Dr. Ani Kalayjian Awarded FES Certification
for Her Worldwide Humanitarian Social Service
We are pleased to announce that the Flower Essence Society has awarded Dr. Ani Kalayjian a Practitioner Certificate as part of the
FES program for Independent Study and Humanitarian Social Service.
We wish to recognize Dr. Kalayjian for her international humanitarian outreach, including flower essence therapy as a vital component of her approach.
In addition to the FES Certification requiring in-depth model case studies with individual clients, the Flower Essence Society
also recognizes those practitioners who document flower essence therapy in social service projects for their communities, or as volunteers for such projects anywhere in the world. These social healing initiatives are characterized by working broadly in a community or group setting, demonstrating and documenting the efficacy of flower essences across a particular spectrum of healing issues.
In documenting her work, Dr. Kalayjian presented a detailed study entitled “Transforming Suffering through Flower Power: Post-Trauma Healing in the Republic of Armenia”. Read the full study, which is also summarized later in this article.
Dr. Ani Kalayjian, PhD is a psychologist and world-renowned educator in natural therapies for healing traumatic stress, including the use of flower essence therapy.
Dr. Kalayjian was born in Syria to a family of Armenian descent. She came to the United States with her family at the age of sixteen. Dr. Kalayjian has trained widely in a number of healing specialties.
The following is a list of her extensive credentials:
- • Fellow, New York Academy of Medicine
- • Fellow, The American Psychological Association
- • Fellow, Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues
- • Ambassador, Psi Chi Honor Society for Psychologists
- • Adj. Professor of Psychology, Teachers College, Columbia University
- • President, Association for Trauma Outreach and Prevention
- • ATOP Meaningful World Representative to United Nations Department of Global Communications (DGC)
- • Received highest medal of honor, Columbia University 2025
- • Certified: EMDR, EFT, Red Cross, Crisis Intervention, Flower Essence Practitioner
Dr. Kalayjian's own experience of overcoming generational trauma,as well as religious, gender, and ethnic discrimination led her to develop programs for healing trauma. These programs form the basis for the work of her organization, the Association for Trauma Outreach and Prevention (ATOP), also known as Meaningful World.
Dr. Kalayjian’s Seven-Step Integrative Healing Model
In Forget Me Not: 7 Steps for Healing Our Body, Mind, Spirit and Mother Earth Dr. Kalayjian describes how her own experiences in overcoming trauma led her to develop a seven-step program for psycho-emotional trauma healing. This program forms the basis for professional training during ATOP social outreach missions, and is anchored in the development of emotional self-awareness and literacy.
The seven steps, as described in the book, are as follows:
1. Identify and Assess Your Feelings
2. Express and Release Your Feelings
3. Empathy and Validation
4. Encourage Discovery and Expression of Positive Meaning
5. Provide and Gather Information
6. Connecting with Mother Earth
7. Healing Through Breath and Movement
The Soulʼs Need to Forgive: A Seminal Meeting with Viktor Frankl
Dr. Kalayjian describes forgiveness as a key to her Seven Step Integrative Healing Program. This was a lesson that she learned directly from Viktor Frankl, Holocaust survivor and founder of logotherapy, whom she met when he was 85 years old in 1990, as described in her Forget Me Not book.
Dr. Frankl recounted his devastating experience of surviving the Holocaust, in which he lost all his family members. Dr. Kalayjian asked him how she should handle the anger and sadness of the survivors of the Armenian genocide, including grievous losses within her own family tree. He explained, much to her surprise, “You have to help them forgive.” After their discussion, she had a profound realization that staying angry was only harming her own well-being and that forgiveness is essential to self-healing.
Dr. Kalayjian acknowledges that forgiveness is challenging for those who have suffered real injustice, and for those who deny the injustice. Forgiveness is not forgetting; it is not victim-blaming; it is not denial of injustice. Forgiving brings peace to the person who forgives.
Dr. Kalayjian went on to study Frankl’s logotherapy (healing through meaning) and has made meaning-making central to her trauma healing mission.
“Everything can be taken from a person but one last thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
—Viktor Frankl,
Man’s Search for Meaning
Man’s Search for Meaning
Meaningful World motto:
When one helps another, BOTH become stronger.
Global Outreach for Trauma Healing Emphasizing Training and Education
Since their first trauma outreach in 1988, following two devastating Armenian earthquakes, Dr. Ani Kalayjian and her colleagues have instituted more than 100 programs in approximately 50 countries on five continents, including disaster relief efforts in about two dozen states in the United States. She is a representative to United Nations Department of Global Communications, and her organization works closely with UN agencies for many of their outreach projects.
