The Subtle Power of the Flower
I have been drawn to the magic of flowers for as long as I can remember and recall many sunny afternoons being lost in the perfume of lavender, rosemary, jasmine, and wisteria in my mother’s lush herb gardens that wrapped around my childhood home in South Africa… and I can still feel the deep droning of bees in their thousands on blossoms in our expansive fruit orchard.
Both my grandmothers loved flowers too; each lovingly tended the most exquisite gardens, and my mother’s mother would spend many hours pressing flowers. I still have some of these precious flowers today. My father’s mother had a large Frangipani tree right outside her front door that was excellent for climbing. I have many memories of sitting in their branches for what felt like eternity, soaking in their delicious, heady scent.
Flowers also came to me in a particularly powerful way when I lived in the Peruvian Amazon jungle studying Shipibo Curanderismo, the craft of plant spirit medicine. Although I had a deep love of the practices I was receiving from my teachers, it wasn’t until I began focusing my learning and dietas on the realm of flowers that the teachings came alive for me in a way that they had not before.
These days, I devote myself to my own flower garden and regularly fall into moments of quiet ecstasy as I witness each plant grow from seed, burst into bloom and then fall away again… this cycle teaches me, body to body. I’m also deep into a wild love affair with the rare native orchids that grow in the bushland where I now live in Melbourne, Australia. Like jewels of the bush, they emerge from their winter slumber for only a few short weeks, their life cycles very sensitive to environmental change. I have spent countless hours wandering through bushland in silence, tracking their rare and precious forms.
Awakening to the Flower Realm
I was directly introduced to the art of making and using flower essences by a wild jungle Passionflower that I met while out on a walk in the Mishana National Park in the Amazon, where I was living and working at that time.
In my years of living on that land, I had never seen a wild Passionflower before, and I was instantly and utterly enchanted from the first moment of connection… I felt as though I was being summoned by her snake-like tendrils into the Other World. Her presence was enough to knock me into an altered state, and it felt a little something like falling in love. I was reluctant to return to camp to prepare for the ceremony we were having that night, but as a facilitator, I didn’t really have a choice, haha.
That night, in an Ayahuasca ceremony, I was very quickly met by the animate force of that particular flower, who invited me to make a flower essence with her the following day. I had heard of flower essences before, but had never made them myself or worked with them before. In fact, I had them filed firmly under the category of “woo woo nonsense” in my mind. I expressed that I had no clue how to make an essence (we were very rural with no internet or even phone signal), and in response, she just laughed and then gave clear step-by-step instructions.
I knew better than to ignore my experience, so I went out early the next morning as I had agreed and followed the instructions given… during this process, I also discovered that the Ayahuasca vine was in flower (very rare) and so was our Tobacco (Mapacho). I felt a strong pull to make essences from them, too, and that is how it all began.
Flowers opened up a whole new realm for me in the world of Amazonian curanderismo and became strong teachers for me on that path.
After some time marinating in the world of flowers, my teachers even started to call me “Cielita Flor”, which means Sky Flower or Celestial flower.
And so began my apprenticeship in the flower realm that continues to this day. Unsurprisingly, I have found a Passionflower vine at every home or next to every home I have lived at since that encounter and have remained a faithful beloved of Passionflower in her many forms for over a decade now.
What are flower essences and how do they work?
Flower essences are a form of vibrational and relational medicine. Not to be confused with essential oils or herbal extracts, which involve working with the chemical constituents of the plant. With flower essences, we are working primarily with the vibrational qualities of the plants and their impact on our consciousness, energetic and emotional bodies. Each species of flower carries a unique vibrational pattern ― its own information signature. While this kind of medicine is subtle, in the sense that you need to have a certain awareness of your own consciousness, energy and emotions to track their effect, they can also be very potent and lead to fairly dramatic shifts. They are also very relational, in the sense that you need to engage their living intelligence to experience the fullness of their medicine.
Flowers speak the language of the heart and interact with us in the realm of dreams and imaginal vision. It is in this world that the medicines do their work, where they begin to weave their consciousness into our own with the potential for catalysing a flowering within our own heart-mind.
To really feel the effect of flower essences, most folks will need to create spaces to intentionally shift out of our fast-paced, overly full lives and consciously slow down, turn inwards and cultivate a more subtle state of altered awareness through some kind of practice like movement, repetitive song or rhythm, connected breathwork, meditation or The Exact Sensorial Imagination which is practice I learned from Stephen Harrod Buhner and one I now teach. From this space, we are able to attune to the vibrational pattern of the flower we are working with and track their impact on our systems. I also love to invite the plants into my dreams, which is a very traditional way to make contact with the animate intelligence of plants.
To me, it feels as if flower essences work directly on the psycho-spiritual centers of the person and help to soften the sense of separateness and alienation from the web of life that many of us feel… they gently remind us of who we really are, by subtly shifting our perception of the world and by bringing awareness to our place within the great web of connections in which we are embedded.
