The Transformative Power of Flower Remedies and Tarot as Revealed by Natalie Grace!

Hello beautiful souls! Embark on a spiritual sojourn with Natalie Grace, an esteemed guide through the realms of intuitive tarot, spiritual mentoring, and the healing powers of plant medicine. Through our conversation, Natalie illuminates the transformative effects of tarot cards in her own journey of self-discovery and imparts her wisdom on the sacred practice of tarot readings. Her insights into the potent influence of flower remedies, particularly chicory root, reveal a deeper connection to nature's healing potential, inviting listeners to experience the symbiosis of the natural world through their own intuitive senses.

Weaving together the mystical threads of tarot, flower remedies, and sacred ceremonies, this episode paints a vibrant tapestry of holistic healing. Natalie shares anecdotes of her personal healing journey, including overcoming thyroid illness with the help of flower essences attuned to the throat chakra. Her story, alongside the broader examination of Dr. Edward Bach's 38 flower remedies, including the renowned Rescue Remedy, showcases the potential of these natural aids in supporting both emotional and physical well-being—highlighting a path to wellness that transcends conventional medicine.

The episode culminates with an exploration of creating personal rituals and sacred spaces that foster connection and mindfulness in our daily routines. Natalie's passion for integrating practices such as yoga, journaling, and meditation with flower remedies into her life opens a gateway for listeners to enrich their spiritual experiences. As your host, I extend an invitation to join our online community for soul-enriching experiences and Reiki sessions, encouraging a pursuit of peace, love, light, joy, and the magical essence that these practices can weave into the fabric of our lives.

To get in touch with Natalie:

INSTAGRAM
@crystalauratarot
@theinitiatespodcast

WEBSITE
crystalauratarot.com
theinitiatespodcast.com
thesacredceremony.com
flowerguide.com.au

To get in touch with me:

enlightenandelevatewithkelly@gmail.com

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@kmatthews840 on Instagram 

https://www.instagram.com/kellymatthews840?igsh=MmtxODhqMzFnYW9k&utm_source=qr

To book a distance Reiki session with me click the link below:

https://alignelevatewithkelly.as.me/

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:11

Hello beautiful souls, Thank you so much for being here. I am so excited to share my guests today and her spiritual awakening. We discuss flower and plant medicine, sacred ceremony, cacao and so much more. Let's dive into this fascinating conversation and enjoy this episode.

Speaker 2: 0:36

Hello everyone, welcome to another episode of Enlightenment Elevate. I have Natalie Grace with me today. She is an intuitive tarot teacher, spiritual mentor, plant medicine guide and sacred spaceholder. Welcome, natalie.

Speaker 3: 0:50

Thank you so much, kelly. It's a pleasure to be here with you today.

Speaker 2: 0:53

Oh, it's such a pleasure to have you, and I forgot to say one thing about Natalie she is also the host of the podcast the Initiates, so you guys all have to check that out. Link will be in the podcast notes, but definitely check it out. It is an amazing podcast. So, natalie, tell us about yourself.

Speaker 3: 1:10

Oh well, I have a lot on my plate. I guess I've been on the spiritual journey for most of my life, but it really amped up around 2012 and then again in 2019 to 2020, as a lot of people experienced, and since that time I really devoted myself to exploring more of the mystics path. So I've established myself as a tarot teacher after developing a real like love and passion for tarot, not just as a divination tool but as a tool for inner exploration and self like, unlocking our own wisdom. So that was like a really big gateway for me. That's led me to work with other things.

Speaker 3: 1:49

I've been on a healing path after experiencing an illness that kind of disrupted my life a few years back. That led me to work with flower remedies and I felt really called to where I live in Australia. There's not many practitioners here or suppliers, so I felt really called to create a little store where I could supply other people with this energetic medicine. If you're not familiar with it, it's basically using the energetic imprint of flowers to heal more at the emotional and mental level. So that's one of my passions as well, and more recently I've been working with the plant medicine of cacao, so I've recently become certified to host cacao ceremony and I've been really enjoying that ceremony, something that's incredibly important to me in my own personal practice and I've had such beautiful collective experiences with others in ceremony at the altar, so it's something that I felt called to share with others as well, hosting these ceremonies in my community, and that led me to my newest project, called Sacred Ceremony.

Speaker 2: 2:48

That's all fascinating. So with cacao, can you go a little bit more into that and explain a little bit more what that means or what that entails?

