Some Thoughts on the Alchemical Process Copyright 2004, 2005 Alicia Russell Smith There have been many fine written explanations of flower essence work; how it works as well as why.   I’m connecting my own words to existing writing as an effort of continuation rather than review or repetition.   If you are not yet familiar with flower essences and/or the human chakra system/subtle energy bodies then I would recommend reading a good book on the subject, or doing some relevant online Keyword searches.  In this way you’ll gain insight for an overview and details that help you learn with your mind.   Your heart and soul will learn through work with the essences themselves.   This is the aspect of vibrational healing that holds the greatest personal meaning for me.   Throughout my life all of my personalized healing experiences have involved flower essences and/or flower wisdom in a more generalized sense.  For years I’ve focused on flower gardening and growing as many different species as possible.   For a time, in Boston, I belonged to a cooperative garden on the banks of the Charles River.   People very frequently asked me pointblank why I wasn’t growing anything important.   They meant food-producing plants.   To me (of course!!) the flowers were the very pinnacle of nourishment but I didn’t yet have a sufficient revolving/concrete understanding to articulate my views. In my version of a perfect world, the global village would be sufficiently united to insure that essences were prepared and utilized by strong majority.  I often visualize ad hoc disembodied community structure emerging from various soul groups.  If there were just five joined members of the group, and they each prepared a modest handful of essences for the group’s exchange, they could wind up with five very well stocked vibrational medicine chests!  From this point forward, everybody touched by the contents of the chests is drawn into the larger fabric of cosmic relationship.   Yaweh told the people to go forth and multiply.   I like to take the basic instruction and apply it to plants, also created by the same presumed god/des.   Their progeny protects and maintains our own children.   It is not for ourselves that we dream and work with flower medicine:  It is for the children of tomorrow and Our Mother the earth. Such things are known to our species at a very deep and organic level.  The knowledge spawns all conscious awareness shared by dedicated students and caretakers of the Green Realms.  Those realms are legion in number, and very adept at teaching us the various lessons of evolution.  Dandelions, in my opinion, are the botanical equivalent of coyotes.   They tend to thrive where they’re least appreciated and flat-out refuse to be conquered.   Digging up just one set of spring-time dandelion roots for a tincture will often result in five very vibrant emissaries taking the place of a single medicine spirit.  They will always be far more powerful than they are reviled.    Within this power, very strong and multi-dimensional medicine emerges.   Nothing makes this more clear than the simple habit of eating three or five dandelion leaves each day during the spring season.   Continuing to work with Dandelion as a model, we’re free to examine the ways we tend to relate to this plant in flower essence form.   This brings us to a point of methodology.   In my own experiences it’s not always necessary to gather blossoms from the largest possible number of plants.   This is particularly true if you’re preparing the essences primarily or exclusively for your first and second circles of relationship.  In such preparations, your family, clients and friends will benefit from direct contact with the power of the link you have forged with a specific plant.    In my experience that link is what provides a connection to the all-encompassing, ascended medicine spirit of the plant.   From this point of inter-relationship, we may choose to establish communication with Overlight energy.  For whatever my opinion and experience can be worth to others – I don’t usually make such a choice.  It’s my sense that I’m best served to-serve-others if I allow such messengers to find me on their own terms.  It’s my further sense that forcing the issue with proclamations of one’s personalized intention is an inherently ego-driven initiative.  Seeing the matter in such light is not a popularized view.  The dawning of the new millennium is peppered with proof that many active Seekers are still disavowing any ongoing connection to their egos.  Until such denial changes, and both singular and collective matters of ego are embraced enough to also transcend their current framework, we’re going to experience “solar flares” of individualized and group confusion. Irrespective of how far or deeply we’re able to take the possibilities of inter-planed dialogue, we’re guaranteed to find a wide range of appropriate essences for our work, healing and refinement.  This is because, irrespective of the details in our individual/group journeys, flower vibrational properties carry all that’s needed to ease our various stages of awareness transition and refinement.  The flowers’ corresponding healing signature can be integral in our view of Self as a conduit to larger energetic forces and wisdom.   Essences provide electrical re-learning tools for our brain’s hardwiring that have the capability to enhance every aspect of development & healing.  The flowers’ vibrations patiently and accurately fine-tune the activities and functioning of our cellular structure, as well broadening our personalized metaphysical and emotional scope.   