We have evolved together with plants. Our bodies, our nervous system, our brains need the chemicals in plants as these chemicals are what we are literally made of, they are needed for our body to function properly, our microbiome also feed on them and they constitute the majority of our physical body. Plants contain thousands of chemicals, which work synergistically together and are the reason that each plant might have so many seemingly different effects on us. Science looks at plants and isolates certain chemicals, for example, curcumin in turmeric. The researchers examine these chemicals on their own without all the other thousand chemicals they usually work alongside. They decide that they are effective or not outside of their normal state. These individual plant chemicals are then used as supplements or added into our food, for example, in cereals. Out of context, the chemicals may work differently. The body isn’t used to seeing these chemicals in this way, and so may respond in a different way than expected, perhaps with side effects. Many of these chemicals are also studied on mice, which aren’t humans. Plants are more than their individual parts.
This is, however, also the way that we have studied the human body. An example is the fascia. For decades, scientists simply scraped off the fascia from around all the organs and disguarded it as something not important. However, once antaomists began to look at the fascia as a part of the body that might do something, they obviously found that it was a vital part of the whole body. Nothing in the body of humans or plants is there for no reason. It all works synergistically.
This is one of the many reasons why processed foods – foods that have been taken apart, stipped, reformed, and had individual synthetic nutrients added are not recognised in the body in the same way as real whole foods.
There is no way to double blind study to measure how these thousands of plant chemicals interact with the body. This is why empirical evidence gained from centuries of people having used the plant and our own lived experience are the only ways to really know if a plant works for any person.
Plants have evolved with us and are conscious of the relationship that we have with them. We could think of them as our ancestors or as at extension of our bodies beause our bodies cannot live for long functioning well without them.
The flavour, taste, and smell of the food you take are part of the medicine. It is a way for the body to prepare itself to assimilate it. It connects us to the earth.
So we need whole medicine, whole plants, whole foods.
I was surprised to hear someone say that the fact that there were statues of female dieties discovered that pre-dated Jesus blew their mind, my mind was blown to find out that people believed that there was nothing before Christ, and yet this quote from the bible more or less sums it up. It explains why it is so hard for us to find pre-Christian gods and goddesses and ways of worship in Britain, it explians how imperialism extended across the world and why it tried to destroy everything in its path, it explains why we live in a world so completely detached from community and the natural world, devoid of soul and our own sense of belonging and ownership.
This is what we are trying to recover in the Weaving the Feminine seasonal circles and ancestral herbalism online membership, piece by piece, connection by connection.
Would you ever consider having trepanation – drilling a hole in your head – to relieve your headache? Not a regular, run-of-the-mill treatment for headaches even in the 1600s, but nonetheless a treatment that some people resorted to when nothing else helped. And amazingly, there are some records of people suggesting it worked for them! As you can imagine, trepanation was a dangerous surgery and involved using a circular saw in a variety of sizes to create a larger or smaller hole. These holes could then be used to apply medicine directly to the brain!
More often than not though, headaches were treated with herbs, spices, resins, breastmilk, garden worms, doves dung, vinegar, and foods. These could be mashed up and applied to fabric to make a poltice for the head and temples or herbs sewn into cloth caps, which could be worn on the head. Sometimes, it was suggested to use a herbal snuff made of Betony or Rue or steep herbs in wine or mead and to have a nip as needed.
There are a lot of herbs that have traditionally been used to ease a headache, including meadowsweet, willow, mint, rose, chamomile, rosemary, thyme, and marjoram.
Some examples of recipes used:
– A handful of daisy’s mixed with 12 earth worms and an egg white spread on a cloth to place on the forehead and temples.
– Marjoram tea
– Chewing poppy seeds or steeping them in brandy. Poppy was especially known in some areas for hangover headaches and called headache flower. The opium poppy was used in ‘official medicine’ whilst folk medicine used field poppies.
