Flowers can help us tap into our own greatness and feel a sense of empowerment, fearlessness and freedom from fear, shame, worry and anger while experiencing the true beauty of who we truly are. I meet with Katie Hess, the founder of Lotus Wei, to find out how.
We’ve all heard the term ‘flower power’, which to many may conjure up images of the swinging sixties or hippies with flowers in their hair. But it’s actually so much more than that and it turns out flowers do actually possess inherent powers. Not only are they beautiful to behold and brighten up any room or situation, the essences or remedies of a flower are believed to be able to heal on many levels.
In the 1930s, a doctor in the UK came up with a process called ‘solar infusion’. Essentially, this process captures the energy, lifeforce, or chi of the flower and stores its essence in water through the use of sunlight, which acts as the catalyst and drives the flower’s lifeforce into storage in the water. When the water contains all the good vibes from the flowers and you put it in or on your body, it starts to shift the structure of the water in your body.
Unlike essential oils or herbal remedies, which are oils extracted from the plants, there is no physical part of the flower in a flower essence; only its healing vibration. And, every flower has a different healing quality.
When we delve into the healing world of flowers, there is no better expert to gain insights from than the beautiful Katie Hess. I first met Katie when she led a meditation and intuitive healing lodge on her visit to Singapore in 2019. The first thing that struck me about her was her extremely calm demeanour. Her serene face wore a constant gentle smile, and when she spoke it was sounded as though she had just come out of a two-hour long meditation. Immediately we all felt drawn to her energy and were excited to learn more about the healing properties of her magical flower elixirs.
I tried several flower remedies that night and can honestly say I felt extremely calm, at peace, and serene. It is difficult to explain the sensation unless you’ve tried it yourself, which I urge everyone to do. I recently interviewed Katie to delve deeper into this magical realm of plant healing.
Can you share the first experience you had using flower remedies?
I first discovered flower essences in 1999 when I was 22 years old. I had been living and travelling outside of the United States for several years and ended up meeting a flower expert from Madrid, Spain. He taught me that every flower has a specific purpose and can alter our state of mind in different ways. So there are like 40,000 super power plant potions that we haven’t even begun to tap into yet! It felt like you could work with these remedies for the rest of your life and never meet the end, which fascinated me.
He said something profound that never left me: “If we can get three percent of the world’s population consistently taking these essences, we can hands down change the course of the future in a positive way.”
That’s what led me to wanting to bring flower essences back to the United States and make them more mainstream.
What happened when you returned to the States with this newfound information?
What happens to every good person who is dangerously ahead of the curb: everyone thought I was insane! In the United States we really believe in pharmaceuticals and doctors and white coats and we’re very afraid of being fooled by ‘snake oil’. It was a tough time. I would tell people what I did and they were totally confused or didn’t believe it. But once I started seeing clients and getting results, it was wonderful – you can’t argue with someone’s personal experience.
How did this lead to the birth of your company, Lotus Wei?
Before starting Lotus Wei, I was focused on seeing people one on one. The transformations I was noticing in people was mind-blowing. I added up how many clients I could see if I saw clients for the rest of my life without any holidays and it came to 76,000 people. That wasn’t nearly enough! That’s where the idea to start a company came from and we started in 2008.
I made the first six blends based on what I saw my clients needing – everyone needs more love, energy, inspiration, peace and joy. And then over the years we continued to refine what it was that people really needed, so rather than focus on specific flowers, we focused on blends to deal with deeper things like trauma.
Is the concept of taking flower essences a new thing?
People have been doing this for thousands of years. Yogis would do these long fasting retreats and survive on the concentrated life force of flowers. In Europe, doctors used to tell their patients to go out in the wild and find one specific flower and drink the dew drop from the top of the flower every morning.
How can taking flower elixirs dissolve self-limiting patterns and accelerate personal growth?