Each flower also offers its own special qualities to help with specific psycho-emotional imbalances within a person’s system. Although my approach is a bit different from traditional systems like Bach, in that I am reluctant to say “this flower does this and that flower does that”… while each flower will have certain affinities, for the heart, for example or for empowerment, I find it reductionistic to approach them that way. When we work relationally, the medicine that emerges will be specific to that person and their relationship… in the same way that my husband will experience me differently from my child, and a close friend will have a different experience of me than someone I don’t feel particularly compatible with… and yet there is an unmistakable quality of Skye throughout all these experiences… it is the same with the plants, which is why its important to learn how to identify “the calling” that comes from the plants, because often the medicine we need most will reach out to us, even if it doesnt make sense to another person or align to their experience of that plant.
When there are mental/emotional blockages, traumas and unhelpful stories that are causing imbalances, it is not uncommon for the flowers to bring those aspects into sharper focus within our awareness so that they can be named, held/attuned to and integrated. It’s good to be aware that the healing trajectory that the plants take us on can be non-linear and really uncomfortable at times. It’s okay to slow down or take breaks if you aren’t resourced to keep going, but leaning into difficult or painful experiences is often a key part in the change these plants can bring about.
Although there are no quick-fixes or panaceas in life, flower essences are a subtle yet powerful way to support oneself on the path to balance, harmony, and connection. I cannot help feeling immense gratitude to them for sharing their medicine with us.
How they are prepared
Preparing flower medicines is a holy process for me and has become one of the many practices I use to connect to the more-than-human world. I usually wait until I am ‘called’ by a particular flower (I also work with tree, stone and fungi essences and the process is somewhat similar for all). Sometimes they visit me in dreams, sometimes they are gifted to me, and sometimes I am stopped in my tracks and pulled into an altered state for a timeless moment by the presence of the flower. I then collect suitable water, ideally spring water or rainwater and then head out to romance the flower in question.
*I never make essences from rare flowers, so for example, I never pick the rare orchids that grow in my locale, as they are endangered. It’s important that we bring awareness and track any wild populations we want to harvest from, whether for food, craft, medicine or essences.
Sitting next to the flower, I bring myself into a quiet state and then begin to feel into it, asking for its medicine and communicating my intentions through prayer, song, imaginal visioning, and feeling. If I feel an intuitive ‘yes’, then I sing to them as an offering of my gratitude and love. My songs are generally not learned but spontaneous responses to what I am experiencing in the moment. Sometimes I sing for a long time, and we enter into a trance together, and sometimes it is just a short song in gratitude. I sometimes offer libations, tobacco or food offerings in the spirit of reciprocity.
I then pick the flowers in question (sometimes several, depending on how many there are and their size) to be placed into a clear glass or crystal bowl with the water and then into direct sunlight (or moonlight) for up to 4 hours. Sometimes I sit with the bowl and again sing, or meditate, and sometimes I leave it and return a few hours later.
The idea is that the light from the sun or moon imprints the vibrational life force of the flower into the memory of the water. I then decant the water into a small amber glass bottle, add a little preserving alcohol (a small amount of high-quality brandy or vodka, just in case some botanical components are in the essence) to stabilise it, label it, and there it is. Every one of my essences has been made in this way, with great love, respect, reverence, and intention.
How I work with flower essences
Various forms of flower energy medicine go back as far as the Egyptians and ancient Greeks (and maybe even further, who knows), but the first historical mention of flower essences as we know them was said to be by Paracelsus (1493-1542), a well-known physician and botanist who used the dew collected from flowers to treat some of his patients.
They were, however, made famous by Dr Edward Bach (1886-1936), who was a medical doctor, homeopath and nature lover who eventually left his very successful full-time surgical practice in the city to dedicate his time to exploring the field of flower essences. Nowadays, the art of flower essences is fairly well-known in the world of natural medicine and is closely associated with homeopathy.
My style of working with flower essences is an intuitive fusion of the ‘traditional’ format proposed by Bach, combined with a strong animistic/shamanic influence.
This happens when I develop a relationship with my essences by entering into Dieta with them, or do a gentle entrainment/attunement by taking the essence every evening before bed and then doing dream incubation or inducing trance through drum journey practices to call the energy of the flowers into my being. Once I begin feeling the flower enter into my consciousness, I work to bring their wisdom and energy through by creating art, poetry, and songs in order to deepen my connection.
In my approach with clients, I enter into altered states of consciousness through drumming, singing and/entheogenic ceremony and then journey within consciousness to make contact with the animate forces of the flowers that want to work with my client. I do my best to drop all expectations and allow myself to be guided directly by flowers in my ceremonial work.
A huge part of my work with these flowers is the weaving of essence with story, dream and archetypal imagery- allowing their spirit narratives to carry their medicine into our awareness. This practice is ever evolving, and I feel like this is really only the beginning. I am excited to see where this partnership leads as I grow and change with the seasons of life.
Deep Earth Dreaming 