Speaker 3: 2:58

Yeah, Cacao is such a beautiful food and plant medicine, a healer, teacher. Cacao is found in so many places around the world. Some plant medicines are very specific to a certain place and there's a really important kind of single cultural lineage that holds that plant medicine. However, cacao is really interesting because it can be found in lots of places in the world and everyone has their own kind of work they do with cacao and so I've been taught by the Andean sort of culture about the role of cacao as a maestro, as a mother, as a healer, as a teacher and from that energetic perspective cacao works with the heart. So it's a heart opening medicine and we kind of can talk about that from a chakra perspective or an energetic body perspective.

Speaker 3: 3:47

And a lot of people really feel that when they have cacao in more of a ceremonial dose or experience, they can really feel a beautiful heart opening, a quite gentle heart opening, but it can be quite profound. Some people sit in ceremony with cacao and feel like they're on a trip. It's not so much hallucinogenic with that feel in the body, but it's completely legal and it's very gentle. But from a more biochemical perspective, cacao actually does literally open the heart. It opens the blood vessels and allows the blood to pump more easily. So it promotes this flow to and from the heart in the body and it also has these beautiful happy brain chemicals. So we can get this really wonderful feeling of bliss when we have cacao as well. And so sitting in ceremony with cacao as a group in circle is such a powerful thing because we can collectively kind of find the heart and brain coherence and come into that space together in a very safe container. So it's really beautiful medicine to work with.

Speaker 2: 4:44

That's so cool. I've always been really curious about it. Do you have any brands for people listening who are curious about maybe trying it? Do you have any recommendations?

Speaker 3: 4:56

I think it should all depend on where you are in the world, because the shipping can be quite expensive. So I buy also which part of the world you want to take the cacao from, because they all have kind of different flavors. So I work a lot, as I said, with Peruvian cacao, but there's also Guatemalan cacao. A lot of people really love Hawaiian cacao. I also have Balinese cacao, which to me tastes a bit sweeter. So they have different flavors and sort of like different energetic properties as well, depending on the place they come from.

Speaker 3: 5:24

So I encourage you, if you haven't had cacao before, usually you can go to your health food store and they'll have a form of ceremonial cacao. It can be in kind of chunks or it can be in a block. And if you can't find anything locally like that, you can go on Etsy, for instance, and find some really wonderful cacao suppliers there. I'm in Australia. I order from a woman who her business is called Empress Cacao, I think, just via Etsy. So I recommend finding a local supplier so you can get the postage a bit cheaper. But there's lots of really high quality. Just look for ceremonial cacao and they call it paste usually, which is like a block or a brick.

Speaker 2: 6:02

Awesome. Okay, Thank you so much for sharing that. I've always been so curious about it and that's just fascinating and I mean, and it makes sense, depending on where you get it from in the world, it would have different energetic properties. That's really fascinating. That's really cool. Do you want to dive into tarot and talk about? You're really passionate about using it as a tool and how it can help people. Let's talk about it.

Speaker 3: 6:27

Yeah. So tarot for me was a really fun discovery. Actually Some people have quite hold like deep superstition about tarot, but for me it was very playful. And so when I had a deck that I'd bought years ago just sitting on my shelf that I never touched, and at some point I was just called to work with it and I was doing the usual thing people do, where you pick some cards, then you look up the meaning on the book or the internet, and it was kind of feeling a little bit boring. And it wasn't until my sister one day called me up because she knows I'm a bit woo-woo and assumed I had tarot but I've never done it with her. I talked about it with her and she asked a question and asked me to go and check the tarot. And I had to pretend like I knew what I was doing and so I interpreted the cards as I saw them and what the feeling was, and then I'm like let me check the book just to make sure. And it turned out it was very similar meaning and it started me thinking like maybe I already know what the tarot is telling me, maybe I just need to like work with it more.

Speaker 3: 7:24

So it was a really wonderful, playful exploration and I do have a background in photography and art so I think I already had a verbal language to articulate symbols and pictures that perhaps other people don't have a need to develop when they're working with tarot and that might be a challenge. But for me that came very naturally because I'd already worked in sort of art analysis and art history, learning about the meanings of symbols, and I also went to Catholic school my whole life and symbols are very important part of any religion. So this didn't feel foreign to me. It felt very natural and it was really cool because as I started working more intuitively with the cards, I realized it was the symbols that hold the wisdom and I took the pressure off. I didn't need to like kind of interpret the meaning of a whole card. I could just see which symbols wanted to be seen that day in that card and work with that symbol. I was able to develop really deep, intuitive in a relationship, I want to say, with the symbols and the cards and it became really fun and I found that the feedback I was getting when I started to read for others was that the way I read was a little bit different to other people, and I think it's because it's very symbol based rather than whole card based, which anyone can do, and it's a really amazing practice, because once you start working with symbols whether it's in tarot or Oracle or some other format you start to be able to read the symbols in the real world as well.

