Testing Puya Essence
After recently launching our new Puya Alpestris flower essence, some people have been asking how we discover what a new flower essence does so we thought we’d share our process with you.
Testing new essences requires a combination of observation, intuition and inner sensing, and it works well in a group because each person brings different insights, understandings and perspectives to the process.
Some information about how an essence works is conveyed when you first make the Mother Tincture essence, some is experienced through your inner senses after taking a few drops in a meditative space, some becomes apparent as you work with the essence over a longer period of weeks or months, and some comes through asking for guidance on what the essence is for.
Observing the Plant Provides Clues About Its Spiritual Qualities
As essence makers we follow in the footsteps of Dr Bach and the ancient alchemists before him by observing how the plant grows and what that might tell us about how its energy impacts on ours. We notice the flower’s colour, shape and size, and we observe the plant itself – its habitat, growth pattern, how it interacts with its environment and other plants. What does the plant’s personality seem like?
Puya alpestris is native to the Andes where it grows at high altitude. The puya plant our essence was made from took 8 years to get established before it sent up its first flower spike, so it’s interesting to note that the energy in the plant was building on an inner level before it expressed the beauty of its blooms for the first time.
The flowers grow on a tall upright central spike and are an unusual metallic turquoise blue colour with orange stamens. These are no shrinking violets!
Puya has strong, vibrant energy. If you compare this plant to the wafty energy of Dr Bach’s Clematis which helps to balance daydreamy ungrounded tendencies, Puya is very direct and upright, centred and sure of its direction. The plant stands tall and straight, and the flowers are very striking – there’s nothing soft, gentle or undefined in its physical expression.
The metallic turquoise/blue flowers with orange stamens evoke the colours of the throat and sacral chakras which are associated with communication, balanced emotions, and creative expression.
These observations all help to build a picture of the personality of the plant itself and hint at its spiritual qualities. Observing these snapshots about the plant’s personality is like noticing the initial impressions we get about a person’s personality when we’re getting to know them.
Meeting The Spirit of the Plant Through Your Heart
When you make an essence, you don’t use any physical parts of the plant, so you’re working with the spiritual essence of the plant itself rather than its physical components. Because you are working on this spiritual level, scientific methods for testing chemical constituents are not applicable. Testing an essence is a subtle art that requires an intuitive connection with the spirit of the plant and your own Higher Self.
Everyone has an innate ability to communicate with plant spirits, but we don’t always remember that our connection is there. When we test a new essence, we connect with the plant from the quiet sacred space within us so we can hear the plant’s messages at that level of heart perception.
Connecting with the Spirit of Puya as a Group
We set aside a time to gather as a group with the intention of connecting with the spirit of Puya to learn what the essence is for.
We created a meditative space and silently tuned into our hearts to feel our inner connection to ourselves. It’s essential to know how you are feeling in yourself before you introduce an essence into your energy field. This enables you to recognise the difference between your current state and the changes you feel after taking the essence. Essences open doorways to higher consciousness as the spirit of the plant begins to interact with us, so having a clear understanding of how you were feeling before you took the essence provides information about the impact of the essence itself.
Everyone took 4 drops of Mother Tincture essence on their tongue and sat quietly to meditate. When enough time had passed to have a clear sense of how the essence was working within each of our energy fields, we took turns to talk about our experiences. The relational field that opens between people and plant in this type of intentional space is rich with information, so taking an essence in a group gives you access to a wide range of experiences, insights, and perspectives.
We talked about the physical sensations, emotional perspectives, mental insights, and spiritual understandings we had each received during the process of meditating with the essence. There were many overlapping themes in how we experienced Puya. It’s as though each person has one piece of the jigsaw so when you join all the pieces of the jigsaw together, the picture of the essence emerges.
Deepening the Connection over Time
Everyone then took a bottle home so we could continue taking Puya for the rest of the month and each explore our individual journeys with the essence. When you take an essence over time, it filters through your energy field reaching into all the places where it resonates so that subtle shifts and deeper transformation can take place. This personal connection with an essence can be very profound because new understandings and insights arise through your interaction with the essence that tell you more about yourself on a soul level.
