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We discovered the Bee Orchid growing on the massive trunk of a 500 year old Ceiba tree in Costa Rica. A fascinating flower shape that looks like a bee or an embryo looking in the mirror, this tropical orchid helps us see ourselves reflected in another person. It fosters our capacity to be with intense emotions and face things head on. Experiencing a heightened sense of familial love or interconnectedness with others helps us look within and experience steadiness during intensity of emotion. It dissolves overwhelm, discomfort or perceived lack of safety. It helps us learn from each other and cherish growing with one another. Read more here!
Notice the overlaps you have with others. Notice when others want what you want – when their dreams intersect with pieces of your dreams. Notice what you have in common with others as well as the deeper essence under what you have in common.
By being intentional when taking our flower essences, we remind ourselves, our guides and the universe what it is we want to embody. Choose one of the phrases below that most resonates, or make up your own! Every time you take your elixir, close your eyes and set your intention:
To take it one step further, as you take your elixir and set your intention, visualize everyone else in this program, all around the world, feeling light and free. By connecting with others in our group, we exponentially multiply the benefit + ripple effect!
Location: Right up the midline of the inner leg, Spleen 9 sits right at the end of the line, in the depression before you get to the bones of the knee. Watch Erin’s demonstration in the video for the exact location.
Indications: Spleen 9 is the quintessential damp draining point in Chinese medicine. So, the physical representation of it is like a thick wet blanket that specifically kind of lays over the digestive system, though it can seep into many other systems in the body. From a physical perspective, this can be due to poor diet which can tax the spleen and stomach system. As it becomes weak, this kind of dampness ensues and overtakes.
Another thing that can tax the spleen and stomach is excessive worry or overthinking. This taxes the spleen stomach which can result in this kind of dampness to come up.
From a more spiritual perspective, dampness arises when intense emotions or experiences come up that we don't want to face or confront. It's just a little bit easier to hide under the thick, wet blanket of dampness. But this protection is not really protecting us, it's actually preventing us from coming through in our truth and shining in our authentic light.
So rather than hide, we want to try and dissolve any of this barrier to just being with that discomfort. It's not so much about dealing with it but more just sitting with it which is very resonant with the Bee Orchid. Allowing us to dissolve our barriers to experiencing discomfort and emotions as the purification process happens so that we can actually feel that interconnectedness.
Learn more about Erin’s work and book a 1:1 consultation with her here.
What situations are difficult to look at or sit with?
When do I feel like an outsider or that I don’t belong?
What do I want to cherish and protect?
What am I currently learning from others?
Prefer to have a printed journal with the writing prompts?
Download the Bee Orchid Support Guide here.
Write down what you cherish most.
Jot down your 10 most important priorities for the upcoming time period.
Do the above with family/friends and then share a little bit of what you wrote with each other.
Ask reflective questions to your family or friends and really listen.
Do a flower card reading with a friend; pull cards about what you’re learning from each other.
Share with a friend what you’re learning from them and ask them what they learn from you.
I will help you:
Use me when:
So excited to work with the bee orchid. It is by far one of the most interesting flowers in our collection that we have. Visually, it's stunning. I mean, just, like, the looks of it are so strange and odd and weird, and you can see multiple animals and embryos and shapes. It is a really bizarre-looking orchid.
I know that we've been working a lot with Costa Rican orchids, and Costa Rica is one of those places that I believe is the host or the ground that has so many different flowers and plants that help us move through different kinds of deep-seated fears.
And Bee Orchid, it does a couple different things. It expands our capacity for intensity. So that could be the intensity of emotion within ourselves; intensity of emotion within another, and being able to hold a greater container of space – so that someone can experience a greater breadth or depth of intensity in character, emotion, feeling, expansion, craziness, weirdness, wildness, whatever that may be.
Sometimes as human beings, we're afraid of other people's intensity. So if we see somebody, like, doubled over, sobbing in grief, we retract or get stuck. Or if we see someone really angry, raging, on drugs, being really weird, right? So there are all these different types of human experiences that for us feel like it's creating too much ugh-ugh inside of us because of the intensity.
So Bee Orchid expands our capacity for intensity and it also helps us be able to see ourselves in another and also have more of a sense of acute awareness of other's needs, we can anticipate others’ needs.
We know what they need, where it's almost like we can see ourselves in them, see a reflection of ourselves in them. And I'll probably tell more stories as we go along this month in terms of the collection process. But I remember when we found this flower, we had been traveling in some really funky areas and had some pretty scary experiences in Costa Rica. And this, finding this flower, was one of the kind of culmination points of moving out of a fear experience.
And so I would say you can enjoy this month as a month to really open up to experiencing more of life and being fearless about it, and allowing others to experience more of their own expansion and not being afraid of that, being able to sort of fall back into like the trust fall of the universe, right? That you can handle as much as you can handle. And also, feeling a tighter sense of interconnection, feeling more of a sense of community and warmth and family.
You may find yourself this month really feeling more drawn to being around people that have your back, that you trust, that feeling of family, and really deepening into that sense of connection and interconnection. The awareness orchid, the awareness orchid? Ooh.
