The Power of Flower Essence
This weeks wisdom Wednesday is inspired by my recent adventures with plants. Being a part of a community garden watching flowers and herbs grow, has given me and idea on how I want to work with them and bring them into my healing practice.
I have used flower essences before from working at Swanson’s and I feel they did help me emotionally. Before I get to far with my story here, I am sure you are wondering what flower essences are and would like to know more about them. So let’s start there before I go any further.
Flower essences are herbal infusions made from the flowering part of a plant, which aid in the emotional and mental wellbeing of our souls. Everything has its own vibrational frequency, including ourselves. When talking about vibrations, I often reflect back on my school days when learning about particles in science class and how they vibrated at different frequencies depending on proximity of each particle from one another. I’m sure there was more information included in that class, but that’s what my brain decided to remember. Haha.
The vibrations of flower essences are often very subtle but with the added intention of healing, they can be very powerful in their own way. Each flower has their own emotional and mental healing vibration. I would like to share two flower essences that I have recently made, chamomile and motherwort. These two flowers came to me recently through the community garden that I am a part of, and that’s when I thought this must be a sign from the universe. If there is anything that I have learned working with universal energies, is that you listen when it speaks to you.
Chamomile was the first flower to present itself for me to create an essence. A couple of weeks ago, I went to one of two community gardens I am a part of, and got to help with planting flowers. I learned that if you plant flowers near some of the vegetables, it aids as a pollinator to the veggies. Yay for learning new things! By the end of the gardening session, someone mentioned that chamomile was ready to be harvested if anybody wanted some. I always wanted to see what chamomile looked like as a whole plant, so I went to check it out and picked some.
It’s aroma smelled sweet and warming, not in a hot way but more comforting and savory or nurturing. I know it’s a relaxing and calming herb that can help with sleep, however I couldn’t remember all of it’s benefits in that moment but my intuition and gut knew that it would make a wonderful flower essence. So I took a few flower tops home with me, put them in a jar with water when I got home, and let it sit outside in the sunlight for a few hours. The energy between the flower, water, and sunlight is believed to transfer “life force energy” of the flower into the water.
After a few hours, I took a wooden spoon and removed the flowers from the water. Then mixed the water with 80 proof alcohol, which helps preserve the water and is then called the mother essence. Similar to when you’re making kombucha where you have a mother scoby, that is used to create more kombucha from the mother, in flower essence you have a mother water essence instead.
After creating the mother essence, I decided to take a break and head to work at Swanson’s. At work, we have a flower essence book that lists a bunch of different flower essences and what they help with. While working, I decided to look up chamomile to see it’s benefits as an essence.
As a medicinal herb, chamomile is known for calming the nerves and helps with sleep. Chamomile essence helps balance our emotions by helping ourselves become aware when our inner emotions feel all over the place, which causes our consciousness to feel clouded and unsure. This flower shifts our mindset to remember that the sun is always shining no matter how cloudy it is. The book from work states “People whom need this essence often tend to hold emotional tension in their stomachs and have a hard time letting them go. This can lead the person to suffer from insomnia.”
Making a flower essence, as I’ve stated before, isn’t just on the process to making it. It’s also the intent that you put into it. On top of setting the essence in the sunlight, I also charged it under a new moon light energy as well as adding vibrations from tuning forks. Let’s talk about how that can affect an intent on healing energy.
The dark night of a new moon represents a time for a fresh start and new beginnings. The lack of light is a perfect time for self-reflection and face parts of ourselves that we keep hidden. It’s a perfect time for re-evaluating and deciding what we really want, asking what we want to keep in our lives and what needs to be set free. Charging a flower essence under a new moon especially chamomile, aids in helping balance our emotions. Full moon energies also can have a impact, and I’ll talk about that a little later in this post. However, let’s chat about vibrations a bit more and why I charged the essence with it.
In one of my previous posts I talk about vibrations and how they can be healing. There have been many studies on vibration, my favorite is on cymatics (greek word for wave form). It shows the different types of effects sound waves have on different material such as water, pastes, and other liquids. On top of that different sound wave frequencies affect the material in a different way. Below is an example of a cymatic depicting two different voices in one of my sound books I have.
With the idea of sound affecting material, this gives an idea of how tuning forks can alter the flower essence I made. Sound vibrations add to the healing process and our bodies are made up of roughly 60 percent water, so the sound added to the essence is also being transferred into our bodies when we ingest it. I used three different tuning forks to charge the essence and even though different frequencies do different things, I just set a simple intention of healing when I used them.
On top of making a chamomile essence, I also made a second flower essence called motherwort. Let’s chat about the healing properties of that one next!
Motherwort is a medicinal herb, but more known to most people as a weed. It can take over an area if you are trying to grow other things. Native originally to europe, it has naturalized across North America especially in the northern Midwest. I first acquired this plant from the community garden I am a part of because it was growing there and some people that were in charge of the herbs asked if I wanted to take some. I had mentioned to the group that I was taking an herbalism class, so it was nice they thought of me.
Later on that same day, I was walking around my backyard thinking about cleaning up some of the flower beds. I decided to not clean them up yet because I discovered I had chinese motherwort growing back there (as well as burdock, which is another medicinal herb that I may harvest and use in the near future). I still have yet to harvest the herb growing in my backyard but I did make an essence with the one I received from the community garden.
Motherwort essence, from what I’ve come across from multiple sources, helps us to encourage love and compassion for ourselves as well as establish our emotional boundaries. I must say that within the last few years, this has been my journey. Honestly I feel that when things cross my path within the universe, it is here to guide me in some way. The universe is always speaking, you just have to learn how to listen.
On top of making motherwort essence, I charged this one under the full moon we just had a few days ago. When thinking about the healing energies, let’s focus on what the full moon does in general. At night when the full moon is out, what do you see? How does it look or feel? When I’m out at night and there is a full moon, it feels almost magical and energizing. Everything is lit up with a soft glow. Now looking at the healing properties behind the energy of the full moon, it illuminates the hidden truths within ourselves and can bring clarity to them. It gives us an opportunity to see situations and relationships with a new perspective or new light.
Since making motherwort essence I have started taking it. I’ve noticed that I’ve started saying no to certain people or situations that don’t feel in alignment with my healing, and saying yes to ones that feel more loving as well as supportive. I’m still navigating what that actually looks like for me, but if I have learned anything from healing is that it’s not linear.
Healing with nature.
The universe is speaking.
Take time to listen.
Thank you for going on a flower essence journey with me! I hope this post was inspirational for your own healing journey! Not entirely sure what I’ll post about next, but I’ll probably let the universe decide that for me in the near future. I hope everyone has a wonderful rest of the week and weekend! Until next time!
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