[00:00:00] Katie: Okay, so close your eyes. Become aware of your breath. Become aware of your heart beating. And I'm so grateful to come together with you today. And anything that we share, speak, express, may it be transformative for you, for me, for everyone listening. May we create a massive ripple effect of-- and may the listeners find exactly what they were looking for. Thank you.

[00:00:46] Luke: I like that. You want a job? I'd like to have you do that at the beginning of every show. Because people come over, and you go, oh, you want something to drink? There's the bathroom. Getting the mic set up and all the things. And if they have some products with them, making sure that's around, doing all the thing. I often just rush into the conversations without dropping in. So that's a good reminder. You know what would be super cool, Katie? 

[00:01:14] Katie: What?

[00:01:15] Luke: Is if you pick, uh, an essence mist out of Alyson's massive collection here of Lotuswei and give us a good dowsing.

[00:01:30] Katie: Divine Truth. Perfect.

[00:01:33] Luke: I'm here for it.

[00:01:34] Katie: Healer, heal yourself.

[00:01:40] Luke: Thank you. Wow, you apply it liberally. I'm always two or three sprays. I want to try to conserve it. It's funny. But we do. We have these things all over the house thanks to you guys. Thank you so much. I don't know what you have worked out with Alyson, but there no shortage of Lotuswei products in the house. 

[00:01:57] I have some in my office, which I just intuitively picked. I have one in my medicine cabinet, so when I brush my teeth and stuff in the morning, I give myself a couple of hits with that. Some are on the nightstand next to the bed. So that's one thing I want to ask you, and we can get into it later, is like, which ones are good for sleep?

[00:02:15] Because I just grabbed one I liked the scent of. But I'm guessing you probably have one that would be good, uh, I've done in the past with lavender. I'll spray my pillow and myself. But I bet you have something way cooler. First thing I want to ask you is this. Who have been three teachers or teachings that have influenced your life and your work that you'd like to share with us?

[00:02:38] Katie: Oh, my root teacher would be the first one. My main teacher. What do you want me to say? Do you want meto-- 

[00:02:48] Luke: Their name. 

[00:02:49] Katie: Oh, Karma [Inaudible].

[00:02:52] Luke: Is that someone we could find online and put in the show notes?

[00:02:54] Katie: Never.

[00:02:55] Luke: Okay. Sometimes the best ones are like that, though. Do they have social media? No. They live in a cave in the Haal, so you'll never find them. 

[00:03:02] Katie: Don't have a cellphone. Totally incognito. Yeah, you'd never know him. Uh, the 17th Karmapa. That one you can find online. Um, and Pedro López Clemente. You might be able to find his name somewhere online.

[00:03:23] Luke: Excellent. And for those listening, speaking of show notes, what are we calling those today? Uh, it's going to be lukestorey.com/flowers. Apropos enough. So how did you get started in flower essences, working with these plants. You're the only person I've ever met that is this deeply steeped into this particular niche practice.

[00:03:52] Katie: So I graduated college, and I saw the people around me getting into all these deep commitments, and then not really sure that what they were doing was what they wanted to be doing. So I took some time, and I traveled around a lot. I was in Europe for a couple of years, in Asia, in Mexico, and I ended up meeting a teacher from Spain who is an expert in flower essences. That's Pedro Lopez Clemente.

[00:04:19] Luke: Oh, cool.

[00:04:19] Katie: And at the time, I was studying as many forms of natural medicine that I could get my hands on because I felt like there was a key in there to helping people dissolve self-limiting patterns. Because I think if you ask any human being, if you could be in a room full of a million people and say, I want one person here to raise your hand if you have maxed out on your potential, you're as fearless as you'll ever get, loving, kind, gentle, wild, bold, successful, you name it, as you'll ever get, you've topped out, you've maxed out, nobody ever says yes. Nobody ever says that's me. Because, innately, as a human, we just know. How do we know that? I'm not sure, but we know that there's more we can expand into evolutionary-wise.

[00:05:09] So I was looking, where can I find this thing that can help ramp up and accelerate people's transformation? I stumbled onto this-- actually it was a crazy story of how I found him. I was walking down a cobblestone street, and it was empty. It was a holiday. There was no one on the streets, and this really sweet Otomi indigenous woman came up and handed me a flyer.

[00:05:34] And so I grabbed the flyer. It said flower essence. I said, this is really interesting. Usually, it's stuff you're not interested in. So I turned around to ask her some questions, and it was like she vanished. So I started running up and down all the different cobblestone streets looking for this woman, and I couldn't find her.

[00:05:53] So I thought, that's really weird. I'm the only one out here. What is she doing out here? So I took it as a sign. I went to Mexico City. Um, I met this teacher from Spain, and he taught me two main things. One was that every flower on the planet has a very specific healing benefit for us. It will accelerate, or harmonize, or amp up certain qualities within us, and that the power of the ripple effect is such that if only 3% of the world's population is actively working with these flower remedies, it has enough power to change the outcome of the future in a really positive way.

[00:06:35] And I was like, I'm in. I think so many of us want to benefit in some way. And when we think of all the problems in the world, it's like, God, what could I do to make a dent in that? About 3%? Sure. I could devote the rest of my life to 3%. So that's what I did.

[00:06:56] Luke: Wow. That's so cool. It's very similar to my worldview because we seem to have signed up for this polarized duality of experience. So if the world was a utopia, and there was no evil, no darkness, no sadness, suffering, etc, there wouldn't really be anywhere to go. There'd be nothing to learn.

[00:07:24] So this is something I'm always trying to reconcile when I see the existence of, for lack of a better term, say, evil in the world, which I don't think actually exists. I think they're just degrees of love. And so you could say my version of evil is a lack of love. So we have the power of love on one side, and then we have a gradient of lesser expressions of love, and we perceive those to be dark or evil.

[00:07:53] But love is exponentially more powerful than any position below it that has less of it. You see what I'm saying? So your 3%, or your teacher's 3% makes perfect sense to me because there's a counterweight. The higher expression of love is so much more powerful than the lower expressions that have less of it.

[00:08:22] So it's not even that those of us that want to see more love and harmony in the world have to fight the darkness. We just have to amplify the love. And there's a tipping point, it seems, uh, that occurs when a certain percentage, maybe it is 3% of the population become more embodied in their love and expressive of their love. And I think that's the thing that holds this mess together, right?

[00:08:50] Katie: Right.

[00:08:51] Luke: Because it seems like right now in the world, everything is just spinning out of control. Especially over the past three years. All of the lack of love energies are coming to the surface and exposing themselves. And it's just insane. And that can be really dark if you're a doom scroller like me. And I go on my own telegram channel, lukestore.com/telegram, uh, and post things. And I'm like, God, this is so negative.

[00:09:18] But it's not that things have become more negative. It's just that I think because of the internet, and social media, and independent media creators like myself and many others, the things that have been lurking in the shadows are now becoming more apparent to more people. So it's a net positive.

[00:09:36] Katie: For sure. 

[00:09:37] Luke: But it's a good reminder, um, that you shared. Yeah.

[00:09:40] Katie: And I don't think what you're talking about is negative if it's truth. If it's truth, it's truth, it's truth, it's truth, right?

[00:09:47] Luke: Right. I guess I perceive some of it to be negative because it elicits emotions of fear or anger, and it's more the reaction to it. Because anything going on in reality is truly objective until we assign some meaning to it. So if I look at then, what's the thing I was reading this morning? Um, Bill Gates wants to, or probably is, um, injecting animal products with mRNA vaccines that go into our system when we eat that meat. It's just like, oh my God.

[00:10:21] So to me, that's negative because I create thoughts around that. I almost texted Alyson, okay, we can't eat out ever again. We have to only get food from our local farmer, or we're going to be dead. The information is actually neutral. It's just the meaning that I assigned to it makes me perceive it as negative.

[00:10:43] Katie: There is a lot of crazy stuff happening right now.

[00:10:45] Luke: Any time I've spent time with you, which is a few times, half a dozen times maybe, if that, um, you seem to be extremely grounded, peaceful, happy, at ease. You're someone, uh, that I think has figured some of this out. And I don't know you that intimately, personally, if you're going through divorces and crazy shit. Is your company firing people?

[00:11:13] I don't know if there's drama in your life, but the way you present yourself seems to be really happy, peaceful, and grounded. So what do you do? We're going to talk about, obviously, the power of flower essences and stuff, but what do you do to keep your head together, keep yourself strong, and resilient, and objective about reality?

[00:11:37] Katie: Everybody has drama. I, for sure, have drama. Just the other day, I was telling someone, man, I do three hours of meditation practice a day now. I take a ton of flower essences. I live and work in a community of people who are devoted to expanding into their highest potential. So we understand when somebody gets triggered or has a weak point. I'm still a shit show sometimes. I still lose my cool.

[00:12:12] Luke: Me too.

[00:12:13] Katie: I think, if I'm this way, anybody who doesn't have any one of the factors that I'm lucky enough to have, or practice, or do, or have access to, how are they even surviving out there? Because sometimes it just feels like you're hanging on with your fingernails. Those are the three things I would say are the most powerful for me. The flower essences work. I don't know that I could be sane without them.

[00:12:43] They accelerate personal growth. So what I've seen over the last 20-some years is, like the regular amount of personal growth you would go through in six months, you're trucking along in your life, if you're using them regularly, it squishes it down to one or two months. So it just seems like you process things more easily. You file things out. What doesn't work for you, you toss it. You don't get as stuck in things. You just move through a lot more easily and quickly. Sometimes easily. Sometimes it's hard. 

[00:13:16] Meditation, obviously, is such a powerful tool. And then being surrounded by people who are in alignment with you, and value the same things, and are working on themselves, and can make space for you to freak out and be human. I would say those are the top three movers, shakers. But even so, I always say a company or an organization can only be as good as the person who leads it.

[00:13:48] So it's like I'm under contract to face every glitch, and challenge, and weakness I have inside of me. Because the strength of the flower essences that we put out there, the cohesion of the people working in my business is dependent on me doing my work. If I slack, then that will trickle down through the whole thing.

[00:14:18] Luke: Totally. Yeah. The responsibility of leadership is no joke because, speaking of business, the culture of your company really is dependent on you. And I've learned that the hard way many times, and it's probably one of the reasons that I keep a really tight team. And I don't really try to scale and grow because I just don't want that responsibility.

[00:14:41] There's a lot of responsibility that comes with it, but the biggest for me is always the people. I had a company before, and, um, I was a little less enlightened, uh, probably a lot less. And I would show up, and it was a time in my life where, um, I was much, uh, less aware of complaining, of just the egoic tendency to make things in your experience wrong so that you elevate yourself into being right, that kind of thing.

[00:15:12] Complaining about, uh, I can't believe it's raining today. I can't believe this. The web guy sucks so bad. Whatever. Complaining about anything. And I still complain a little bit, but I really do my best to monitor that. And I observed over time, and, uh, my partner at the time was maybe even more negative than I, and we're the two leaders of the company, and, um, I noticed that it caught a cold, man. It's like I started coming into work and everyone was just making fun of people and complaining about people, and it got super toxic. 

[00:15:45] And because I had some self-awareness, I was like, oh, you guys all need to change. You know what I mean? And then I realized, oh, I'm actually modeling at least some of this behavior and this attitude that everything sucks, everyone sucks, no one can do anything right. And it was a huge wake-up call because then I started finding myself on the receiving end of that and started losing the respect of the people that were working for me because I had fostered that culture. So I just left. Didn't change. I'm just kidding. How many, uh, people do you have on your team?

[00:16:20] Katie: Oh, we're about 15 now.

[00:16:21] Luke: Really? Damn. You guys are like a real company. Crazy. 

[00:16:24] Katie: I'm most excited that we are in the process of registering in India right now. So we're building ground up. Um, Sonica is our director of everything there. And if you would have asked me, even a couple of years ago, where's the next place you'll find yourself? I would have never guessed India. It feels like home to me, and I couldn't be more excited.

[00:16:52] Luke: That's cool. Yeah, that's cool. I've always had a connection to India. I've only been once. I went for a month or so many years ago. Yeah. But I always, um, I don't know, Indian culture, music, food, the smells. There's an ancient relationship there. 

[00:17:12] Yeah. I wanted to talk about, um, your Flower lounge events, and I don't know if there's something that is ongoing, or it was periodic, but the last time you were here, Alyson and I came to your event. And I remember telling her, this is the only event I can go to from now on because your team is so zen, and the ambiance, and the feel, the chanting, the, I don't want to call them lectures, but presentations, everything is like super mellow.

[00:17:47] And that's what I like. I'm the antithesis of Burning Man. You know what I mean? I want a few people. Everyone's pretty quiet and well-behaved. There's no real loud music. There's a lot of meditating and chanting. That's my shit. And in Austin, that's not that popular here in the circles in which I run. It's like a little more nt nt nt vibes here. I'm older too. Actually, I was telling you, I don't look in the mirror a lot.

[00:18:15] Today, I was, um, shaving to look presentable. I was like, damn bro, you got a lot of gray hair. I'm turning into an elder. And I was like, oh shit. But that's part of it when I was younger. I was all about all the parties, but your event was just so grounded, like how you started us off today, just a lot of devotion, and stillness, and presence, and I just thrive in that kind of environment. 

[00:18:42] So I want to learn about that. And then also, you invited us to a salon you were doing at a home here. And, uh, Alyson and I came over and got, I don't even know what they were called, but two flower essence treatments. And maybe you can elaborate on what that was. I remember being bathed in flowers and getting some acupuncture and maybe some body work. 