The awareness anchor for this month would be to notice each time that you notice something about someone else. Notice when that sort of wisdom, that self-arising wisdom, shows you something new or fresh about someone else, and in a way that makes you feel more connected to them.
And the question for this week would be:
When does intensity scare you? Intensity of emotion, experience, wildness, weirdness, your own stuff, someone else's stuff. When does that become scary?
And can we allow our systems to relax and loosen enough to open up to a wider version of capacity? And also this month, you may wanna pair the Bee Orchid Elixir with the Luscious Embodiment Anointing Oil because that will also help us really open up to the kind of wild and free and able to withstand feeling.
I can't remember if I have shared this story in depth before. But right before we found the Bee Orchid, Taylor and I were traveling in Costa Rica and so many different things happened. The short story, not to go on and on, but a friend of ours told us about this really cool place that was sustainable; where you could stay there, you could work. Just a phenomenal experience.
And somewhere in the weird cables of communication crossings either I misinterpreted the information or the name or something, we actually did not go to the place that our friend recommended, we went to this other place that somehow popped up on the map. So, but we didn't know that at the time, right? We're driving out to this place to stay for the night and we rented a car and the whole way out there was kind of creepy and scary and we would stop to do these recordings which we should dig out and share with you because they're pretty great. Of insects at night and then we had a couple of weird experiences where we were afraid of either people or ghosts or entities; or weird stuff that we could hear wild animals, I'm not sure.
We probably actually have that on tape, but so we end up at this place, right? It has these beautiful cabins and it was kind of jungly. We end up there in the black darkness of night because even though they say not to drive at night we typically end up driving at night because we do all our best work during the day, right? Collecting flowers and sunshine and then we drive at night.
So we get to this place and first of all, it just kind of feels different and funky and then we get on the golf cart and the guy who's helping us with our luggage starts telling us the story of how a week or two ago he saw a jaguar. A jaguar, walking through the, you know right here walking through the grass and that just seemed kind of interesting and eerie and normally you know, wild animals don't want to bother humans, but the whole kind of vibe just seemed interesting and strange.
So then we get to our room, there's a giant bug, Taylor freaks out and we have to take care of that. It's kind of like this wooden cabin with screen windows, right? It's really warm and Costa Rica anyway, we're really tired. So we just kinda have a weird dinner, kinda wonder about our surroundings, think it'll be better in the morning, go to bed and then we wake up in the middle of the night and we hear all these weird sounds. I still don't know what it is still kind of creeps me out of just thinking about it. If it was people, it had to have been, I dunno what it was, it was either people or entities 'cause I don't think we'd feel that way if there were animals.
There was stuff crunching around out there and we didn't feel safe and there was no cell phone connection, no wifi, no satellite, no nothing. We had zero way of communicating with the outside world. No one knew where we were actually. I don't think we gave the address or the name of the place to anyone back at home, family. So we were kind of, I realized like we were in sort of a pretty precarious situation like anything could have happened to us and no one would know. We could just disappear.
Needless to say the next day we took a little walk around and everything just seemed creepy, creepy, creepy, creepy, creepy, creepy, creepy, creepy. I'm sure Taylor would tell this story in a better way than I would, I'm not the best storyteller actually but the sense of this place was like something was off.
So we had planned on staying there several nights and we just left and they wouldn't even give us a refund, it was like they were all grumpy and crunchy and cranky about it and we were just like, we're going leave the money and run because this place is not safe. We're not safe here, right? Like I don't know, we couldn't imagine sleeping another night in that cabin and what? Somebody comes up with a machete? I don't know, it just seemed...erghhh.
So we didn't feel safe and then we moved on to another place where we sat in some hot springs and had some time to think. We stayed in this really awful little hotel that was freezing cold and however we were safe.
And then we're finally able to call home and well we called my teacher and then we got a pretty harsh scolding. And I remember he said so many interesting things that night and gave us a really specific instruction about being aware of our surroundings. And, you know, he was saying things like every time you go to a coffee shop look around and notice who is in that coffee shop with you and then the next place you go, maybe you're getting gas, do you see any of the people that you saw in the coffee shop? Are any of the faces similar, you know like in a sense, like, is anybody following you? And then he kind of like went off about, you know, abduction and trafficking and how common it was and how naive we were and it just kind of like, totally took us aback right?
I mean, I'm telling you these stories because you're the insiders and you know people will think like, oh, I'm going to collect flowers, it's so like lovely and wonderful and it is, but there are these situations, I think that lend themselves to understanding a flower better, I mean, that's how I see it, is these situations that we find ourselves in, where we suddenly feel not safe.
So part of what Bee Orchid Elixir is doing inside of us in terms of patterns and our cellular makeup is helping us understand where we can have more awareness and more clarity of what's actually happening around us, but at the same time being able to have an understanding of when we are safe and not safe and right?
That could have so many different meanings today in society, whether that's, you know walking into the parking lot at night by yourself or whether that's am I safe to speak my mind? Am I safe to tell the truth? Am I safe to tell someone that I love how I really feel? Or, you know, am I safe to explore my creativity?
