When I started working on the fifth Treehaus Talisman Spray in spring 2021, I had no idea how much I would come to need it for myself later.
I had wanted to make a spray for the times, the days, when I feel broken hearted. Not romantically, but just broken hearted and lonely. Or disconnected. Or even worse, hopeless. Pema Chödrön has described this feeling as ‘the genuine heart of sadness’.
“Bodhichitta is our heart — our wounded, softened heart. Now, if you look for that soft heart that we guard so carefully — if you decide that you’re going to do a scientific exploration under the microscope and try to find that heart — you won’t find it. You can look, but all you’ll find is some kind of tenderness. There isn’t anything that you can cut out and put under the microscope. There isn’t anything that you can dissect or grasp. The more you look, the more you find just a feeling of tenderness tinged with some kind of sadness. This sadness is not about somebody mistreating us. This is inherent sadness, unconditioned sadness. It is part of our birthright, a family heirloom. It’s been called the genuine heart of sadness.”
– PEMA CHÖDRÖN, Start Where You Are
So if the genuine heart of sadness is our birthright, it doesn’t need fixing, right?
In fact, none of our so called negative feelings need fixing.
But sometimes they need soothing. Mine did.
When I started working on this, I couldn’t have known that I would be experiencing some of the deepest grief of my own life just a few months later. And while grieving temporarily put a stop to all things creative, as it tends to do, I at least had several prototypes of Anahata already done, and I was able to test on myself, at my lowest, which ones worked for me, what they needed more or less of, and how to use them.
So when I started to come out of my creative slump, I had something meaningful and to work on, and that, along with time, and allowing grief to occur without taking hold, also helped bring me back to life.
As always with these products, it’s my hope that they can help someone else, as they have helped me and my little circle of loyal customers.
