Flower Essences edmonton Archives

November 3, 2017

Lessons on Passion, Love & Romance

The past 2 weeks have been super intense for me. I think I kicked off the intensity by taking a Flower Essences blend I made for myself with – not 1, but 2 – flowers for femininity and passion as it flows through the sacral chakra. The revelation gifted to me by that blend is this: I’M REALLY FUCKING PASSIONATE. I knew I was passionate, to a degree, but didn’t realize I was THAT passionate! Surveying my behavior with acute awareness of my femininity and passion, I recognize that I express myself in big, animated ways, feel deeply, dance frequently, and, if my passion is not channeled through healthy habits, react vehemently. Passion is somewhat of a double edged sword – it moves and shakes and can get things done, but, like a fire, it can burn out of control, causing destruction in its path when not attended to.

I’m in a romantic relationship that’s only 4 months old. Despite all the inner work I’ve done, I still find myself somewhat jaded by a past of so called “failed” relationships that have lent themselves to the formulation and maintenance of deficient paradigms. Sometimes, my head tells me that I’m a dejected, rejected, 2nd rate woman – “the fuckable one”, not the long-term relationship one. Sometimes, these false paradigms cause me to flail around in desperation inside romantic connections. Whether I’m flailing inwardly or outwardly, it always leaves me lacking because I’m seeking on the outside of myself for fulfillment, and that’s a clear recipe for emptiness.

I recently started praying for “discernment” with relation to my current romantic connection – I put that in quotations because if you were sitting across from me while I told this story, I would be using air quotes for that word. The reason for the air quotes is because while I was consciously praying for “discernment”, what I was really wanting, in the recesses of my unconscious mind, was a “yes” or “no” answer from the God of my understanding. Because, you know, spirituality is black and white and God operates within duality. I’m being facetious – just in case that wasn’t obvious.

After one particular morning of “praying for discernment”, I got up off the meditation cushion and started my day with flair. On the way to work it hit me – “I feel shoved into a box by him! Whenever I’m around him, he always wants me to reel it in! I’m too passionate for him and he’s too conservative! Ra-ra-ra! Roar! That’s it!”, I thought, “that’s the answer I’ve been looking for. It’s no! It’s clearly no!” I barged to work with resolve. I’ll fix him for not having a container that I deem big enough for my passion! Who does he think he is being himself and trying to meet me where I’m at to the best of his ability with gentle presence?!

Um, yeah, so that’s not how my thought process ended, but with some gained perspective, I can definitely express it as such.

That afternoon, as I shared my fiery thought processes with my sponsor, I felt embarrassed just hearing them come out of my mouth. Undeniably, I heard the judgment and intolerance. It’s ME that’s reeling myself in, keeping my passion under a bushel for fear of further rejection. And then, angry at myself for not being authentic, I lash out, blaming him. Ugh. Later, my sponsor sent me this beautiful poem by Shel Silverstein that, when I read it, brought immediate tears of recognition:

That night, I had a lovely conversation with said lovely man. The next day at work, I meandered over to the retail section of our common space and picked up the book A Return to Love, by Marianne Williamson. Would you believe I opened it to these precise words?

“Pure love of another person is the restoration of our heartline. The ego, therefore, is marshaled against it. It will do everything it can to block the experience of love in any form. When two people come together in God, the walls that appear to separate us disappear. The beloved doesn’t seem to be a mere mortal. They seem for a while to be something else, something more. The truth is, they are something more. No one is anything less than the perfect Son [“child” is a more inclusive word for me] of God, and when we fall in love, we have an instant when we see the total truth about someone. They are perfect. That’s not just our imagination.

But the craziness sets in quickly. As soon as the light appears, the ego begins its powerful drive to shut it out. All of a sudden, the perfection we glanced on the spiritual planes becomes projected onto the physical. Instead of realizing that spiritual perfection and physical, material imperfection exist simultaneously, we start looking for material, physical perfection.
…And so no one gets to be a human being anymore. We idealize one another, and when someone doesn’t live up to the ideal, we’re disappointed.”

