We recently sat down (virtually) with the wonderful Alexis Smart, flower remedy practitioner, classical homeopath and creator of Alexis Smart Flower Remedies, a line of gentle yet potent flower essences that encompass a wide spectrum of human emotion and personality types. Read on for PART 1 on Alexis Smart and her magical remedies, as interviewed by Sun Potion's founder Scott Linde.
Alexis, can you please introduce yourself a little bit and bring about some story on your background, what got you interested in and inspired about this category of working with plant materials and healing substances?
My name is Alexis Smart and I am a flower remedy practitioner and classical homeopath. I'm the founder of my company Alexis Smart Flower Remedies. I make combination flower remedy formulas for, to me, every possible thing a human being can need help with, from writer's block to heart break to anti-aging. I'm trying to address the whole human condition. It's a lofty goal but that's my goal. As every healer I know that has been doing this for years and is dedicated, I got into this because I was healed myself and to me that’s what starts it all. We learn through our own suffering and illness how to heal ourselves and we want to share it with others eventually if that's our calling. I was lucky that I grew up with a mother who was an herbalist. In the 70s and 80s it was kitchen herbalism, more like the European folk tradition of herbs. She rarely took us to doctors. I had very few antibiotics and was cured of most of my childhood illnesses with herbs. She did not let us get our tonsils out when they suggested that, she said, "You need your organs, there's a reason we have them."
I was kind of primed for having an open mind to plant medicine and all esoteric teachings. So I grew up not taking a lot of medication or anything like that. In my 20s I strayed from that path and was overprescribed antibiotics, cortisone inhalers, allergy shots. I just strayed in many ways in my life and I paid the price big time because my perfect health, my resilient, glowing health was compromised. Within a year I had asthma, allergies, hypersensitivity, environmental sensitivity, depression, anxiety. My health deteriorated really rapidly and it all started with antibiotics. I would go to a doctor to treat the last thing that happened and I would get a new medication that would cause another bunch of stuff. Physically I was worn out. And then I had a lot of emotional, pretty heavy traumas that was kind of the nail in the coffin for my vital force. My vital force was so low. So I started looking to alternative healers again. I went back to my roots and started seeing any healer I could find. I did cleanses and tried different things but I wasn't getting results. And I saw therapists as well for my spirit for a few years.
Finally I was given a flower remedy by a woman I met very randomly. And within 3 weeks I was back to my old self. Before flower remedies, even though I used natural medicine, I did have this idea that it was only through months or years of cleansing, practices, diets and a kind of work that I would return to health. And also the same emotionally, that years of therapy or years of meditation of some practice or discipline that would involve rigidity or self denial. But when I took this flower remedy, not only did it make me feel better, but it freed me from this misconception that health is achieved through rigid self denial and practice, work and years and toil. I think a lot of us who are interested in healing have this idea. It's an asceticism I think in some way. So my introduction to flower remedies was really my own healing. And it was so profound. It came at a time when I was in a previous career I was really unhappy with. I was a kind of commercial actress and model. It was never my passion. So to discover flower remedies just as I was ready to pursue another job, I felt it was my calling. I knew right away this was it, and I started studying flower remedies and went to homeopathy school and it all converged beautifully.
You mentioned asceticism. It's always interesting to me to watch the mindset, ideals, beliefs about how health and the body needs to be treated. We put ourselves through a ringer.
I learned when you set up an inner authority-- a lot of my friends who used to be drug addicts, now they are clean but they still have this tendency to say, oh i'm going to eat like shit for two weeks and oh i'm doing a cleanse now. They set up this inner authority and rigidity. And then inevitably they will rebel against that because the teenager in them says fuck that and then they have to go off the deep end again. I think there is a way to treat yourself with love and fun. We have these beautiful bodies and life, there is so much joy to have in having a body. We don't have to punish ourselves all the time.
Absolutely. I sometimes say when talking about Sun Potion with folks, think of chemistry, a little bit everyday, a drop of positivity. You start putting in that beneficial frequency and plant material into your body. I would say my experience with the kind of products that you make are certainly very vibrationally beneficial. Although they may be subtle to some people, like with adaptogens for example, the effects might be quite subtle initially but they can become quite profound in the body as that little drip, drip, drip everyday starts to saturate every corner of your being. What I have personally seen in myself is the good starts to shoulder out the things we may have had conflict with in ourselves in the past. There is a sense of relief of not having to push things away from us, or out of our field because they don't have a foothold to cling onto us anymore.
