Allergy Relief

Aloha Everyone,

Today I want to talk about my latest experiment for allergy relief. I happen to be allergic to many things which is in some ways unfortunate and in other ways a great gift. I see my allergies as a gift because they have been the greatest teachers and motivators in my life always keeping me on my toes searching for healing and relief. I have to say allergies are what brought me to my path of herbalism and apothecary practices. So, as uncomfortable as allergy suffering can be, there are some great benefits like exploring the world of plants and herbal remedies!

My latest experimenting consists of an herbal infusion made of:
3 parts nettle
3 parts peppermint
2 parts elderflower
1/2 part marshmallow root
1/4 part licorice root.

The part refers to the relationship between the amounts of each ingredient. In my case the part I am using is a tablespoon (so 3 tablespoons of nettle, 3 of mint, 2 tablespoons of elderflower, etc.). If you wanted to make a smaller amount your part could be a teaspoon.

I put the mixture into a quart canning jar and fill it full of boiling water. Be sure to do this slowly to allow the jar to warm up. Too much hot water too fast into a cold jar can cause it to crack or break. I am letting it steep from 4-8 hours. This makes the blend be strong, nourishing and something I drink over the course of the day. But, you could also mix up a batch and just use 1-2 tsp steeped in a cup of boiling water for a nice cup of tea that can bring you some relief from allergy symptoms.

Let's take a look at the purpose of each ingredient in this blend.

Nettle - Urtica dioica - Nettle contains natural antihistamines and anti-inflammatories that open up constricted bronchial and nasal passages. Its beneficial affects on allergies may be due its ability to reduce the amount of histamine the body produces in response to an allergen. In general nettle is used as a cleansing and detoxifying herb. It promotes the elimination of waste and toxins in the body through increased urination. It is also high in calcium, magnesium, iron, potassium, zinc, Vitamin B's and A. It contains niacin, vitamin C, D and K.

Peppermint - Mentha piperita - The high menthol content of peppermint helps to open up the respiratory passageways, and relieve congestion making breathing a bit easier. It also tastes good which makes it a useful addition to many tea blends. Mint is rich in Vitamins A and C and also contains small amounts of minerals such as manganese, copper, iron, potassium and calcium.

Elderflower - Sambucus nigra - Elderflower is mildly relaxing and has anti catarrhal properties which help the body get rid of excess phlegm. It is also anti-inflammatory and promotes the elimination of toxins from the body through increasing perspiration. This makes elderflower useful for nasal congestion, throat inflammation and bronchial conditions. It is high in vitamin C and flavonoids and is useful for colds and winter chills. The flowers tone the mucus membranes increasing their resistance to infection. It is suggested that elderflower infusions can decrease the severity of hayfever attacks especially when taken for some months prior to hayfever season.

Marshmallow root - Althea offcinalis - Marshmallow protects and soothes the mucus membranes which line the respiratory, digestive and urinary systems. It is soothing and and decreases inflammation of the mucus membranes helping to expel phlegm and relax the bronchial tubes. It helps with dry coughs and bronchial congestion.

Licorice root - Glycyrrhiza glabra - Licorice reduces inflammation and supports the adrenal glands. It acts as an expectorant, getting rid of phlegm and mucus from the respiratory tract. Substances in this herb are able to enhance the body's production of cortisol, a hormone that decreases inflammation. In Chinese medicine, licorice is said to replenish vital energy, moisten the lungs, strengthen the digestion and modulate the effects of other herbs. It is also very sweet so use it sparingly to sweeten tea blends.*Licorice can raise blood pressure if taken in large doses for long periods of time.

Results:
Lately, I have been experiencing some pretty drastic allergic reactions. I'm not sure what I'm reacting to but my eyes are very itchy, my nose is stuffy off and on, my lungs feel tight and constricted and I am experiencing hives off and on during the day. So I thought it would be a good time to test out this allergy tea blend. As I said above I am drinking a quart of strong infusion over the course of the day. And I have been doing this off and on for a couple of weeks now.

What I am finding is that my eyes stop itching usually within about 10 minutes. My lungs open up immediately and breathing becomes easier. My nose opens up also within about 10 minutes and often hives and rashes calm down quickly. All of this lasts for several hours. When I notice the symptoms coming on again I drink another cup of the tea. I'm mostly drinking it cold because I've let it infuse for such a long time but I'm sure a cup made with 1-2 teaspoons of the hot tea would work well for most minor symptoms.