[00:19:06] To be honest, I went in such a deep theta, drooling, beautiful state. I don't even know what happened. I just know I didn't want it to end. And when it did, I was like, ah, what? How long has it been? Time elapsed quickly. It was in such a beautiful place. And then we went outside for the flower baths, and it was just lovely, the whole thing, both events. Um, so tell us a little bit about how you work, how often it happens, what was involved in all of that.

[00:19:36] Katie: So we do a flower launch tour typically once a year, and we'll hit a string of cities. It was our first time in Austin. Austin is my favorite place to be. 

[00:19:47] Luke: Really?

[00:19:47] Katie: Yes. 

[00:19:48] Luke: Cool.

[00:19:49] Katie: Love people here, and the place, and the earth beings. Everything in Austin. I'm in love. Um, but, that particular tour was about, we called it Ripple the Void. So we really wanted to create a ripple, and we brought out some of the practices that we've been doing, some of us, for decades, but we like the chanting practices, for example. 

[00:20:16] We usually keep those kinds separate from business, but it felt like good timing to bring it out into the open and let people experience what are some of the things that we do on a regular basis to clear energy and invite in auspicious, good health and synchronicity. 

[00:20:39] And it was also a really nice way to educate people about what a flower essence is. Because I think we've been in 21 different cities, uh, with Flower lounge events before, but I just created a beautiful experience for people. Like, have a flower, edible flower food. And we'll put some stuff in there, and you'll feel good, but we're not really going to tell you what it is.

[00:21:03] Because I feel like maybe people weren't totally ready. It was woo. Now I feel like people are ready. They want to know, what is this stuff? Flowers have energy? How? And how does it work? And what's the science behind it? And why is this so important right now? Why is this going to be one of the most important wellness modalities going forward? So it was an opportunity for me to start saying some of the things that I've been holding tucked since the early 2000s.

[00:21:37] Luke: Wow.

[00:21:38] Katie: My flower essence teacher would talk about cellular memory, and that in each one of our cells, we hold all the information, and DNA, and emotional experiences from our family lineage up to six, eight generations back. And we know that because what is it? When you hit 35 years old, you start saying things, and you're like, oh, that's what my mom would say. Or I sound like my dad. 

[00:22:04] It comes out, but we don't realize that some of our thoughts belong to our family lineage. We think they're unique and different, and just us and our own little heads here, but it might be the same thing that a great-grandmother thought or a great-grandfather was going through. So that's one of the areas of things that we can actually address, is how do we turn down the volume on things that aren't really us and turn up the volume on what our absolute true nature is, free of that lineage influence?

[00:22:41] Or people that we've been sexually intimate with in the last seven years also impacts, or who we spend our time with. All of those things affect the emotional sphere, mental landscape, spiritual energetic field that we exist and impact how we see reality. So the name of the game, I think, is really to-- what are those things that will elicit who we truly are, and our strengths, and our power, and our unique qualities, and what turns down the volume on noise?

[00:23:21] Luke: The big volume knob. Alyson and I have talked about your squad. It's the Lotuswei squad, but you have such a unique group of people, just interesting creatures. Just diverse and interesting, yet unified in an energetic, that is what I described earlier, of just super grounded and chill. You can tell the people that you roll with have done a lot of meditating. These aren't people that learned to meditate on TikTok two months ago because it was the hot trend. These are people grounded in a devotional practice.

[00:24:02] And, um, I've not ventured into the realm of Buddhism much. It's never been my lane. I get it, resonates, but it's never been like, oh yeah, this is the thing. Was any of the stuff you guys were into rooted in Buddhism? What's the lineage of how you guys are rolling? Or is it just disparate and random and everyone's doing their own thing? Because you're all chanting chants that sound very ancient. Where did those come from? What books are y'all reading? What's the lineage of teachings that you guys are most rooted in?

[00:24:34] Katie: Yeah, the chants are Sanskrit or Tibetan. And not all of the company is practicing, but a good majority of the folks are, and the community I live in, um, we're doing practice together every day, or separately, every day as a commitment. One of my roommates, Lisa, her passion is chocolate. She started making the dark chocolate.

[00:24:59] Luke: She's the one that made the chocolate something? Oh my God.

[00:25:01] Katie: Wei of Chocolate. 

[00:25:02] Luke: Alyson was embarrassed because I kept going back and taking more. She's like, dude. I'm always that guy. And I was like, what? There's plenty left. So they passed out a certain amount of them, and I think the bowl was in the back of the room, and I'm eyeing it.

[00:25:15] Katie: So good. 

[00:25:16] Luke: So freaking good.

[00:25:17] Katie: So just as an example, uh, you might not know it. It's just really yummy dark chocolate. You want more. What is that? But she spent a good, uh, 10 plus years living in Asia. She studied with some of the best masters in Tibetan Buddhism. She spent time meditating in a cave in the Himalayas, real old school.

[00:25:38] Um, and then there are other folks in the community who studied, uh, Alyson studied, um, painting. Painting Buddhas, the perfect symmetry and how to mix your own mineral inks. And, um, so there's people in the community with really far-back, old-school ties. And then there are newer ones who are just jumping into the practice. We do practice a lot. I think that impacts the work that we're up to. 

[00:26:08] Luke: 

[00:26:08] Katie: And typically, we keep it separate just because I think people have misconceptions around Buddhism. They think, well, is this some religious thing, or is my religion going to fit in with this experience? But it's based on a path that-- Sakyamuni, one day, realized that as much as the king in India was trying to keep him really sequestered in the palace, not let him see anybody getting old, not let him see anybody get sick, not let him see anybody suffering, give him anything he wanted because when he was born, it was prophecy that he would become an ascetic monk and attain this incredible realization. And this seer, when he was born, just started weeping. 

[00:26:57] Because he was like, I'm not going to be here when he attains enlightenment, but I can see that that's the future. And so this Indian prince, somehow, makes his way out of the palace and sees people who are getting old, and sees people who are sick, and sees people who are suffering, and it just starts this rupture in his whole being.

[00:27:21] And so he leaves and spends the rest of his life trying to figure out the true nature of reality, and what this existence is, and why are we here, and what is this impermanence thing, and why do we get sick, and why do we grow old? What is this all about? And so that's who, in terms of Buddhism, we refer to as one of the original Buddhas.

[00:27:43] Buddha just meaning awakened one, enlightened one. And there have been thousands and thousands of human beings who have attained the similar or same state of awakening using a method, a map from point A to point B. In Buddhism, we would say there's 84,000 different teachings because all of us are so different and so unique, and our trips, and triggers, and stuff are so interesting and complex that all of us need different types of teachings.

[00:28:14] Some are more intellectual. Some of us need to be whacked with a ruler or pick up bricks. Some of us need to work with flowers. Some of us need to communicate. So the teachings come from a long time ago. From India, they moved into Tibet and all over Asia, and now they're in the West. And so we're just working with some really ancient methods and practices. I wouldn't call it a religion. For me, it's more like a method, a practice, something that helps me face the craziness that arises in my own mind. My mind is like a--

[00:28:55] Luke: You have one of those too.

[00:28:56] Katie: Crazy.

[00:29:00] Luke: Oh man, yeah, the mind is really a double-edged sword, isn't it? It's such a beautiful super computer of consciousness, but it also does its own thing a lot. I think about this sometimes. The mind, the ego, oftentimes, as we get into spirituality, um, there's a vilifying more so with the ego probably. Like, oh, ego's bad. I got to get rid of it. And the mind, the chatter of the mind, the self-talking, the endless thoughts, people try to meditate and stop that from happening. Good luck with that, by the way.

[00:29:45] That it's something working against us. And something that's helped me a lot in my own evolution is to have more realization that both of those entities, if we could call them that, are actually working toward my self-preservation. It's like they're doing a job. So I have a feeling, and the ego causes this emotional thing where I feel threatened, and then the super computer of the mind jumps in and is like, ooh, here's how you can manipulate this situation to protect yourself. 

[00:30:16] And all the games that they're playing, they're not going to stop. It's what they're wired to do. It's like trying to make your liver stop filtering toxins. It's doing what it does, but the pathology arises, I think, when we lose awareness of those energies and allow them to start controlling us without our agency. 

[00:30:42] And then all of a sudden, the crazy horse mind, I like that term, is telling me to think things, and say things, and then do things that are deleterious to my life and likely the lives of the people with whom I share the planet. So it's like you can't stop thoughts. You can't stop the impulses of the instincts or the ego, but you can really, you obviously have this experience yourself, develop a relationship with them where a different part of you, call it your soul or higher self, is in an observational perspective of that phenomenon as it works its way through your persona and your life.

[00:31:20] So in the beginning of my sobriety, for example, there was a lot of talk about, you have to smash the ego. You got to smash the ego. You got to kill the ego because that's the thing that gives you the denial, and the grandiosity, and all of that to carry on drinking and using. And so anytime I would see the ego arise in my behavior, I would condemn myself for having that happen.

[00:31:48] Many, many years of coming to the understanding like, oh no, the ego is like a little pet. It's like your little yappy dog. And it's not going anywhere. So rather than trying to get rid of it or demonize it, for me, it's more about having a right relationship with it and allowing it to be present and to do its job, but to know that my higher self or my consciousness supersedes that as long as I'm exerting some amount of effort in my practices to stay in that witness observer perspective and not get it flipped inversely so that I'm just an automaton that's being controlled by mind and ego and going through my life like a bulldozer. Does that make sense to your way of practice?

[00:32:40] Katie: 100%. And I think what some people don't know and what we continually forget is that the observation is the key because the observation is the dissolution. The observation is the dissolution. But I forget that all the time. I forget that if I just watch it, watch it, watch it, watch it, sit with it, sit with it, oh, this is really uncomfortable.

[00:33:06] I just want to like, ah, scream or cry. Sit with it, sit with it. And that the actual just watching it is enough. It's like there's a child in the room, and we're just ignoring the child, and then suddenly all of us turn our gaze toward the child. The child changes their behavior because they can feel that.

[00:33:29] So when the self, the part of you-- self is a bad word. But the part of you, the beingness, the knowingness part of you, the true nature part of you that is so big that your logical mind can't even conceive it turns the gaze toward the crazy. It shifts and changes. It already does the work. It's like the body going to heal itself. It's already going to heal itself. 

[00:33:56] We forget that, and it's hard to sit with it. We want to turn to things that are going to numb us out, or express it, or get really crazy. But if we can keep remembering, like you said, to make space and watch, and sometimes we need to-- I call it my inner bossy girl, or the protector, or the prison warden, or the-- oh, I had a teacher once who talked about the parts of him that are like attached to things like the Gollum character in Lord of the Rings, precious. 

[00:34:29] Luke: Yeah. Totally.

[00:34:30] Katie: We have that. 

[00:34:31] Luke: 100%.

[00:34:32] Katie: Just the last couple of months-- did you ever see the movie The Dark Crystal?

[00:34:36] Luke: I don't think so.

[00:34:38] Katie: It was in the early '80s. It was puppets, the whole movie. And there was this character, this woman, who was like, super wild hair, unkempt, this ruby red dress. She lived in a trash pit. She could even pop her eyeballs out. She was just wild. Um, really ugly. And over the last couple of months, I was like, that's me. Oh my god. I feel like her. [Inaudible] a trash pit.

[00:35:09] So sometimes it's helpful to put a character to these parts of ourselves so that we don't do exactly what you were talking about because that's our instinct, is like, squash it. Well, that's unbecoming. I don't want to be that. That's not me. Repress. But the more we can soften, and have a sense of humor, and make passion and space to just observe all these nutties, nutcase characters in our psyche, the more they can then transform. I used to tell my clients, let everybody sit at the dinner table. Let everybody eat. Everybody's hungry. Let everybody sit around the table, and let's all eat together.

[00:35:52] Luke: I like that. Yeah. Just reminded me of something that someone told me many years ago, uh, around attachments. And I think it's just an ancient parable, but it had to do with, um, addiction. And I don't even know if the origin story of it is true, but it was explained to me like this. That in certain parts of India, the way they trap monkeys is they put some material that's attractive to the monkeys inside a jar, essentially like a clay pot. 

[00:36:27] And the opening to the pot is big enough for them to get their hand through when their hand is open. But then when they go in to grab the berries or whatever, nuts in there, they close their fist around it, and when they go to pull their fist around, they can't lift the big clay pot, and they essentially trap themselves. And all they have to do is let go and loosen their hand, and they can pull their hand out.

[00:36:47] Katie: They can.

[00:36:48] Luke: Yeah. And, um, I don't know why I haven't thought about that in years, but I remember, um, being in a treatment center, and, uh, I think someone told me that shortly before I went in there, but I remember thinking that it's just like, let go, let go. Stop holding on, stop holding on. And now I would probably frame that as just my relationship with attachments to how I think things should be.

[00:37:12] Katie: And I think today, when sometimes we think, let go, we think of, like the monkey, loosen the grip. And sometimes we don't really know what that means, to loosen the grip. And if anybody is having a moment, like we all do, we probably-- each of us probably had a moment in the last month, um, that's gripping us.

[00:37:41] I tend to think of it now as, unhook, unhook, unhook. Because you don't have to let go to get it to go away, or to drop it, or dissolve it, or make it go. It's like, can you unhook your mind and see the walls around you, or the trees around you, or do you hear the sounds around you in the space, or can you feel the way the air is moving on your skin, or the way your spine feels? It's all these other reference points we can look to to unhook, unhook, because that monkey mind-- we have a mind like a monkey. It just wants to grab onto everything. 

[00:38:25] Luke: Yeah. Mine is a barrel of monkeys. Remember those little toys? It's a party going on in here. 

[00:38:33] Katie: They're all connected.