Speaker 3: 8:46

Symbols are everywhere and it's a universal language, so it's something we can all understand. While we can't, we can go to another language and not understand science in their language. When a symbol is used, anyone can understand it. Usually it's very universal, and so my belief is that the universal language of symbols is actually within all of us and it was probably our original language, but it's been suppressed and now it's kind of controlled.

Speaker 3: 9:12

You know we hear a lot about these evil symbols used by Illuminati types, but I'm really all about empowering people to demystify it for them. So no symbol's scary. Even a card like the death card is actually. Once you take a neutral perspective, it's not good or bad or it just is, and it's reflecting back to us the cycle of nature that everything that's living must die at some point, and it's at the end of a chapter, the end of a cycle, and what comes of death in nature is beautiful compost that nurtures the new seeds that are going to come up in the spring.

Speaker 3: 9:44

So even the scariest Harrow cards actually have beauty in them and they're not to be feared at all. They hold such deep lessons for us and, yeah, I just find so much knowledge and wisdom not just in the cards, but it's like a mirror unlocking it within us and it's a lifelong exploration for me. I'm constantly learning every new, every new pull I do. I'm constantly learning and I love teaching it to people as well. So I teach the kind of systems of the tarot, the way I broke them down, to others so that they can read intuitively for themselves, because it also trains your intuition and your own self-belief and your own self-trust having a tarot practice.

Speaker 2: 10:20

Do you have a favorite deck you work with?

Speaker 3: 10:22

Oh yeah, it's very easy. It's just the classic Rider Waite Smith. I know some people are really interconnecting lots of different decks and that's not really. I love the original because the original symbols were very intentional with how that deck was created. Once you get to know that, you can use any deck and you'll be able to feel the resonant energy of the symbol itself. That's why I like that and that's why I teach.

Speaker 3: 10:48

I always teach, starting with the classic Rider Waite Smith deck. But I do have different decks I work with for different purposes, so for teaching and for reading for myself. That's what I use. But I do have a couple of others depending on my vibe. If I want to do a bit more shadowy, I might have a different type of artwork deck I use. But generally I work with my classic and then I also have one that I do my readings for the collective. So that's one of my passions. More than reading one on one is to read for the collective. And yeah, that's like a really cool deck called Aquarius Tarot. It's got a bit of like a psychedelic vibe. So I find that fun and kind of approachable for the people I read with in a more collective sense.

Speaker 2: 11:29

So yeah, so anybody listening who is interested in starting to use Tarot? How would you guide them in just a simple way to get started and how to read the cards and yeah, that's such a good question.

Speaker 3: 11:44

I think the first thing to do is just take any pressure off yourself about how you think you're supposed to do things, based on what you've seen on social media or read in any book. You can do it however you want. So if you find spreads confusing, don't worry about it. Just use one or two or three cards to start. If you love spreads and that helps you, that's great too. Don't worry about how you shuffle. Some people find it really hard. I was one of these people in the beginning because I'm not like a card game kind of person to shuffle the cards. So some people go through their whole Tarot career mixing the cards on the floor, and that's totally okay if that's what feels good for you. So take the pressure off and remove any expectations. Have a very curious kind of approach to Tarot playful exploration and you can also take the pressure off yourself around predicting things.

Speaker 3: 12:33

Some people are fantastic. They have really good psychic ability or clairvoyant ability and they're able to use the cards in that way. But not everyone has that and it's not also for that for everyone, but I do believe everyone can use it for self exploration. So a really great way to start is just by pulling a card a day or whenever you feel cold, one card and be quite specific with your question. It's always good to start not using yes or no questions, but actually have an open question like show me the vibe I can expect at work today, you know, and then you can actually feel into the feelings of what the card's showing you. Is there conflict in this card? Is there cool outcomes in this card, like a rainbow or something like that? Is there lots of people around or are you by yourself? Asking those open questions allows you to kind of develop your own relationship with the card and the symbols, rather than asking yes or no questions. If you get it wrong you can feel bad about it. Even now, I prefer not to use yes or no questions as ways to do it, and when you get a bit more experience with Tarot you can go down that path.

