Essential Power Of Flowers
Carlson grows flowers to use for his essences | Coco Zickos photos
Ken Carlson
Owner, Starmen Unlimited
Please tell us about your business. I make flower essences from flowers on Kaua’i.
What are flower essences? Flower essences were first discovered in the 1930s by a man named Dr. Edward Bach in England. It is isolating the energy of the flowers themselves in water and then taking it under your tongue orally, like home-opathy.
What do the flower essences do for people? Each flower or each plant has a different quality. Most flowers have some benefit to people, and the benefit is not physical for healing ulcers or broken bones, but it’s to undo the cellular memory of all our patterns of contraction and pain, etc., that we build up and forget and becomes part of us.
What is an example of what a particular flower can do? Plumeria, for example, is to clear old family memory and to align a person back to their family ancestry. The lotus flower, as another example, has all the greatest qualities of healing, spiritually and physically, and it’s just a lovely essence. I like to have lotus flower essences, but I also have dandelions and a lot of different weeds, because for what I do, flowers don’t have to be pretty and smell nice. Flowering weeds have different qualities, too.
How does it work? Someone who has stress, for example, can pick up a bottle of “Less Stress,” which is a combination of orchid, dahlia, hau, woodrose and dandelion. You take a few drops, preferably under your tongue. The usual dosage is four or five drops at a time. For reducing stress, you would take it a number of times during the day, especially when you feel anxiety.
How do you make flower essences? Most flower essence practitioners fill a crystal bowl with the heads of the flowers of whatever plant it is that’s being made and leave it out in the sun all day. The water becomes the tincture that the drops are made from.
How did you come up with your business name? The way flower essences are made is with the sun. It’s our star. You can’t make the flower essences without the sun. And so this is just a cute way of reflecting that this is the energy vibration of flowers that has been processed by our sun.
How did you start this business? I was an environmental lawyer in California prior to moving to Kaua’i in 1986, and I was already taking flower essences for many years on the Mainland. I practiced law for another four or five years after I moved, representing Native Hawaiian issues and environmental issues. And then it just got clear, as I started working with the land here, I started becoming more and more attuned to nature like everybody does here and I just took it another level and started a new business.
Why did you start this business? It’s an ability that I didn’t used to have – to become aware of the resonance of plants and then, after time, the resonance of people. The thing I do most, here in my office in Kilauea, is match my essences with some 2,000 other essences from around the Earth to the person for whatever it is they are dealing with at the time. People visit from around the world and I make special formulas for them.
Where do you sell your products? I sell them through my website, star-men.com, as well as health food stores around the island such as Papaya’s Natural Foods, Vim ‘N Vigor, The Market at Common Ground and On the Road to Hanalei.
What is the most rewarding aspect of your business? There are many levels of rewarding aspects. On one level, I sell essences like “Less Stress” and other ones like “Go to Sleep” that help people. Then, when I work with people individually, I get to really help them eliminate the most problematic, old stuff that they have, which really frees a person to be more themselves and be more authentically who they are, and so that’s personally the most rewarding for me.
How soon can a person see changes when using flower essences? It could be right away to some level, but over time, the changes will become more pronounced.
How do you collect the flowers? I have 100 flower essences and some of them are from the mountains in Kokee. So sometimes I go up there with my bowls and spend the day making flowers essences in the sun in Kokee. Usually, if I need to make a flower essence, I either have it growing on my property in my garden or I plant it for that purpose. I only take a little bit of the flowers and I don’t harm the plants.
What makes you get up every day and do this? This is what I do. I’m really good at this. I’ve just followed a path of becoming better and better at attuning to flowers.