These words were a spiritual gut punch. The only kind of gut punch I like. I haven’t been able to stop reading Williamson’s section on “Romantic Love” in this book ever since! Here are some other segments that stand out to me:

“Rejecting another human being simply because they are human, has become a collective neurosis. People ask, “When will my soul mate get here?”

…Our soul mates are human beings, just like we are, going through the normal processes of growth. No one is ever “finished”. The top of one mountain is always the bottom of another…

…The idea that there is a perfect person who just hasn’t arrived yet is a major block…

…Thinking that there is some special person out there who is going to save us is a barrier to pure love. It is a large gun in the ego’s arsenal. It is a way the ego tries to keep us away from love, although it doesn’t want us to see that. We seek desperately for love, but it is that same desperation that leads us to destroy it once it gets here. Thinking that one special person is going to save us tempts us to load an awful lot of emotional pressure on whoever comes along that we think might fit the bill…

…Looking for Mr. Right leads to desperation because there is no Mr. Right. There is no Mr. Right because there is no Mr. Wrong. There is whoever is in front of us, and the perfect lessons to be learned from that person…

…We sometimes fail to work on ourselves in the relationships that are right in front of us, thinking that “real life” begins when they get here. This is just a ploy of the ego once again, making sure that we’ll seek but not find.”

Seriously – Marrianne Williamson: are you walking around in my head and now you’ve written a book that is the anodyne to all my insanity in the arena of love and intimacy?

These passages speak right to the core of my mental commotion upon the landscape of love. Especially that last part about “…thinking that “real life” begins when they get here.” I’ve done this in such a protracted way ever since my first heartbreak when I was 23. This thought process dooms whoever I’m dating to a fixed audition for the position of “the Right One” in my life. This also keeps me in constant withdrawal – withdrawing my love, my presence, my full attention, my vulnerability, my closeness. Withdrawing it from everyone and anyone I’m dating until they become worthy of the position, which, they never do because this is an obvious projection of my own insecurities – I’ll never be “the Right One”, so nor can you – or you – or you… and it ceaselessly rolls out as such. Or at least it has…

After reading and re-reading Williamson’s inspired words, I decided to show up to the relationship instead of putting a kibosh on it. I channelled my passion into verbal sharing with others and physical movement. I decided that pigeonholing him into the position of “the Wrong One” is unfair. That withholding love – from anyone – is unfair. Such withholding is conditional love. I decided that maybe, he’s JUST the human I’m intended to be in relationship with right now, or I wouldn’t be in relationship with him. I decided that clearly, our connection is bringing the right lessons at the right time and is actually quite “right” – for both of us. That maybe, the pressure of searching for the “Right One” causes inevitable emotional crumbling and sabotage. I deserve to be loved, and so does he. We all do. I’m an equal contributor to the loving atmosphere of any relationship. And maybe – but more than likely quite certainly – redirecting my newly acknowledged passion into loving my own damn Self is the ultimate remedy to my attempts to overthrow romantic love in my life.

August 30, 2017September 2, 2017

Rawberta’s Diaries: Sticking it to Shitty Paradigms

Having been subject to societal paradigms around what it means to be professionally successful my entire adult life, I’m deeply pressed when I don’t meet those standards. You know the ones: your bank account should be bulgy, you should be busy, productive, effective without mistakes, and your work schedule should be replete with long hours that propagate a quiet martyrdom. I, for one, am ashamed of the current state of my bank accounts – desperately, I try to keep my financials a despicable secret, agreeing to coffee meetings where I buy coffee I can’t afford to shield the truth. God forbid anyone know how broke I am since that means I meet one of the top criteria of professional failure. My daytime hours are spent building my new expression of business, but without consistent bookings to fill those hours, I’m bombarded by my slanderous mind, long inundated by said societal paradigms. The slander infiltrates my physicality and, on days that I don’t have clients, I get to feeling like an awkward hindrance wherever I go – “useless” in a world where generating lots of money in ways that deplete my spirit has come to define my worthiness, or at least that’s how the story goes. In direct conflict to that story is another paradigm that I also happen to be deeply entrenched in. The one that tells me that money is “bad – the root of all evil”. What a shit show!

