Katie Hess | Lotuswei & The Power of Flowers: The Ancient Art of Crafting Plant Essence Elixirs
Katie Hess of LotusWei joins InnerVerse to share the incredible healing power of flowers! We discuss how she found her plant essence path, the language of flowers, the Radiant Energy Elixir, and others, the history and science of flower essences, how subtle energy medicines transform your world from the inside out, throat chakra dynamics, and the curative quality of epiphany.
In the Plus+ Extension, Katie shares about her book Flowerevolution, how flowers represent and support us through transitions into the unknown, the meditative aspect of tactical training, the similarities between warriors and healers, magical places of the world and their rare flowers, the exponential factor of homeopathic preparations, astrology & the doctrine of signatures, and creative DIY ways to work with plants.
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In this episode
Core themes
The Spanish Teacher and the Three Percent Idea
Hess traces her twenty some years in flower remedies to a stretch abroad after college, where she studied herbalism, essential oils and acupuncture before meeting a flower remedy expert from Spain who taught only in Spanish, and only in Spain, Mexico and Argentina. She says he left her with two ideas: that every botanical, tree and growing thing carries a specific emotional, mental or energetic benefit, and that if three percent of the world's population worked with these remedies, the ripple effect would change the future of the planet. She brought the work back to the United States in 2001, when, as she puts it, yoga was not yet cool.
Doctrine of Signatures and the Language of Flowers
Chance opens on the Doctrine of Signatures, the principle that how a plant looks, smells and grows is key to understanding its virtues, and Hess extends the idea past Victorian flower symbolism. She describes a 4.5 billion year old living earth in which each flower is a thread of wisdom, an antenna transmitting information, and claims a person absorbs some of it just by being around it. Their dandelion exchange is the case in point. Hess reads the children's rhyme about flicking the flower head off as folk memory of the plant's signature, while Chance offers a world tree cosmology where every plant is one branch of a single organism.
Scaling Dew: How the Elixirs Get Made
Asked how the elixirs are made, Hess describes a practice she says turns up in Africa, Australia, the Himalayas, Europe and Central America, most commonly as drinking the dew drops from the tops of flowers, or having a healer soak chosen blooms in sunlit water and pour it over your head. LOTUSWEI, she says, has simply figured out how to scale dew and get it into a bottle, since Phoenix is far too dry for the real thing. Flowers are used because the flower holds the most energy in a plant as its reproductive part, sunlight is the catalyst that drives the life force into water, and alcohol stabilizes it.
Water as Recording Device, Body as Screen
Hess maintains there are no chemical constituents at work, only what she calls the chi or life force, and compares water to a recording device, reaching for DVDs, cassette tapes and cell phones as things we use without understanding. She cites UK research she says found bees are drawn to flowers by a subtle electrical frequency felt through the hairs on their legs rather than by color or scent. Her clearest framing is death: the 21 grams that leave the body, she says, is the layer flower essences work on, with the body as a screen and consciousness as the projector, an image Chance ties to his biofield tuning work.
Static, Blind Spots and the Flower Revolution
Both describe a world that has grown noisier. Chance frames ambient EMF, refrigerator hum and urban smells as things we constantly filter out, each one a drain on the battery of our awareness, and Hess says her own practice has changed over two decades, while admitting she cannot say whether EMFs, toxicity or human evolution explain it. She calls the essences one of the gentlest ways to surface blind spots, and points listeners to the Flower Revolution subscription, where roughly 150 members receive the same new elixir monthly and compare notes, the flower picking quiz on lotuswei.com, and her Self Rising Nature Center in Phoenix.
Quotes
“Every flower on the planet, every botanical, every tree, every living, growing thing in the plant world has a really specific emotional, mental, spiritual benefit or energetic benefit you could call it.”
“Instead of seeing each plant, each tree, each blade of grass as a separate entity or even each human being, that instead you look at it like they're all branches off of the same tree.”
“Nowadays, we just have figured out a way to scale dew, essentially, and get it into a bottle because I live in Phoenix, we don't even have dew, really, it's too dry for dew.”
“Then your body reflects that and finds a way to dam up the flow of energy in your body to be in correspondence with what you believe.”
“The mind blowing thing about flower essences is that it turns the volume down on the things that are self-limiting and turns the volume up on what is your true nature.”
“You're adding droplets of pure light and consciousness into your field. You're like recharging your battery without going to sleep.”
“Every single month, people are having insights. Every single month with the new flower, people are like, oh my God, I saw this new thing about myself.”
“The cool thing about that quiz is it shows you that you actually know what you need, when you see it reflected back to you.”
Katie Hess is the founder of LotusWei and author of Flowerevolution, known for her work crafting flower and plant essence elixirs; she discussed the history and symbolism of flower essence medicine on InnerVerse.
See all Katie episodes→Kyle and Serena Denton are community herbalists creating wild-crafted and organic plant medicines out of Milwaukee since 2015. I have used their teas and tinctures on an almost daily basis for years now. Kyle is a great friend of InnerVerse and has appeared on the channel more times than I can count. These products work, not in the allopathic "pharma-medicine" way, but in a terrain-support, consciousness bolstering plant-teacher sort of way.
