For all their color and beauty, flower essences have no smell. When I say, “I’m a flower essence practitioner,” people often respond, “Oh, an aromatherapist.” It’s easy to assume that flower essences are the same as essential oils, which, like most flowers, have a...
What does it mean to live with reverence? What does it take? Watching Kishore paint gave me the words I was searching for. Living with reverence is having the courage to follow the call of your soul. Listening to Kishore talk about his work, it’s easy to be touched...
The big day arrived…the opening of Kishore’s solo exhibition. His parents would not be able to visit. He wanted my mother and an older artist he had invited to light the ceremonial lamp to inaugurate the exhibition. I called my mother. I felt overwhelmed by the weight...
I left the world of finance and academia and entered the woo-woo world of flower essences. This was an abrupt and dramatic shift. I felt like an outcast on both sides of the great divide. Stripped of a title, without a clearly defined job, I struggled to explain what...
I teach high school children leadership and I didn’t feel that I could teach my kids to “Lift Someone Up” if I couldn’t do that myself. I decided therefore, that I would help Kishore sell a few of his paintings- -just enough to help him stand on his own two feet so he...
A few years after she met him at the gallery, Kishore came to my mother asking for financial help to pay for the brochures and gallery costs for his first solo show. My mother called me, like she did the time before. Then, she had bought his big painting for me. Now,...
It was not rush hour, yet the streets were packed with cars and drivers shuttling the women of the house to work, shopping and the clubs. My mother would jostle with the drivers for parking, maneuvering her little red car into an impossibly tight parking space. It had...
According to the dictionary, reverence is a feeling of awe, wonder, and respect. When I first discovered this word, I asked myself, do you feel this way about your life? Do you sense that your life is amazing, miraculous? Are you filled with wonder? I had to answer,...
Are you worrying about the people you love? Consumed by fear and anxiety? Many of us are in desperate need of techniques to reduce anxiety. The coronavirus outbreak has brought our subconscious fears bubbling to the surface, which is compounded by the loss of our...
It is normal, and right, to be grieving in this moment. We grieve for the normalcy we’ve lost, the friends and family we cannot see, the horrors we hear and read about on the news and our social media feeds. Grief during quarantine is normal but knowing that doesn’t...