[00:38:35] Luke: Yeah, everyone's invited. Yeah, it's funny. I didn't know we were going to get philosophical, but I think, even sometimes when I start a conversation and I have-- this is a pretty niche topic, the power of flowers. Power flower. Power flower. Um, say that 10 times fast. But then there's the more human side of me that's like, yeah, but I want to know the person behind the philosophy. It's like, why was someone drawn to something? The why has a lot to do with the who, so I appreciate just getting to know your perspective a bit.

[00:39:10] Katie: And I think you can't have one without the other. When I, uh, the first 10 years of working with flower essences, all I did was see clients one-on-one and make remedies for them. And then they'd come and see me every month. And I realized really quickly that because you are offering someone this antidote that moves them through things more quickly, sometimes it can be more intense.

[00:39:34] And the necessity of what I would call mind training, or working with your emotions, or making space for what arises, is necessary. Because people will have what's called a healing crisis, or they'll look at things in a different way. You need the rubber hits the road practice. If a flower can unearth something that happened to you when you were four years old, oh shit, now you have to look at that. It dislodged this piece that was stuck in there, and you're about to let it go like a kite. 

[00:40:18] But right before you let it go like a kite, you've got to go through it, and see it, and experience it on its way out. So I realized really quickly, oh, we also need training. We need mind training to the capacity of, we need to know how to work with our emotions because we're not taught that in the West. We don't get taught how to work with our emotions. Do we, in the United States, or in the West?

[00:40:45] Luke: No. Generally not. And I think many of us that become aware of that and get into spirituality as a way to find answers for our lives are drawn into the temptation of bypassing. When you get "spiritual," it's like love, and light, and crystals, and flower elixirs, right?

[00:41:09] Katie: Right.

[00:41:10] Luke: Um, green juice, smoothies, meditate, go to yoga. So many and most of us on the path have probably gone through this phase and hopefully outgrown it, but there's a misconception that the way to happiness is just to put on a smile and act as if and to be spiritual. But the real juice of the squeeze, I think, is in our capacity to feel those things and really face those things, especially the things in the past. Otherwise, it becomes a pantomime of, I'm a peaceful, spiritual person, but you can sense in that type of person under the surface--

[00:41:56] Katie: Bullshit.

[00:41:57] Luke: Hidden under the surface, that there is a well of rage, or anxiety, or whatever that's just being suppressed that's eventually going to come to a boil and erupt like a volcano, and you just hope you're not in their midst when it happens. But it's also really fucking hard to be a feeling person too. It takes a lot of courage to face what might come up. I mean, this happens with Alyson all the time. 

[00:42:27] I talked about on a podcast the other day that I did with Stephen, uh, Jenkinson about death. And my own death is something that I really try to think about a lot, not in a morbid way, but it's a reality that I don't want to face, and then when I'm aware of that, the wise part of myself makes me want to face it more, but I was talking to him just about, um, attachments to form, right?

[00:42:54] Katie: Right. 

[00:42:55] Luke: And the love that I have for Alyson, which is just so different than any love I've ever felt for another human being in my life. Period. It's just an ancient ineffable-- I don't even know what you could call it love. It's just its own thing. And sometimes, um, I'll just be looking at her, and I look in her eyes, and it's impossible to ignore the impermanence of that experience, of her in her form and me in my form. And it's heartbreaking. 

[00:43:35] And so when I start to feel it come up, it's like, where's my phone? Fuck this. I don't want to feel this. It's not even a sadness. It's intense. It's intense, and I don't want to feel it. It happened this morning. She was laying on the floor in the other room, and I went in and just laid next to her and looked in her eyes. And I was like, oh, here it comes. Because there's these fleeting moments of connection, and beauty, and love that we experience. And if we have the awareness, we can sense the power of those moments.

[00:44:06] But there's also the awareness that it's gone just like that. It requires a lot of bravery, I think is the word, to just ooff. Let me just embrace all of this and not just compartmentalize that, wow, I really love this person, but also embrace that this form of this love is going to die at some point. Those are the feelings that I spent the first half of my life running from, almost to my demise. 

[00:44:43] So it's a beautiful experience, though, to actually just feel the resistance in the body that's like, ah, I don't want to feel this. Feel the impulse to run away, whether it's emotionally, physically. It's like, I don't want to feel this. It's really a beautiful practice to fully embrace everything that comes along with being a human and everything that you feel. And I find that experiences or sensations that I might have framed as being negative become much more neutral. I'm actually just feeling life, just feeling reality more, and inviting more of that in.

[00:45:30] Katie: I don't think you could really deeply understand and appreciate life if you don't look at death. I understand it's not easy. It's not easy for anyone to face that imminent possibility. It's not even a possibility. It's a surety. It will happen. All of us will die. You will die in that form. I will die from this form. Alyson will die.

[00:45:56] Luke: Think about this. Everyone, including us, every single person you and I know right now will be dead in a 100 years. It's great. It gives life a richness when you-- maybe we won't. Maybe technology will advance and we get a few more years or something. But just based on the way things have gone so far in our life expectancy. To me, that is a precious thought because it reminds me to value and cherish each moment, like the moment you and I are sharing right now, the cat walking across the table. Just being present to that, I think, gives life a depth and a richness that makes it easier to appreciate.

[00:46:42] Katie: You wouldn't that if you were ignoring death.

[00:46:45] Luke: Yeah. And it makes it easier to appreciate even when one is getting their ass handed to them by life too, because you know in that moment, this will also come to pass. Those moments of elation. You get married. You win the lottery. Your company does well, whatever. You achieve something, or you have some grace bestowed upon you in some way, and you're elated. That elation is also as temporary as your darkest depression.

[00:47:16] Katie: Everything is changing. That's the only sure thing, right?

[00:47:20] Luke: Yeah, totally.

[00:47:21] Katie: Everything's changing. It can be really unnerving. 

[00:47:24] Luke: Yeah. All right. There's a bunch of other stuff I wanted to talk about here. I want to pivot into the flower essence because I feel like we would talk for three hours just about the meaning of life, which I love, but we do have a topic that the show will be titled, and people will be like, why are they talking about consciousness when we want to learn about flowers?

[00:47:47] Um, tell me what history there is of working with flower essences. So what you do, you have these serums. You put one on my wrist before we started. It's just absolutely delicious. You have some elixirs that you can eat, and then you have these sprays, these mists. And before Alyson turned me on to your stuff, I had no idea that this thing even existed, with the exception of that rose water stuff that girls at yoga class like to spray around a lot. 

[00:48:21] I had no clue, and so they started just appearing in the house more and more, and now they're in this room, and now they're in every room, and they're just ubiquitous in our home life experience, and she travels with them, and the whole thing. Um, so to me, it's very new, but I assume there is a history of use, so maybe give us a synopsis of that.

[00:48:41] Katie: Yeah, it's a really ancient technology. You see it all over the world, and it is based on drinking the dew drops on the tops of flowers. So the Aborigines in Australia would drink the dew from the bush lollies. The yogis and yoginis in the caves in the Himalayas would consume a substance called chillum, which was the concentrated life force of crystals and flowers. The Daoists were drinking the dew drops in the mountains. Uh, if you go to Central America and you work with medicine women, um, oftentimes, they'll have you select flowers, or they'll select flowers, soak them in water in the sunlight, and dump it over your head.

[00:49:21] Luke: I had that in Costa Rica, at ayahuasca, uh, retreat at Soltara. Beautiful. Much like the one that you did. 

[00:49:32] Katie: Yes, exactly. 

[00:49:33] Luke: Yeah. So when that one was coming, I was like, ooh, I remember this. This is really nice. I wish I could do that every morning. What a way to start the day, with a flower bath. I guess I am with your sprays. The medicine cabinet, mini flower bath. But yeah. Anyway, carry on.

[00:49:48] Katie: They do the same thing in India, um, moments of transition, dump the flower bath over your head. And then if you look in Europe, you see 13th, 14th, 15th centuries, the alchemists, the doctors, the nuns, they were recommending to their patients, and clients, and confidants, go out into the wild, go across this hill, over this bend, in this part of the forest, look for this particular flower, and drink the dew from the top every morning.

[00:50:14] So it was a practice. It's nothing new. It's been around forever. But this way of, like you said, bringing it into our everyday life so that it's easy and convenient, that part is a little bit new. In the 1930s and '40s, a doctor by the name of Dr. Edward Bach, he was in the UK. He was an allopathic doctor. 

[00:50:35] He got frustrated with the limitations of Western medicine, so he studied homeopathy, became a homeopathic doctor. Then he got frustrated with homeopathy, and then he just turned to his backyard and all the flowers in his backyard. And it was him who figured out a way to scale dewdrops. Because if you live in-- I live in Phoenix. We don't even have dew.

[00:50:56] Luke: You don't have dew. Not at all.

[00:50:58] Katie: Maybe you do here in Austin, but it's too dry.

[00:51:01] Luke: We have a lot of humidity here, but I've tried to grow flowers, and they just melt in the heat. I don't know what flowers you need here, but we've attempted with a couple. And either the deer eat them, or they just shrivel. You water them every day. They're not meant for this climate.

[00:51:16] Katie: And what if your deepest, darkest thing needs an orchid from Costa Rica, or a wildflower from Iceland, or something from India? There's over 40,000 flowering species, and every single one has a thing that it unlocks inside of us. So this technology has been around for a long time, and, uh, the way that you can incorporate it really easily today, which is the new part, is you can put it in your mouth. You can put it in your coffee, water, tea. You put it in your beverages. 

[00:51:51] Think of it like very low-dose microcurrent. It's botanical Wi-Fi, or floral Wi-Fi. If we could see it, it would be amazing. And for some people, that's a little out there, but if you look at your cell phone, how does your cell phone work? Do any of us really understand how the cell phone works?

[00:52:16] And if somebody would have said, hey, Luke, when you were little, you're going to carry around this little box in your pocket when you get older, and it's going to emit these invisible waves, and riding on a magic carpet, you're going to put all your poetry and music, and love notes, and podcasts, and all the things that are most important to you are going to ride on these invisible waves that you can't see, it's nuts. 

[00:52:41] So in that same way, nature has had that technology all along. The Earth is 4.5 billion years old. There is a Wi-Fi, if you want to call it, or a field that is being emitted from every botanical on the planet, and from the earth itself. The earth is a living entity. It's not like we're on some rock.

[00:53:02] Luke: Thank you. Yeah. I've only come into that awareness, sadly, over the past couple of years, really, where I have realized that the planet is a living organism. I don't know why it eluded me. I've always loved nature, but I think when I started working with medicine, I think just standing outside going, oh, I think that tree is talking to me, and realizing it's not because I'm tripping. It actually is. It's responsive. 

[00:53:33] It's the Vedic philosophy of-- I'm sure other philosophies have this too, but I relate it to Vedic, that there's only one thing, and this one thing is consciousness expressed here on the planet infinitely. So why wouldn't one flower and its single expression of consciousness have, um, an effect on me as another single, unique expression of consciousness. 

[00:53:57] It's like all nature is all in a dance, but it's all really one thing. Just God, for some beautiful reason, has chosen to express itself infinitely as all these different things that are really the same thing. So that's what has started to become more apparent to me. It's like looking out the window, seeing that oak tree blow in the wind. I'm having more of an experience that there's not a separation between the tree and the wind. It's one thing, actually, that just looks different.

[00:54:35] Katie: And there's no separation between the oak tree and you. And if you maybe are overworking, working too hard, or grinding away, that tree will catch your attention, and you'll want to go closer to it so that you can absorb the, if you want to call it energy, life force, chi, uh, quality of that tree, which is to calm you down when you're overworking.

[00:55:05] Luke: I just thought of something wild, read recently, and it was something to the effect, and you might have a better understanding of this, that, I forget if it was bees or birds, but their sounds, and vibrations, and behavior have an influence on flowers, or else it's the flowers have an influence on them. But it's this, like you said, nature's internet. Do you know anything about that? You know what I'm talking about?

[00:55:34] Katie: I have heard how birds and bees will have routes. And then, also, we know that bees are not attracted to flowers based on color or scent, like we thought. That flowers are actually emitting a very micro electrical current, and the bees feel it on the little hairs on their legs. And so they can communicate dynamically with the flowers and botanicals. 

[00:56:04] Luke: That must be something at the root of what I'm thinking of. It was just an article or something that I came upon, and I was like, oh, that's weird. And it had something to do with that, when the flowers open because they sense the bees and birds are around, or vice versa, something like that. But it was an internet of nature phenomenon. It's like, oh, that makes a lot of sense if you consider that everything is one thing.

[00:56:27] Katie: And then since we're also a part of nature, why wouldn't we be able to download, or upload, or all these funny tech words that we use, but those lessons, messages, frequencies, energies, life forces, chi flow from botanicals, or flowers, or the earth itself? Why wouldn't we be able to do that? Of course, we can do that. And of course, it's something that we all know how to do. We just forgot that we knew how to do it.

[00:56:54] And what's even more fascinating is each one of us knows exactly what we need. So if you walk into a flower shop or into a garden and someone says, which one do you like the best? It's not arbitrary. You will always be drawn to the one that will have the most positive impact or will activate something inside of you, or magnify, or empower something inside of you that is important.

[00:57:22] Luke: It's like, um, forest bathing.

[00:57:25] Katie: Yeah.

[00:57:27] Luke: I forget again. I'm not good at remembering details, but I remember reading something about how, um, pine trees, for example, and you smell the terpenes or whatever in the air, that it has an effect on your brain and your nervous system just from smelling that. That's part of why forest bathing works. There's the energetics of it. But there's a biochemical thing that's happening when you smell a certain smell. 

