t always reflect each other perfectly. And do we have those reinforcements to keep out sources of disruption or harm?

And there are a lot of ways we can do this. I like rocks. So, I’ve got rocks strategically placed throughout my home accordingly. A really easy combination that is also highly customizable because you can add more stuff to it, I love a combo of Black Tourmaline and Selenite for environmental grounding, cleansing, and protection. It’s a all three-in-one. So, supposing someone’s home is roughly square-ish or rectangular, four pieces of each will do the job really well. Put some Black Tourmaline near the corners, in the corners preferably, and Selenite along the walls over a doorframe or on a windowsill as a really simple, intuitive place. They do not have to be perfectly symmetrically evenly spaced. If you have a home that is another shape, or if there are strange room divisions, you’re never going to get that anyway. So, just choose the next most convenient location.

And then you can add more stuff. You can go, hmm, maybe what I really need is that alchemical quality that Amethyst has to transmute disruptive energy. And so, I’m going to put a nice Amethyst cluster in the heart of my home. Or in the social center of my space is where we seem to have the hardest conversations, so I want to reinforce that with maybe something like Rhodonite and bring in that emotional fortification, or maybe something like Angelite to bring in some soft, angelic vibes to help us communicate from a space of more understanding. So, we can fine-tune that.

In the book, I’ve got a lot of grids and layouts for the home for different needs, depending on where you’re at. Is it just general maintenance, or in the exception to the rule, is someone actually sending some energetic BS your way on purpose? Then there’s some, we’ll say, heavier grids, some more active grids that show up there.

And when it comes from the perspective of using essences for this, another guest you’ve had on the show, Deborah Craydon, one of my flower essence teachers, who’s just brilliant, she talked about diffusing essences in your space, just using the Flower of Life. You get a grid of the Flower of Life. You can put an unopened bottle of an essence on it, and it fills your space with that.

I will also use Clear Quartz Clusters if you have a freshly cleansed and cleaned Clear Quartz, because somehow, dust just magnetically ends up on it. But if you have one that is a nice, clean slate, you can put a few drops of your favorite essence, and it’s like programming the cluster to carry, to project that essence throughout your space. That’s a really quick way to do it. I know in the Alaskan Essences tradition, can also use the bowl method, a nice bowl of water, a few drops of your essence or essence of choice, maybe some aromatics if you like, a great way to diffuse the energy in your space. I use all of these actually at different times and places. So, you can choose a combo of flower essences, gem elixirs, and environmental remedies, and other things. You might even add a water-stable crystal to go in there with tumb or get really creative, build a grid around the bowl and layer these tools to really fill your space and keep it, I want to say pure, but I don’t think that’s really the connotation I’m going for. I want to say more like just free from disruptive influence, free from outside interference, because your stuff is going to be in your home, because it’s yours, but at least if we can keep the outside stuff out, it’s easier to sort through what actually is yours and where it comes from and why. And when we treat our homes like a sanctuary, they have to be both the sanctuary space that is our spiritual refuge, as well as our castle that is defended. Two things can be true at the same time here. When we approach our home environment or wherever we spend a lot of time from that perspective, then we create the optimal conditions for healing, for growth, for remediation of all the psychic miasma we’re going to encounter in the universe. And we can’t do that without personal protection, and we also can’t do the personal protection without that. It’s definitely hand in hand where we’re going to fall short.

Rochana Felde: Thank you for all of these ideas. I know you can also put the elixirs in an aromatherapy diffuser with or without essential oils. It doesn’t have to have a scent to work. And I love the concept in the book about the combination of Black Tourmaline and Selenite, alternating around. That’s an interesting use of Selenite I had not considered. So, my mind is going and I’m thinking, oh, that could be a great spray to do a mist with both of those, and perhaps spray it around the perimeter if somebody doesn’t have the stones, right? So, there’s so many creative thoughts and ways that listeners can use this information. And for the stones that Nicholas has mentioned that you might not know about a way to get a pre-made elixir from somebody who makes it, they’re quite easy to make. And I don’t know if you want to mention just the basics of that quickly, Nicholas, but for listeners to know that those instructions are in, I believe, all of his books, definitely this latest one, and Crystal Basics is a great place to get that information too.

Nicholas Pearson: Yeah. As far as safely making elixirs go, I’m always going to encourage people to err on the side of caution. Indirect methods are universally safe, and what I mean by that is, much like in flower essence therapy, there are ways we don’t have to take the flower off the plant and float it in some water. It’s the same with gems. We don’t necessarily have to put the stones directly in water to transmit that energy imprinted onto the water. So, you can do a two-container method, is probably best known for this. You’ve got two glass containers, a bowl, and something else, a drinking glass, a jar, a smaller bowl. You’re going to put your crystals in that smaller vessel and good quality water, just like you’d use for flower essence, in the outer bowl. And then, depending on the nature of the elixir, you might put that in direct sun. If I’m doing this with Kunzite, I’m not putting it in direct sun because it’ll fade, and I don’t want my beloved Kunzite to fade, but otherwise, the same steps are going to apply. We’re going to potentize that through stabilizing it first, so it’s shelf-stable, and then do our dilutions, have our mother essence, the mother tincture, which is probably half and half mother essence and a preservative of our choice. And then we can make our stock bottles and our dosage bottles from there.