The goal of the relief work of Dr. Kalayjian and her team is to empower the local population to use tools for emotional self-care and trauma healing after their team has left. Their relief missions emphasize the training of local health professionals and relief workers as well as direct communication to the affected populations through radio, television, and social media.
For an illustrated catalogue of the many missions of ATOP/Meaningful World, please see her book, A Journey of Empowerment, Healing, and Transformation.
The following examples give an overview of three ATOP/Meaningful World programs in Haiti, Puerto Rico and Armenia.
Humanitarian Mission to Puerto Rico After Hurricane Maria
After devastation from the monster Hurricane Maria left Puerto Ricans in physical and emotional trauma, ATOP/Meaningful World organized a relief effort. Their report describes the mission’s goals as “to promote emotional healing and well-being with the focus on the Seven-Step Integrative Healing Model and flower essences and essential oils, to assess the level of trauma as well as forgiveness and meaning-making, to offer supportive and integrative interventions, to train professionals in the Seven-Step Integrative Healing Model, to help create a sense of empowerment and a sense of personal control,
to transform horizontal violence* and
to establish Peace and Forgiveness Gardens for reflection and healing.
To supplement these goals, we also purchased plants of rosemary and palm trees that are native to Puerto Rico.”
*Editor's note: Also known as lateral violence, horizontal violence is defined as internalizing the aggression of a perpetrator and displacing it onto others.
The relief team worked extensively with local stakeholders: “Police department, Minister of Education, Health, and Social Welfare, shopping malls, Scouts, schools, teachers, hospitals, morgues, Department of Housing, women’s shelter for domestic abuse, FEMA, Red Cross, churches, orphanages, and communities without homes.”
ATOP/Meaningful World reported conducting “eighteen workshops, three radio and two TV interviews and distributed ten luggage bags of donations. The program impacted 750 people directly, and 25,000 indirectly. It reached 300,000+ through radio, two million through TV, and an additional 15,000 through social media posts twice a day.”
Training in flower essence therapy was also conducted in Puerto Rico. Flower essences donated by FES for the Puerto Rico mission included Fear-Less, Post-Trauma Stabilizer, Five-Flower Formula, Star of Bethlehem, Mustard and White Chestnut.
Humanitarian Mission to Haiti
Dr. Kalayjian training Haitian teachers in mindfulness techniques at the Children’s Academy in Haiti
Dr. Kalayjian teaches the director of an orphanage in Haiti how to administer flower essences to the young girls in his care
Training at the Maision des Enfants (Children’s House) orphanage in Haiti
Dr. Kalayjian on Radio/TV Métropole, Port-au-Prince, Haiti
Flower essences donated for the Haiti mission included Fear-Less, Post-Trauma Stabilizer, Five-Flower Formula, Flora-Sleep, Illumine, Leading Light, Star of Bethlehem, Mustard and White Chestnut. A few immediate reactions were reported by participants in the training. (Longer term cases are difficult to collect given the short timeframe of the visits). One of the participants reported feeling calmer and more peaceful after taking flower essence of Post-Trauma Stabilizer and Fear-Less. Another participant reported that she was “very depressed and couldn’t stop crying.” She was given Illumine flower formula, and at the end of the day she too was feeling much better.
Generational Trauma Healing in Armenia
Read Dr. Kalayjianʼs full report on trauma healing in Armenia.
The trauma of the Armenian people began over a century ago with the World War One genocide by the Ottoman Turks and continues to this day with the conflict and ethnic cleansing in the conflict with Azerbaijan. ATOP/Meaningful World has made more than two dozen trips to Armenia to train local health professionals in healing from trauma, including in the use of flower essences.
The following are the four major issues and some of the flower essences used to address them, as described in Dr. Kalayjian’s Armenia report: intergenerational trauma, forgiveness, meaning-making and post-trauma growth.
1. Intergenerational trauma, including the relived trauma of the genocide by descendants of the survivors.
Mustard
for creating peace within, by working on thegenerational depression and a darkened soul force
Star of Bethlehem
for grieving the massive losses and comforting all sorrows.It offers a warm, soothing, and cozy blanket to those grieving, or
feeling loss and sadness, especially long-term generational losses
Honeysuckle
for letting go and helping to place past traumatic memories inperspective, especially for those who are feeling homesick, as
two-thirds of historical Armenia is currently occupied by Turkey
2. Forgiveness is a key to healing emotional wounds, yet it is challenging to avoid self-blame and victimhood
Forget-Me-Not
to engender and nurture a spirit that endures
Willow
to transform feelings of bitterness, resentment, defeat,and the tendency to blame others and self.