[00:57:55] So I think I learned that a couple of years ago, so I started running the essential oil thing on my desk, and it's part of my little productivity hack because you're like, well, I can't be in the forest because I got to sit at this damn computer, but I'm sure as hell going to make it smell like the forest, which I think is why I like having your sprays on my desk too, because I'll just get caught in the matrix of work and go, all right, hold up. I need to just recalibrate myself.

[00:58:22] So I can only imagine, and we'll get into the deets of this, but say just the smell of a pine tree does that. Then it got me thinking, well, all of the different combinations of flower essences that you put together, it's not only this one thing, but then there's all of these different combinations, this synergistic--

[00:58:43] Katie: Yeah, it's crazy. It's like musical notes. 

[00:58:45] Luke: The symphony that's happening. 

[00:58:47] Katie: But before we do that, I want to share something with you. The most fascinating thing I find about forest bathing, um, because I know you're going to geek out on this, is when you look at-- it's exponential. That's what the most fascinating thing is about nature to me. It is exponential, like us, like life. 

[00:59:07] If you spend one full day in the wild, let's say you and Alyson go camping, and you're just out in the wild, no cell phones, um, your white blood cell count will go up, so your immune system is boosted, your adrenal glands relax, your cortisol goes down, your adrenaline goes down, so you destress, and that effect lasts in your body for a week, even though you've only spent one day. So it's not 1 to 1. Here's where it gets even trippier. If you spend two days in the wild, those positive effects on your body last for an entire month.

[00:59:43] Luke: Oh my god, I got to get outside more. That's crazy. 

[00:59:48] Katie: And the same goes for flower essences. So there's two things happening. One is the smell. So the smell of the pine trees, or the smell of a rose, or the smell of jasmine, all the yummy smells, that's the essential oils. It's like squeezing or distilling the literal juice from the plants. And that is such an amazing sensorial experience that's tactile. 

[01:00:13] And then there is this thing that is just the life force that we can't smell, that we can only feel. That's like love. You can't see love with your eyes, you can't smell it, you can't hear it, but you know it exists because it keeps the whole planet together. Love is love. It's only perceivable.

[01:00:37] Luke: Yeah, I love that example of love. Um, that's usually my conversation starter for atheists. It's like, you can't prove God exists. Can prove love exists? When you pick up your two-year-old, or you pet your dog, or you see your husband, or wife, your mom, your dad, what is that then? It's intangible, yet you know it's real, and you know it's true.

[01:01:03] Katie: And that same love exists. 

[01:01:06] Luke: And no offense to atheists. I think atheists are very faithful people because they have a belief that they adhere to. So there really are no atheists, if you want to get down to it. Because atheists believe in something, and what they believe in is that there's nothing. That's a belief. Anyway, this is the shit I think about when I'm meditating. These thoughts come together. I don't know if they make sense to anyone else but me, but I like to share them.

[01:01:32] Katie: It's important because it dictates how we see the world and where we see the malleability, workability of things. And the love exists in nature. It just doesn't look like how we're used to it. As humans, we're used to a touch, or a smile, or a coming closer. We're used to something a little more physical, or maybe not. Maybe it's a subtle felt thing. 

[01:02:06] That's more how nature rolls. It's a subtle felt thing. If you look at a flower, it's, uh, undeniably-- you feel something. It's beautiful. It's weird. It's funky. It's crazy. Or if you think about when you were a kid. Tell me about some time in your childhood when you played around flowers, or trees. What do you remember?

[01:02:34] Luke: Um, thing that comes to mind isn't relevant to flowers, but one of my earliest memories, and it isn't related to plants, is when, uh, my parents had been divorced when I was really young, and we lived in Aspen, Colorado. And, uh, they broke up. My mom lived there for a few more years and then decided to move back to the Bay Area in California. And, uh, the only life I had known was in Colorado. 

[01:03:00] And so I didn't know the smell of sea air, and I didn't know about lawns, really. There weren't a lot of lawns there. And so I remember when we arrived at my grandma's house in Concord, California, getting out of my mom's brown Pinto, and just reveling in the enjoyment of the lawn, a manicured lawn. 

[01:03:23] This is a weird memory that pops up. I'm sure many more important things happened. Seeing grandma, hey. I'm sure there was some impactful moments, but I just remember the essence of California, of smelling the ocean air, the Bay Area, and just being on soft, green, lush grass.

[01:03:42] Katie: If you could describe the character, personality, feeling, um, of that lush grass and the sea breeze, how would you describe it in three words?

[01:03:55] Luke: Um, bliss, playful, and free.

[01:04:09] Katie: Okay, this is really interesting. I'm just going to interject for the listeners here. If you want a really cool exercise to do, do what we just did. So you're going to think of something from childhood that you love, whatever your first memory is. Write down three words to describe its personality or how it made you feel. Try not to use color or fragrance. Just do that right now. And then there's a second part to it. And that is, tell me any flower, tree, botanical that is super interesting to you right now, whatever pops into your head. Got one?

[01:04:47] Luke: Orchid.

[01:04:49] Katie: What does it look like?

[01:04:53] Luke: Fuchsia. Yeah, fuchsia. And the petals look soft.

[01:05:03] Katie: So if you could describe the personality or character of that flower, how would you describe it in three words?

[01:05:12] Luke: Delicate, sensitive. Those might be the same. Not necessarily. Physically delicate, energetically sensitive, and generous. 

[01:05:31] Katie: Okay, so if you're listening, then you're going to do this same exercise, what pops in your mind. Write down three words. Do you want to know what it means?

[01:05:38] Luke: Of course.

[01:05:39] Katie: Okay. So in my experience, the childhood experience is how you bring your greatest gifts into the world. So through this vehicle of bliss and-- what else did you say?

[01:05:56] Luke: Playful.

[01:05:57] Katie: Playfulness.

[01:05:58] Luke: And free.

[01:05:59] Katie: And freedom. So you probably could look at all the different experiences you've had over your life and say, this is what you were aiming for. This is what you were embodying. This is what you were bringing to the table. Or maybe you bring that to your relationship with Alyson. Bliss, freedom, playfulness. Or maybe that's what you bring to the podcast. Or maybe that's how you bring the essence of you into your work.

[01:06:22] Um, and the flower that you're drawn to today is, rather than being like-- that is you. So the first part is, that is you. Does that resonate? The flower today is something you're working on today. So you might be exploring the edges of, what does it feel like to be sensitive? Sensitive meaning perceptive, aware of what's going on around you, aware of even the subtlest energetics. The delicacy of the physical body and how it interacts with the sensitivity of the world around it. What was the third word you said?

[01:07:01] Luke: Shoot. I forget. Do you remember Brandon?

[01:07:06] Katie: You said soft originally. 

[01:07:08] Luke: Uh, generous.

[01:07:09] Katie: Generous.

[01:07:10] Luke: Yeah. Generous. 

[01:07:11] Katie: Okay, so then you might be exploring-- you said soft. I'm going to go with that one too. A softer side of you now as compared to when you were younger. And then generosity. You might be exploring the edges of your generosity. Does that resonate?

[01:07:28] Luke: Yeah, very much so. Yeah.

[01:07:35] Katie: Did you have fun?

[01:07:35] Luke: I love it.

[01:07:36] Katie: Okay. Do you want more games? 

[01:07:38] Luke: Yeah. Let's do it.

[01:07:41] Katie: Tell me--

[01:07:42] Luke: So for those listening, not watching the video, um, there are two-- well, for those that are watching the video, this is what we've got here. So there's three cards that are, uh, full of photos of flowers, and they're about a foot square. And, um, there's all sorts of different flowers with a number next to them. That's what we're looking at. 

[01:08:05] Katie: So you'd want to take a look at that first card and point out three that you're most drawn to or that look interesting.

[01:08:11] Luke: How intuitive should it be versus taking one's time?

[01:08:16] Katie: However you go about your normal. 

[01:08:18] Luke: However you roll. Okay. Number five, and um, number 16, and number 18.

[01:08:53] Katie: Okay. Let's see. Uh, first of all, I'll just say, the flowers on this card have more to do with acquired or inherited patterns. Inherited being, remember how we talked about like six to eight generations back in your family lineage? Acquired meaning, oh, I had this experience when I was in elementary school, and it led me to have this M.O.

[01:09:19] So the first flower you picked is the bird of paradise, and this answers the previous question that you had had and tucked it away for later. So the bird of paradise is for people or times when we have a really busy mind, really active, tons of ideas, super creative, innovative, and also hard to turn it off at night. Or very logical, intellectual, and then, at times, hard to come down into the heart.

[01:09:47] Luke: The former would be, uh, fitting for me.

[01:09:50] Katie: Good. Good. Innovative, creative thinker, hard to turn it off at night. So that flower and the quiet mind remedy in general would help you relax everything and be able to sleep better at night.

[01:10:06] Luke: There's my answer from before. Well done.

[01:10:12] Katie: Okay. And these can change any time. These aren't static. This could change in a month from now. The fern is, you are doing something that's a little bit different, maybe, that you've never done before, or going about something in a new way, and your typical M.O. would be like, okay, I'm going to plan this, this, this, this, and this.

[01:10:34] But in this particular situation, you just can't. You have to trust that you're just going to get to here. And then once you get to here, you're going to trust that you'll know what to do once you get there. That's the essence of the fern, is to just really allow yourself to let it unfold as you go and deepen it into that self-trust. Does that make sense? And then the crazy tall tower of blue flowers is pride of Madeira. That is for when we are different, unique, weird, not like the crowd.

[01:11:14] Luke: That's definitely suitable.

[01:11:16] Katie: Always coming back to that as asset, not hindrance. Because sometimes we feel like, oh God, I'm so weird. I just don't fit in here. Where do I belong? And so that can happen when we're young kids. And now we're coming to this fullest expression of who we are in the world. So the fern is in a blend called inner knowing. The pride of Madeira is in a blend of florescence. It's called luscious embodiment.

[01:11:46] Luke: Where does the pride of Madeira grow in the world?

[01:11:49] Katie: It grows outside of San Francisco in these huge cone-like towers. 

[01:11:55] Luke: Really?

[01:11:55] Katie: Yeah, they look like creatures.

[01:11:58] Luke: Cool.

[01:11:59] Katie: Or, uh, Las Palmas, Tenerife, the Canary Islands in Spain.

[01:12:04] Luke: Wow. So fun. I mean, who doesn't like to look at these too? From a reductionist logical standpoint, one could say, oh, flowers look beautiful because it attracts the bees, and that's how they pollinate. But I mean, that's no accident that humans are intrinsically yoked to flowers in every culture. And it's got to be more than just, oh, it's nice looking. I'm preaching to the choir here, but just coming at this from my more pragmatic self, it's like, huh, maybe there's more here than meets the eye when you look at the way that we relate to flowers.

[01:12:48] Katie: Even if you look at just here in the States or here in the West, when do flowers make their appearance in our lives? They come in when we're in love, or when we have babies, or when we, uh, get sick, when we bring our loved one's flowers at a death or any ceremony. These are pivotal moments of change and transition. I think on some level, we must know that these flowers assist us in getting to the other side of whatever that--

[01:13:17] Luke: Right. And we put them on graves. Yeah, that's interesting. I never inventoried all the ceremonial and ritualistic ways that we work with flowers too. That's interesting. Uh, what about, um, are you done with this part of it?

[01:13:35] Katie: Did it resonate? 

[01:13:36] Luke: Yeah, it did. I mean, that one, especially because, um, or no, no, no, it was the fern. The fern. It's immediately brought to, uh, this process of, uh, writing a book that I've been in for a while now. And it's a new thing. I don't know how to write a book. I'm learning by doing it. And then going, oh, okay, well, this doesn't work, this does work. It's a new experience entirely.

[01:14:08] And one that I really enjoy, but there's the hurdle of not knowing how to do it. And so not knowing how to do it is one form of resistance that comes up and gets me to find all sorts of other things to do around the house other than sit and write the book. Talk about writing the book, think about writing the book, water the plants, or anything except sit there at a blank page and go dot, dot, dot and start typing.

[01:14:36] Katie: I remember those days. I was writing in 2014 or '15, and I remember thinking, when I got the deal from Hay House, that like, oh, it's going to be so fun. I'm going to wake up in the morning. I'm going to feel creative, and I'm going to write. It's going to be the best thing. And then some weird thing happens. At least for me, I hope you don't have moments like this, but I would have moments where I was just crawling out of my skin, so uncomfortable. And I couldn't pinpoint why or where the discomfort came from. And then I would look for all the other things to do besides write.

[01:15:13] Luke: There's a million things to do besides write. Yeah. I should go out and rearrange the bins in the garage today. Anything. Anything other than just freaking write. 

[01:15:27] Katie: It's like that when you were talking about this morning, next to Alyson, feeling, and you're reflecting on the moment, the impermanence, the imminence of death. It's that, oh, I got to just move. I got to do something else. I got to go somewhere else. We don't really understand why these things are so uncomfortable. But in the case of books, usually, it's because your essence is going to be your greatest work exposed and put out there.

[01:15:59] Luke: Yeah, totally. Yeah, it might be more prone to resistance if it's a really personal book, which mine is. It's twofold. It's that, that I'm going to be sharing-- not like I'm guarded in any respect. Anyone who listens to the show knows it's super personal, and I'm pretty open, but it's that other people are going to be getting access to the deepest parts of me, but it also means that I have to face the deepest parts of me during the process. 

[01:16:38] Katie: That the harder part.

[01:16:39] Luke: And my book is going into trauma, and addiction, and all kinds of gnarly stuff that I'm not afraid of in my conscious state, but when you get there and really start to tease it apart, it's much different. You really get down to the granular level of some of the things that have been painful to experience, and it's a different way of facing it. Yeah. But it's fun. So the fern. So should I--

[01:17:06] Katie: One more thing.

