Meet Siddha Flower Essences

“What’s important in your life? This is dealing with things on a different level. All of these are relating to different kinds of stress, where does that stress show up in your life? Digestion? Skin? The adult [Siddha] line has good coverage on where the stress is gonna manifest, so it’s up to the person.” – Stan Deland

What on earth is this Stan guy talking about?

In one of my most favorite interviews ever, I talked flower essences with former Marine captain Stan Deland. My first, painfully stereotypical, question was: the armed forces and flowers?

“Once you come back from being in combat, you have gone through this big thing, so who is gonna really tell me what I can and can’t do? I survived that; it was liberating,” says Stan, founder of Siddha Flower Essences (siddhaflowers.com) and U.S. Marine corps veteran who served two tours in Iraq.

“When I returned from Iraq, I’d been overseas 18 months out of the previous 36″—he first served as an infantry Platoon Commander who led 60 Marines from Kuwait to Baghdad during the initial invasion of Iraq; he returned as second in command of an Infantry Company of 260 Marines for the November 2004 assault through Fallujah. “I wasn’t expecting or looking for it, but when I started doing this [homeopathic] stuff, it resonated with me … I was off the reservation a little bit towards the end there. The last two years, I was down in Coronado, around guys making my smoothies and toasting my Ezekial bread and eating vegetarian.”

“But being over in Iraq, you’re around a lot of heavy metals. All the rounds we fired—as a company we fired 800 main round gun rounds—think of the off-gassing of depleted uranium on each one … good for me to do all that cleansing. I didn’t know why I was doing it, I just did it.”

While he got his start in homeopathy, Stan’s Siddha Flower Essences company is focused on flower essences. Why? “The thing with homeopathy is that likes cure like. Think of a flu shot: a little bit of the flu inoculates against flu. But with flower essences, they’re flowers. There’s no real negative; you’re getting the apex of that species.”

“Siddha is a Sanskrit term, a form of medicine that predates Ayurveda. Like old school alchemy.”

Siddha offers two general remedies: Stress Relief and Emotional Detox, delivered by spray to the mouth. There are also other focused remedies (Sleep is a best-seller, Throat can help people having trouble expressing their truth, and Lungs can help people with grief they’re holding), and sprays for kids and pets too (all at siddhaflowers.com). His Rx? “Start with Stress Relief, Emotional Detox, and one other … do one of a specific one for a week or month. Not all at once, you don’t want to try to do all at once!” Each bottle is $21.95.

Stan says, “You’re trying to compress time and space, with these, you’re asking your body to pay attention. With pharmaceuticals, you’re saying, ‘don’t pay attention to that area, it’s painful, let’s numb it out.’ Whereas with these remedies, you’re telling yourself, ‘mobilize resources to pay attention to that aspect of being.’ It’s about awareness or consciousness, it might be happening in a unconscious way, but maybe we can do this better or differently.”

“We’re providing opportunities for more awareness and with that comes greater responsibility. At some point, with these remedies, there’s going to be some thing you have to change yourself through will, in your life.”

“It takes 33 days for the mind to cycle, 6 months for energy to cycle, and 7 years—and this is corroborated by western medicine—for every cell in the physical body to renew itself. So with this stuff, dealing on the mental aspect, you’ve cycled through the mind.”

“I felt completely unburdened afterwards. Things had shifted, layers had been peeled away. That’s how it started for me.”

Stan gave me some essences to try, so I’ll report back in a few weeks. #dirtyhippieceleb