That's exactly my philosophy and the philosophy of Dr. Bach who discovered the remedies, that you don't eradicate negative emotions or bad things, you increase the good whereby the negative can no longer exist. That's kind of the philosophy: you don't fight bad things, you don't suppress negative feelings, you keep flooding yourself with spiritual nourishment and the positive feelings and then that light obliterates the darkness. I've often said that the way I formulate is a different approach. I formulate emotional adaptogens, so it's similar to what you do. I might have formulas that on paper have two very opposite qualities in them because as humans, when we try to find balance we might kind of go in one direction and then overcompensate and go the other way. If you know someone who has trouble in love and they may say, oh I'm too needy, I'm obsessed with this person or I'm too needy so I'm gonna be really aloof and close up, but then that doesn't work so now I'm back. You try to find the middle way by going to these extremes. The flower remedies are meant to help you find the middle way and adapt.
I did (find the middle way), even without having words to articulate my experience with your remedies, quite the way I just heard you say it. You're bringing these formulas for emotional adaptability. I would say that has been my experience and the benefit in having your products in due course for some years. There is a more etheric and subtle emotional, not necessarily affecting the densities of the body but some of the more subtle aspects of the being. For instance, I love the Personal Assistant. It makes me happy and I just feel nice when I take it.
That one is described as a kind of energizer, motivator. It is one of my lighter formulas, it's not for heavy things. But I think it's a very profound one. When I take that I get this unstoppable, whistle-while-you-work, I say yes to everything because I know I can handle it. Whereas sometimes I might be nervous about agreeing, like oh I will not have the energy to take that on. But with it I have more forward motion.
That's certainly how I've felt taking it. Can you give us an introduction to what flower remedies are? There's clearly a history of origin with them from Bach and others. Can you talk about the lineage of your craft?
Yes, I'll start macro and then I'll go micro. Flower essences, also called flower remedies, are basically liquid tinctures. They're not really extracts, that's more of an herbal preparation. You take the essences internally as drops under the tongue. They're made from water that has been imprinted with a healing pattern of a certain flower. We make them by floating blossoms in a bowl of spring water. It is basically water that is imprinted, not an herbal tincture. A lot of people say these have been used since ancient Greece, and maybe in theory they were, but Dr. Bach, an English doctor in the 30s is the one that discovered them. He was a quite well known physician in vaccines and immunology. He was celebrated in his career. He discovered homeopathy during his studies and it totally resonated with his belief about the mind-body connection. He felt that he couldn't offer enough to his patients. He didn't feel he was curing people if they were only healed of their physical ailments but they might still be depressed or anxious. He said that's not a total cure.
There are so many physical ailments that stem back to a spiritual or emotional root or trauma. There's so many different interesting fields of study such as German new medicine for instance, traumas creating scarring on certain parts of the brain. If that emotional trauma is not addressed and cleared, then that scarring will later outpicture as a specific type of ailment. That's one example but it sounds like Bach discovered that for himself as well.
Yes. He also believed that we had given our power over completely to the physician. He would say the body has an ability to heal itself, so human beings should be able to heal themselves and their families. You don't always have to go to someone else. We know the answers within us. So Bach wanted to find a whole system of healing that would put the power back into the individual and be nontoxic and have no side effects and nothing malignant, only beneficial. So he gave up his practice and moved to the countryside and started studying flowers. He decided he would make remedies for personality types first. That was his idea, you have 12 people with arthritis, but they need 12 different remedies depending on their personality and “soul type,” he called it. He was really connected to something else because I don't know how he got these downloads but he just knew which flowers were for what kind of person. He tried them on his patients and they worked. He was healing people of migraines or arthritis, patients with all kinds of chronic illnesses, giving a corresponding flower to their personality type. He found 38 different flower essences and each one corresponds either to a personality type or an emotional condition. You can take them in combination or by themselves. They are really the safest, most gentle medicine you can take. Even for people who are sensitive to herbs or homeopathic medicine, that are too sensitive to that, these are great for them.