[01:17:07] Luke: When I want to sit and write, should I use the blend that has the fern in it? 

[01:17:12] Katie: Yes, in the knowing. Yes. It will help you have enough energy to push through the resistance. It will give you breakthroughs. It will help you navigate, how do you explore the unknown territory and face things maybe in a new way, in a new dynamic?

[01:17:34] Luke: Cool. 

[01:17:35] Katie: Okay, let me ask you one last question. This might have to do with the book. I don't know. We'll see. These two are more like collective consciousness patterns. So this would be, what is Luke anchoring in in this moment right now for all of the collective consciousness? These are things all of us feel. But you, in particular, are working on this flavor right now. Do you like these better or these better as a whole? Which bouquet is more interesting to you?

[01:18:04] Luke: This one.

[01:18:05] Katie: Okay, so I'm going to toss this one. And which three flowers on there are you most drawn to?

[01:18:11] Luke: Flowers are such a trip. So wild. That one. Number 11. 

[01:18:22] Katie: Okay.

[01:18:23] Luke: And this one, number one. Um, it's so hard. I want to pick all of them. They're so interesting-looking. Number 20.

[01:18:49] Katie: Oh, cool. Okay. I think it has to do with your book too. Interesting. Okay, so we'll start with this bright yellow one. That's one of the Agave species. So they would call it a century plant, or something that blooms every 100 years, and then it dies. So it puts all of its juice and energy into growing and growing and growing and growing and growing and growing. And then it blooms and dies. This is just one chance. 

[01:19:22] It's for when you're ready to just take a huge-- it could be for physical cleansing. It could be for emotional cleansing. It could be all in one go. Really rapidly, not little baby steps, and drink more water, and detox, and so on. Incremental. It's a huge dump all at once. Then we have this white orchid, the radiance orchid, and it is for when we feel, sometimes, a sense of loss or separation, which for you is really interesting because it may not be past. It might be future, based on what you've been talking about.

[01:20:10] For some people, it could be, oh, I'm really missing this person, or I feel really nostalgic for these moments in my life, or I feel really separate, or so and so died, and I feel this, like, ugh, chasm. For you, it might be, it will happen. 

[01:20:24] Luke: Yeah. That rings very true.

[01:20:27] Katie: Using those--

[01:20:28] Luke: I'm much more afraid of success than failure. Always have been. Failure, I know how to do that. I've done a lot of it. I'm well versed in fucking up my life, but succeeding is scarier because it comes with, uh, requirements and demands of me.

[01:20:52] Katie: Can we come back to that? 

[01:20:55] Luke: Yes. 

[01:20:55] Katie: I want to ask you about that. So the antidote to feeling separate is to feel more interconnected. And in those moments, like this morning with Alyson, that you feel like, oh my god, one day she's not going to be in this form, then rather than hanging out there, uh, this particular flower, if you worked with it, it would take those moments and anchor you into inseparability with her so that you feel 100% interconnected and inseparable.

[01:21:29] And then the pain of the loss isn't there, which I think that's really important. I don't know if you're going to put elements of that in your writing, but something I think that everyone would want to hear about. And then the Venus flytrap is your third one. And that is for when we--

[01:21:51] Luke: And that's considered a flower?

[01:21:54] Katie: It's not really a flower, but it does have a flower. We just featured the little snappy thing, but it has a little white flower.

[01:22:01] Luke: Oh, okay.

[01:22:03] Katie: It can be for two extremes. One is, either you might find yourself giving too much, doing too much, and then, uh, feeling tired, or you give and give and give and then you finally get the success, and you're like, meh, I don't think I really wanted that anyway. Or some great opportunity comes to you, and you're like, is that what I really want? You hesitate. So the Venus flytrap would be divine timing. It would help you conserve energy. Conserve, conserve, conserve, instead of give too much.

[01:22:37] And then in that right moment, boom. You just act without any hesitation. That could also apply to your writing. Sometimes we think we need to be writing all the time and every day. Maybe not. Maybe you conserve, conserve, conserve and fill yourself up with other things, and then when the moment strikes, you hit it. Did any of those three resonate?

[01:23:01] Luke: Yeah, definitely. Especially the latter, um, because with all creative ventures, I tend to perform my best when I'm under pressure and a deadline, and I like to do a bunch at once rather than a little at a time, and that's definitely true of writing. I dread sitting down to write. I put it on my calendar. I'm like, oh God. I put it off, procrastinate, and all that. But then, once I sit down, you can't get me off the computer for six hours. I just literally can't stop.

[01:23:35] And I won't eat. I won't come out. Alyson will come knock on the door and give her the obligatory hug, and I'm just like, I got to get back to writing. I don't want to break the spell. I'm in the zone. Um, so yeah, that definitely rings true. It's funny, though. When I use the essences, um, that I described earlier around the house, I don't even know which ones I'm using.

[01:23:58] I feel like after this conversation, I would be served to become more deliberate because I just picked them based on, oh, I like the label, Divine Within. Beautiful label, great branding, by the way. Um, and I don't even look at the ingredients. I'm just like, I like the label, and I like the way it smells, and that becomes part of my routine, but I don't have any, just for lack of knowledge, that I and everyone listening are getting now, um, have not used them deliberately with any intention. 

[01:24:28] Katie: I can make a little key for you.

[01:24:33] Luke: Cool.

[01:24:33] Katie: This is for writing the book. This is for hesitation, jumping on it, and intuitive communication styles.

[01:24:42] Luke: Oh, it smells so freaking good. I wish people listening could smell what we're smelling. I guess they can. Um, talk to me about sourcing. Where do you get-- I have a sense it probably doesn't take that much bulk material if you're just using, like the word would imply, essence, um, but I know that in the commercial flower industry, it's very problematic because they're spraying glyphosate on the roses.

[01:25:10] And I always think about that every time I see someone sniffing roses. I'm like, oh my god, you're probably sniffing glyphosate. Is that true, that you go to Whole Foods and buy a bouquet of flowers, that it's likely sprayed with pesticides? What's up with the sourcing, sustainability, uh, purity, all that?

[01:25:30] Katie: So with what we work with, I specialize in flower remedies, so that's the part that doesn't have a scent. I also work with aromatherapy, so we'll get to that part. The first part is the flower essence, just the energy part. So I go to the wild. I look for the flowers. They have to be growing in the ground. They can't be picked, uh, ideally in a place where there aren't humans, where there isn't a lot of interference. Wild places. Nature places. And I'll just travel to find the flowers.

[01:26:02] Luke: Wow.

[01:26:03] Katie: Then we come back to the exponential part, which is-- this is what's so cool about this modality, is all you need is-- depending on the size of the flower, one to 10 flowers for a long, long, long, long time, because what you're doing is making a mother essence. So the sunlight drives the life force into the water.

[01:26:25] The water is a recording device. Water stores information. Studies show 44,000 pieces of information in every water cluster. So it's like the shiny stuff on a CD. That's water. Recording device. So it stores the information from the flower, and then you add alcohol to preserve it. That is just the mother essence.

[01:26:47] Then we bring it back. Then we do the dilution. It's like homeopathy. The more dilute it becomes, the more powerful and subtle it becomes, the more it's like, uh, to give a metaphor, the less of lightning bolt it is, and the more of subtle little, um, electrical impulse that you're tapping into with an acupuncture needle. 

[01:27:08] And then that essence moves through all your acupuncture meridians of your body, in your chakras, in your nutties. So hypothetically, just a handful of flowers collected by me may be enough, unless our company really goes gangbusters, that I could even pass it down to future generations.

[01:27:28] Luke: Wow.

[01:27:29] Katie: That's how exponential--

[01:27:32] Luke: Crazy.

[01:27:33] Katie: Mother Nature is.

[01:27:34] Luke: Because when I spray these, I would picture each little bottle took a whole of flowers or something.

[01:27:43] Katie: If you're talking about the scent, it did. So that's the whole other extreme. We love to work with essential oils frankly because when I first started in 2001 in the US, people were just not ready for flower, energy, life force, chi. That was not a conversation. They were popular in Europe, Australia, Asia. People knew what they were in Mexico, but in the US, in the early 2000s, meditation wasn't even cool. Yoga wasn't even cool then. So my strategy was to combine them with essential oils. And then if people just thought it was a nice-smelling thing-- 

[01:28:24] Luke: Okay. So the smell that I'm getting is not the essences. That's the essential oil component of it.

[01:28:30] Katie: Right. And the essential oils are very precious in that one drop of rose oil requires 40 roses, so somebody had to grow the roses, and harvest the roses, and distill the roses, and get the oil. I mean, incredible plant, vast amounts of botanical material to make this tiny little portion of essential oils. That blows my mind. That's so much labor and effort into this precious form. 

[01:29:05] Luke: I've heard that before. I've been on lavender farms, which are just beautiful. I love lavender. And to think each bushel is probably going to make a drop of the end product of the oil, it's just wild.

[01:29:20] Katie: Yeah. Exactly. So the base of this one that we started with is rose and Palo Santo. How many pedals went into this one experience?

[01:29:39] Luke: Obviously, you're talking about the energetics of the flower essences and this dilution that you're making with the sun and the water. I get that, but there's got to be a compound effect of the sensory experience of the essential oil part too, because even just running a diffuser with some very basic essential oils definitely changes the ambiance in the room, can change your mood, can have all these concrete physiological discernible effects.

[01:30:12] Katie: Do you know what I think it is?

[01:30:14] Luke: What?

[01:30:15] Katie: I think it's the most powerful tool we have, and I think it's awareness. So let's say I put-- oh, this is a funny one. Uh, let's say we put stream orchid. This is a flower essence, no scent, into your drink here. And you're just moving, going. You're doing stuff. You slam it back. You're not really aware.

[01:30:41] But if you stop and take a deep breath, and you are stopping to perceive the smell or you're inhaling, you're opening up the doors of your awareness even more. So is it that the effect of the energy was less in the drink? Not necessarily. But if you turn toward it, do you notice it more? Probably.

[01:31:10] Luke: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. It's just like the practice of burning incense. When you walk into a space and there's beautiful incense burning, is it the smoke that's helping you feel more peaceful to do your meditation or whatever? Maybe. But it's probably a lot of what you're describing, is the presence. You walk in, and your senses are hit. Boom. Something changed when I walked through that door. And what changed was, oh, I'm stopping to notice something now.

[01:31:38] Katie: It's unhooking you from your thinking mind into nowness. Presence.

[01:31:46] Luke: So when you travel around the world to collect these flowers, um, are you rolling through customs with a bunch of dried flowers? What does that look in real life? It sounds like a fun life.

[01:31:57] Katie: It is fun. The customs piece, I'm rolling through customs with lots of little jars of liquid wrapped in clothes. If they were to look at them, they'd just look like water and alcohol because they're not going to test the energetics.

[01:32:14] Luke: So when you travel, you're doing the extraction process on location and then bringing the essence back with you.

[01:32:22] Katie: And the actual flower stays there. If the flower is bendy, we can just bend the flower over into the water.

[01:32:30] Luke: Oh, wow.

[01:32:31] Katie: And then put it back. If it's not bendy, then we have to cut it. But it's such a minimal quantity that--

[01:32:37] Luke: Uh-huh. I like what you're saying about the water being this recorder of information. That whole topic is fascinating to me. I don't know if you happened to listen to an episode I did with Veda Austin. I don't know if you've heard any episodes, but if you haven't heard that one, that shit-- it's one of my top downloads.

[01:32:56] And she's, relatively speaking, as compared to some of my guests that are more, uh, noteworthy, Joe Dispenza, whoever, she's very under the radar, and she's, I think, my top download number six, or eight, or something out of almost 500 episodes in seven years. People love that episode, and it was one of the most special conversations just to me personally, subjectively.

[01:33:20] And she proves beyond any shadow of doubt that water not only records consciousness but really is consciousness. It's alive. That episode blew my mind. And so when you're talking about the water recording the information that these plants carry, it makes perfect sense.

[01:33:42] Katie: And then the fact that we're 75% water, and in our brains, it's 95% water. The blood and fluids of our body. My flower essence teacher used to talk about it in terms of the microcrystalline structure of the blood. And there's all this information that's held in our own bodies. And so when you introduce the purity of flowers in the form of water into your own waters, it harmonizes.

[01:34:15] Luke: How do you figure out where to go to find your flowers in the wild? You're not going to downtown LA to the flower mart and just hacking off a bunch of glyphosate roses. How do you even know where to go?

[01:34:27] Katie: Every time, it's different. When Airbnb was new, I was just scrolling through Airbnb on the iPad, and I was like, Iceland. What is this place, Iceland? I felt like it was super indulgent, like, oh my gosh. Oh, I really want to go there. Wait, why would I want to go to Iceland? I don't have a reason to go there, but the more I looked into it, I discovered that there's this huge amount of orchids in Iceland.

[01:34:57] Luke: Really?

[01:34:57] Katie: So I went to Iceland. Um, and, man, that is one powerful place for sensing and feeling the essence of the earth. Flowers from different parts of the world have different themes. So I discovered just by collecting and going different places and getting to know the different flowers from different places, for example, Costa Rica, all of the flowers I've collected from there, even though each one is so nuanced and different, like a fingerprint, they all follow under this theme of very deep subconscious fears. Weird stuff.

[01:35:39] Fear of persecution, or fear of getting eaten by a wild animal, or fear of being attacked. Stuff that we don't really think of on top of mind, but it's in there somewhere. Iceland is all the childlike wonder, and joy, and discovery. Flowers from Southeast Asia are, like, wow. Prolific growth. What can help move you into prolific success and activity? So it's interesting to see, by location, what the themes are.

