Ancestral Apothecary Gifts and Specials
Give the Gift of Health this Season.
Miakoda, Healing and Transformation Consultant
for all Ancestral Apothecary Products and Services
(Most consultations with Atava are available by phone, email or Skype, so you don’t have to live in the Bay Area to benefit from her healing expertise.)
Services Include:
Herbal Consultations: Wish to fine tune your health for the New Year? Looking for someone to help support and guide your path back to good health? In these individual appointments, we will discuss in detail your health history and concerns. You will receive a unique herbal formula made just for you by Atava to address your particular needs and constitution. Follow-up visits continue until your health issues have resolved. Occasional herbal consultations are a great idea for health maintenance as well.
Flower Essence Consultations: Stuck in an emotional rut? Wish you had a magic wand to conjure up some special energy for yourself? Flower essences are like this kind of magic in a bottle. They work particularly on the emotional, spiritual and mental realms to help us come back into balance and harmony.
Acupressure and Jin Shin Jyutsu®: Stressed? In pain? Feeling run down or in poor health? A quick way to help tune up your body is to receive a hands-on healing session from Atava. After sessions, clients report feeling immediately much better, including having more energy, more mental clarity and focus, and a greater sense of peace and well being.
Limpias: The limpia is a traditional Mexican ceremony that helps cleanse the body and spirit of unwanted energies. Limpias are a great way to work with shock, trauma, loss, and grief and they are also good if you just want help letting go of something.
Deep Genealogy Coaching: For people of all backgrounds who wish to connect more deeply with the indigenous spiritual traditions of their ancestors. In theses sessions, you will work one-on-one with Atava to navigate your personal ancestral remembrance process.
For more information including rates, click here to go to my website.
Buy Three Get One Free!
Purchase a package of three of any Ancestral Apothecary services and get the fourth free!
Treat your loved ones and yourself!
Mix and match any three services.
Call 510-541-2715 or email atava@ancestralapothecary.com, or click here to go to services page.
Good towards Herbal & Flower Essence Consultations, Acupressure and Jin Shin Jyutsu Sessions, Limpias, or Deep Genealogy Coaching. Purchase package of any three services and receive one free of equal or lesser value. Sliding scale rates do not apply.
Offer Expires 12/31/09
Tags: december specials, gifts
Featured Product of the Month: Siete Flores
Siete Flores is inspired by the traditional Mexican remedio Siete Azares, which is a tea made of seven flower blossoms and traditionally used for relaxation. I created Siete Flores also from seven flowers: four herbal flower blossoms and three flower essences. The herbal ingredients include passionflower, chamomile, scullcap and magnolia blossoms. These four herbs are called herbal nervines which are herbs that nourish and calm the nervous system. They are helpful with stress, tension, anxiety, insomnia, PMS, and many other nervous system disorders.
The other ingredients in Siete Flores include the flower essence of California Wild Rose, which helps to open our hearts and to feel love and joy. The flower essence Angelica connects us to our spirit guides and guardian angels, thus helping us to feel more protected, guided and comforted. The flower essence of California Wild Valerian is deeply calming and relaxing. This is a very special plant that grows wild in the Sierras but rarely blooms. We came across this plant a few years ago on an herb trip and had a lovely afternoon making this special flower essence.
Siete Flores is a remedy to calm your nerves, nourish your spirit, and to uplift your heart. It is a perfect remedy for the emotional challenges of this wintertime season. It can be useful for seasonal depression, stress, and the feeling of grief and loss that often comes up for people around this time of year. To order on-line, click here.
Flower Essences for Healing, Recovery & the 12 Steps
This post is based on a workshop I taught on Flower Essences for Recovery at the Mandana House in Oakland, CA.
Flower Essences are a form of vibrational or energetic medicine. They address the emotional, mental, and spiritual components of wellness. By connecting the individual to the spirit of Nature, flower essences help awaken the beneficial and healing qualities within us. Flower essence remedies are safe and effective for adults, children, the elderly, animals and plants.
Rescue Remedy/ Five Flower Formula
Crisis: Desert Emergency Formula- Encourage calmness and stability in any time of shock, trauma, stress, or injury. Great for all levels of recovery, whenever in place of extreme stress, transition, or crisis.
Cherry Plum- For fear of nervous breakdown, or losing control of the mind. Helps one to connect and surrender to their Higher Self/Higher Power. (To “Let Go and Let God”.)
Sweet Chestnut- For the “dark night of the soul.” Helps cultivate courage, as well as and faith and trust in a Higher Power/Goddess/God/Spirit World. Indicated when one has reached “rock bottom” in their addiction.
Self-Heal- To connect to one’s innate ability to heal. Helps cultivate a strong sense of wellness. For taking responsibility for one’s healing.