An essence’s mother stock preparation is complete when the outward grace and beauty of the flowers have been distilled as an energetic pattern with its own vibrational frequency.   We need to understand that the same equation applies to healing ourselves and other sentient beings.  In such a context, we learn to recognize the grace and beauty of our own spirit.   Flowers serve as both metaphor and salvation in the evolutionary sense.   It isn’t necessary to journey somewhere exotic or appreciably unspoiled in order to forge a link with the flower kingdom’s collective body of awareness.  We only have to perceive and believe that such a kingdom exist.  Within our developing experience, we grow increasingly aware that flowers replicate their wisdom with astonishing accuracy.   In my teens much was written and discussed concerning the “amazing discovery” that plants have feelings as we define them.  At this same time, people from my own generation and my half-step elders were actively and successfully forging an individualistic, earth-based Gaia connection.   I grew up in an environment that made it impossible to believe only people living in unspoiled wilderness can “really” know the spirit of a place, creature, or kingdom.    This is the sort of perfect-world pastiche of optimum conditions and conditioning which creates an inherent skew of elitism.  Such a skew will in time lead to both value judgements and self-importance.   To believe such things will result within individual cases of this philosophy’s adoption is as unfair and essentially useless as saying one has to live in rather specific conditions in order to experience bona fide attunement.   I have learned a lot from my half-step elders.  I respect them in our adulthood just as fully as I did not know what to make of them during our formative years and adolescence.   Nonetheless in the bridge between incomprehension and humility, I have found the blind-side of Unspoiled elitism to be quite truly elitist.  The intentional belief system abounds with exclusion and materialistic edicts which I pray more of the half-steps recognize so as to re-evaluate their golden years’ priorities and belief systems.  It would be a very big shame otherwise; to have them bring the rest of us so much closer to our heart’s soul only to balk and restrain themselves right on the thresh-hold of enormous change.   In order to facilitate their own evolutionary process, the half-steps must learn to respect and learn from people not quite as fortunate or driven to attain/own/marry/preserve wilderness.  Otherwise they shall continue to condescend to every single species involved with the perpetual, ongoing reality of universal attunement.   The current movements of preservation and reclamation suggest all that cosmic linkage and potential has been in place simply to serve us when and if we ever get up to speed.   This implies we are somehow qualified and within a degree of sensible rights claiming for ourselves the job of re-creating nature.    In point of fact, I’ve learned the most pleasantly and constructively from my half-step elders who do not punch down hard and heavy on the wilderness/purity issue.    Irrespective of how they might live themselves, they acknowledge the reality of other lifestyles and choices.  It’s only logical to understand that most medicine makers and other ethnobotanists are going to want access to the widest possible range of fresh botanicals.  This means owning/keeping land enough to yield plentiful indigenous medicine plants.  It may also mean the barter system; working with other people and plants in order to supplement individual harvests.   Most people who love plants are compulsive about it.  Unless they are undeviatingly dedicated to very specific forms of indigenous medicine making, most growers and gatherers will seek expansion fueled by instinctive curiosity.   You will find individualized collections of Old Favorites, obscurities, obsessions, and current New Crushes where-ever you find somebody blessed with resources to grow – if not at true full throttle Will then at least within reasonable and oftentimes remarkable parameters of accomplishment.   That is the nature of the healing Green Ray organism.  Once we’ve entered its flow of life, it’s impossible to leave it all the way behind or forget the powerful ongoing fact of its existence.  We may in our conscious minds appear to forget.   Daily life and personal concerns may obscure what we remember quite well at a cellular level.   For almost 20 years, I lived in a variety of homes within Boston’s city limits.  Each home had a garden; one of which I dug a tenacious clay-filled soup spoon at a time.   One of the most earth-conscious aspects of city life is the ability to stop driving a solitary, insular vehicle.  Public transportation can take city dwellers virtually anywhere they need or want to go.  Walking is a very viable alternative to the bus.  In the city I could cover impressive distances in just one free hour’s worth of time.  It was a different way of being one with the environment and my physical body.   I walked everywhere and my most habitual routes were landmarked by gardens of all sorts and sizes.  I remember those plants and their flowers as powerfully as I remember anything at all.    In one of our Boston homes, an absentee landlord allowed us to dig up most of the yard.  The soil wasn’t well tended and although the first year’s garden was spectacularly unimpressive by many standards, I loved each plant dearly.  