The humble heart of radical acceptance.
I made a fresh batch of rhododendron flower essence this past week and its medicine shone as the humble heart of radical acceptance. Acceptance of one’s self. Acceptance of one another. And acceptance that we are bound in the human experience, meant to depend on one another to thrive.
Rhododendron is the humble heart of radical acceptance.
It has the heart essence of rose quartz with a deeper message of communion. Life is not meant to be lived alone but danced together. Love and life are meant to be shared on a deep level to truly experience the light of our existence.
Replicating the heart of the Divine Mother, rhododendron radiates self-acceptance, self-love, unconditional love, and compassion. This does not mean we accept hate and violence from others in naivety, or that we judge it with arrogance. This means we see beyond what is most visible and hold the knowing, energetically in our core that every heart is pure at its center so those around us can see this in themselves.
Unconditional love and compassion do not come without boundaries, and boundaries in their purest form, do not come without unconditional love and compassion.
Knowing how to protect ourselves and hold our boundaries while keeping our hearts open is rhododendron’s wisdom.
We can expand our hearts outward, and inward as a healthy protective mechanism whether we are shielding ourselves from aggressive or chaotic energy, or dancing between introversion and extroversion. We can expand our hearts outward, and inward as we witness the tender and atrocious moments of the world around us. We must both grieve what breaks us, and melt into what touches us and gives us hope. Our ability to expand and contract our hearts without hardening the walls is an art.
Our hearts can calcify when we try and project outwardly or overly protect inwardly instead of being humbled by the tedious process of accepting, facing, and unearthing the truth of our feelings and letting them move through us. Our hearts can calcify through our various self-protective mechanisms when we push away with spite, distrust, arrogance, and pessimism. Fear, grief, and unprocessed pain can be disguised by all of these things. And so can simply forgetting that no matter how different we all see and move through the world, in our cores, we are not that different and our hearts function quite the same.
We are all learning how to let love in, and how to let it shine out.
When we live in fear and distrust, and when we hang on to our stories and shortcomings, we alienate ourselves breeding loneliness, and breeding a cynical belief of isolation that can swallow us whole.
It's true. Nobody has ever experienced the world as we have. Nobody else knows our pain. We can use this as an excuse to shut people out and say we’re protecting ourselves or that nobody understands, or we can claim this as the beauty of communion, compassion, and unconditional love - knowing our individual experiences are the keys to unlocking this universe as a whole, and that we need one another to get as far as we can.
We’re mirrors of one another. We are each a piece that makes a whole. We have wisdom, medicine, insight, and experience that others need. And the medicine we need that is beyond our knowing, lives in those around us.
If the walls of our hearts are hardened, no one else can get in, and our light can’t find a way to shine out. We are dependent on one another. We need one another. Our life force thrives on hearts bound.
We’ve all been hurt, we’ve all been betrayed, abandoned, and deceived. We have the choice to choose trust and use this to build courage, discernment, and strength.
If we could humble our hearts and find radical acceptance for ourselves, and for all, the world would be a different place.
If you’d like to work with rhododendron flower essence directly, know that rhododendron is in the Heart Chakra, Awakening Woman, Virgin, and Lover Flower Essence Blends. You can order any of these, or rhododendron on its own through “Single Blends” and state what you want if you don’t want the full sets they are each in.
In the Heart Chakra Blend, rhododendron is mixed with a combination of flowers to also target moving grief, amplifying our feelings of self-love, tenderizing our hearts to feel more profoundly, and awakening our confidence to shine our light brightly.
The Awakening Woman Blend, it’s mixed with a combination of flowers to awaken us to where we have been oppressing ourselves, violating our own boundaries, embodying the victim, and living in our past with our hearts shut to the world. It’s a blend to awaken us to how we are perpetuating our own suffering and is the first blend in a series of three that go together.
As far as the Archetype Blends, even though rhododendron emanates the heart of the Divine Mother, it is instead in the Virgin and Lover Archetype Blends because the Virgin is the initiation into Mother, while the Lover is the Archetype of relationships which are dependent on our courage to trust and commune.
When the flowers are put into essence blends they infuse the mix with different angles of their medicine to bring out whatever healing is needed most in the collaboration with the other flowers. They also meet the individual taking the medicine where they are at. Targeting what is most needed. Finding the roots to begin the untangling of the past, beliefs, and wounds that have imprinted in the depths of them holding them back from freedom.
Even though rhododendron may not awaken the juicy, luscious, flirtatious, or sexy side of our feminine energy directly, the heart is always at the center. It’s the roots of that energy unfurling. The more frivolous energy we often crave is dependent on us tending the tender depths within us.
If we can't radically accept ourselves, if we can’t radically accept those we love, and if we cant radically accept that we cannot do it all ourselves, the juicy side of life can never truly awaken in its full form.
Our hearts and wombs are bound.
With love,
Abby