Speaker 3: 13:35

But the other thing I'd recommend is two things Make an energetic connection with your deck. If you haven't already. Easiest way to do this is to sleep with it in your bed. If that feels a bit too weird for you, put it on your altar or wherever your like sacred things are, or even in your underwear drawer, wear things that are very close to you in your field, so that your Tarot deck can absorb your energy, because it's going to become like an extra limb for you. It's going to become part of your field and act like a kind of spiritual telephone from your higher self, from your guides, whoever's around wanting to help and send a message. So it needs to be part of your energetic field and you'll find that when you do that, before you start working with a deck, you'll get that deck really quick. So that's the first thing, and then the. I had one other tip. What was it? That's OK, we'll come back. That's a good place to start.

Speaker 3: 14:24

Oh, I remember, I remember If you already love something like numerology or astrology or cabala or alchemy. There's so many systems of symbols and correspondences in Tarot, so don't feel pressure to know them all to begin with. Just pick the stuff that you already know or are really interested in or passionate about, and that's a fantastic starting point.

Speaker 2: 14:46

That is so cool. I am so happy that you've explained it in the mystery and the negativity that is often. You know, people have a lot of fear, right With Tarot, because of what you described the deck card or the devil or because everything isn't always literal you know, yeah, but that's.

Speaker 2: 15:05

You definitely made it and I'm super excited to do that. I love everything that you recommended. I'm so fascinated by your flower remedies and the only thing that I know of that oh my gosh, and I can even think of what it is it's like a coffee alternative and it's made from dandelions, chickery Chickery root. So I know that that is like a flower and that's necessarily a remedy. I know it to be made from flowers and that it is like a coffee alternative. But I don't really have any knowledge about flower remedies, or? I'm sure that some people listening are curious too. Would you want to talk a little bit about what you use and how people I'm sure and again this will be depending on where you are in the world you know indigenous to your area and that kind of thing. But let's dive into flower remedies. I'm super curious about it.

Speaker 3: 15:55

Oh, I love that. Yeah, and you bring up chickery. Chickery is a flower remedy that I do work with. It can be a bit confusing if you haven't come into contact with these remedies before. It's a system of energetic medicine rather than kind of like botanical herbal medicine, so something like a chickery root as like a coffee alternative, which I love. It's using the actual, like plant matter in drying up the herbs and then you create your sort of tea from it or your coffee alternative.

Speaker 3: 16:24

Flower remedies are a little bit different from, say, teas or tinctures or something like that, because they're simply using the vibration of the power activated by the energy of the sun. So it's quite woo-woo because when you actually get a bottle of flower remedies, you're not getting any flowers in it. It doesn't have a smell, it is simply energy. It would be the same as having some kind of like a gem essence or a reiki infused sort of drink. Okay, what we're doing is basically it's kind of like tarot, and this is why I think I was so drawn to work with flower remedies when I came across them. Each flower and plant, like natropathy, has a specific healing power or capability. I believe that everything in nature humans are here to be in coherence with everything in nature. We have, like this relationship where it's a co, not co-dependency I'm trying to find the right word, but we all work symbiosis, it's a symbiotic relationship. So we've come here and we know this through plant medicine. There's some stuff that we should never have kind of figured out. Like at ayahuasca, someone's at some point knew to put the vine with the root to create this brew that created this incredible healing experience that lasts for hours and days. You know that stays with you for your life. And how did someone know to do that? Well, you know, if you ask the indigenous people, it's the plant told them to. So the plants have these spirits and each spirit is unique and each has a different healing property. And with flower remedies, if you sit with a flower or you look at a flower, you can kind of understand or a tree or a plant, what their healing properties might be.

Speaker 3: 18:00

And so, with the system I use, it was developed by an English physician from the early 1900s. His name was Dr Edward Batch, or Bach, some people say. Basically started out as a regular medical doctor. But at this time in history was basically when things started moving from a homeopathic system of medicine to an allopathic system, which literally means not homeopathic. So we went from caring about feelings how one feels when they're not well, what might be going on at the other layers, below physical. And what he started to be taught by this profession was that we don't care about how people are feeling anymore. And he didn't agree with it, so actually started out as like a proper medical doctor and then went to homeopathy and in that process so that he could nurture his patients feelings and emotional state and use that as part of his practice. Through that process he was also a channeler and he received this wisdom that he could create a system of 38 remedies that would heal all emotional and mental ailments basically, which are the cause, the spiritual and energetic cause for all physical illness or physical states. So on the one hand, this system can help you to do that underlying energetic work to help when you're experiencing physical issues.

