How to Pick Flowers from a Field of Dreams

The past is never dead, it’s not even past. -William Faulkner

You might say, painful personal history is what makes post-ceremony integration challenging. You might say painful personal history is simply what makes life challenging. The past is never dead really, it’s not even past. I know I am not alone in this experience; it’s just that it can certainly feel that way sometimes.

I’ve had my own life curve-balls. With my own personal blind-spots, it can be hard to see those curve-balls coming. So occasionally I’m beaned upside the head by the present moment, while I’m all hyper-concerned and up in my head about my past. It’s not like you can rewrite your subconscious with your conscious will. There’s a dance between your dream life and your conscious waking life. In some very ordinary ways, in order to wake up, you need to sleep, to practice sleeping peacefully, to dream and to sleep dreamlessly. To wake up, it seems, you need to be at rest. Now there’s a puzzle. What’s the key to seeing clearly through the lens of your personal history? So, how to even explore that question?

There’s not a single holy text out there that doesn’t reference plants. Consider it. Perhaps that’s because those texts originate from a simpler time, when people were more connected to the tools and resources of the earth. So, the metaphors of exaltation, worship, gratitude, love, and the miraculous were found in the metaphor of the garden and the plants that grew in the garden. Or more pointedly, are we looking at recipes and methodologies concocted or hidden in plain sight in these ancient texts?

One of the many gifts of working with ayahuasca is the potential to gain a new perspective on all the things that weigh heavily on one’s heart. It is in the choice to face the darkness within ourselves that we, in turn, have the opportunity to abandon self-deception and in doing so, come to know ourselves better, deeper, and truer. In a lot of cases, ayahuasca’s visionary capacity can offer glimpses into real changes we need to make in our lives in order to move forward. These visionary states can be so crystal-clear in the moment we receive them that we can feel a sudden strong, unshakeable confidence to make the suggested, often long-overdue change.

Some time back, after beginning to work with ayahuasca and showing vast improvement in my mental and physical health, I found myself going through a super heavy phase of contending with my own self-judgements. These judgements seemed to have a life of their own even after their source in my personal history had long since past. They were residual from my past, but in many ways no longer had a connection with the present. Whether I put energy into them or not, the thoughts would persist. There was a time there where I felt utterly wrung out. Then in a dream one night, I was shown a simple flower, a violet, and told to take a flower essence made from of it.

Flower essences would appear to be the most unlikely of healing agents. Preposterous. Nothing burgers. Vapor. In making a flower essence, you simply cut a number of flowers and leave them to float in a crystal bowl with water for the morning or an afternoon. The water is strained off. Alcohol is added to preserve it. A prayer of healing intent is added. The water is decanted in a little blue bottle. Done. It’s nothing. Each flower has its own essence. In the case of violets, think shrinking violet. As I look back, I can see how I had become, through the force of my personal history, a shrinking violet. I was painfully shy, racked by bouts of social anxiety, revolving in my mind escapist fantasies and judgements. So then, I take a few drops of this nothing, this flower essence, and drop it on my tongue for a few nights.

After that, the burden of those thoughts was gone. Gone. Poof. Don’t ask me to explain, because I’d sound like a complete idiot. I’m not saying that I can’t sound like an idiot. I’m just saying that I’d rather not sound like one just now. But these intrusive thoughts that had outlived their source in my personal history had fled. Like ayahuasca, flower essences are not a pill. They can defy cause and effect. Most inexplicably, their healing effect becomes closely tied to your personal intent in this dance between your waking and dream states.

So, this violet flower essence worked for me, you might say, because I plucked the flower from my dreams. It began there. So too for you, it begins with listening to your intuition and your dreams. From that place you can begin to explore the vast fields, forests, and jungles of plants and master plants surrounding ayahuasca not only in the Amazon, but wherever you may find yourself sitting in ceremony . . . for me today, that’s in the Sonoran Desert.

Is there a flower that calls out to you when you encounter it in your waking or dream life? Begin there. Working with flower essences requires no special skill other than being open to changing how you view yourself and the world around you. If you are interested in working with flower essences further, the Sonoran Desert Plant Club offers community involvement for those who seek to explore their own consciousness through meditation and the wide pharmacopeia of plants all around us. As psychologist Carl Jung once put it, “It is the privilege of a lifetime to become who you really are.” For more info on meeting times and dates, visit the Sonoran Desert Plant Club at www.sonorandesertplantclub.com.

[Story by Corrie Amber Vesely]