Life & Work with Nicteha Cohen

Today we’d like to introduce you to Nicteha Cohen.

Hi Nicteha, we’re thrilled to have a chance to learn your story today. So, before we get into specifics, maybe you can briefly walk us through how you got to where you are today.
Well, like any good story, it’s hard to pinpoint where it began. In truth, the origins may lie with my hippy entrepreneurial parents when they decided to give birth to their first child, me, in a hammock in Yucatan, Mexico.  True story! A native Mayan midwife, who helped my freaked-out mother through the process, gave me my name, Nicteha, which translates as Flower of the Water.  Akin to a lotus, my name (which most people assume I chose myself after some sort of spiritual experience) has somehow guided my very meandering life path but always stayed true to the theme of turning the muck into something of beauty.

In my adult life, I’ve been a professional chef, a florist, an artist, and a part-time interior designer. I’ve planned weddings, trained in hospice, and am certified in Feng Shui. I have a degree in Environmental Studies and have tinkered with botany, biology, anthropology, and etymology. I taught kindergarten, ran my own sewing school for kids, and was an outdoor educator for inner-city children. I’ve studied dance, stone carving, yoga, and herbalism.  I was a tour guide for 4 years traveling to the ends of the earth. And then I got Lyme disease and spent an entire decade homebound, bedbound, while the life I’d known slipped through my fingers.

The gypsy life came to an abrupt end when I got sick in 2007, and while it was the hardest, grittiest, most painful thing I’d ever known, it was the grit that began to carve my life into something more simple, more meaningful, and more authentic. For years it felt like one loss after another – losing the chance to have children, losing my ability to work, travel, and even drive. I lost my independence and often felt that I was losing my mind; but all of what I do today was birthed during that tumultuous time. Somehow all the disparate things I’d studied, worked as and explored in my earlier life distilled during my years of illness and found their way into new forms.

After years of training and practice, I now have several facets to my work.  And because I am endlessly curious and interested in just about everything, I’m always adding more pieces!  My work is multifaceted: Cranio-Sacral Therapy,  the Foxflower Botanical product line, and classes for kids and adults.

Early on in my Lyme journey, I discovered Cranio-Sacral Therapy and a variety of somatic trauma resolution therapies. I worked with them in-depth and ended up becoming certified in Biodynamic Cranio-Sacral Therapy in 2016. In conjunction with a number of other modalities, I now have a private practice, specializing in working with people with chronic illness and early childhood trauma. With the wonders of technology, I am now able to offer this both in person and online! I integrate my botanical products into my sessions, particularly my flower essences, which I have found to be beautifully supportive for my clients.

My decades of working with kids have coalesced into leading groups for girls ages 7-12. Using nature and the seasons as a guide, we explore the outer world and our inner worlds, learning ways to love and care for ourselves and each other. We make herbal medicines and skin care, we do a lot of art, we play in the forests, and harvest from the garden. It’s truly one of the most fulfilling parts of my life to spend time with these young gals, still so attuned to the magic of life.

And lastly, I have an organic botanical product line, which includes skin care, tinctures, and flower essences. I began my product line in 2019 while camping in Southern Utah. I’d been playing around with making products for years. I had a closet full of tinctures and salves, infused oils, and dried herbs, and I loved giving them as gifts or selling them along with my other arts and crafts at holiday fairs. But I’d never really thought of making a business of it. But for a couple of years, when camping (which I do a lot) I’d been getting a message… It went something like this:

“Make things from this land. Make things with plants from the places you love best. Only from the plants you know best. Collect with the seasons. Specific moments in time, in particular places, hold meaning, vitality, and potency.”

By the third time I heard the message while climbing the reddened rocks in Utah, I decided to play with it. My first collection came entirely from that Utah trip: Piñon resin salve, Sage flower essence, and Wild rosehip oil. The essence of that place and time was infused in every aspect of my creation, and all of it was informed directly from the plants and the land which I harvested.  It became the first Foxflower Botanical Collection.

The collection sold out, and I was stunned. I decided to do a winter collection next from my home in Crestone, Colorado. I’ve continued to make a new collection every season, waiting to be directed by the plants to know what would be included. Each season I’ve chosen bottles, boxes, and labels that would represent the beauty most sincerely. My line has changed some over the last couple of years and I now focus primarily on my Wild Rose Skin Care collection and my unique line of Flower Essences, but I still love to make tinctures, salves, and teas too. I’d love it if you check out my Etsy shop! The products are now being carried in Boulder, Santa Fe, Sedona, and Crestone.

Although I do a number of different things, they are all spokes on the wheel from my primary mission – to heal with beauty and creativity, restore the intimate connection with the natural world, and re-discover our wholeness.

I’m sure you wouldn’t say it’s been obstacle free, but so far would you say the journey has been a fairly smooth road?
I wonder if anyone you’ve interviewed has ever said, “Yes, it’s been a smooth road.” I’d be so curious to meet that person! I’d say my road has been curving, rutted, bumpy, diverging, steep, and sparkling.