Sacred Datura- For disintegration of a known form of reality. Feeling as if your being/identity is dissolving. To help see beyond one’s present view of reality to a much more expanded state.
Angelica- For connecting with one’s Higher Power/Higher Self, as well as benevolent angels and spirit guides in one’s life.
Centaury- For an unhealthy need to serve or please others, a remedy for those working with co-dependence.
Sticky Monkeyflower- For deep fear of intimacy and sexuality, which can manifest as either sexual addiction or anorexia. Helps build balanced integration of human warmth and sexual intimacy.
California Poppy- For those who are attracted to the glamour of spiritual highs that come from outside of the Self. For addiction to narcotic and hallucinogenic drugs, materialism, and fame. For cultivating a true spirituality centered in one’s heart.
Black-eyed Susan- For penetrating insight into the painful and buried aspects of personality. Cultivates ability to consciously acknowledge all aspects of self, including the “shadow”.
Holly- Remedy for a closed heart. For jealousy, suspicion, anger. Opens the heart, develops compassion.
Willow- For feeling resentful, bitter, like one is a victim. Encourages acceptance and taking personal responsibility for one’s life.
Pine- For guilt and self-blame. Promotes self-acceptance and forgiveness.
Mimulus- For known fears, and shyness. Helps with courage and confidence.
Mariposa Lily- For healing emotional wounds around childhood, especially issues around mother and mothering.
Saguaro Cactus- For feeling powerless, and not trusting one’s inner wisdom. Helps us access our deepest inner wisdom. The “true father” remedy that helps us to empower ourselves.
Scarlet Monkeyflower- For repression and fear of intense emotions, such as rage and powerlessness.
Buttercup- For low self-esteem issues. To cultivate self love, and a knowing of one’s inner beauty.
Wild Oat- For finding one’s true calling and vocation. For developing a life and work that is a true expression of one’s inner values.
California Wild Rose- A remedy for apathy. For enthusiastic love for and service to All Our Relations.
Iris- For creativity and divine inspiration. A remedy for feeling dull and uninspired.
Administering Flower Essences
How do I use Flower Essences?
The most common way to take flower essences is directly from a dosage bottle. A common dosage is to take 4 drops 4 times/day. We can take a single flower essence at once, or in combination with other flower essences or herbs.
Another way to use flower essences is to add seven drops into a mister bottle. In this way, we can mist our home or office environment with our flower essences. By adding essential oils to the mister bottles we enhance our flower essences with the benefits of aromatherapy.
For topical use, add 4-7 drops of flower essences to your favorite cream, lotion, or massage oil. You can also apply the essences directly to the skin.
Flower essences are safe and effective for adults, children, infants, animals and plants. Animals and children are especially sensitive to the healing energies of flower essences. For children, add 1-4 drops of flower essences to juice or water. For animals, add 1-4 drops to their food or drinking water. Essences can also be applied topically to skin or fur. For plants, add flower essences to watering can. Diseased or injured plants, as well as transplants all benefit from Rescue Remedy. Mist with flower essences in the home environment of the animal, child or plant.
SHAKE WELL! Always shake your flower essences before taking. Shaking helps activate the energy of the flower essence. As I like to say, shaking the dosage bottle wakes up the sleeping flower fairies and lets them know it’s time for work.
Flower Essence Therapy
by Atava Garcia Swiecicki, MA, Registered Herbalist (American Herbalist Guild) and Flower Essence Practitioner in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Thich Nhat Hahn
What are Flower Essences?
Flower essences are the energetic, or vibrational imprint of a plant. Flower essences contain the essence, spirit or intelligence of a plant. Each essence contains the unique life force and healing properties of each particular flower from which it is made.
How are Flower Essences made?
Flower essences are made with the blossoms of a flower infused into water in full sunlight. In making a flower essence we are careful not to harm the plant. Only a few blossoms are needed. Sometimes, with rare or endangered flowers, we need not even pick any- instead, we gently lean the flower into the water. The original flower water is called the mother essence. From the mother essence, flower essences are diluted in a way similar to homeopathy, and then preserved with brandy.
How do flower essences work?
Flower essences help to shift our consciousness. Flower essences help awaken our awareness to our patterns of imbalance, and provide us with the energetic support to make positive changes. They bless us with the power of Nature. Cynthia Athena Kemp Scherer of Desert Alchemy writes that flower essences are “nature’s tuning forks. As we use the essence we begin to resonate in harmony with the qualities of the flower, and limitations and disharmonies begin to change.”
Flower essences stimulate our own innate wise woman ability to heal ourselves. Dr. Edward Bach, the pioneer of flower essence therapy writes:
“They cure, not by attacking the disease but by flooding our bodies with the beautiful vibrations of our Higher Nature, in the presence of which, disease melts away as snow in the sunshine.”