– Chewing willowbark
– Thyme was recommended for headaches by folk and ‘official medicine’.
By the 19th century, women were thought of as frail and weak and that any overstimulation could lead to many brain issues, including headaches. Wandering wombs mnstruation, over indulgence, and an imbalance of the temperments or humours were other reasons considered.
Even today, we are not entirely certain why some headaches and migraines occur. We have also developed research and have centuries of empirical research that supports the use of using many of the herbs. Plants such as meadowsweet and willow, for example, became the basis for asprin when the salicin within them was found by science to be pain relievering with anti-inflammatory properties. This chemical was then extracted to create the white pill we know today. Potentially, it is more potent, but it also comes with various side effects. So, although there are some remedies that we might think of as strange today, there are many that have been proven as effective.
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Disclaimer: Nothing in this article is meant as medical advice or for people to try.
Today, on World Social Justice day, in the podcast I am speaking with Karen Gevirtz the author of THE APOTHECARY’S WIFE: The Hidden History of Medicine and How it Became a Commodity A ground-breaking genealogy of for-profit healthcare and an urgent reminder that cantering women’s history offers vital opportunities for shaping the future.
The world feels like it’s gone slightly crazy right now, although in reality, it’s always been like this, at least for as long as we have recorded history in writing. Our history has made us who we are, our history has created the world we have inherited, and our history shaped the lives of our ancestors, which in turn shaped us. In our normal lives and everyday learning, we don’t tend to learn about the history of the common people. If we learn history, it is usually about the lives of the Kings and Queens and Noblemen. We have inherited a very patriarchal, misogynistic world, and this cultural view continues to affect our daily lives. Although we have made great strides, misogyny still exists, and there is still a shadow of it running through most of our lives. We don’t need to go back very far to see this play out, perhaps only to our parents or grandparents, and it was a view that existed and shaped our lives for hundreds of years, so we cant expect it to disappear quickly.
Our world continues to be run by mostly men, but our separation is perhaps a bit more hidden than before. This in turn, means that our world is designed by and crucially for men rather than women. This historical fact has affected our modern things like cars, which are designed specifically for men and tested on male crash-test dummies. It wasn’t until 2011 that a more female size and weight dummy was used, only in the passenger seat, not the driver seat, meaning that cars are made safer for men than for women. So it isn’t surprising that women are 17% more likely to die in a car crash. Pregnancy testing isn’t even mandated in government car testing, and so there is currently no safe seatbelt for a pregnant woman.
In America, only 8% of large companies are led by women, and there is likely a similar representation the world over. Work hours and work places are therefore still mainly geared towards men, ignoring the fact that women tend to also have the job of caring (either for children or elderly parents) on top of their employment, meaning that most women work much longer unpaid hours than men, it also means that they are more likely to only be able to get low paying jobs to fit in with these unpaid roles. Only 14% of the STEM industry in the UK are women. Virtial Relality, consequently is predominantly designed by men, and geared towards men and well known to give more women motion sickness because it isn’t geared towards them and their body-eye-motion needs.
The medical system, which developed and overtook women’s domestic medicine, has historically always been biased towards men. Medical education has, and still does, focus on the male body as the norm, with the female body a diviation from this norm. Medical research was done only on the male body up til 1990s, and even now that research has begun many male researchers argue that it is a waste of resources, pointless, costly and too complicated to include the female sex. However, growing evidence shows that male and female cells actually respond differently. For example, in HIV, flu, cardiovascular disease, and other diseases, women experience different symptoms and complications than men. Even though there is now (albeit still limited) research happening, women are still hugely underrepresented in clinical trials, with pregnant women being completely excluded. Even in the area of womens reproductive health, women with painful and uncomfortable conditions like endometriosis or heavy menstrual bleeding frequently find their symptoms ‘normalised’ and their ‘pain dismissed’ when speaking to their doctors.
