Hey crystal, plant, and woo-woo lovers!
If that's not you that's okay, you can still hang out! But I imagine if you found this, that maybe you're into that :) Anyway...
Why aren't you using flower essences instead of essential oils?
It strikes me as odd that essential oils are so popular in the spiritual community, when their production and usage is anything but holistic. I'm not here today to talk about the "medicinal" uses of essential oils, this is going to be about their use in emotional, spiritual, and energy work.
Here are 3 reasons we should ditch essential oils for this kind of work
1. Essential oils are not sustainable.
Countless acres of soil depleting monocrops are grown and natural habitats are wiped clean due to the fact that it takes sometimes 10,000 pounds of raw material to produce one pound of essential oil.
2. Essential oils don't contain most of the plant's medicine
On top of their wasteful production, they are by definition a stripped-down isolate of a plant's complex synergistic system.
Synergy means that all the different chemical constituents of a plant somehow work together to produce an effect greater than one would expect based off of adding up the individual parts on their own.
When you strip out the essential oil constituent from this system, all of that is quite literally going into the garbage.
Now, theoretically these producers should be obtaining plant hydrosols as a biproduct. Whether those are put to use or not is unknown by me, seeing as they're not nearly as trendy as essential oils are. But hydrosols a much safer and more holistic alternative to essential oils, and they smell just as good (albeit less intense) while maintaining more of the plants integrity.
3. Essential oils are not safe
They should never be used undiluted and, in my professional opinion, should never be smoked in a vape pen or used internally (sidenote: nothing dilutes oil besides more oil, not even an entire tub of water).
They are being marketed to be used in these ways by MLMs and their untrained representatives who claim that theirs are safe because they are "therapeutic grade". Purity means nothing when a "pure" oil can cause serious chemical burns just as much as an "unpure" oil can.
Even just diffusing them or misting them on furniture because they smell good can be extremely dangerous for pets, children, and people who are pregnant or nursing.
But I digress. I'm here to talk about flower essences!
What are Flower Essences then?
Flower essences are liquid extracts of flower vibrational energy that are used to address emotional imbalances and mind-body well-being. They're like crystals and plants combined, and no, they're not a replacement for your medications. They are however, dilute herbal infusions prepared from pristine garden blossoms. In fact they're so dilute that I'll come right out and tell you, if you had them tested in a lab they probably wouldn't detect any physical evidence of the plant at all. So like, the opposite of potentially toxic essential oils. And yet somehow, people have been reporting good experiences with them since the 1930's.
You might know, my background is in the hard sciences and research. My degree is in biology. I'm a skeptic and I want evidence. But at the same time, to pretend that modern science can understand everything in our universe is just self-righteous and disrespectful to nature.
That said, to make flower essences, the fresh, dew-filled blossoms are gathered in the early morning and infused by the warmth and light of the sun.
This process creates an imprint of the unique energy pattern of the flowers into the water, which then embodies the healing archetype of that particular plant. This is combined with the intuition of the crafter, who connects with the plant as the essence is being made. Very small doses are taken orally over a period of about a month, and they can also be used topically in creams and sprays. Putting the flowers in water is easy, but personally, it took *several years* of working with plants for me to feel connected enough to begin this energy work. I've been over here growing a line of my own to offer you that aren't mass-produced like commercial ones are. I believe there has to be something lost when you're producing enough flower essence to be shipped to every single health food store in the "western" world.
You can find mine in the Spirit Haus Botanical Essence Collection
What do you think? Do you work with flower essences already? Would you consider making the switch from essential oils?