How can I be helped with Flower Essences?
Flower essences are a subtle, yet profound system of healing. They help harmonize our mental, emotional, and spiritual bodies. In this way, flower essences address the root of many of our healing projects. Flower essences work with a broad range of important healing issues, including depression, creativity, sexuality, addiction/recovery, old traumas, stress, relationships, spirituality, and work.
As a form of vibrational healing, flower essences do not work directly on the physical body or issues of physical disharmony. Instead, they work on our energetic or etheric bodies. As the flower essences help shift our energy fields, they reach the emotional and spiritual roots of physical illness. In this way, flower essences can be a catalyst for deep healing within our mind, body and spirit.
Making Flower Essences
Flower essences are powerful remedies for our mind, body and spirit. They are also very easy to make. The most common way of making flower essences is called the Sun Method.
Flower Essence Making, The Sun Method
1. The first and most important step in flower essence making is to find the perfect, vital, blooming flowers. Ideally you are in a place in nature or in your back yard away from cars, people, or other energetic distractions.
2. Use a clear, clean glass bowl or goblet. I have a few bowls that I only use for flower essence making.
3. To energetically clean you goblet, rinse it with cold water or smudge it with sage.
4. Fill the bowl with the purest water available.
5. Find the flowers you are going to harvest for the essence.
Make an offering and ask permission to pick them. An offering can be a song, a prayer, some tobacco, some candy (flower fairies love candy!), or whatever feels connected to your heart.
6. Pick several blossoms without touching them and drop them into the bowl of water. I like to use two small stones or sticks to grab and cut the flower blossom. (It helps to have two people for this step; one to pick and one to hold the bowl.)
Desert Lily Flower Essence
7. Some say to completely cover the surface of the water with the flowers. I say this depends on the flower. Be mindful if the plant is rare, endangered, if it only has a few blossoms, or there are only a few plants in the stand. Sometimes all you need is one blossom. Sometimes it is better to not pick at all, but to simply lean the flower down into the water while still keeping it on the plant.
8. Keep the flower water in as close to full sun as possible for at least three hours.
9. After three hours, check the flowers to see if they look wilted and “cooked.” This means that their vital essence has been transferred into the water and it is ready to be finished.
10. Strain out the flowers (and any insects that may have jumped into the water) and pour the water into an amber glass jar covering with an equal amount of brandy. This flower water and brandy mixture is called the mother essence.
11. Label your flower essence immediately. Include the name of the flower, location of harvest and date. I also like to include relevant astrological information, like “Sun in Leo” or “Summer Solstice.” Also note the potency of the essence: a mother essence, stock or dosage bottle.
12. Variations: You can make flower essences by the light of the full moon.
Flower Healing Part 2
In March I made a journey to the Anza Borrego Desert, outside of San Diego. The desert wildflowers were in full bloom. I was joyful to be around the plants of my desert dwelling ancestors. Here is one of the important flowering plants that I encountered:
Chaparral is one of the oldest living plants on Mother Earth. Some chaparral plants living in the California desert are over 9,000 years old. Chaparral, which is also called Greasewood, was considered a panacea for the native people that lived around it. As an herb, chaparral is powerfully cleansing to the body and it has been used for many illnesses, including cancer.
As a flower essence, chaparral is a powerful emotional cleanser. It helps us to release old, toxic emotions that we have stored deep in our body. Once, when I was sitting in meditation with a chaparral plant, she showed me how my emotions vibrated in the cells of my body. Later, when I took the flower essence, I went through a healing phase where for many days I released old feelings of sadness and anger. Chaparral also helps to connect us to our own ancestors. In this way, it helps to root ourselves into our own genealogy. Connection to ancestors has always been an integral part of indigenous cultures. Many modern people suffer from disconnection to their ancestors. This creates many other issues, including loneliness and a sense of not belonging. If you wish to connect to your ancestors, begin by making a prayer and offering to let them know your request. Then take the flower essence of chaparral, or take a small piece of the plant and put in on your altar or carry it on your body.
Flower Healing Past and Present
This is a good time of year to learn about the healing power of flowers. Flowers have been and continue to be a significant medicine for all traditional peoples. Flowers are used for spiritual cleansing, for blessings, for celebration, and for mourning. Flowers are an important part of ceremonies all throughout the cycle of life, from birth to death.
In modern times, flowers have been incorporated into a system of healing called flower essence therapy. Flower essences are a subtle, yet profound system of healing. As a form of vibrational healing, flower essences do not work directly on the physical body or issues of physical disharmony. Instead, they work on our energetic or etheric bodies. As the flower essences help shift our energy fields, they reach the emotional and spiritual roots of physical illness. In this way, flower essences can be a catalyst for deep healing within our mind, body and spirit.