Coming from a challenging childhood, dealing with ongoing and severe health challenges, being wired for depression, and having an overabundance of ideas each calling for my attention, have all been part of the journey. And in truth, there have been many moments of nearly giving up. There have been a lot of slates wiped clean when I didn’t expect it or choose it. But when I turn and look back from my vantage point now, I begin to see the preciousness of each of the twists and turns – of each of the sharp losses, of each of the “missed opportunities”. Now I see how all of this was part of the tapestry of my life, valuable for the thread and texture that weaves it all together. And it truly has been from the muck that beauty has emerged. The very thing that seemed like it would destroy me, being sick for over a decade, gave me new life.

Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
What I feel sets me apart is that I have truly lived through what I endeavor to bring forth. I didn’t just take a class and then rewrite it to teach others. I have experienced illness and recovery so when I do a session with someone it comes from my lived experience. This helps me to truly know, feel and have compassion for my clients. When I work with plants, it’s sourced from a lifelong curiosity and commitment to the land, and to the plants themselves. I’m not simply formulating something with herbs I bought online (no offense to those that do this, that’s awesome too), but my products reflect a deep enduring relationship. I truly want to be as authentic, transparent, and compassionate as I can possibly be.

As a Cranio-sacral practitioner, herbalist, and mentor to children, I reflect a lot on the concept of healing. The idea of healing in our culture is linear.  And many people seem to hold an unconscious deadline or time frame in which healing is meant to occur.  If it is outside of this, one often feels they have failed, or the practitioners supporting them have failed.

In my perspective, healing is not a verb but rather a change of state. There is a common assumption that if you are sick, or ailing, you are broken and that healing is ‘fixing the problem’. I see it more as we may have become fractured, and parts of us have been separated, or appear that way, yet the actual process needed is “whole-ing”. Resting in a state of wholeness has no direction or time connected to it. And one can rest in wholeness regardless of physical or emotional symptoms.

Plants can help us more easily rest in wholeness, which is ever present and penetrates everything all the time. Cranio-sacral therapy which works directly with regulating the nervous system and is rooted in the premise that we all have access to inherent health and wholeness supports this type of “whole-ing”. No being is ever separated from wholeness, we only forget. For me, one of the greatest bridges to remembering the natural state is Beauty: noticing the ever-unfurling beauty of the natural world. Feeling the beauty through our senses and imagination. Beauty is a reliable and consistent quality of the natural world.

Plants, trees, and flowers in particular, are direct portals to re-connect us to beauty, and beauty automatically shifts our systems into wholeness, even if you don’t notice it; your body, heart, and spirit change their subtle geometry and song when beauty is noticed.

What I feel sets my botanical products apart from many of the ones you can find commercially is the fact that I am committed to wild gathering or growing 99% of the ingredients I use. I have personal relationships with each of the plants I include in my formulas and spend long periods of time with each plant in its native environment. I pay close attention to the season and the energetics of the land, the individual plant as well as the community it lives within. I wait until I feel I have been invited to harvest, and take small amounts with a lot of awe and thanks. I use both my intellectual studies of herbs and my intuition to decide how to formulate, so each time I make something it is unique and alive. And when I make the medicines, I do my best to stay present in my heart and soul, resting in the silence and enormity of the plant’s intelligence.  I only use organic high-quality oils and alcohols and use distilled local spring water.

My intention is to make simple but whole medicines that catalyze our being to return to wholeness. By sparking the senses and invoking beauty, through this ongoing courtship of plants and elements, my hope is that their living spirit can be felt by whoever uses them.

Another aspect of the deepest importance to me is evoking the interior beauty and qualities of the plant, and expressing that in how it is packaged. I feel the experience of opening a carefully curated box filled with living botanicals, careful branding, handmade artwork, and an infusion of wishes, is an aspect of Foxflower Studio Botanicals not seen in many other places. My focus and efforts towards translating the beauty I experience with the plants are inseparable from the experience of using the products themselves. It is not the most time or cost-efficient approach, but I can do it no other way.

Each season I spend time drawing some of the plants I am closely working with. The act of drawing a plant is an intimate one. It automatically slows me down and makes me focus on both the details and the wholeness of the plant. It feels like a mutual gift to spend this time finding a way to represent the visual quality of the plant and also its personality. I use different drawings each season. They are not just a representation. They are visual poems, illustrated directly from the plant, through my eyes and hands.

The name “Foxflower Studio” emerged years ago, while in a dark night of the soul, but I didn’t know what it was. But over the years it has become a weaving of various interests and offerings: botanical products, flower essences, Craniosacral Therapy, visual arts, and creative classes for kids and adults. All of these spokes are held together by the purpose at the center: Healing With Beauty.

What quality or characteristic do you feel is most important to your success?
I would say it is Devotion to the truth. The truth of life, of myself, of how it all works. This involves trusting my intuition, and trusting the natural world and how I feel it communicates with me.

Even when it feels like I am a bit crazy, or it all sounds New Agey, when I trust the communication from Life, and don’t try to work it out from my mental constructs or from a motivation to fit into the mainstream, or make a bunch of money; then something of meaning and uniqueness tends to happen. And that’s how I would define success for myself: to live a life that feels full of meaning and beauty, connection with the natural world, and creativity.

Pricing:

• Products $20-75
• Sessions $120-225

Contact Info:

• Website: www.foxflowerstudio.com
• Instagram: @foxflowerstudio
• Facebook: foxflowerstudio
• Other: https://www.etsy.com/shop/FOXFLOWERSTUDIO

Image Credits
Nick Keefer