Try it yourself and let us know what happens!

Aloha!

Sources:

James Duke, The Green Pharmacy Herbal Handbook (2000)

Andrew Chevallier, Encyclopedia of Medicinal Plants (1996)

Bigger Visions

Greensong, as a business was created out of desire to offer healthy natural skin care products to people using local, organic and fair trade ingredients at prices everyone could afford. The foundational idea was that it would be nice for all of us to be able to take care of ourselves in the best way possible, regardless of our income, with the added benefit of also supporting others to live in healthy and environmentally beneficial ways by doing so. While I love, and believe fully in, this foundational idea making and selling body products is not the end of the story for me. For me, learning and sharing about the relationship between our health and the health of the local and global environment is where the heart of the matter lies.

Greensong's products have always been created in response to people's requests for specific things for their spas and healing centers or by customers who came to my tables at various craft shows. In this way I think of Greensong as a grassroots, community based, slow food, slow money, thinking global and acting local activity. This is important to me as I see Greensong as a response to the global challenges that face us applied at a local level in an open and flexible way.

Continuing on this path of responding to what is asked for has taken me deeper into these various ideas over the last year. Many people have asked me to show them how to make herbal products so I began to offer classes here on Kauai over the winter. I spent most of the summer at the Findhorn Community living, working, engaging with people from all over the world and eventually presenting a week long workshop there called Herbal Allies.

I have noticed in my life that teaching always provides me with the greatest opportunities to learn. In preparing for these classes I delved deeply into the relationship between humans' health and their environment and I have come to the point where I see no separation between them. My view is that we humans cannot be healthy if the environments around us are not healthy and vice versa. Our bodies are the environment. We are exchanging minerals, air and water with everything around us all the time. These things flow in and out of us continuously. And, if they are contaminated and unhealthy than we are contaminated and unhealthy, if they stop we die. It's really as simple as that.

Other things I have learned in these explorations are that environmental degradation can be reversed by planting plants and trees. Water can be cleaned by plants. Pollution can be cleaned by plants and fungi. Climate changes can be mediated by planting trees. Deserts can become full of life and water using permaculture practices. And, problems of hunger, disease, drought, poverty, violence and warfare all arise in places where plant diversity has been reduced and all the trees have been cut down.

While I love developing and making all of the products, I feel like there is something more requesting my attention. I want to make these connections between health and the environment more clear and obvious to people. I want to make the concept that as we heal ourselves we heal our planet part of our common sense. I want to support people in taking responsibility for maintaining their health by engaging in an active and harmonious relationships with Nature and each other. I want Greensong to be a vehicle for these things.

So, changes are afoot. In this moment I have a bigger vision for Greensong. I've been studying lately with David Crow of Floracopeia and many of the teachers that work with him. I like very much his ideas of plant based, local, affordable community health care and replanting the global garden. I love William Siff's and Goldthread Farm's farm to farmacy program and herbal apothecary CSA. I love the way Floracopeia and Mountain Rose support small producers all over the world to grow more plants to make the medicinal essential oils often giving life to families and communities in the process. I love the way Organic India is spreading Tulsi around the world and in the process giving farmers in India new and vibrant lives where suicide had seemed their only option. And I love the way Geoff Lawton is greening the desert doing what seems impossible but is really rather cost effective and simple.

Many wonderful and amazing things are going on all around the world every day. It leaves me breathless and smiling. I'm not exactly sure what role Greensong will play in all of this but I do know that I intend step deeper into being part of the solution and shaping the changes that are happening.

Life at Findhorn

I have been here at Findhorn for 3 weeks now. It has been a pure joy in many ways and then, of course, my stuff (patterns and issues) has been coming up which is not always so pleasant. One of my patterns is getting too busy. I try very hard to leave space in my day and in my life. Space for spontaneity, space for my thoughts, space for others, space for connection to the Divine and Nature which to me are one and the same.

When I first came here many years ago I remember thinking I was coming to a monastery sort of place where I thought I would be free to spend much of my time in prayer and contemplation and connection to Source. While that is certainly possible here, it is only possible if you are on a workshop or can learn to be connected to the Divine as you are doing everything else. In many ways this is the core of "work is love in action," and "hearing the small still voice within." It is being able to be connected and still enough within to hear the voice and feel the connection so that all one's actions come from this source.