The great thing about do-it-yourself kind of gem elixirs is if we don’t want to stabilize them for a long-term use, if we don’t want to preserve them, we can use them as gem waters right away. So, I think this is also a really good exercise for our environmental health and well-being. We can treat them as offerings to the land. And even if you live in a cityscape where you’re not so “on the land” because you’re on the 23rd floor, where does the drain go, no matter what floor you’re on? Do you have a potted plant? Could you pour some out? There’s so many creative ways that we can do this, but making those as just offerings to the land—the Earth is doing so much for us, and the more conscientious we are about how we contribute to that, and the more conscious we are of that reciprocal relationship, the more we’re going to get out of it too. So, you can do unpreserved elixirs, which are sometimes just called gem waters, and either use them immediately or some in the bath, or diffuse some around your space. And you don’t have to worry about whether your vegetable glycerin will make things sticky or whether brandy is going to stain when you inevitably spill it, because that’s my experience, right?

So, you’ve got plenty of creative ways that you can work with gems and turn them into gem waters or gem elixirs, but just bear in mind, if you do want to do the direct method, put your rocks directly in your water, you need to know a thing or two about the safety of that. I have really detailed instructions about things we should look out for in terms of the physical-chemical properties of rocks and minerals in Crystal Basics, in the chapter on gem elixirs, maybe a little less information on that in this particular book, and just opting for indirect is always a safe choice. When in doubt, leave it out. You won’t poison yourself that way.

Kathleen Aspenns: Well, on that beautiful note of what we can do for the world, what we can offer, being able to offer that gem water to our space, to our plants, even truly, just literally down the drain, it’s radiating outward. Everything we’re doing to make things better, kinder, more grounded is radiating outwards. And so, we can become this gift to the world by our work. So, thank you for bringing that piece in. It’s really important.

As we come to a close, thank you for spending this time with us. It’s really a privilege and a pleasure to spend time with you. Can you tell us more about where our listeners can find what you’re up to and where your books are and all that?

Nicholas Pearson: Absolutely. Thank you both for having me back on. I’m so glad you’re not sick of me yet. If anyone would like to learn more about the work that I do, you can find me online at theluminouspearl.com, designed by the lovely and talented Ro, I might add. I’m also @theluminouspearl on most social media. And I will have a slightly less active season ahead in terms of travel and other things through the summer. I’ve got a trip up to New York and Massachusetts planned for the summer, but I will maintain a few online events who are there. My monthly free community Reiki share and a few courses with The College of Psychic Studies, but my hope is that I will finish writing a book this summer, so that’s why it’s going to be a little bit of a quieter season for me. But if anyone’s interested in the book, it’s available anywhere books are sold. Go find your local indie bookstore. If they don’t have it, I’m sure they’d be delighted to order it for you. And of course, you can get it from any major retailer, any online retailer as well.

Rochana Felde: Wonderful. Yeah, thanks for the shout-out, too. People might not know that I also design websites, and you can find out more about that on creativesoulbusiness.com.

So, Nicholas, thank you so much for—we’ll never get sick of you. I mean, come on, anytime. You’re always welcome. I feel there’s so many things that we can talk about, and we love having someone like you that has the flower essence knowledge and experience, as well as the gemstone knowledge and experience, and not just from the vibrational standpoint, but also from the science standpoint in how you know and understand and work with minerals. And that is really valuable. So, we definitely appreciate you.

And for the listeners, I wanted to make sure to let you know that Kathleen and I, we’re going to have a live Ask Us Anything session. We’re going to be doing this in our—you may already know we have these monthly live chats in our Flower Essence School community. So, be sure you are signed up for our mailing list at The School for Flower Essence Studies. And you can go to floweressencestudies.com to sign up for that mailing list, if you haven’t already. And you’re all welcome to join. You don’t have to be a current student of the school. You can just join. And if you have any burning questions about what we talk about, flower essence therapy and the world around it, come on and join us for that live chat on June 11th, if I didn’t already say it.

Kathleen Aspenns: And these live events are ongoing every month. We pick a different theme for each one. So, if this one, you can’t make it, we do record them and put them out on our YouTube channel afterwards. So, if you want to go check out what we do as far as the live chats go, it’s a really warm, welcoming environment. It’s really casual and chill, and we just like to talk with you. We like to hang out together. So, you’re all welcome. And we hope you join us. And thank you for being part of the flower essence community.

The Flower Essence Podcast