[01:36:13] Luke: That is interesting. So let's say you, uh, are attracted to Iceland. You fly there. You get a ride to your Airbnb. How do you know where to go? Are you just driving around until you see a field, you see a hill, like, oh, those look like flowers? And you go over there. How do you navigate where to go?

[01:36:35] Katie: Sometimes, yes. In the case of Iceland, I probably did some research and looked at the different species, but it was a total shitshow. I think it was on day 7, and I was like, am I ever going to find these? I was like so doubtful. When you look at the pictures online, the orchids look huge. You get there, no wonder I couldn't see them. They're a centimeter tall. The actual flower is so tiny. So beautiful, but so tiny. It takes a while to find it.

[01:37:09] Luke: So it's foraging practice, essentially, that part of it. 

[01:37:12] Katie: It is. 

[01:37:13] Luke: Like you go out in the forest and look for mushrooms. 

[01:37:15] Katie: Foraging, wildcrafting, and in some cases, if it's a really rare flower that I get-- I've gotten really interested lately in finding rare things that are hard to find, then it requires, how do I say this without sounding woo woo? Oh, so do you know the work of Stephen Herod Buhner? 

[01:37:35] Luke: Uh-uh.

[01:37:35] Katie: Oh, he's an amazing-- he just passed away in January. He, uh, did a lot of work with plants and indigenous people, and, um, he saw that if you put an intention out there to a particular plant, let's say, I need help with this, or my son has asthma, I need help with this, or I'm grieving, I need help with this, that the plant's chemical constituents would actually change within 24 to 48 hours based on that request.

[01:38:06] Luke: Wow.

[01:38:08] Katie: So if I'm looking for something really rare, I remember looking for this one actually, this white crazy orchid that looks like fingers. Of course, I looked online, and I looked at, where did it grow? Um, I called some sciencey academic people. They would not tell me. They didn't want me to know where it was because it was almost on the endangered list.

[01:38:38] For two or three months before I knew I was going to be there, every morning in my meditation practice, the last little thing was like, hey, um, remember I'm coming in July. And if you want to be found, if you want to be of service to humanity in this way, if you want to reach thousands of people, please help me find you really quickly. So I just do that every day. Every day. And part of you thinks you're nuts. Is this really going to work?

[01:39:06] But, holy shit, it works. We say the earth is a living entity, but when you put it into practice, it is still mind blowing. Fast forward a few months, we're driving through the middle of the country, in the middle of Minnesota, in some county that there's probably more blades of grass than people, and I just say, that road sounds cool. I like the name of that. Let's drive down there. And literally, within five minutes, I spot one from the road. 

[01:39:46] I didn't even have to walk and look. And then I'm like, oh my God. So I'm freaking out. So I tell the photographer, Taylor, oh my God, I see one. So we stopped the car, we get out, we go running, and we're just standing there. Our jaws drop. How could we find this? How could it be so easy? And it was dusk, and the sky was pink and orange, and there was a teeny little cloud, but for the most part, the sky was clear. 

[01:40:17] And we're standing there with our jaws open, looking at these orchids, and that teeny, tiny cloud above us rumbles. Thunder. We're just like, what? How is that possible? And, to me, in the moment, it felt like Mother Earth saying, yes. I see you. Here's what you wanted. It sounds crazy, but if we ask for that type of communication, it's there. And if we're open enough to receive it, you could go in your backyard and say, this is my deepest challenge. Does anybody here have, uh, information for me? And you might think you're crazy, but you will get information. 

[01:41:05] Luke: Wait, you're describing what I see in the backyard every day when Alyson goes out there. I learned a lot about this type of thing from being in relationship with her. It's not like I ever judged her. I was like, ah, it's her thing. She's out talking to the tree. And she literally just lives like that, as you describe. Um, but seeing it in practice and seeing things come to fruition over and over and over again to the point where I'm like, okay, she's on to something, then I become curious, like with your products. You know what I mean? 

[01:41:37] It's like, oh, that's a cute little thing, Alyson. She sprays. They smell nice, whatever. I just didn't really think much of it. Um, one thing that was actually really impactful though too because, I don't know, I am very woo woo, and intuitive, and spiritual, and all that, but there is still the pragmatic part of me. It's like, ah, it sounds cool, but I need to see proof. But when we were at your Flower lounge, um, when was that? Last year or so? About a year ago?

[01:42:03] Katie: One year ago.

[01:42:04] Luke: Yeah. In your presentation, one of the things you did is you showed all of these before and after slides of people. And it was mind blowing, just the physical changes in people's faces from just doing this, just incorporating the flowers into their life. It was really cool. 

[01:42:25] Katie: It is. It is nuts.

[01:42:26] Luke: Um, my battery on my iPad has 3% left, and I want to make sure I get this right. So I'm going to let people know, if you guys want to check out the Lotuswei products, I highly recommend that you do. Uh, we'll put this in the show description, this link, but I wanted to mention it because I don't do intros anymore. I decided I just going to do everything within the episode. Hopefully people like it, because I certainly do. Here's what you're going to do, go to lotuswei.com/lukestorey, and that is L-O-T-U-S-W-E-I. lotuswei.com/lukestorey. And if you put my name in there at checkout, you save 10%. 

[01:43:03] And as I said, I'll put that in the show description too. I probably wouldn't have been able to memorize that, by the way, Brandon, I think we should keep this iPad plugged in. Yeah, just leave it over there because I find that, um, even though it's so old when I have it plugged in, it always makes me nervous that it's going to die. But it is on the right charging thing. It's charging. It doesn't want to stay. I like incorporating you into the show on. Like on Rogan, he always talks to Jamie. You're like my Jamie. Yeah. We need a TV, or a computer monitor, so you can look stuff up. Fact check that, Brandon. We don't need any fact checks today.

[01:43:47] Katie: It's so hard for me not to include you in the conversation. 

[01:43:49] Luke: It feels weird.

[01:43:50] Katie: I really discipline myself to.

[01:43:51] Luke: I know. I know. We should just throw a mic on him next time, and he can interject. It's funny, because after we do these, he'll often have questions for the guest, or comments, or it'll spur a conversation between us, and he really is part of the show anyway. Okay. 

[01:44:08] So when you talked earlier about, um, your community in Phoenix, are you living in a communal house with a bunch of people? You mentioned your roommate. What's your little scene look like out there? I've spent quite a bit of time there. It seems like an unlikely place that a bunch of flowery Buddhist type of people would congregate and land. How'd you end up there? What's your day-to-day life like there and your social and work community, and whatnot?

[01:44:43] Katie: How did I end up there? When you come back from living outside the country and you're going through reverse culture shock and you're just trying to figure out where to land, it's January. I'm not going back to the Midwest where there's snow. Phoenix. Great. I have been to Phoenix when I was a kid to visit my grandparents, and I always felt like it was this really-- 

[01:45:03] Luke: Me too. That's why I was there.

[01:45:05] Katie: Quiet. People go to the desert when they're on their spiritual seeking journeys because you can see the horizons. It's the reflection of the plant life shows you something about yourself. So when you can see all the horizons-- you can't hide things when you're in the desert from yourself. It's very, like, in your face. Not everybody wants to live in the desert because it's so hot and dry, and there's no water, and there's no wood, and you can't go crawl up on a nice warm piece of soft moss.

[01:45:36] Luke: You certainly can't. 

[01:45:37] Katie: It's not happening.

[01:45:38] Luke: Yeah.

[01:45:40] Katie: and pokey. 

[01:45:40] Luke: That's interesting. There is a spaciousness about the desert that does beckon introspection. There are fewer distractions.

[01:45:49] Katie: Yeah.

[01:45:50] Luke: Yeah.

[01:45:51] Katie: In some ways, I feel that here, too, in Austin, although it's a little different. It is that spacious, um, awareness. Yeah. So in terms of my community, all of us just converge there at different times, and some of us live together, some just come over for dinner at night. Um, there's a whole mix of people, and then we also have folks in Singapore, Canada, India, uh, Ireland. So we're also very spread out too. Um, but our Self-Arising Nature Center is in Phoenix. And if anyone wants to get a taste of the desert, that's a really beautiful place to come and experience the private ceremonies that you and Alyson experienced.

[01:46:39] Luke: Highly, highly recommend. And we'll put that in the show notes, you guys, uh, for those traveling to Phoenix or people that live in that area. Again, the show notes is lukestorey.com/flowers. So Self-Arising Nature is what? Your spot? Your brick and mortar there?

[01:46:55] Katie: Yeah.

[01:46:55] Luke: And you guys do those treatments with the acupuncture and the flower. I highly, highly recommend, honestly. I love your products too, but that was amazing. I would do that shit every week if I lived in Phoenix. It was beautiful. It's so restorative. I think different people have different personalities. I think because I'm super productive, and active, and just hyper in the way that I work and just busy, super busy, like many people, I loved that because it put me in that drooling on the pillow theta. That's my favorite. 

[01:47:39] I think if I could pick my favorite brainwave state, it would be high theta. I like it when your mind's awake, but your body's asleep. That's probably why I used to like opiates a lot because it's-- opiates have a lot of side effects, unfortunately, but that's the thing. It's like daydreaming, where you're not awake and you're not asleep. That's the sweet spot. If I could live like that all the time, I would, but you don't get much done except drooling. But that was so, oh my god. It was so nice, and Alyson had the same experience. 

[01:48:11] Katie: It's such a powerful state for being able to dump stuff that you don't need, and turn up the volume on who you are, and turn down the volume on the noise because you are such a subtly attuned, sensitive person. You don't need to be whacked over the head with some crazy treatment. It's like you're receiving the subtlety of that information, and it's nourishing you and waking you up in ways that it doesn't have to be this really extreme and tense thing because you're attuned to it. 

[01:48:49] I remember working with this fellow who was a vet, and he had been working in the special forces and had been shot at and stabbed, and bombs going off, and trapped under burning cars. Really, really, really intense crazy stories. And I watched him go through, in one session, reliving the memories and unpacking from all of those different injuries in the course of two hours.

[01:49:21] And at that point, I just started missing him and touching his body where he was feeling it, and he was like describing, oh my God, I feel like this, or the knife feels cold, or I'm under the car, and it's hot, and I can't move because I'm going to get shot. And just kept using the flower essences and watched how-- it's almost we pulled out those files from his body system, from his energy system.

[01:49:53] And you think, if something so subtle, and delicate, and unseen can pull that level of intensity of trauma out of our energy systems in two hours. Maybe you could say it was him. Maybe you could say he was ready for it. Maybe someone else wouldn't be ready for it, but why are we not all using this for all of our various different types of traumas and experiences that we have in life. I don't have that level of intensity of experience around violence, for example. And I look at other solutions for veterans, and talk therapy, and, oh gosh, we could just save all that time and money and just get to the drooling theta state.

[01:50:50] Luke: I'm sure there's a lot going on energetically, but there's something to be said to, specifically with trauma, um, the healing that can take place when you truly feel safe. And when you feel, uh, cared for, and held, and seen, that in and of itself, like you were talking about before, just the awareness of the phenomenon of the mind is the thing that unravels it.

[01:51:16] You don't actually have to do anything to fix it. It's just you become aware of it, and I think sometimes with healing, like you described, it is more in the subtle realm, not drinking four cups of ayahuasca and getting blasted off with the elves, the [Inaudible]. Um, and there's a place for that for some people too.

[01:51:32] But in the subtlety, I think a lot of it has to do with just the safety, when you know that the energetics of the people in the room are of high intention, and that there's a field of integrity, and a field of caring, a field of safety, so much magic can happen. And you add in the energetics of the flowers and the things that you're doing, it makes perfect sense to me.

[01:51:58] Katie: And honestly, this year I came to such a strong conclusion, and probably a lot of your listeners will relate, that I cannot convince anyone of anything. There's no amount of talking I can do, or showing, or pleading, or begging. Close family members, sometimes they'll have a health issue, and you want to maybe share something that you've learned, and they don't want to listen, or they choose a different path, let's say.

[01:52:35] Luke: That happened a lot in the past three years.

[01:52:37] Katie: Right.

[01:52:38] Luke: Many families have been torn apart for that very reason.

[01:52:41] Katie: So with this new way of-- it's not new, actually. It's ancient. The body heals itself. If we observe the mind, it unravels itself. If we are in a safe space and we have the right methods, and tools, and practices, and remedies, we can let all of those things dissolve and become liberated or free from the sticky points and the trauma. 

[01:53:11] Then we don't have to do any of the convincing. We don't have to impose how we feel on anyone. It's like everyone becomes sovereign. Everyone is powerful in their own right to solve their own problems, whether it's now or later. We get to choose. And it's like, oh, if I just get as many-- it's so funny to me because this is what inspired me from my teacher.

[01:53:42] He said, if we get 3% of the world's population, who we're getting flower remedies, and then here I am all these years later, and all this meditation practice letter and all these clients and business and stuff later, I'm like, right. That's all I have to do, is get the flower essences into as many hands of people as I can and let them wake themselves up.

[01:54:04] Let the flowers, and the botanicals, and Mother Nature just work their way through their systems to a point that each sovereign individual awakens on their own accord, because that's how we do it anyway. This is just a little bit of acceleration dust. Sprinkle acceleration dust.

[01:54:25] Luke: I like acceleration. I want to make a product called acceleration dust. It’s interesting I'm understanding a bit more about the energetics of what you're doing. It's like micro, micro, microdosing something. Like maybe homeopathy is the ultimate end of the spectrum of microdosing because there's not actually anything in it.