The longer I am here the more my pattern of busyness, with the loud obnoxious, voice of "gotta get things done," fills my time and presses me. It is also a pattern of this place as everyone who lives here is often very busy and stressed. There is so much to do, so many people to hold, meals to be cooked, rooms to be cleaned, huge gardens to be tended. It seems hard to keep space within in the midst of so many people and things that need doing, hard to find quiet enough to hear the voice. So the question for me is how do I give Nature/ Spirit the value and space as an equal part of my life along with all the busy things of making money to live and taking care of all the physical things? How do we as members of the community give Nature/Spirit a voice and equal seat at the table? How do we structure our lives and organizations with Nature and the spiritual as a valued member? How do as humans in the collective of humanity live as if the living systems that support us and make this planet inhabitable for us really mattered?

There are some interesting efforts being made around the world to do just this. One that I am aware of is in Ecuador where the people have worked to include Nature in their constitution as a being with rights. In the US, corporations have legal rights as individuals without the accountability and responsibilities, they have also been given more rights than individuals now in some ways. So recognizing Nature as a being and valuing it by giving it rights seems a logical and good and important move to me. I would like to see this be the case in all countries - a recognition that our environment is of value as more than a commodity to be exploited. That it is actually a living participant in all of our lives can not be denied or neglected. As the oil continues to hemorrhage the life blood of our economy into the ocean that is the source of life it seems a good opportunity to take pause, to stop and reflect upon where our drive for progress is progressing us to? What is our constant drive for economic growth growing us into? As we damage and foul our oceans, air, water, soil where will all the animals go, how will plants continue to grow, what will feed us, what will we drink, what will we breathe, will we construct a biosphere bubble to live in? What are we doing as a species? What have we become? Is this what we want? Are the corporations who rule the world creating a world that we want to be living in, or even one that we are even able to live in?

As my pattern of filling my life with busyness fills my hours I forget about all of this. I get frustrated, irritated, and have no time to interact or connect with others. But then, I am at Findhorn. There are guests and sharings that happen. I hear the voice of a guest who says, "thank you for giving me permission to stop and connect and hear the voice of Nature." And I remember what I am doing here, and what I value. Then I get an e-mail from a friend who says take a look at Eileen's guidance for today and I know that I am connected and that I can indeed hear if I only take the time to listen . . . .

Daily Guidance
from Eileen Caddy's book Opening Doors Within

Tuesday 29th June 2010

Be not over burdened by all that has to be done. Simply learn to take one step at a time and know that each step leads you one step nearer the goal. Do not try to run before you can walk, or undertake something that is too much for you, so that you have to drag yourself along, with every step an effort. Doing so is not the right attitude; it is not being filled with My joy and freedom. It means you are trying to do it on your own strength; it means that you have separated yourself from Me and have lost the vision. Stop what you are doing, and then change your whole attitude. Hand it all over to Me, and then relax and enjoy what you are doing in a completely new way. Change of attitude can come in the twinkling of an eye, so change and change quickly, and dance and sing through this day hand in hand with Me.

Arthurs Seat

These are pictures from Arthur's Seat which is an extinct volcano located on one side of town. In some of the photos you will see parts of the city through sort of saddles in the hills. All the yellow on the hillside is the gorse in full bloom. It is such a rich beautiful yellow and smells strongly of coconut and apricot. There is also a picture of Holyrood Palace which is where the Queen stays when she comes to town and some lads enjoying a game of football on a lovely sunny day.






I had these in order but the blogger program doesn't seem to care. So sorry about the willy nillyness of the photos. Hopefully by next post I'll have it worked out better.

Next stop Findhorn.

Edinburgh #2

Next is a picture of a beautiful Iris blooming in her front garden and of Lulu her rescued greyhound who has been a gentle companion on many of my wanderings about Arthur's Seat and town.

Edingburgh Scotland 2010

Aloha from Edinburgh.
I arrived a few days ago and have been having a wonderful time wandering about, eating great food and enjoying the company of Jeanne my mother in law, and her dog Lulu. At left is a picture of the front of her house which is in a tucked away little lane in the midst of Edinburgh. On the right is her front gate which I think is lovely.

