In Conversation is a companion series to In This Body the Podcast, offering shorter, slower moments drawn from the wider well of dialogue. These are distilled encounters with thinkers and feelers whose work lives at the intersection of embodiment, sexuality, creativity, and spirit. Each episode invites you into a more intimate pace—thirty minutes of attunement, reflection, and quiet inquiry into the ways the body remembers, responds, and reclaims. Paired with gentle journal prompts, these offerings are an invitation to not just listen, but to feel what stirs within your very own body.
Heidi Smith
Heidi Smith, MA, RH (AHG), is a psychosomatic therapist, registered herbalist, flower essence practitioner, and the author of The Bloom Book and The Uncommon Book of Prayer. Within her private practice, Heidi specializes in supporting survivors of complex trauma (C-PTSD) and narcissistic abuse. She enjoys working collaboratively with her clients to empower greater balance, actualization, and soul-level healing within themselves. She is passionate about engaging both the spiritual and scientific dimensions of the plant kingdom, and sees plant medicine and ritual as radical ways to promote individual, collective, and planetary healing. She lives in Brooklyn, NY, with her partner and two cats.
For more, visit moonandbloom.com.
The Conversation
In this conversation with Heidi Smith, she shares how flower essences and ritual can become a bridge back to the body when trauma has made it feel like an unsafe place. How working with plants isn’t just a protocol, but a relationship—an intimate reciprocity with the spirit of something older, steadier, and wiser than we are. And how language itself—prayer, mantra, intention—can be a tender architecture for building trust inside ourselves again. This episode reminded us that healing doesn’t have to be forceful or grand
Sometimes it begins with the smallest agreement: that we are willing to stay, willing to feel, willing to open—one drop, one word, one breath at a time.
Highlights
00:44 – A bridge between the Western and the mystical
Heidi shares how discovering flower essences felt like a revelation that could unite clinical training with ancient wisdom.04:20 – Plants as teachers of presence
A reflection on how plants, free of ego, model what it means to simply be—and how their vibrational medicine invites us to do the same.07:07 – Creating safety in the body
A detailed example of how angelica and cerato essences help build trust and containment for survivors of complex trauma.15:51 – Plant consciousness and the chakras
A poetic mapping of flowers to the energetic centers of the body, from lotus at the crown to redwood at the root.
Embody the Material
Questions to sit with:
Where in your body do you feel the old patterns of dissociation or self-abandonment most strongly? What happens if you simply notice without trying to change them?
What does it mean to you to be in a reciprocal relationship with something beyond yourself—a plant, a practice, a place?
Recall a moment when you felt an intuitive “yes.” What conditions made it possible to trust that knowing?
If you were to create a simple ritual to mark your own commitment to presence, what would it look like? What support might you invite in—seen or unseen?
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