There was a time in my life that I worked 3 jobs, 7 days a week. And for what? Surely not for personal joy or fulfillment. Hell no. I did it for money because society tells me that the more of it I have, the more valuable I am. Concurrently, my familial paradigms told me that having lots of money meant that I would be arrogant. And so, equipped with a stifling work schedule, my hard-earned and learned martyr syndrome and addictions, I drank and smoked all the money away, on a miserable hamster wheel for years, slowly killing myself as I tried to align to polar paradigms.

Fast forward to about 6 months ago, when I thought I was having a nervous breakdown. Accustomed to working 5 days one week and 6 days the next, this schedule was normalized, and a noble expression of popular culture’s standards – having 2 consecutive days off felt superfluous. I had myself on Olive Flower Essence for burnout – nervous exhaustion from excessive slogging. I didn’t feel burnt out as of yet, but was getting there and figured that taking Olive would help me achieve deeper rest. As it turns out, Olive FORCED me to slow down by near burnout, which came to a head in a precise moment. There I was, sitting across from my fourth client of the day, distinctly aware of something rising inside of me – like a tidal wave coming up to drown me with its pleading swell. Something was screaming inside – it’s miraculous that I heard each word my client shared as this scream intensified. What was the scream saying? And then I heard it: “I’M GONNA LOSE MY SHIT!” Shortly thereafter, I wound up in my doctor’s office asking about a stress leave, to which she said no, it would cause me more stress than good and I should reduce my working hours instead. Since then, I no longer work Thursdays. Permanently. And I refuse to bend on that even while my paradigms flare up telling me that I don’t do enough – that I’m lazily hanging out at the pit stops of the rat race, a joker of a participant who walks while everyone else runs.

It’s time to make my life look how I actually want it to look, not how I think it should fit with the expectations of our society. If slogging doesn’t equate financial freedom in my case, then why slog? Life is fleeting and full of beautiful moments that are worth being shared, not missed because I have too much to do.

And so here I am, working on these deeply rooted, insidious paradigms around joy and money.

A couple weeks ago I had no clients, which means I didn’t get paid. Previously, I would have slunk away home, isolating myself to bathe in this idea that I must not be good enough or have any value to offer this world. But instead, I decided to function within the law of opposites. Feeling like a blight on the fabricated prototype of professional success, I took a pile of posters I’d had printed with a Reflexology offer for Edmonton service professionals and I stomped around downtown, stopping in at umpteen businesses to ask if they’d put my poster up in their staff area. And do you want to know how that felt? Terrible. It felt terrible because I felt terrible. I was sure I’d show up and express my request only to be laughed out the door because obviously, I’m a pointless contributor to this unremitting urban sprawl – do my insecurities not precede me? Apparently they don’t, because 23 of my posters got hung up that day. And you know what happened the following week? I was almost fully booked. Why? Because success actually has nothing to do with how busy I am, how much money I make or how much I sacrifice myself – success is a mindset. If I continue reacting in the face of perceived failure the way that I always have, then I can expect more of the same results. So I took those feelings of failure related to old, shitty paradigms and I stuck it to them! I let them know, by my action, that I heard them, but that they are not allowed to direct the show of my life! “Move aside false failure”, I said, in an unpretentious inner voice, “we’re doing this anyway!” And I did it anyway even though I didn’t want to.