Speaker 3: 19:20

For me it was thyroid illness. I worked with a flower practitioner who became my friend, who provided me with a blend of specific flowers that are known in this system to work with the throat center, the throat chakra and the thyroid, specifically that there's certain things about using one's voice when people don't feel like they're able to speak their truth, they can start getting blockages here and that could potentially manifest if you believe this stuff in something like a thyroid illness. So for me, I found that taking on my healing journey in addition to completely changing my diet, because it's an inflammatory thing, to an anti-inflammatory diet, and doing all I could to reduce stress in my life, having a much deeper spiritual devotional practice and meditation practice, yoga practice all these things One of the main things that I really really do believe helped me was this flower remedy blend, because it provided this gentle energetic support that's basically designed when things are very out of balance, which is when things manifest physically, to bring things back into harmony. So it's always trying to create this state of equilibrium, and through that I felt this internal gentle support to actually be stronger, find a deeper sense of strength, use my voice more. I honestly don't believe I would be able to have healed the way I did from my illness, because I'm much better now than I was without this flower remedy, and so I started to study the flower remedies system to see, like, how does this work? And yeah, so basically I was so intrigued by it that every flower, and so for him, he went out, basically and worked with all these flowers and tested them on his patients to see how they'd improve their emotional and mental states and what impact that would have on their physical health. And sometimes it's not. Every illness is physical, sometimes it can be very mental or very emotional, but we work with all of those. So, and he found great results and so he developed the system of 38 flowers plus one blend which many people have found, which is called rescue remedy.

Speaker 3: 21:22

A lot of people use this when they're anxious or when they're going to go on a plane or go to the dentist or something like that. It's quite famous around the world, but the rest of the individual essence is not so much. Yeah, and each remedy, including chicory chicory is one of the remedies works with a specific emotional state in the body. So if you are having an imbalance and you work with a flower remedy practitioner, they'll be able to say OK, based on what you're describing about how you're feeling, these essences will be helpful to you to rebalance and then you'll be able to get more to a baseline state of doing more healing on a physical level. But the other way, I use flower remedies, which is fantastic and this is what my story is all about is also using them to elevate.

Speaker 3: 22:02

When you're actually pretty good.

Speaker 3: 22:04

You want to use them to support you with work, to have better focus, to support your sleep, to support your mental health, to support detoxing, to elevate your spiritual practice, to open your upper chakras. One of the first remedies that I created was called higher self and another called aura cleanse, so these blends are using these specific flowers that help with, say, psychic protection. There's a remedy called aspen that is all about helping one to hold less fear about being in other realms. In addition to other things, it does other things as well. So if you're having bad dreams, for instance, and then you're getting scared about going to sleep, aspen can be really useful for you. But also if you're wanting to do some psychic work and you want to make sure your field is kind of clear and cleansed and not attracting more negative energies, it's great for that too. So I'm definitely working with these flowers on a more health-based, but also a more symbolic level, so that there can be ones for healing but also ones for elevating and I want to say supercharging your spiritual practices.

Speaker 2: 23:12

My gosh, I loved everything you just talked about. I think it's fascinating, too, that you bring up something that is so that people don't talk about, about the energetic side of illness. In the Western medicine model, it is not discussed or talked about, and I just think that it's so fascinating because there is an energetic piece of it and how that anything in your body that you don't process or you hold on to it's held in the body and then it does. Things do manifest into different illnesses, and I think that's absolutely definitely something that people should be talking more about.

Speaker 2: 23:47

What's really cool is something like flower remedies is something that you can use. It's natural. You're not taking another pill or putting something chemical in your body that is not meant to be there, or I feel like there's so much of a push for, oh, just take a pill to fix this or that, instead of getting at the root cause, the energetics behind it, and really healing and working through that. It's just fascinating that you can do this. Have you written a book about this or are you going to? Because I think this is something that everybody, I mean, needs to know about. I'm sure you talk about it on your podcast and you know what?

Speaker 3: 24:28

I don't talk about it much on my podcast. Up until recently I've been kept keeping all my little pursuits quite separate, but I've definitely felt called to bring them all into a more coherent place lately. But I haven't written a book. There are lots of really great books. You can go to Dr Bach himself. He wrote a number of books on his system.

