The Spirit of Flowers with Caitlin Phillips by Celeste Adams

Celeste: How did you first discover that you had an ability to connect to plant devas?

Caitlin: As a child I did rituals with plants and communicated to the spirit of the plants. I always had a strong connection with nature, but within the world of plants there was such a validation for communication that it opened up a huge doorway to me. It led me on a journey into flower essences and also into gardening.

Celeste: How can we begin to communicate with plants?

Caitlin: Instead of talking to plants, which feels awkward to me, I go by my own intuition. The Secret Life of Plants talks about how plants respond to sound and music. Everyone has a different type of communication level, and mine is more clairesentient. I feel as though I can hear plants communicating to me.

On a practical level, you can pet a plant. If you rub your hands together and then open up your hand chakras, you will be able to feel the energy of the plant. Then if you run your hand over the leaves of the plant, it actually perks up and stands up straighter.

A great way to start is with your house plants, because those are the ones that are around you all the time. They are capable of knowing what's going on with your highly evolved emotional life, and they're actually picking up on things.

You can begin by just feeling the energy on your plant. Maybe you feel static on your hand or maybe you feel cold or warm.

You need to get into a quiet space, preferably without music and without other people around. Animals, though, are connected to the plants and the nature realm, so their presence can help.

Ask yourself what you feel from that houseplant. Your houseplants can actually heal you, but generally they need to be supported first. So ask them if there is anything you can do for them. Maybe you need to boost their immunity. Maybe they need a little fertilizer, a little extra water, or sunlight. Help them become strong. Then let your intuition guide you.

You can't really go wrong. You're not going to harm the plant by giving it a little bit of water or maybe some fertilizing pellets.

Another way to create a connection is through dream space and in meditation. If you get into a very relaxed space, you can ask to connect with the plant, and it will create images in your meditation. Then you ask that plant to help you in your dream space, and ask to receive an answer in the morning. Affirm to yourself that you're going to remember your dream in the morning.

Celeste: That's beautiful, because the houseplant is part of your family, although most people don't think of it that way.

Caitlin: Yes. Hopefully you'll begin to see yourself as more connected to the larger picture. You don't have to go out to the woods or to a place that's considered perfect nature. Everything is nature.

Celeste: How do you discover the healing properties of a plant?

Caitlin: Flower essence practitioners like Ian White talk about communicating with the spirit guide of that plant. You need to say, "What do you have to offer me as a healing and as a quality?" It's as if that plant is a person communicating to you in a healing sense.

Let's say you would like to cure a sore throat. Before you go to sleep at night, ask a plant to appear to you. The best way to do this is through the astral realm, because the dream space is free from our logical reality. In the astral realm, we get a lot of pictures and experiences and adventures that can be helpful to us.

In your astral space, ask the spirit of the plant to help cure that sore throat. Ask it to show you what healing quality it can give to you. Sore throats could go back to childhood, where you picked up the energy of being yelled at. It may be a recurring issue for you, and it could be that this plant is offering you a larger healing, not just one that is topical or that touches only the surface. The work that plants do can go very deep.

Celeste: What are the different personalities of flowers? For example, how does the personality of a rose compare to a sunflower, or to the blossom on a cactus?

Caitlin: They are very different personalities. I hate to generalize about them because they are really defined by the person that connects with them. Basically, you can communicate with the spirit guide of the flower and ask it to explain its healing qualities.

Roses tend to help us open up to spirituality, transformation, and awareness. I was born with the name Rose as my middle name. In my psychic training we used the image of the rose a lot as a vessel for energy. We learned how to read auras through the image of a rose. Roses tend to be a neutral flower — they're symbolic of love and spirituality.

Cacti tend to be hardy and strength building. They take you to the heart of things, to the root, to the truth.

Sunflowers are about expressing yourself to the outside world and expressing your gifts. They tend to address third-chakra related issues, such as career and self-expression.

Celeste: So in addition to using the essences of the flower, you can also benefit from the healing power of a particular flower by having it in your home?

Caitlin: Exactly. You can ask that plant to shift its energy to your energy. It will actually do an overlay of its energy on top of what you want to correct. You can bring that energy into your field to align its heart to yours. The overall healing quality of that flower will help you express your highest ability and the gifts that you have. It will help you clear out the stuff that's between you and whatever it is that you want to express.

Let's say I want to be more aware of my personal truth. The rose might help me to align with my own ability to achieve that awareness.

I don't want to walk around and "be" a sunflower, because a sunflower isn't me. What I want to do is shift that energy quality of myself so that it's like the sunflower's. This way I can enhance my own self-expression.

It's all about getting back to our own personal purest form of energy, which is connection to nature.

In our purest form, we don't have any problems, we don't have any pain. We've picked up a lot of stuff through experiences that interfere with who we really are. Plants help us to realign with our own self and our own integrity, our own original source energy.

Celeste: Do the plant devas take a form that you can see?

Caitlin: I see them as glowing orbs and energy forms. Many psychics see them as mythological creatures, but that's not how I see them.

Elliot Cowan talks about how he worked with someone who saw the energy of one plant as a kind of big fat green happy jolly guy. This person was in a lot of grief. It could be that plants take on the form of what an individual person needs. They could shape-shift into that image.

Celeste: Do the flowers help you understand what to blend together in order to make certain essences?

Caitlin: My experience is that a flower will give me a direct message and say, for instance, "You need to communicate with me right now." It'll present itself as a flower that stands out in my garden.

I've had lots of experiences of being awakened in the middle of the night and told to lie out in my garden to receive a healing from my plants. I believe they're communicating with me all the time and they're telling me how to create flower remedies.