The only way I can see to do this is to make several separate posts because I can't seem to upload the pictures in the context of my words. It always wants to put them up top at the beginning. If anyone knows a better way to do this please let me know.

Walking with Ghosts

I find myself currently in a place I once was long ago. I am visiting a friend who lives in Ashland, Oregon where I also used to live off and on when I was first on my own. It was a pivotal time as it is for all of us when we first leave home to try on life on our own terms. I bonded deeply here with a few friends who have been my intimate companions through the many inconstancies of life. I look at us now, two old friends who have been through many trials and tribulations within and between ourselves and I look out the window remembering how things felt then, when we were 19 and 20.

When I walk these streets I see both what is here now and how it was then. I feel both how I am now and how I was then. It is like walking beside a ghost of myself, two dimensions overlaying each other. I can feel the feelings so clearly of what I hoped for myself and the world at that point of beginning. I had such deep passion and intense longing to right the injustices and to facilitate humans' connection to the world of Nature.

I can say from my position now, some 33 years later that nothing has changed and everything has changed. I still have the same passions and longings though the intensity has receded somewhat. In the youthful times the incredible awareness of potential and possibility lit my days in brightness stoked by an urgency to stave off the disasters that lay dormant in unsustainable choices and misused political power. Today I have more experience and a broader vision of the world, of humanity, the universe and of my own place in the spectrum. I have a much better sense of my own strengths, weaknesses and what is possible for me in this lifetime. I have been through both the light of my potential and the darkness of my fear's and have finally come to a place peace with it all.

Ironically, or perhaps incredibly, I feel like I am now come to a place very similar to where I was in those youthful days long ago filled with the magic of inspiration and passion about how beautiful this world can be. After traveling the long journey through the ills of politics, economics, environmental disaster after disaster, of lives tried and changed, loves found and loves lost, fortunes sought and re-evaluated, I have finally come out the other side where I can once again see the best in things. When I look out at these hills that once so enchanted me and see the magnificent beauty of the spring bloom of color and texture in plant, tree and flower I am once again touched by that sense of magic and possibility. I once again feel like we can't have come this far, in an evolutionary sense, only to destroy ourselves and take a good portion of the other beings with us. I believe now, as I did then, that true transformation of humanity and the planet is happening.

What I was seeking then is happening now, it just took much longer than I had expected. And I didn't end up playing the role I imagined I would play which is very likely what made it so hard to see along the way. I suppose what I see now is that is was always happening it just didn't look like what I thought it would so I didn't recognize it. That is the biggest difference between then and now, besides the fact I no longer have the body of a 19 or 20 yr old, but now I understand that things happen slowly, subtly over time, day by day. When change happens like this in such small increments it is very hard to see it. I also know now that it is the subtle changes within me that make the world around me appear differently.

Ultimately, the role I have played is not as grand or important as I had imagined it would be, at least not as measured by standard social measures. The role has shown itself to be that I follow my own conscience and my own heart. This path has led me to the learnings and changes I have made within my self and that have eventually brought me to this place where I can once again feel the existence of the magnificence of what humanity can be in its interrelationship with the living systems of the planet. As humanity slowly but surely begins to find it's place within the larger context of the living systems that nurture, support and interact with us, all that sense of passion and excitement reinvigorate me as they did in the days of my youth. So, as I walk these streets today I feel a strong presence, the ghosts of my past self, and my future self walking with me side by side. I feel humanity's past and current existence, it's possible non-existence, and it's possible transformed existence in harmony and resonance with all of life. It's like seeing in the distance something glimpsed out of the corner of your eye or listening deeply into the darkness for something beautiful you are sure you heard, something not quite grasped but deeply felt. There is a presence I know exists even if I can't quite touch it like a diaphanous vision coming into form and for the first time, in a very long time, I can feel the magic and wonder of it.

Earth, with her plants, water, dirt, trees, and creatures is truly the mother of all of us. The living beings we share this thin skin of a biosphere with are our brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins. We have no life without them, literally. Let us learn this simple fact deeply and completely. We are Nature and Nature is us. There is no out there, out there. There is no separation. We are all connected. We are all born of the same elements.

Aloha, Happy Springtime and awareness of new life to us all.