Speaker 3: 24:47

There are other systems of flower remedies too, so I want to say that, and also cultures across the world, including the indigenous Australians, the First Nations people here that we were here for many thousands of years before we got here, have used flower water and still do basically the easiest way to describe what this is, and so I know that this is something that influenced the bush flower essences. So that's a range out of Australia of flower essences that uses our native flowers. There's also, I think, california flowers, alaskan remedies as well. I can't remember the exact names because I don't use these systems, but there's a number of different remedies, like big brands of these from around the world that might feel more local to you because I have, you know, an more British heritage in my line, using the European flowers make sense as well as the bush flowers here. So there's different systems, but anyone can do this, because the original form of these flower remedies was to work with the dew dew drops on the flowers, so that's the best way to describe how this works. When there's water on the flower, water is a holder of energy. It is, it's such a beautiful holder of energy and it's something that we can take. So, you know, you can have a glass of water, put it out in the sun and it can get charged by the sun and it holds the energy of the sun so you can drink it and take it. By putting the water or taking the dew drop. Basically it was holding the energetic like imprint of the flower and it was a very beautiful gentle medicine, a very feminine medicine as well, and lots of older cultures I know the ties have used this a lot too.

Speaker 3: 26:18

From my understanding in the research I've done, basically, what we're doing is taking a flower or a number of flowers, and the reason I'm explaining this is because anyone can make these. So you can order mine from my store and that's cool. You can go to someone else's store and order them, that's great. But if you have flowers in your garden and you love them, you can make your own flower remedy very easily. So it's basically taking a bowl of water and it needs to be on a sunny day and taking the flowers very gently, always ask permission and pick them with reverence, place them in your bowl and so they float at the top and they cover up the whole top of the bowl of water. It should be a glass bowl with no prints on it so it's completely clear, because any symbols that in that bowl are going to also be held in this essence. So ideally you want a completely clear bowl with no patterns and you keep it sitting in the sunlight for an hour, two hours, whatever feels right, and then you drain the flowers out and you have a flower remedy. That's basically it and we go through a more specific process, or more actually like producing these.

Speaker 3: 27:23

There's a couple of remedies in Dr Batch's range that are like more around trees, and so there is an alternate way of getting those remedies through boiling bark and that sort of thing, but mostly it's flowers and if you go on Etsy, for instance, there's a lot of I have a few friends doing this too of like folk producers making their own ranges because they have this very specific relationship with the flowers in their garden. So one for example I've used is Johnquil. I see Johnquil bloom straight after the winter solstice. It's almost immediate they appear and they're such beautiful, bright, sunny flowers, and so the energy of that flower for me is this like burst of light after the darkness. So if you think about what that feels like, that's its medicine. When we're in a very dark place and it's hard to feel like the sun's going to come out, johnquil will be really helpful for you because it's a reminder that no, the sun will always return. So that's how they work, and you can work with any flower in your garden in this way If you want to preserve it.

Speaker 3: 28:24

So if you've made a bowl of remedy and you want to work with it for a month or two, you want to add some preservatives. That could be an apple cider vinegar, it could be a grape brandy or vodka, it could be a glycerin. So any preservative will keep that, for you know, longer on your shelf. You can keep it in the fridge, but that's as simple as it is. So it's the sun, beautiful masculine energy of the sun, activating the beautiful feminine healing energy of the flower and the water, storing it for us to receive. So cool.

Speaker 2: 28:55

I'm sure everybody listening is thinking about what is in my garden and how can I do this. This is, and I actually think this would be an activity for people with children that they would be able to enjoy and then learn how to use, and that could be like something at a very early age. My youngest is five, but she's a lover of nature and being outdoors, but she's always collecting flowers.

Speaker 2: 29:21

Dandelion in particular is something that she has always been a collector of Owen rocks, but I mean, I know that doesn't really work with plant medicine, but it just made me think that this would be something that somebody could explore on their own, but also they could incorporate their family into it and flow it in that way, and I think that that's really cool.

Speaker 3: 29:41

Yeah, absolutely, Anna, be a beautiful practice to do with the child, asking them what does this flower mean to you when you hold it? What does it feel like? How does it look, make you feel? What do you think its healing energies are? You know? Doing that in a very simple way, I'm sure the real essence of the flower would be easily understood by the children.

Speaker 2: 30:00

Absolutely. They're so in tune. So, absolutely, oh my gosh, that's so cool. Okay, so now we're gonna deviate to sacred ceremony, which I feel like a lot of the things we've talked about can be incorporated into sacred ceremony. So let's talk about that.