It was the first time I’d been able to grow whatever I pleased without first considering somebody else’s wishes or instruction.   Since then I’ve learned in a haphazard, often backwards and typically Coyote fashion.  I still don’t claim to understand the full nature of my experience then, now, and the decades of between-time.   What I know is that somewhere in the first summer, I knelt down at the edge of a small, overcrowded herb plot.  I put one open palm on the rough grass of the path.   The other palm rested on some pennyroyal.  I made a conscious statement of intent to work in direct cooperation with other kingdoms and species.   The rest, as God’s Dog likes to tell us, is mystery. That first gardening season was a giddy time.  I learned many things including the impracticality of growing angelica, garden sage, italian fennel, three kinds of mint and a monstrously oversized sunflower in a 2 x 4 plot.  And I’m being really generous about the plot size.  It’s a fact of ongoing life that we remember things being larger than they were.  I remember that herb plot, as well as my understanding of what compelled me to select the plants I was growing, as being markedly small.   In my mind I was calling the place “little findhorn” and was thereby largely unphased by the fact that the place, taken in context of linear space and size, was hardly impressive.  It wouldn’t even seem like an authentic growing space to anyone accustomed to moderate or large scale cultivation. The plants themselves were impressive in an inconsistent and (then) enigmatic fashion.  Some thrived to a certain degree irrespective of what the plant was known to require as growing conditions.  Others flopped miserably despite 90% diligent attention to the plants’ documented needs.   Now I can look back and understand that the plants which thrived were all allies of strong meaning to me. They showed themselves in response to my expressed commitment.    Moreover, the variety of medicines they embody has remained as a strong, ongoing force in my life. Over time and varieties of experience I’ve reached the conclusion that inter-species cooperation compounds itself.  The more we’re willing to listen to the plants and care for them on their own terms, the more they seem willing to shape themselves to the reality of physical space and its constraints.   This level of fused energetic focus contains enormous healing potential.  It’s important to remember our own small place in the larger cosmic web.   In this way we do our most expansive healing work for people, places, and personality.   If time truly began in a garden, then I would like to think it’s also true that love began with a flower. Despite the reality of energetic inter-connections that transcend physical location points, there is a concurrent truth that the most globally powerful essences are likely to come from the most unpolluted environments.   These environments insure a vibrationally pure flower spirit essence.    Purity insures power of a reliable healing nature.   It’s a direct link to All That Is.   At the same time, within so many realities of imperfect nature, it has become evident that energetic fusion has an equally viable place in the healing spectrum.  I do not feel myself in charge of my garden beds.  I understand I’m just one of many forces and I’m probably also the force with the most to learn.   As an adult I have (thus far) always created my gardening space on rented land.  It has not occurred to me to perceive this as ultimate foolishness because, to my mind and heart, it is no such thing.  What I see of my choice is an ongoing opportunity to be humbled.  I have been permitted to participate in the making of sacred space just as surely as I’ve been called to create it by my own definition.  What I’ve seen in that truth heralds an insurgence of essence applications which pertain to cosmic fusion.   We do not need to ascend from our bodies, so much as we must relate what is personal to the aspects of personal-ity which are also universal. So many flower essences with direct relationships to spiritual growth and our species- activated evolution are prepared from flowers which are quite literally shaped like crowns.   This basic signature of shape is like an arial diagram of energy released and received through the upper registers of human energy.   The essences all relate to our increased understanding and discoveries of a metaphysical inter-relational matrix.  The essences which emerge from unspoiled wilderness are like ancestor spirits.   They possess the root level truths and healing spirit medicines which will have the greatest results for the largest number of people.   These essences will produce stories as intense and incredible as their unadulterated floral beauty.    Healers in many parts of the world are learning the teachings of these essences.    Nobody can accurately imagine or predict the true grass roots level of impact that ongoing essence work provides.   Flowers are a universally viable language.   Essence work is an aspect of healing which is so subtle its true scope is often unfathomable.   Preparing an essence is an experience of bliss and absolution.   We cannot co-create unless we are grounded, focused and centered.  The simple physical act of the preparation means we must cleanse all superficial impurities.   We must turn off our minds and the ego switch.  We are One and All.  That’s real.  Its truth asserts itself every single time an essence is prepared.    site directory h-o-m-e