Whatever it is for you, I would say the theme for this week is noticing safety.
When do you feel safe? When do you feel not safe?
And just observing what effect does taking this elixir do in your consciousness, in your awareness around this concept of safety.
So when we actually made it out of this weird situations that we were in and while we were on our way to a different part of the country. We were just going down this road and saw this sign for a 500 year old tree, and I was like, "pull off." Right like how cool, 500 year old tree, I wonder what it looks like. And it was like literally like a piece of wood, you know half like crooked and handwritten, 500 year old tree.
So we went to check it out and it was this long hill that we had to walk up and the howler monkeys were roaring and we get to the top and it's this incredible enormous tree which many of you have probably seen. Actually, it's the Ceiba tree, I think this is actually the same tree. This table is from the same tree that we found the Bee Orchid on. It's you can't even, you know put 10 of us in our arms around and maybe be able to hit, like go around the whole perimeter of the tree.
And this orchid was growing inside the tree. It was insane. The weirdest, wildest thing I've ever seen.
Collected the flower, had a conversation with a woman out there about snakes, you know, poisonous snakes and how did they let their children just sort of like play outside, knowing that in the, you know, dry leaves and stuff that there could be really poisonous snakes. She just basically said "We don't let them play in dry leaves", very commonsensical. But I thought, wow, that adds like this whole other element of watching your kids, you know, that you have to get used to speaking of safety.
So we collected this flower and then I'm pretty sure all of our, I can't remember if I had the materials or not, but we wanted to come back down the hill and so we had the bowl of flowers came all the way back down this long hill down to where the car was and I think maybe we had the, 'Oh, maybe we'll find some other wild orchids'. And we saw some incredible wild orchids but there was too much jungly brash and we would've had to risk finding snakes. So we just let it go. And then we just let the bowl infuse with the flower essence and waited, and I took my notes.
And then like, suddenly it's like that feeling when your hair stands up on your back like you're being watched, you know, and you're looking around, no one here, but the hairs on your back and you feel like you're being watched and both Taylor and I were like, okay, that's time, time to go. That's just like such an odd phenomenon, right? Not, you know, not typical necessarily but also very indicative of some of the elements of these crazy flowers that we find in Costa Rica and what they can help us with on the inside. So we burned out of there.
And after, you know, wrapped everything up and we went on our way and we ended up, you know, doing that same, like follow just sort of follow where your heart wants to go, 'Oh handwritten sign, 500 year old tree. Stop'. And then we saw another handwritten sign in a town that we came to, was like 'Chocolate Kombucha' and something else like, yeah, let's go there.
So we ended up walking into this cute little store that had all these amazing, you know, organic, natural, health food type things and tons of different forms of dark chocolate and this substance that the fellow who was running the store called like the local crack or something it was just like the most divine chocolate experience.
And so this fellow who ran the store was a total sweetheart and we befriended him, his name was Christian. And he took us out into the back of his shop where he had a garden and he was growing medicinal herbs. And he let us smell things and taste things. He made a Coca leaf tea for us. And he showed us this whole sort of like apothecary in his backyard of medicinal plants that are native to Costa Rica that we'd never heard some of the names of even before.
So that was a beautiful experience. And we ended up just like, you know, press record because he was telling us so many amazing things. We shot a video, we turned it into a podcast and we'll link that for you so you can check it out. And later Christian told us he shared with us a long time after that, that he had been having this really rough time personally, and was, you know, just feeling really conflicted and like really doubting himself and just like super like bottom of the barrel miserable, like, 'what am I doing'? And then we showed up and then we sat down and we had this wonderful conversation and it's like his whole kind of life and perspective changed and turned around.
And I would say, you know something similar for us in the sense that we just came out of this like weird deep jungle, 'Are we gonna survive or be abducted in the middle of nowhere,' kind of feeling to like, wow somebody who totally understands us, who's totally on the same page who is native to Costa Rica. But like we could be brothers. We're so compatible and aligned on the same page, spiritually, energetically, mentally, emotionally, healing wise, everything.
So it was this sort of beautiful juxtaposition of eughh and then, wow, 'How amazing', like in a place where you simultaneously feel like something really bad could happen to you but also then meeting someone, you know who just appears miraculously, like, I'm sure he feels like we appeared like miracles in his life like out of nowhere off the street, and we were like instant sisters. And we felt the same way about him, just like an instant brother. And so really being able to like see yourself and the other person in that way.
So that's where the Bee Orchid comes in of this kind of being open to moving through experiences that have discomfort and really just continuing to follow what pulls you and allowing that to lead you to the next experience in which you may find the connection with someone or be able to find yourself reflected in them or find a kindred spirit or not feel so lonely or see someone that's in your life already but see sort of a new side of them or a new way that you can connect.
So the question for this week is:
What are you noticing that's slightly fresh or unique about your connections with others?
Which relationships are surprising you?
And which experiences with other human beings are surprising you or are fresh in some way?