Speaker 3: 30:17

Yeah, ceremony for me has been so important and it's been such a gateway and I'm learning a lot more about it now because I'm doing more in-depth training into more indigenous ceremonies out of the Andes. I would never say that that's what I do, because it's a culture that is not mine. However, this culture is extremely generous in sharing their teachings with the world because that's what their ancestors have told them to do. At least that's what my teachers have communicated to me. So, coming from a very Western place, australia is not a religious place at all either. Even though I went to Catholic school, it wasn't like religion wasn't a really big thing for me as a growing up. However, it was cool to make ceremony a normal thing for me. Some people see ceremony and ritual from growing up with them more like agnostic or like non-religious or atheist perspective, as being really weird and really like almost dark, but it's not like that at all. Ceremony can be whatever, whatever it feels beautiful and whatever reverence is to you. So it's really all about taking yourself out of you know the mundane 3D reality for however much time you can spare and sitting in the present moment. That's really all it is, and you can do that on your own or you can do that with people, and I found so much joy in firstly cultivating an altar. This is something that I love. Having altars in my house.

Speaker 3: 31:40

I've started to make altars outside as well as beautiful sacred spaces where anytime you walk past, it's an invitation to come and sit and be present. And we know, you know people going into a yeah, into a church or a temple. That's the invitation you go there to be present, and you know it is about praying, but it's not always about praying. Sometimes it's about everything's a prayer really to me. But contemplation, sitting in contemplation, doing journaling, playing with your tarot or Oracle cards, whatever your practice might be, if you have an altar, it's a sacred space that holds that energy for you and the invitation to sit there and be present for however long you can spare.

Speaker 3: 32:18

And so that's where it began for me really spending some like good time and intention and energy into setting up an altar and then being like what do I do in this space? It's such a beautiful space, I want to be here all the time and I started to cultivate like my own ceremonies, which weren't like particularly woo-woo, but it was more like a set of things that I would do that became ritualistic for me every day and it was a huge part of my healing journey. So you know, coming and doing some yoga, some tantric yoga, and then doing some channeling and journaling in the Akashic records that's another thing that I work with doing tarot, working with the flower remedies and meditating with that flower so I could build relationship with the flower. I'd pick a few things every day and I'd just do it. But it was about the time and the space and the intention and it's really led me to actually create more of a, a formal container for this. So I've started holding.

Speaker 3: 33:09

I held my first ceremony for the equinox, a recent equinox, which is a beautiful guided smudging and then a invocation beverage. So really asking to like it's an encoding of whatever our intentional prayer is into the medicine that we all drink, and when we do that together it's very powerful and then a guided journey of activation. So that's kind of how my ceremonies have evolved and it's very, very beautiful and very, very powerful and anyone can do it. So Sacred Ceremonies is a very new project for me, where I'm hosting these ceremonies online. I'm about to start hosting live Kakao ceremonies where I live in Australia and I'm also going to be creating resources in this space to help other people cultivate their own sacred space and sacred ceremony practices.

Speaker 2: 33:57

That's amazing and I love that. I love how you are talking about it, because anybody can do it. It's not they don't have to do what Natalie does. They can do. It speaks to them. Whatever it is that you like to work with or whoever's listening. It's not like checking off the boxes, like you have to do step one, two and three. It's kind of going in there with an open mind and what feels good, just like you do when you're exploring your follower remedies and the. You know how it is it feel to you.

Speaker 3: 34:31

Mmm.

Speaker 2: 34:32

I have never thought of my spiritual practice as a sacred ceremony, but it actually is, and I yeah, now that I'm like listening to everything that you're talking about, but I have things that I do every day too I just really like how you broke it down and and talked about it. Thank you for sharing that with everyone. Everything that you have talked about is so fascinating. Really. How can people reach you? Where can they find you? Can they take classes with you?

Speaker 3: 34:59

Yeah, absolutely. So I've got a few. Like I said at the very beginning, I've got a few different like arms at the moment. So if you want to work with me with tarot, the best thing to do is follow me on Instagram at crystal or a tarot. I am kind of on a bit of a little hiatus at the moment, but things are gonna start ramping up again in December and January, so not sure when this will air, but it's a little bit quiet, but that doesn't mean you can't book in with me. So currently I'm offering one-on-one tarot teaching containers. So it's like a tarot coat not so much coaching, but tarot lessons that you can do one-on-one with me, where we go through the foundational systems of the tarot for eight weeks, which is really fun. I'll also be running a, an intro course to tarot early next year and and releasing a tarot planner for 2024 very soon as well. So I've got a few things going on there.