Each flower remedy has a specific vibration that a person needs to replace in their aura. I can tell when a flower essence is going to help a person fill in a color in their aura that they're missing.

Celeste: Do you ever do muscle testing to see if a flower essence is appropriate?

Caitlin: No. Sometimes I use a pendulum and sometimes I use a dowsing rod. The easiest way, I guess, is by looking at the energy in the bottle and the person in front of me. Then I can tell what will work.

Celeste: Do you pay attention to the results to see whether you're on target with the remedy?

Caitlin: I look for shifts. I want to see a person feel better and at least to make a change. If you're sailing your boat and you take the steering wheel and go just half a centimeter to the left, in 300 miles you're going to be in a totally different place on that ocean than if you left the wheel where it was. It's the same thing with flower essences — they create a subtle shift that can eventually redirect a person in profound ways.

Celeste: Do you have a favorite flower?

Caitlin: They're all beautiful. Flowers amaze me. How do they get that kind of potent color and vibration? How does that color explode out of a green stem?

If you stare into a passionflower, it looks like a Christ. It has a thorn on the outside, with hairs coming out, and there's a cross on the inside. It's a very sexual, powerful, opening plant. I was with a friend who is a biologist, and he said, "let's potentize this passionflower." We took the nectar from the passionflower and crossed it over to the stamen. We pollinated it just by putting our fingers on it, and some of the resin was left (I think passionflower resin by itself is actually a very potent substance).

That night, I had some really powerful dreams that woke me up. In the dreams, the flower devas were beings. They were long, green, and sinewy. Their voices reminded me of sirens because the energy was so strong. They told me to go lie down in my garden and receive a healing.

I just opened myself up to receiving a healing from those flowers. And my life transformed after that point.

Celeste: How does one extract the essence of flowers?

Caitlin: You actually ask the plant if it wants to create a flower essence. The plant may not be at its highest level of energy. That's why you need to ask.

A good way is to ask a plant to appear to you if it wants to be included in a flower essence. Let your intuition tell you when it is right to make that flower essence.

Then you remove the flowers from the plant and put them on top of purified water in a crystal bowl. Flowers are quite capable of shifting their energies, so you can make a flower essence by putting the petals of the flower on top of the water.

You ask the petals how long they need to sit there. Usually, it's one to twelve hours. Then you put the petals around the bottom of the plant, like an offering back to the plant. The water becomes your tincture, and it has the ability to change its form.

When you're taking a walk and you see flowers whose energy would be right for you, ask the plant if it will shift its energy into your field. If you do that, you don't even have to make the flower essence, you've received the healing energy right there on your walk.

Most people notice how much better they feel after they walk in nature — it's because they have connected with that energy.

The plants around us are the ones we need in our life. Wherever we are, we're not there by accident, and we are closest to those plants that grow in our everyday environment. If you take a walk into Topanga Canyon, for instance, you can find vervain. It's a Bach Flower Remedy and is for people who have an overbearing sense of pride and authority towards other people. I think that's a pretty strong personality trait in Hollywood, so a lot of people here could benefit from vervain. What I'm saying is that vervain actually grows around here in order to offer its healing power to the people who have that imbalance.

I wouldn't underestimate the ability of the plants to be transformational.

Celeste: What are some of your most profound experiences with plants?

Caitlin: I was taking a walk in a tropical rainforest in Australia and entered an altered state. I felt as though the plants picked me up and carried me through the forest. It seemed that I was flying through the air. It was euphoric.

Another profound experience was with the banyan tree, which has incredible roots, like legs. These trees are sacred in India and they are very powerful. I was walking through the rainforest and had lost track of time — I felt as though I were floating — when a clear crystal green-and-blue energy surrounded me and covered my entire aura. I had a strong energy of euphoria that was overpoweringly strong. There was just no way to deny it. I was carried through the forest. That euphoria lasted for the rest of my trip. It couldn't stop smiling.

I've had a lot of experiences like that in Australia because of the energy there. It's a little more difficult to connect with the plants in a big city, but in Australia there's a very clear, old energy, and it's a lot easier to have a direct line of communication with the plants there.

Celeste: It's a tragedy the way people in cities and suburbs have lost contact with plants.

Caitlin: It's absolutely a tragedy, because there's so much potential for healing that is available to us through the plants.

We've lost our sense of the sacred. The food that we're eating isn't giving us life-force energy. That's because we're not acknowledging the source of the energy, so we're not putting into our body a positive life force.

Try noticing the difference between the food that you make with love in your own home and the food that you get over the counter. The quality that you're getting is a different energy. What you're eating is energy, what you're absorbing is energy. Without that sense of acknowledgement of the sacred, you're disconnecting yourself from that stream of energy.

There's a huge resource out there that is available to us if we open ourselves to it. Nature intelligences would like to communicate to us and help us in our lives and in everything that we do. Everything. They're there to help us shift our realities. All we have to do is ask them to help us.

And unless we're opening ourselves up to them and praising them for what they have to offer, we're not receiving it.

Caitlin Phillips is a clairvoyant, flower-essence consultant, aromatherapist, and healer. She has been working in healing since 1990, but has worked with nature intelligences since childhood.

Caitlin trained as a clairvoyant and healer at the Berkeley Psychic Institute, and publishes articles on nature intelligences and animal communication. After traveling to Bali, Caitlin got a clear message to work with the public directly using flower remedies. Later, she traveled to Australia to create flower remedies. She also has conducted retreats in Bali and Ojai.

Caitlin teaches and works with her clients to bring them into alignment with their purest form of communication with themselves and nature. She plans to open wellness centers in Bali, Italy, and Los Angeles.

This interview was conducted on July 8, 2002.