3. Meaning-making is an essential part of post-trauma recovery. Support from religion, family, community, and professional counseling to find meaning in life facilitates a healthy response to the post-trauma chaos.
Grounding Green
to help feel and recognize living qualities of the earth
Post-Trauma Stabilizer
to address the trauma symptoms and shock;to rebuild and recover
Fear-Less
to address any remaining fear, panic and terror4. Post-traumatic growth is the positive change that occurs following a traumatic event. It follows a typical process that requires acceptance of the trauma and the willingness to move past it.
Roots TerrAnoint oil works on clarifying our life force, strengthening lower chakras, receiving vitality from the earth, and channeling it upward.
Flower Essence Study Participant Testimonials
161 participants took part in this study. Here is a sample of their comments:
I cannot believe a few sprays in my mouth would bring me so much peace.
I tried Fear-Less. I was going for an interview and I was extremely anxious. After spraying two sprays in my mouth, I went through my interview and got the job. It was like a miracle.
I used the Fear-Less and the Post-Trauma Stabilizer, and my nightmares of the war stopped haunting me.
My child was crying for a long time. I gave him a few drops of the Mustard, and he almost immediately quieted down and fell asleep.
Star of Bethlehem helped me a lot to grieve for my only son being killed in the 44-day war.
Conflict with Azerbaijan Triggers More Generational Trauma in Armenia
Dr. Kalayjian led another relief trip to Armenia in the fall of 2023, after five years of conflict with Azerbaijan culminated in what was widely considered to be a campaign of ethnic cleansing in the region of Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh).
Dr. Kalayjian reported that “Illumine really helped me in preparation for the trip to Armenia. It was emotionally difficult for me as I was hearing stories of how the refugees were suffering. I heard from one woman who said, ‘We are nineteen people in two rooms, three to four families together.’ It was mostly women, children, and elderly survivors, as most of the men had been killed. I was taking sprays many times during the day, at times with Post-Trauma Stabilizer.”
“During and after the trip to Armenia I continued to use AncesTree Align and Illumine. These formulas helped me stay afloat, engaged, but not out of control in sadness and anger.”
On arriving in Armenia, Dr. Kalayjian heard from refugees who had been subject to the bombing of their homes, who escaped with only the clothes on their backs, often on foot because there was no petrol (gasoline) available. They had untreated wounds because of lack of medical care, electricity and other necessities of life due to the attack and subsequent invasion by Azerbaijan. “We had to retreat to our cars from time to time and cry, the suffering we were meeting was so intense.”
ATOP/Meaningful World conducted workshops for the refugees and introduced the flower essence formulas. Two of the most important were the Grief Relief and AncesTree Align. Many of the women explained how three generations of men had been killed by the ethnic conflicts between Armenians and Azeris. They had fled in September with only what they could carry. Now that it was getting cold and damp, they were kept alive by donations of blankets and winter clothing.
Armenian refugees from Artsakh
The refugees reported that taking the flower essence formulas helped them cope with their stress. “I sleep better. I am not having nightmares. It is giving me peace of mind.” They had felt abandoned by the world. Thus, the relief packages from ATOP/Meaningful World and FES were a welcome gesture of support.
Dr Kalayjian teaching psychology students about flower essences at Yerevan State University in Armenia.
Margo Sargsyan is a certified psychologist who graduated with honors from Yerevan State University in Armenia, with an MA in Personality Psychology and Counseling, and who works in collaboration with ATOP/Meaningful World. Listen to her report on the use of FES formulas by her mother and herself.
During a return trip to Armenia in the spring of 2024, Dr. Kalayjian and Margo Sargsyan were invited to present their research at Yerevan State University, as well as working with many non-government organizations who assist the displaced population from Artsakh.
Testimonials from the Armenia Trip
A refugee from Artsakh wrote on Facebook, “I received such positive energy meeting you and working with you. The oils and flower essences you gave helped me tremendously. Since the war I have been getting anxiety attacks, and as soon as I felt the symptoms, I picked up your lavender oil and rubbed it as you directed, then sprayed the flower essence of Peace & Justice,* and I slept so soundly for the first time. May God bless you always.”
One twelve-year-old in Armenia had bleeding cuticles from nail-biting. She continued to use the flower essences Post-Trauma Stabilizer, Fear-Less and Peace & Justice.*. She no longer bit her nails and cuticles and she became more outgoing and started to play sports.
*Editor’s note: Peace & Justice is a custom formula made for ATOP/Meaningful World, which is used for processing anger, resentment, helplessness and dependence.
Contact information for Dr. Ani Kalayjian
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