Speaker 3: 35:47

Otherwise, if you follow me on Instagram at crystal or a tarot, you'll be able to see collective readings I do and free resources. I pop up there if you're interested in flower remedies and I well, I haven't written a book. I'm really working hard to create more and more resource information, educational information on my website. So that's at flower guardcom, the initiates podcast. Please come listen. I'd love to have you join in the collective field. We've got a beautiful, beautiful community there. So that's. You can follow me on Instagram at the initiates podcast, or visit my website, the initiates podcastcom, or just find me on any good podcast player. I'm right across the board and sacred ceremony. That is a work in progress, but if you're interested, you can sign up to my newsletter there at the site. It's called the sacred ceremonycom.

Speaker 2: 36:33

Oh, my gosh, nearly boy. Are some closing thoughts or a final thing that you would like to leave the audience?

Speaker 3: 36:41

Oh, what a beautiful question. I think Times are getting a bit crazy again. I think we can all feel that. If you feel how do I say this? There's a really, really big call to take a side, and this isn't going to be about one particular issue, but it's about everything. And so the system wants to pull us On to one side or other of the polarity. It doesn't actually care which side, it just wants us to take a side rather than sit in the center where we can actually see. All that is if you don't feel Aligned with a side.

Speaker 3: 37:12

Sometimes we do, and it's a very righteous cause, and when it affects us personally, it's important to use our voices. But if there's something that's happening in the world whether that's in your personal sphere, that's in your family, that's at your work or in the global, more global perspective that there's demand from the collective to be pulled on either side of the polarity and it doesn't feel aligned with you, don't feel pressure to do that, because we need people in the center, point. It's not sitting on a fence, it is not ignoring what's happening. It is a very powerful place to be able to stay centered when the world's trying to polarize the people. So I don't want to make this political. I don't want to make it negative in any way, because I feel like that's always going to be happening. But if you feel like you're able to be centered in these times, it's going to be really healing for all those around you. And Don't feel bad about that if that's where you feel called, because we need people in that position as well.

Speaker 2: 38:08

Thank you so much for saying that. I think that needed to be heard and I 100% agree with you. I actually had a conversation with somebody today Very similar to what you're talking about. I am 100% there with you, as you're 100% right. They don't care which side you choose, but they want people to be separated.

Speaker 2: 38:27

Yeah and not together, and there's nothing else I can say to that other, because you so you so beautifully and eloquently Put that out there and I thank you for that and I think that's beautiful. And I just want to thank you so much for your time and for sharing your wealth of knowledge With us today. I'm honored to have you as a guest and I just want to say that I honor the light that you are in this world and thank you so much again for being here today with me.

Speaker 3: 38:52

Oh, Thank you, kelly. I feel your light too. I'm like buzzing with your warmth right now. So thank you so much for the invitation and to connect with you and your listeners. It's been a big honor, so thank you so much.

Speaker 2: 39:05

Oh, you are so welcome and I am so glad that we had this conversation today.

Speaker 3: 39:09

Thank you.

Speaker 5: 39:13

Hey, it's Jen Mitchell, Host of the Soul Traveler podcast and your partner in leveling up your life through quantum hypnosis. I'm sure that you've heard before that all answers lie within, right? Well, it's true. Do you ever wonder how some people are so wildly successful and seem to achieve all of their life goals? It's because they've figured out life's secret the power of the subconscious mind. Highly successful CEOs and entrepreneurs have used hypnosis to make their dreams a reality, and it's no longer a secret. Now you can transform your life with the power of the subconscious by using these same techniques with quantum hypnosis. Let's level up your life. Visit me online at the soul experiences calm and click on subconscious coaching.

Speaker 4: 40:15

Hello, beautiful soul. Thank you again for listening. I'd like to ask you to please rate, review and follow the show. It really helps to how to become more visible and the beautiful messages be spread to more people. I Also wanted to mention that I am now offering reiki distance sessions. The link will be in the podcast notes. Feel free to reach out to me with any questions About that. Also, I wanted to put out there. If there is something that you have to share, you to be a guest on the show, please reach out to me and we'll see if it's a good fit. Thank you again for being here and sending love like joy and peace and magic your way.