These examples are just the tip of the iceberg, where the historical view and supression of the female gender continues to this day. There are many other areas across our lives that, when looked into, are geared towards men. Which, when you think about it, makes sense when we are run by a partriarchal society.
It is also important to know that even though we have made strides forward, it doesn’t mean we can’t go back. A recent example can be seen in America with a lawmaker putting forward the “covenant marriage law” whereby a couple could only divorce when one spouse proves that there has been adultery, abuse or abandonment for over a year. This harkens back to historical divorce laws, which resulted in many women staying stuck in abusive, controlling marriages, and resulted in strange historical practices like wife selling.
So I argue that it is important to look at women’s history and to acknowledge the ways that women have been ignored, denied, controlled, supressed, and belittled throughout our recorded history. It shows us what our current world is being built upon, what practices underly our current ways of living. For example, Aristotle said that women were just mutilated men, and this has underpinned our medical research and education ever since, leading to us only researching medicines on males.
It is equally important to acknowledge and remember the stories of our great female ancestors. It works in the interest of the male establishment for us to forget women’s history, to forget the struggles and achievements of the female gender, as it enables them to control the narrative and the status quo. Women’s stories have been systematically left out of our history, with only 0.5% of our written history being women’s stories.
I think that understanding our mothers’ stories helps us to understand our current world and the lives we lead. We are afterall made of these mothers and their stories.
This is why, as we reclaim the Wise Woman, we are looking at the history of women (for our context mostly in Britain), and we uncover and tell our ancestors stories and struggles. The suppression of women is one of the ways that our ancestral heritage has been hidden from us, and it is one of the reasons that we now feel like we need to look to other cultures to find our spirituality. Learning about our history is also a way to start to heal our ancestral line. To find our voice as women, we need to see how we were silenced.
This is a short podcast I recorded yesterday with Freddy from Women Concern DR Congo. I have been in contact with and working with them in their quest to help women in their area of Congo, which is South Kivu, for about a year. As an NGO in Congo they are understandably concerned about the humanitarian crisis that is happening in Congo as a result of the M23 rebels taking over Goma the capital of North Kivu. I don’t know how much you know about the situation, but it is important to note that this isn’t about Africans fighting Africans, it is much bigger, as always, and includes many western companies and governments. There is a lot of extractive mining occurring in that region which is particularly used by technology and so-called green industries such as phones and electric cars to name only a few. Freddy isn’t able to say a lot one way or another about the actors in the geno-cost, to keep himself and his staff safe and to enable them to work across regions as an independent NGO. As you will hear in the podcast most international NGOs including the UN have left the region, making this fundraiser all the more important. As people undertaking this path towards collective liberation, and coming to terms with the history of colonialism that makes our lives possible, I implore you to share the fundraiser in your networks and give something if you are able.
Right I’m just going to come out and say it right at the start…motherhood is hard. Don’t get me wrong its amazing and beautiful but it is also lonely and challenging. This is what I wish someone had told me when I was having my first child. But its like a big secret that no one wants to talk about. We spend our whole pregnancy taking care of ourselves and preparing for labour but we are woefully unprepared for life after the birth.
And when it happens, even our bodies have turned against us, I’ve heard many a mother (only since having a baby myself) complain of not being able to make it to the bathroom in time or being unable to feel their core after having their abdomen cut open and internal organs taken out. I’m now in the mothers club so privy to this boggling info, never before did I even consider what birth might do to the pelvic floor. Who knew all these women were walking around being afraid to jump on a trampoline or walk too far from a toilet…I’d never even heard of prolapse. Not one nurse mentioned this in their antenatal talks. And its hardly ever mentioned afterward. Go forth and kegal away. I’ll tell you a secret you need a whole body approach to heal rather than spot treatment, but that’s for another post.
The transition into motherhood is like the phoenix; your ‘Past Life’ and ‘Previous You’ burn away in a blink of an eye. All the ideas you had of what kind of mother you would be, what you would and wouldn’t do disappear along with it. For some the transition is harder than for others, a bigger change and loss of the old life, the cocktail if hormones and shock or trauma of birth and this new life …overwhelming. But then like the phoenix we raise from the ashes into new beautiful strong beings, the Mother.