Here’s a video I shot on that day in the midst of my discomfort:

Here’s the thing – something that I am FAR from integrating, but which I know damn well to be true: financial abundance AND enjoyment of life can coexist. In other words, no one need work – even at a job they love – 6-7 days a week at the expense of the finer things in life, like relationships, connection, travel and rest. The only way I’ll ever be able to achieve this reality is by changing my mind. And that’s what I plan to do. One of the ways I plan to do this is by the law of opposites – whenever my mind tells me to do what I’ve always done – to slink away from the limelight of my life – from my wildest dreams and aspirations including the potential for a luscious professional practice, I’m going to act in opposition to that. In so doing, I change the energy and challenge my inherited belief construct. Money, contrary to what I learned in my life (“must be nice”, “money doesn’t grow on trees”, “the meek shall inherit the earth”) is NOT “bad”. Nor is downtime and enjoyment. So move aside shitty paradigms because you’re being re-written. Right now.

May 6, 2017August 20, 2017

What are Flower Essences?

Flower Essences are, by far, one of my favorite things.

Let’s clear up some misconceptions right away: Flower Essences are NON-aromatic and are remedies that are ingestible by mouth. In other words, Flower Essences are NOT aromatherapy and each remedy smells exactly the same.

Flower Essences are plant spirit medicine – the spirit energy of flowers captured in solution.

Flower Essences are the brain and heart child of Dr. Edward Bach, a medical doctor, homeopath and bacteriologist whose career spanned from 1906 to 1936, when he died in his sleep at the tender age of 50. Known for his creation of 7 bacterial nosodes used in the practice of homeopathy, in 1930, Bach became assured that there was a more subtle way to treat his patient’s ailments over and above the modern medical model, which he found to be crude and invasive. The premise of his outlook on treating individuals more subtly, is that illness is the result of discord between the purpose of the soul and the actions and mental paradigms of the person.

In 1930, Bach abandoned his lucrative medical practice for the countryside and fields of England, where he intuitively discovered his remedies over a dedicated 4 year period. Bach’s discovery started with his personal experimentation of holding his hands over the flowers he was studying while in the throes of difficult emotions. In this way, he would connect to the energy of the flowers until he found the one that alleviated his emotional discord. In spring and summer, Bach psychically connected to plant spirit, and in winter, he treated patients for free. Bach discovered that the dawn’s sunlight could infuse dew drops on flower petals with the healing energy of that flower, so he began testing the remedies by gathering those potent dew drops and preserving them for ingestion. As this practice progressed, the amount of dew collected was not enough, so he suspended flowers in spring water and used a sun-infusion method that is still employed today.

Water has memory and the ability to hold energetic charge. This is the basis for the way by which Flower Essences work. Since our bodies and cells are made up of more than 75% water, when we ingest plant spirit medicine, the energy of the medicine resonates throughout the water of our cells. Resonance is when vibrational frequency matches an endogenous state of being, therefore enhancing the charge of that state and allowing it to be brought to the forefront. For example, there is vibrational frequency associated with the quality of confidence – think about it: how does it feel to be in the presence of a confident person versus a person with low self-esteem? Feels different doesn’t it? Well, there is also a flower essence that holds within its water the resonant quality of confidence (there are a few actually). When you ingest that flower essence, the energy of confidence resonates throughout your cells, awakening your innate human capacity to be confident and amplifying that capacity, thereby drawing it to the conscious forefront of living. As these innate qualities get drawn forward with the use of Flower Essences, they also move through all the limiting beliefs that are keeping those innate qualities repressed. This facilitates profound awareness around the precise nature of such limiting paradigms and how they have been keeping us stuck.

What do I do with Flower Essences?

I am like a “flower interpreter”. I work with about 155 Flower Essences and have spent the past 11 years learning about the qualities of each one, both intellectually and experientially. When I meet with someone for the 1st time, I conduct an interview process that takes about 75 minutes. Within this interview process, I gather information about you and your life. We talk about values, goals for change, core wounds and paradigms: what is important to you and how would you like to see your life and your inner landscape change? What is your story? I love holding space for the stories of others and I do so with utmost respect and reverence. What are the core wounds that were created within that story that you hold to so firmly that they’re getting in the way? This does not mean that pain, anger or loss are not relevant or legitimate, nor is there ever any attempt to diminish your experiences. How have your core wounds and experiences shaped the paradigms you currently have? For example, the most common paradigm set that gets in the way of our living a joyful and fulfilled life is the “not enough” paradigm set: not good enough, smart enough, attractive enough, successful enough, etc.
Once I gather all relevant information about you and your life, I match flowers – anywhere from 1 – 5, just for you, and make them into a custom blend. I then send you off to ingest this blend for about 30 days, which is considered one cycle. I will ask you to come back in 6-weeks for a follow-up, where we will discuss your experiences, the state of your goals and how to move forward.