[01:54:52] There's an imprint of something that was in it, um, but many people have profound life changes from microdosing psilocybin or something like that, and they're not going on a journey. They're not getting their ass handed to them and crying about all the trauma. It's just like something's happening that is inexplicable. It's something that's subtle. It's something that happens over time, and it doesn't require, as you're describing, any convincing or taking on of any kind of belief system. It's like, just take a little bit of this thing every couple of days. It's really, really subtle, yet the impact can be profound.

[01:55:34] Katie: You hit it. That's it. That's it right there.

[01:55:37] Luke: Which is hard for me, because I'm more like, hit me in the head with a sledgehammer. Let's get her done.

[01:55:43] Katie: You think you are, but then when you look at the words you used to describe where you're at right now, this subtle, sensitive, delicate, attuned, aware--

[01:55:56] Luke: Right. 

[01:55:57] Katie: That's who you are also.

[01:55:59] Luke: I think I'm leaning into that more. And a lot of that has to do with this lady downstairs. That's how she rolls, and we're influenced by the people around us both positively and negatively, but learning about her relationship to nature and shamanism as she practices it. She doesn't do all of the things that I do that are oftentimes outside of myself to impact the way I feel. All of this stuff. She just looks at me, chuckles, and she's in the backyard talking to the birds and has the similar end result without really having to do a lot.

[01:56:44] It's a receiving and a much more attuneed sensitivity. I think I'm becoming more that way. Have you noticed, um, along those lines, within yourself or just people that you have, um, brought into your methodology here and your practices, um, that as people become more tapped into the subtleties of their beingness, they become more reclusive and solitary and less outgoing, social, extroverted, and so on?

[01:57:28] Katie: That's a really interesting question. I didn't think you were going to go there. I thought you were going to go somewhere else, like people become more sensitive and more deeply trusting themselves, which is true. Uh, just on that note, something that really shocked me-- I've been working with this stuff for 20-some years, but in the last three years, anyone in our community who was working with these remedies regularly was totally unfazed, completely unfazed by the last three years. They would say things like, oh yeah, it feels like a theater, or it feels like a show, or like something I'm watching. They weren't super--

[01:58:10] Luke: They're not actors in the play. They're certainly the audience.

[01:58:13] Katie: And it might have been something else that was tearing them apart, or bringing them to their knees, but it wasn't that. They had this deep, rich self-trust. That really surprised me. The whole thing surprised me. And then the actual question that you asked, I think so, yes. I think it becomes narrower and narrower and narrower, even if I just observe my own self and my community. You just think about when you're young and you can handle parties, and loud music, and people, and drinking, and drugs, and weird energies. 

[01:58:56] And then as you get older or more refined in your practice, I think that is a natural thing, to isolate more. Because if you are more attuned and sensitive to your environment, you're going to feel, oh, there's a funny energy here. I don't feel right with that. I can't really put a finger on what that is, but I don't feel right.

[01:59:18] Luke: Yeah, that's been my experience as someone who used to like a lot of-- I was just very social, extroverted, doing a lot of speaking, and events, and stuff like that. And, uh, yeah, it's really been, um, an adjustment to acclimate to changes that I didn't ask for. I wasn't like, oh, I'm going to become more of an introvert that just wants to stay home and be super, super discerning and picky about the people with whom I associate and so on and locations that I venture to and whatnot.

[01:59:55] And I'm like, I've become much more reclusive and, um, very sensitive to crowds, and energies, and things like that. And I've just equated it to just getting older. And there might be something to that too, but yeah, I wasn't expecting that. Just came, and then would find myself out in a public place and feel just super cagey and social anxiety, and just like, I got to get the fuck out of here. Could be a great event great people, and it's just too much. It's just too much.

[02:00:27] Katie: I would call that wisdom and awareness.

[02:00:30] Luke: It requires an adjustment, though, too, because, uh, I'm going to go with that. Wisdom. Yes. Uh, the other day, very generously, um, some friends of ours invited us to go see the comedian Dave Chappelle. And, um, I don't know anything about the comedy industry, so I was imagining in my mind-- he was probably performing at, um, Joe Rogan's, uh, comedy club, the Mothership.

[02:00:53] A bunch of my friends always go there. I haven't made it out. So I'm gearing up to be in a comedy club. I don't understand that this dude is super famous, and that it's at an arena. So we go to meet for dinner beforehand and like, oh, I'm thinking we're just going to walk down the street and just casually walk into a comedy club.

[02:01:12] And no, it's going to a concert. It's a whole parking thing, and people are drunk, and smoking weed, and I'm not particularly a fan of, um, hip hop music. It's not my jam. Um, really loud hip hop rap and just the whole thing, man. And there's a lot of booze in the place. And it's just an energy I'm not used to being around.

[02:01:36] And, um, it took everything I could to sit there and just stay calm. I felt so uncomfortable up until the moment he got up on stage, which is four hours into the night or whatever. It's like an opening band and opening comics. Afterward, I was very grateful that our friends brought us and paid for the tickets. It was a really beautiful gesture, and I really enjoyed his comedy. It was fucking hilarious. He's a master of his craft, without a doubt. 

[02:02:07] But when we left, walking back to the car, to my 75-dollar parking ticket, um, I told Alyson, I don't know what's going on, but I don't think I can do this anymore. I can't go out in public. You know what I mean? It's weird. Because I used to be all about that life. And it's just, I don't know. Maybe it's your freaking flower essences. Katie, making me too etherically sensitive.

[02:02:36] Katie: But it's important because you value the impermanence of life. Life is short. You have a certain amount of energy and time, and you want to do big things with that energy and time, or at least be preciously aware of it. And if unseen forces, things you can't see, that are attracted to the smell of certain things, like alcohol and weed, or, um, vibrations, those are all things that you can't necessarily see, so you can try to talk yourself out of it. 

[02:03:06] Luke: And the system sees.

[02:03:08] Katie: If you feel like crap afterwards, or you get in a fight with somebody, or an argument, or you feel crunchy, or cranky, or weird, or like you need to jump in your pool or take a shower afterwards, then something is there. Because you know you only have a certain amount of energy, it's like I want to guard that and use it, and I don't want anyone to steal it, or it to be affected by these forces that I can't see. 

[02:03:33] Luke: Yeah.

[02:03:34] Katie: I think that's perfectly natural.

[02:03:36] Luke: Yeah, I'm hoping it's just--

[02:03:38] Katie: It's just different because you're not used to it.

[02:03:40] Luke: Yeah. And like I said, it's taken, I don't know, three years or so. Some of it might be related to the world events of three years, probably not, but it takes a bit of adjusting because you plan things differently. It's like you used to have a modus operandi of how you roll, and then everyone else that you know is still rolling in that way and expecting you to roll like you always rolled, and now you don't. Now you're at a standstill. You're not rolling at all. Or a different kind of rolling, um, to a different place. So it takes a little getting used to to adjust to that new type of acclimation to the world. 

[02:04:23] Katie: Yesterday, I flew into Austin, and you have that moment where you're getting the rental car, and you're figuring out how to go, and you're starving, and you're looking for the food, but you got to get here first. And then you drop your stuff off, and by the time you get there, you're like, oh shoot, it's 8:20. All the restaurants close at 8:00. Ah. And then you're starving. 

[02:04:42] Luke: Totally. Every trip.

[02:04:44] Katie: Then you're just like, got to get the food, so you're in survival mode. You get the food. You come back. And I forget. I forget that, oh, what I need to do is, after I eat-- but the first thing I should do is just eat when I land and then shower because I've just been around tons of people and tons of EMFs in the air. Shower. And then, uh, we have this smoke offering practice where it's burning sacred herbs or incense. Um, anyone can do it really.

[02:05:19] Um, ours is 30 minutes long and involves some chanting, but you could just burn some herbs as an offering and touch the ground. I'm here. I'm acknowledging you. I've arrived here. Thank you for hosting me. And then this morning, I woke up, and I did my practices, and I was like, ah, why do I forget that I need to just eat, shower, and do the practice immediately and not go to bed?

[02:05:45] Because last night, I slept like-- you know that feeling when you feel like you're awake the whole night, but you're actually asleep? You're just tossing, turning, and you're half in between, but not in the good in between, like you were talking about. Feeling funky. Tossing in between. So I can relate to what you're saying.

[02:06:05] It makes such a huge difference when you allow yourself to just acknowledge, oh right, I'm functioning in this world. I'm operating in this way. And when I do it this way, everything goes so smooth. And when I don't, it doesn't go smoothly. Okay. Note to self. Eat. Shower. Cleanse. Make an offering. Arrive at the place.

[02:06:29] Luke: 100%. Yeah, you're speaking my language with travel. That's definitely my kryptonite. 100. Yeah, it's a whole thing. Won't get into it. Um, and this might be a bit of a stretch, but you mentioned EMFs, and I'm an EMF mitigation fanatic from way back, probably because I seem to be more sensitive to it than most people, unfortunately.

[02:06:54] But the upside is I get to educate some people about it and maybe catch some people that are sensitive like me and help them. Um, do you see any application of your flower essences? Um, again, I know this might be a bit of a stretch. We can't trust the science on it, but seeing as we're becoming more resilient integrating these flowers into our lives, do you see any potential for having any assistance with something like EMF sensitivity?

[02:07:25] Katie: Are you kidding me?

[02:07:26] Luke: Oh, it's a thing?

[02:07:27] Katie: How could it not?

[02:07:29] Luke: All right. Goon 

[02:07:30] Katie: Go out into the wild. Go out and be in nature. See what happens. I mean, even just spend a couple of hours out there. It's not just the oxygen. It's all the life force. So what you're doing, essentially, even though you're not in nature, you're bringing it in. You're bringing it into your medicine cabinet. You're bringing it into your morning routine. You're bringing it into this moment. You're bringing it into your food, your coffee, your water, your tea. 

[02:07:55] It's like you're replicating being out in the wild but pulling it into this crazy life. So absolutely. And I can tell you from my personal experience that over the last 20-some years, my personal use has changed dramatically, and I would be willing to bet that it has a lot to do with EMFs. I started this in the US in 2001. We didn't have cell phones. 

[02:08:28] Luke: There were very few cell towers.

[02:08:30] Katie: I mean, I didn't have one.

[02:08:31] Luke: We had cell phones, but they would always drop out because there weren't enough towers, which I wish we could go back to that time. I don't care if there's a dead zone. We're so inundated. In a city like Austin, there's 5G all over downtown. Phoenix, same thing. Last time we were there, I was like, damn, these guys went off with those small cell towers that are in the middle of the city, which are the worst ones, incidentally. Yeah, I miss the days, 2001, when there were very few cell towers around.

[02:09:02] Katie: I notice in those days, uh, I used to take the internal remedies in my mouth a few times a day. One remedy. That was it. That was it. Now I observe myself. I observe members of my community. It's easier, I think. Maybe I'm biased because I have a lot on hand. So if you just have it there, you'll use it, but I'm using it at least every hour. It's in every cup of coffee. It's in every glass of water. I'm spraying myself.

[02:09:35] I'm putting on the oils. It's multiple, multiple, multiple, multiple, multiple times a day. It's in my kitchen everywhere. It's in my bathroom. It's on my desk. It's everywhere because I want access to it. And there has to be a correlation. If we're talking about subtle energies, in those days, we didn't have cell phones.

[02:09:56] Now we have smartphones. How much time are we spending with that thing in our hands? And I love it. It affords me. I can GPS my way to your house, and it's really easy, but it affects us. And absolutely, 500 million percent, flower remedies fortify your own body's energy. So you are not a swayed or negatively impacted by that. It's a super infusion of Mother Nature in it.

[02:10:29] Luke: Totally makes sense. Yeah. A lot of the things that are most effective for EMF are in the realm of quantum energy, which sounds crazy to some people too, but like you were talking about earlier, when you use your cell phone, you can't see--it's like Facetime or something. It's not like you face flies through the air and hits their phone.

[02:10:48] We can't see any of this stuff. Now, that said, there is a lot of snake oil in the quantum realm. All these weird little stickers for your phone, I don't trust most of that stuff. But how a lot of them, the EMF mitigation tools, work is by fortifying your nervous system and fortifying the resilience of your biology, not by blocking them.

[02:11:09] Blocking is the physics approach. And then you have the quantum physics approach, which is more what you're describing, where it's like your energy body becomes fortified against energies that are, um, deleterious to your health, the draining energies of non-ionizing radiation everywhere.

[02:11:27] Katie: That's the way to go, because are we going to go create some copper hut in the middle of nowhere and live there for the rest of our lives? 

[02:11:35] Luke: I might.

[02:11:36] Katie: We might, we might, we might. Okay, we might. 

[02:11:38] Luke: Every bedroom in this house is a copper hut, actually. But most people, it's not practical yet.

[02:11:44] Katie: You still want to live in the world, right?

[02:11:47] Luke: Totally.

[02:11:47] Katie: My whole mission is to get these to as many people as possible. I must live in the world. Uh, but you can fortify yourself. You can make yourself superhuman.

[02:11:59] Luke: I was talking about people smoking weed at the Dave Chappelle show. And cannabis makes flowers. You don't strike me as someone who's a weed smoker. I'm not either. God bless those that are. But have you ever, um, made essences out of cannabis flowers?

[02:12:15] Katie: I haven't yet. That'd be very interesting.

[02:12:17] Luke: Right? 

[02:12:18] Katie: Yeah, it would be very interesting.

[02:12:19] Luke: I mean, it's a powerful plant. It's like a Swiss army knife plant. I'm voting that you make one, because I don't use it in a recreational sense, but I still love the smell of it because I was a huge stoner. So if there was essential oil of indica or whatever, purple haze, I would be spraying that shit all the time. I love the smell of weed. Yeah. 

