How to Find Balance through our Relationship with Plants

Feb 02, 2023

Join us for an amazing conversation on the magic & medicine of flowers and our relationship with Nature with Renee K. Smith (Ifagbaye Esubola Ayelaagbe Egbesina), flower essence practitioner and founder of Akika Flower Essences & Apothecary.

In this episode, Renee shares how flowers can help to open layers of awareness in the process of healing and transformation, and how they help us in creating new pathways for how we want to walk in the world. She also offers wisdom on the magic that occurs when we are in community with the natural world, and how connecting with the Earth creates healing and promotes balance in our everyday lives.

Renee K. Smith (Ifagbaye Esubola Ayelaagbe Egbesina) is a certified flower essence practitioner and proud founder of Akika Flower Essences & Apothecary. Akika Flower Essences was created to explore the ancestral practice of tuning into plant intelligence as a tool for transformation, healing, and empowerment on one’s soul journey.

Renee received her flower essence certification from Oceans & Rivers Acupuncture and Wellness and The Flower Essence Society (FES). As a strategist, Renee believes that everyone can manifest their dreams by creating a strategy that encompasses the right people at the right time. Her goal is to assist others to find joy through connecting with plant intelligence in as many forms possible beginning with flower essences.

As an Iyanifa and Olorisa, initiated to Ifa and Egbe in Nigeria, Renee also uses the knowledge she gains from her spiritual practice to assist her clients in finding and maintaining balance in their lives. She continues to expand her repertoire of community tools for healing through consistent study of our plant allies, learning and practicing the art of alchemy as taught by Master Teacher Diana Pharr and becoming a Level II Reiki Practitioner certified by Taino Reiki Healing. Renee is a Brooklyn native, mother, artist, healer, alchemist, strategist, cultural arts curator, flower essence practitioner, SRJ advocate and community member.

You can find Renee at https://www.akikafloweressences.com/ and on IG @akikafloweressences

For more info please visit Sara's website at https://www.multidimensionalnature.com/ and on IG @multidimensional.nature

Learn how to communicate with plant consciousness in the free workshop on How to Learn Plant Language:
https://www.learnplantlanguage.com

“Listen to Finding Balance through our Relationship with Plants with Renee K. Smith here”

Here’s a potent excerpt from the episode:

Sara Artemisia: How do we restore our relationship with the Earth now?

Renee K. Smith: It starts with us recognizing that we are in a reciprocal relationship. That's the first place, this understanding that we have had as humans that we are better than and that part if we can let go of that. That's our first thing, right? Because I often will say, what you are seeing in plants today existed from the first seed that ever existed in the first time on Earth. Can you imagine the amount of information it's pulling forward?

We haven't been around that long. The plants have been around longer than us. So we're witnessing history every day. You know that saying that the Earth is an ancestor, we're witnessing and we're communing with that every single day. So that begins the first place.

I think the second place again, is this idea of being able to communicate, our third eye has been like gunked up for so long, that we forget that there are other ways in which we communicate with the world. And one of them is we plant, yes, you can talk to a plant. And if you sit there and do active imagination long enough, it will talk back to you. 

Why is that important? Because it gets us out of the fog of us believing that were the only sentient beings on Earth and that can't be it. I come from a spiritual tradition that believes that every single thing that exists on the Earth, did their spiritual work and exist for purpose.

As much as I may not like the roaches, I got it, they did their spiritual work that here, I can't be mad at the ants, I can't be mad at the stick. I can't. Why? Because they did their work and so they came with a purpose. It may not be a purpose I like, but it's a purpose.

And so again, this is understanding that community exists not just in our human community, but that we're in an ecosystem that requires us to be in community so that we can have balance, right, because when it's not imbalanced, what happens we have drought, we can't have, we either have too much water, we don't have enough water, right? We have too much food, we don't have enough.  

It's a lack, when we get to the lack is when we're paying attention, that something is wrong. But it should be before it gets there, we should be getting signs that something is going on. So I think that's the first thing, right, is to really understand that we are in a reciprocal relationship. I think the second thing with restoring our understanding of our relationship with plants, is just being able to be caretakers of them.

Even if it's a little pot that you keep on your desk or in your room, or that begins that opportunity for you to restore trust, right? And being able to be in nature, it's hard when we live in cities, because in our cities, the cars, the streets, the but I always like to tell people, especially in the summertime, it's really beautiful. You'll see concrete everywhere.

And all of a sudden, this little plant is growing up in between the concrete happens in New York all the time, you're like how's it because you don't have to tell plants to find the sun, they do that automatically.

That's the one thing, we're always learning, right? It doesn't matter. They'll do it automatically. So how do we start to harness that so that we are able to have something that we can observe and see and take care of. And that brings us into a larger relationship with everything that's going on with the Earth. I think those are the biggest ones, and then us really getting into Nature.