April 14, 2017August 21, 2017

Barking at Fear

My son and I have become unseasoned fans of Harry Potter, having progressively watched all the movies over the last several weeks.

It’s gotten me to thinking about the symbolic nature of the classic ‘good versus evil’ storyline, which is representative of reality on so many levels and allows us to identify with our humanity through folklore. Voldemort (the villain in Harry Potter) is the archetypal shadow aspect, the quintessential personification of fear. Meanwhile, Harry Potter and his cohort are the classic presentation of courageous conquest. One of the more poignant scenes in the 2nd installment of part 7 in the series is when we can see the fear on Voldemort’s face as he recognizes he’s losing power. This struck me because he impersonated my own fear, desperately clutching to a form where it no longer belongs.

I’ve been sitting on a vision for a long time. It’s taken me ages to see this vision with any semblance of clarity and it’s still coming into focus. I’ve resisted this vision because of fear. Fear of failure, fear of success, fear of losing external validation, fear of financial collapse, fear of incapacity, fear of not being good enough.

I recently finished a Flower Essences round with the flower Wolf Willow. Wolf Willow entices a pointed personal exploration of where one stands in their own life’s progression and how we allow ourselves to be held back by fear, societal expectations and expectations from our own selves and those around us. One of my teachers, Laurie Szott-Rogers, who created the essence of Wolf Willow provided the following guided exercise as an adjunct to taking Wolf Willow:

“When making this essence I envisioned 6 wolves each guarding a spiritual direction: One wolf in the north- the direction of ancestors and regeneration; the second wolf in the east to support new beginnings, the third sits in the south where passion and creativity are honored, and the fourth wolf guards west, the direction of intuition and letting go of that which no longer serves us. The fifth wolf guards what is below and the sixth, what is above.

Each wolf holds open the space to allow newness to emerge. They also alert us to interference from others around us, who benefit from us not shifting.

Take 6 drops of Wolf Willow Essence: Silently summon the six guardian wolves. Take a few minutes to notice each of them individually. Find out what they like and how you can develop a bond of trust with them.

State your boundary intention clearly to the wolf guardians. i.e. “I wish to write my book in the next 3 months. If you notice internal sabotage or interference from me, or external sabotage from anyone around me, or outside circumstances, please alert me. Please give me recognizable signals at the first indication that this boundary is being crossed, and help me repair and reinforce it.”

I did this guided visualization numerous times during my Flower Essences cycle. What eventually came forward in my own vision were the wolves barking at all these villainous fears as they crept into my mental reality over and over again. Much like Voldemort, my fears can suddenly appear behind a smokescreen of reality and logic – my thoughts trying to convince me of all the reasons why my visions are unfounded and I must be an imposter in this world with such gall as to believe that I deserve to live forward my wildest dreams. Fortunately, my wolf guides have been consistent and present in their warding off my fear – dedicated in their spirit realm, barking with courageous conquest and spiritual dedication, ever reminding me of the illusory aspect of my worries.

Today I’m here on this cyberpage sharing the outset of my vision with you. I am consciously guided by my ancestry, connected by lineage and blessing to the medicines of the earth. I am forging new beginnings, committed to moving through the fires of my fears. I am passionate about making a difference through accessibility, honesty, holding compassionate space for others and joining my Flower Essences work to social programs and I pursue my passion with creative expression. I am intuitively connected to a power greater than myself. I acknowledge that that which is above is equally valuable as that which lies below. My magic wand is my spiritual practice and my hoarcrux is my self-doubt. Together with my wolf guides I move myself forward on this path, barking at fear.