[02:12:42] Katie: A lot of people have asked me. I probably should make a flower essence of it because so many people are curious about it. I do think it's interesting that we will gravitate towards one thing. Or when we talk about plant medicine, we'll talk about five different things, and we'll fixate on those plants when there's 40,000 flowering species of plants on the planet. That's where my mind is like, whoa. We're over here fixated on these things when there's all this awakening with 40,000 different species over here. We don't even know what's out there and what it can do for us.

[02:13:22] Luke: Yeah. I think about that too with just the terminology around plant medicine. I think most people today obviously assume that that's some psychedelic experience, but if you look at pharmaceuticals, most of them are mimicry of plants. Aspirin, white willow bark, on and on. Most medicines, um, opiates, obviously from the poppy. It's like the pharmaceutical industry has essentially just copied, and isolated, and amplified medicines that have existed forever.

[02:14:02] Katie: They will single out one chemical constituent out of hundreds in a plant. So it's like taking Luke Storey and just taking one part out of the 300 parts of you. It's odd. It's not the whole picture. If somebody talked about you and your, uh, you have this knack of doing X. Yeah, but you do that one day out of the year. It's not the whole you. 

[02:14:31] So similarly, it's like we attach a heavy metal or a chemical to that one constituent so it can drive something. There will be an effect, but those other 299 constituents, what role do they play in this whole big picture of healing? And Mother Nature and all its perfection is so complex. That's one of the things that I super geek out, is when you look at, whether it's an herb, an essential oil, a flower remedy, whatever, one plant, one flower, it can do so many different things, not just one thing. So it's, in some ways, like we're limiting our view by doing that.

[02:15:18] And then also, of course, creating this whole cascade of side effects that are unfortunate. When I moved back to the United States, I realized just how many of us are on medication, anti-depressants, anti-anxiety, ADHD. At the time, I was doing research looking at all the children on the entire planet who are on ADHD medications. It's around 10 million. Seven million of those were in the United States.

[02:15:47] Luke: Oh, my God. Oh, man.

[02:15:50] Katie: It's like we-- 

[02:15:51] Luke: It's crazy.

[02:15:53] Katie: We turn that direction. And I'm not saying there isn't a place for allopathic medicine. It's wonderful for, um, if you have accidents or you're in a trauma or crisis. It's where you want to be. But when there's something natural that doesn't have side effects, when you were talking about, um, microdosing, like microdosing beauty, and joy, and peace, you can take them when you're pregnant.

[02:16:19] A pregnant woman can take as many flower remedies as she wants. Essential oils, she has to be a little careful. Herbs, has to be careful. Flower remedies, she can go nuts. Elderly, babies, toddlers, people in immunocompromised situations, people who are sick, hospice, dying, birthing, go nuts. You can incorporate as many flower remedies as you want.

[02:16:43] So it just seems to be that in the reductive world, it's limited seeing and sometimes a lot of side effects we don't want. And then in the Mother Nature world, it's expansive, abundant, exponential, this whole mystery of life approach and what's possible. My wish is just to have more people be able to integrate and see the two and what's possible in the mysterious realm as well as the deductive realm. That makes sense?

[02:17:22] Luke: 100%. Yeah. I think that, um, those of us that live in the United States, I think, because we're so close to it, that it's all become normalized, just the prevalence of pharmaceuticals. Um, I don't watch a lot of TV, and when I do, it's usually not TV with commercials, but Alyson watches some. She loves her love reality shows.

[02:17:49] And I don't know what network they're on or whatever, but I haven't seen TV commercials in a very long time because I just paid the 10 bucks a month, and I haven't, but anyway. I'll just come say hi to her, and she'll be watching one of her stories, as I call them. They're like soap operas to me.

[02:18:03] It's cute. She enjoys them. But she has commercials. And they're all pharmaceutical commercials. Almost all of them. And the other day there was one that was a drug that you take to mitigate the side effects of being on antidepressants. It's just like, what if you just made the medicine without side effects, and then you wouldn't need to take the second medicine?

[02:18:26] But thinking about that, I'm so far removed from that world, but many people have gotten institutionalized into thinking that being on a bunch of medications is normal. And I think the prevalence of that phenomenon where someone, oh, I need to get on high blood pressure medication, then it starts wrecking another part of your body.

[02:18:47] And so you have to take another one, and another one, and another one. Ad infinitum. It's an incredible business model if you're, uh, someone who lacks love and empathy as a, uh, shareholder. But it's freaking nuts, the destruction that's being caused by-- and mostly lifestyle diseases. That's the thing. It's what we're breathing, what we're eating. It's the fluoride in the water. It's the EMFs. It's literally diseases that are caused by things that you could change if you knew better and had the discipline and resources to do so.

[02:19:26] Katie: It's also how you see things. Either there's something wrong with you that you need to fix, or there's an opportunity. Maybe it's a dark night of the soul as they call it, or maybe it's an opportunity to see something you weren't seeing before. Maybe this is the moment where your whole life changes.

[02:19:44] Maybe this is the moment where you wake up and see something completely new through going through a difficult experience in life, versus, something's wrong with me. I need to fix it and shut it down. I'm feeling uncomfortable. I need to shut it down and take a pill. What if our culture chose to view that as a rite of passage?

[02:20:08] I think you've interviewed her, Kelly Brogan. She talks about it as, this is a rite of passage. And I love that way of just describing it. This moment where we're freaking out is normal, is natural, and when we get on the other side of it, it's like, ah. It's like an awakening. It's like seeing life in a different way. We're not the same. 

[02:20:33] When we have a baby, we're not the same on the other side. Or when someone we love dies, we're not the same on the other side. What makes us think that if that's how coming into this world and leaving this world is, that our whole life isn't full of those things? We can be born and die so many times in this life.

[02:20:57] Luke: There's a great quote that I, uh, heard somewhere, and I'd really like to find the origins of it. I think it's from Greek philosophy or something. If anyone listening knows where this came from, please inform me, educate me so I can attribute it to the appropriate party. But it goes like this. If you die before you die, when you die, you don't die. That's all you need to know really, to your point. It's just surrender. 

[02:21:31] And also, when we're faced with these challenges, they could be an opportunity for transformation, but also, I think we've been trained in the West to think when the body's ill, that there's something wrong with it. I think a lot of the time what's happening, not all of the time, a lot of the time what's happening is the body's actually healing itself, and what we perceive to be being sick, having a cold, or a flu, or something like that, um, that we have to suppress the symptoms, and we have to fix it and heal it, when the body's actually going, dude, get out of the way. I'm detoxing. I'm healing, and you're just feeling the side effects of the healing, uh, process. Everything is so backwards, I think, in that regard.

[02:22:15] Katie: Yeah. I interviewed this woman, uh, on my podcast about biological medicine, and her view was that when you get ill, that's actually when your body is starting to heal it. It's not actually when something is going wrong. It's when the healing process is already starting to occur. In the world of energy medicine, we would say, if you had a projector on a screen projecting an image on a screen, that your body is the screen, and the projector is all this energetic, emotional, mental stuff.

[02:22:44] And when something takes place physically, it's just a red flag to go back and trace it back and say, okay, what's the root cause? Sure, there might be lifestyle, and food, and chemical issues also, but what's the root emotional, mental cause for this so that if I handle it in the physical realm, that it doesn't ever come back?

[02:23:05] Luke: 100%.

[02:23:06] Katie: Then we have agency.

[02:23:08] Luke: Yeah. Yeah. I know this to be true because I've seen many people, especially in the past 20 years that I've been deeply steeped into all type of healing, but I've seen people who have, say, a chronic condition. And if they have the resources and the drive, uh, to apply every known solution out there, doing all the things, and they can't heal, and then they arrive at the end of the road with everything, all the ozone, the PEMF, the saunas, all the things, fasting, going to clinics, and never addressing the underlying emotional issues and the trauma eventually get to that, and that heals them. 

[02:23:54] And I've also witnessed people who have a chronic condition or a life-threatening condition even that don't even go do all the physical stuff. They just happen to stumble across the inner healing, and they heal the physical thing. This happens all the time at Joe Dispenza retreats. I don't know what those people are eating or how healthy they are, but they tap into the quantum realm and work things out in their psycho-spiritual body, and then the physical manifestation of their disease goes away like magic. It's inexplicable. It's just crazy.

[02:24:31] And it points to the fact that we understand so little about reality. I have conversations with brilliant people like you, and we're teasing some stuff out of the fabric of that reality, but at the end of the day, there's so much that we don't understand. It's what makes life interesting to me.

[02:24:51] Katie: And so much support. That's what I would really want people to walk away with, is that you're not alone. That there's so much support. Even if you turn to Mother Nature herself, there's so much support there. Uh, tell me any neuroses you have. Tell me any neurotic habit you have. Tell me any crazy, deep, dark secret you have. There's a flower for it, no problem. It's so workable, so easy. We just like to punish ourselves, and be really hard on ourselves, and repress it.

[02:25:28] And if we can soften a little more and be open to it and open to exploring, there's so much support. And we can awaken ourselves. We don't necessarily need someone in a white coat to tell us what's wrong with us. We can figure out, actually, and illuminate what's right about ourselves. And that's a whole lot more fun.

[02:25:52] Luke: Um, I love it. I think that's a good bow to wrap on the gift of your presence today. If folks go to lotuswei.com/lukestorey, and they're like, oh, this is interesting. I've never heard of this. I want to try it. What would you recommend as a first product for someone? Because you've got the topicals. And then you have the sprays, and you have the elixirs. 

[02:26:18] What's one that's an overarching beneficial that someone might notice, and which of those forms would you recommend? Let's say someone doesn't have a lot of disposable cash flow laying around, and they're like, this sounds cool. I just want to try the one thing and see how it feels.

[02:26:33] Katie: I would try the one thing that you'll use most often. If you like to take things internally, try the elixir. If you like the yummy smells, do that. It's whatever is going to be the easiest for you to be reckless with and use it up. Don't store it somewhere. Use the whole thing up within three to four weeks because then you really will feel a difference within three to five days. We have a quiz. We have a whole page of quizzes. 

[02:27:05] Luke: Oh, cool. 

[02:27:05] Katie: A really basic quiz, a really complicated one, a really fun one. All kinds of different quizzes. So if you're that kind of person, then you can just see, what do you need today? And see what the recommendation is. Infinite Love, I would say, is a really good place to start because we're all too hard on ourselves. 

[02:27:23] We could all use a little more love, and softness, and gentleness. And if you use that really regularly, after about a week, you see a difference, and you notice people being drawn to you, giving you compliments, your loved ones being a lot more affectionate, um, or something like Joy Juice that makes you laugh in five minutes. You feel it. You feel it. 

[02:27:44] Luke: Really? 

[02:27:45] Katie: Yeah. 

[02:27:45] Luke: I wonder if we have that one here. Alyson, can you hear me? Oh, she's somewhere. She's probably out in the yard talking to the birds. All right. Cool, man. Well, thank you so much for making the time to come in. It's lovely to see you. And, um, I will say I'm bummed we didn't know you, or at least, uh, maybe if Alyson did, she didn't realize you were in Phoenix because when we moved here a couple of years ago, it had this big shitshow of a storm here, and all the roads were icy, and everyone was freaking out. Um, so we stayed in Phoenix for a week. 

[02:28:18] Yeah. We kept checking the weather. Like, nope, not going to Texas yet. And we stayed there, and we were really-- it was a nice break, but we were super bored. We were just at some hotel that I selected based on its proximity to cell towers, and um, was out of town a little bit, and we just sat at the pool every day and thought, man, I wish we knew someone in Phoenix. There you were.

[02:28:43] Katie: Anytime you come to Phoenix, come visit us. And we have a little condo too that you guys can stay in. It's available.

[02:28:48] Luke: What? Oh, cool. 

[02:28:49] Katie: And it's a stone's throw from the SAN Center.

[02:28:52] Luke: Amazing. That's so cool. I look forward to getting out there and getting another one of those treatments, and meeting some more of your people, and seeing the ones that I met before again, and driving up to Sedona and playing around. That's the cool thing about Phoenix, is you can go to Sedona, but you don't have to live there.

[02:29:09] Katie: Right. 

[02:29:09] Luke: Some people like to live there. We tried it. We couldn't hang.

[02:29:13] Katie: It should be national park.

[02:29:17] Luke: Right.

[02:29:18] Katie: As far as I know, the indigenous people would go there, have their ceremonies, and then leave. So I think only a certain, really strong constitutional person can live there.

[02:29:30] Luke: Yeah, we weren't strong enough. It kicked our asses out. And I used to go there when I lived in LA. I'd drive out there, a couple of years, and stay for a week, and it was amazing. It's only a six-hour drive from LA or something. Um, so it's very accessible, and I always thought, man, when I leave the city, finally, I'm going to move to Sedona, and I'll try to get her on board. And we stayed there for two months. We brought all our stuff. I set up my computer and pretended like we lived there and looked at houses. We had an agent there and everything.

[02:30:00] First month, she was a good sport, but she hated it because she knew I was really invested in the idea and thought that I loved it. She was like, I'm going to hang in there and see if something changes, and maybe I'll grow to love it. And then, in the second month, I hated it. Not Sedona. Just hated the way I felt there for a long period of time. So yeah, it really is a beautiful, very sacred, and special place, but I think you're right, that only a certain type of person can be there full-time and thrive. Many people seem to be able to do that, but I wasn't one of them.

[02:30:36] Katie: Yeah, we often will take team retreats for a day or a couple of days. Go there, generate a bunch of ideas, brainstorm, and then come home.

[02:30:44] Luke: Yeah, right on. 

[02:30:46] Katie: Yeah. 

[02:30:46] Luke: Next time we pass through, we'll come say hi to you and old Sedona. Thanks for joining me.

[02:30:50] Katie: Thanks for having me. 

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