All About Flower Essences: 4,000

Thank you to everyone for helping us get to 4,000 Etsy sales!

Well, this is pretty awesome.

In a Wood Snake Year marked by near-constant start/stop, herky-jerky, serpentine undulations of a most unexpected and unpleasant nature, genuine good news has been hard to come by. Sure, there have been flitters and flutters of positivity and human kindness at the margins (and we’ve been working overtime to try to feature these bits of ephemeral sunlight here on Substack!), but the real deal, tangible good stuff has kind of seemed like an endangered species.

Which is why I’m so pumped to share that we’ve just hit 4,000 sales on our TOTEMReadingsATX Etsy Shop!

While this milestone may not seem like a big deal in a world of big business and scale at all costs, this is truly an incredible blessing for a small Woo-based business operating ethically in an environment marked by maximum material limitation.

It’s particularly incredible considering that I didn’t even initially really want to sell on Etsy.

Why? Well, because I was scared.

I mean, this whole Flower Essence thing started as a hobby during Covid lockdowns in Chicago, originating in an impulse to “touch dirt” and, well, just grow stuff and spend time outside. For the first whole year after making our flowers into tinctures (a suggestion from my husband), I just gave them out as gifts to friends and clients. I didn’t even personally ingest any of them until the second year of growing and making them, when we were already moved into our new home here in Austin, TX.

So, when my friend and client Claire suggested I sell them on Etsy, let’s just say I didn’t really share her vision. Or, at least, I didn’t share it initially.

I mean, I had already started to notice the rise in interpersonal histrionics and unexpected conflagrations in my interactions with the general public, and I was shook at the thought of selling handmade oral tinctures to nameless, faceless folks I had never met— let alone gotten to know or trust!

I mean, these folks would be ingesting these non-FDA approved tinctures with actual plant matter and alcohol in them, all formulated and bottled by my very mortal and very imperfect hand. And then I had to wrap it and ship it in a way where a small, fragile glass stopper bottle filled with liquid didn’t explode into a soggy pile of sharp edges and blood!

Yikes, right?

Coming from a corporate background, the risk mitigation profile of this scenario seemed downright insane in a litigious society lit up with new levels of blame, persecution, deception and incivility, all fueled by the demon of social media and, in particular, the malignancy known as “Yelp” (for the record, I’ve only ever gotten 5-star reviews on Yelp, but this doesn’t make their overall influence weaponizing everyone’s lame-sauce opinion any less nefarious).

But my friend Claire sent me an educational PDF and walked me through how Etsy works, and I took the leap. I mean, I kept making, like, thousands of bottles of this stuff that were lining every wall of my work/ live space. Was I really going to sell them all myself, in-person at my work/ live space?

Of course not.

If my spiritual business, TOTEM, was going to grow, I had to start taking some chances. I had to start putting myself out there. I had to, in effect, trust the efficacy of what I was doing and making enough to be totally vulnerable with it.

Celebrating the small successes

Sure, there have been a handful of difficult people making life on Etsy shitty for no real reason in the two years since I made the leap to online sales, but my overall experience with this trust fall with myself, the universe, and all of you has been overwhelmingly positive.

And there’s a lesson in that.

I could bore you with an overused profundity like, “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take”, or I could just give it to you straight: if you have made something that you believe in and that you think will be of service to humanity, you have an ethical obligation to try to get it into the hands of as many people as possible.

You have this obligation to yourself, to those that will benefit from using your “stuff”, and, frankly speaking, to the world of spirit that likely gifted you with the idea and inspiration in the first place— and will inevitably also benefit from the effects of its use at scale.

By taking the calculated risk to share our TOTEM Flower Essences with the general public, I’ve been able to enjoy a genuine dialogue with other flower essence lovers and recent converts, as well as hear stories about the weird, Woo ways our tinctures have impacted your spiritual practices and daily life. From lucid dreams to contact with deceased relatives to exploding divinatory or psychic capabilities and more, your stories of how our TOTEM Flower Essences have helped you expand make all of the hard work and fear really, really worth it.

In reflecting on today’s 4,000 sales milestone and how far our Etsy shop has come in the few years since launching it, I realized just how important it is to take a moment to celebrate Woo-based business wins— however big or small!

Not only am I overcome with a surge of active gratitude— a tremendous “must have” in this Wood Snake Year— but I’m also fully rooted in and committed to continuing this work as long as I possibly can, regardless of whatever roadblocks or drama may come my way.

And it’s all because of you wonderful people, so please take a moment to thank yourself for shopping small, supporting a Woo-based business, and continuing on your own spiritual journey regardless of how many eye-rolls or passive aggressive comments you get from “the Muggles”.

What’s next?

Our massive experiment, known as the TOTEM Flower Essences, has already given birth to another massive experiment: our TOTEM Flower Essence Deck. And this, in turn, has sparked an interest in Intuitive Herbalism, Plant Medicine Oracle Readings, and democratizing the knowledge of how to garden, grow and formulate these powerful— but gentle— tinctures.

To this end, we’re going to keep spreading the good word and the even better vibes of these high vibrational spiritual tools, starting with some very fun in-person and online Flower Essence-themed events and workshops this summer— stay tuned by checking the Events page of our website HERE for details and new announcements.

We’re also currently running a 50% off sale on our Etsy page, adding a small square card featuring a $50 off promo code for a 1:1 TOTEM Tarot Reading with me to each shipment. If you get one of these cards, you just email me the promo code in the subject line and I send you a special booking link!

And, of course, we’ll be announcing our Review Raffle winners this Friday, June 27th, sharing THREE incredible Grand Prizes and paying these good vibes forward!

In summary:

THANK YOU to everyone that has made a purchase from our Etsy Shop.

THANK YOU to everyone that has made a purchase of our decks on Amazon.

THANK YOU to everyone that has listened to The Skeptical Shaman podcast.

THANK YOU to the lovely people that have undertaken Spiritual Transformation Coaching and Business of Woo Mentoring work with me.

THANK YOU to everyone that has taken the time and made the effort to share a review of our podcast, products or services.

And, most of all, THANK YOU for subscribing to our Substack, reading our posts, and engaging in such a dynamic, life-affirming dialogue in the comments.

Reaching 4,000 Etsy sales is because of you. Recording the podcast is because of you. Me doing this and maintaining TOTEM through challenges times is all because of you.

So, thank you.

Now, go open your own Etsy shop or start your own Woo-based business or, at the very least, do one thing that scares you in a good way today.

I want all of you to have a moment like this, too, so let me know how I can help!

-Rachel