The normal amount of personal growth I would see a client go through in six months would be squished down into one or two months, which is really shocking to watch. When they first come into your office, they are holding onto things they’d been dragging around like heavy suitcases for decades. I get them to tell me about their life, their challenges, their problems, and then I make some remedies to help them.
A month later they come back and their face and body looks different. We run down the list of everything that used to bother them and they say, “You know what? I just decided I can’t control any of that so I just let it go.”
The flowers dissolve information in your cellular makeup, bringing you into that perfect harmony of the true you.
How does the healing process usually take shape?
The first stage we see is called stabilization: you feel more calm, less irritable. After that the flowers start to turn up the volume a little bit and you will start to see these destructive patterns that you hadn’t noticed before. It’s like the flowers shine a light on blind spots so that we can make changes from there.
Our internal world is full of harmony, peace, stillness and love and joy, and the world that is reflected back to us from the outside is different. After about four months, people start to notice big changes in their external world like a new job or relationship.
The issues that you have are always there and you may feel them running at 1 percent in the background all the time. The flower makes it come up and out so that you experience it 100 percent so you can dislodge it and get it to back to zero.
Can you take flower essences when pregnant?
The wonderful part about taking flower essences when you’re pregnant is that the baby gets all that yummy, wonderful flower energy in utero. Use something gentle like our ‘infinite love’ blend, which helps to reduce stress. Anything that helps to destress or for love is good for both of you.
In your opinion why is it so important to take flower elixirs in today’s fast-paced, modern world?
When you connect with nature you feel different, you feel at ease. When you see something really vast like mountains, it makes you feel really small at first, but in the smallness we also feel vast because we feel connected to everything. Of all the reasons to take flower essences, the most important is to remember that we are vast and that as human beings we have incredible qualities.
Then of course there’s heightened stress, insomnia, food sensitivities, disease. If you’re always taking essences and cleaning up your chi, then it never has the chance to manifest in the physical body. So in a sense flower essences prevents it before it even happens.
You’ve travelled all over the world in search of the healing energy of flowers and plants. Which flower blew you away the most?
There are different qualities to the different regions. For example in Singapore, the flowers seem to be about abundance, possibility and freedom, as well as interconnectedness and a deeper understanding of the past. Iceland is about curiosity and wonder and childlike discovery. Costa Rica some of the orchids are digging into deep fears. In the middle of the United States, I had this experience in the plains with a particular flower that was about patterning or energy in groups of people.
Every flower blows me away. I love them all! I’m really in love with one I haven’t made an essence of yet. It’s called toad lily and is the most other-wordly-looking flower.
How do you test each flower’s healing properties?
After we make the essences, we try them ourselves and we have a group of about 100-150 people who work with them and report back to us with what they experienced. We make sure that whatever notes I take and other experiences are synced.
What would you say to a sceptic who has never tried flower elixirs and doesn't believe they have the power to change anything?
It’s very healthy to be a sceptic – they are critical thinkers. I would say just try it for yourself and see how you react and then you’ll know. It can’t hurt you. There are no negative side effects.
Can you share your daily spiritual practice with us?
I get up every morning at 4.15am to do a short meditation, but then I go back to sleep. 4.15am is a special time in the Earth’s atmosphere. Your body and mind have a very magnified capacity to awaken.
When I wake for the rest of the day, I’ll do another meditation, and throughout the day I really try to be as aware as possible. Observation is incredibly powerful.
What is your dream for the world?
My dream is that enough people would be using the flower remedies and healing qualities of Mother Nature to be able to tap into their own greatness and feel this incredible sense of empowerment, fearlessness and freedom from fear, shame, worry and anger. And be able to experience the vastness of themselves and the true beauty of who they and others are. And to be able to liberate the potential of other people who aren’t even taking the remedies and creating this ripple effect of happiness.
Flower essences open the door for us and we ultimately have to walk through the doorway.
Beautiful, Katie. Thank you for sharing.
I use Lotus Wei flower elixirs during my energy healings, allowing my clients to choose which elixirs, if any, they would like to support their healing during their session.