Communication with Your Higher Self
There is another level involved in testing an essence because, as you connect more deeply with it, you receive clear information from your Higher Self about how the essence works in the wider sense. Part of the process of determining how an essence works comes from consciously entering the quiet space inside yourself to ask your Higher Self for guidance about the essence.
Alongside your personal experiential understanding of how the essence impacts on you (the subjective level), you receive information that is separate from that (the objective level). This type of inner knowing has a particular quality of clarity and you know that the information you’ve received goes beyond the personal into the collective.
Expressing the Essence of Puya in Words
After we had gathered everyone’s feedback from working with the essence over time, it was time to write the description of Puya for the website. We took the essence during the writing process, pulled out the recurring significant themes from everyone’s experiences, and asked the spirit of Puya to tell us how it would like its essence to be expressed in the description.
If you’re taking Puya essence we’d love to hear what you’re experiencing since that helps us to build an even more complete picture of how the essence works for different people. Let us know in the comments below.
Here’s what some people have said about how taking Puya essence has impacted them:
‘It felt as if I had been pulled in; pulled right into my centre so that I was all there. I felt completely connected to myself instead of feeling scattered. My awareness became very focused and even though I felt really grounded I also felt expansive above and around my head.’
‘Things that would normally irritate me didn’t bother me in the slightest. I was aware of them but they didn’t affect me at all. I felt very present with everything, noticing things I hadn’t noticed before like the sounds and movements of leaves and insects. I noticed I was walking bolt upright, mindful and more aware of myself and everything around me. A real heightened awareness and it brought my focus in. I felt really calm, like I could pretty much handle anything.’
‘I felt deeply rooted, it was very grounding. I felt that it was pulling everything together to achieve balance, clear thinking and order therefore enabling a better connection both physically and spiritually. No judgement, complete acceptance.’
‘It’s become the essence I go to if I want to get something done; if I want focus and connection to get things finished.’
‘As soon as I took it I felt physically very present and heat began to rise up my spine into my head. I felt a surge of energy as though I’d been plugged into a cosmic power source! I saw myself in the sky above Machu Picchu surrounded by geometric stargates. I was being shown that Puya was opening the connection to my multi-dimensional self to experience the vastness of who I really am. I felt fully connected to my true spiritual nature and physical body at the same time.’
‘My experience was that I was being pulled right in, drawn into my centre. My awareness was really sharpened and I had a sense of being very much more connected to myself. It had the effect of drawing my focus in so my focus was inside myself, all the channels were open and spiritual information could be drawn in. I use it whenever I’m feeling a bit scattered.’
‘I was surprised at how much I felt in my body, it was very physical. I felt grounded and rooted but also felt like I was sitting up tall with my spine aligned. It was warm around my head and I could feel a lot going on in my head. I had a sense of being in my power in a really grounded way. Unnecessary noise faded away and I was in touch with what’s important.’
‘When I took it, I instantly sat up really tall, feeling very connected to the ground.’
Now, over 6 months after Puya essence first came into our lives we are happy to be able to share it with you. It’s an essence that we all love taking because we feel very aligned, connected, balanced and expansive while working with it. Puya essence is the perfect ally for expanding our consciousness and activating our true spiritual purpose at this time of great transformation.
Read more about Puya essence and buy yours here:
Shop – Puya Flower Essence
Essence Range: Single Flower Essences
Adult How to Use: Four drops on the tongue 3 – 4 x a day… Full How to Use
Essence Type: Single Flower Essence | Stock Level
All of our Flower & Vibrational Essences are handmade with love and care.
Jackie Stewart has been using Crystal Herbs essences for 25 years and trained as a Flower and Vibrational Essence Practitioner in 1999. She joined the Crystal Herbs team in 2019 and is passionate about how essences help us open our hearts to co-create a world that thrives on Love.