As mothers we feel the pain of the world more, the news, songs, stories are a totally different experience (!), anything to do with children and pain for families is just too much! One minute you are passively listening and the next tears are falling down your face for the poor child/mother/other family member.
Overnight life changes, suddenly you have a tiny human that you are somehow expected to know how to look after and keep alive. See you later and good luck! Life is different now, there’s no going back!
This is a remedy from my Portuguese mother-in-law. When her sons were little children and had a sore throat her doctor prescribed them carrot syrup, which she and my husband have been making ever since.
Here is the recipe:
1. Slice 1 carrot very thinly
2. Sprinkle on rapadura or muscovado sugar (these are both unrefined sugars with higher levels of vitamins and minerals than white or brown sugar.
3. Leave for a few hours until the sugar extracts the juice from the carrots and a syrup is formed
4. Squeeze half a small lemon into the syrup
5. Take a teaspoon every 2 hours until the sore throat goes away.
Hot chocolate is such a great winter comforting drink and often liked by adults and children alike. I’ve found that it is a useful way to get my children to drink herbs, and is equally tolerated by adults who might not enjoy a cup of herbal tea. I start with a base of organic cacao, which has an intense flavour and then add my herbal or mushroom mix to this. My top tip is to powder your herbs before blending your chocolate so that you don’t end up with bits of herbs in your mouth, which can put folk off. I usually make a batch in a jar and then add sweetner to taste, I often add a herbal infused honey, but you could use honey, maple syrup, sugar or any other sweetener of your choice. Make your hot chocolate with hot water or some kind of milk, it’s entirely up to you. Sometimes I will also add some marshmallows to the top for my children so that it’s a treat.
During this cold time of the year I was thinking of herbs that were warming to the body to keep the temperature up, while maintaining good circulation, herbs that have antimicrobial, immune supporting and digestive effects and also nervines for the saddness that the dark winter days can sometimes bring.
There are all sorts of herbs that you could add into this, but the recipe we made for our winter HerbCare Stations is:
3 parts Cacao
1/2 part Ashwagandha
3/4 part Tulsi
1/2 part Rose
1/8 part Ginger
1/8 Cinnamon
Cacao – Theobroma Cacao
Energetics: warm, drying, tonifying
Marcus Patchett has written an entire book about the benefits of chocolate and its help in improving mental health, it can help to reduce anxiety and lift the spirits. Although it contains small amounts of caffeine so can be stimulating, it also contains theobromine which is a relaxant, and also large amounts of magnesium often lacking in our diets. It has been called “the food of the gods”. Some research also suggests that Cacao can support the immune system and contains a broad spectrum antimicrobial which has an inhibitory effect on the influenza viruses.
Ashwagandha – Withania Somnifera
Energetics: warm, drying, relaxing
It is best known as an adaptogen, supporting the adrenals and helping us to deal with stress. It is known to aid the circadian rhythm to become balanced helping someone to fall asleep at night whilst being a wake and energised in the day. Recent research (of the extract) has shown that it “significantly improved the immune profile of healthy subjects by modulating the innate and adaptive immune systems. Boosting the immune system of people at risk of infection and during widespread infections.” https://www.mdpi.com/2077-0383/10/16/3644
Tulsi
Energetics: warm, dry, relaxant
Tulsi is an adaptogenic nervine, helping the body to deal with stress, so it is supportive for someone who is feeling unwell and also supports the immune system to work better to keep viruses at bay. Tulsi is great for lifting mood, releasing tension and depression which is helpful for someone feeling run down. In addition, Tulsi has been said to strengthen and modulate the immune system, playing a central role in cells involved in immunological defence.
Rose
Energetics: Cool, dry, tonifying
The cooling nature of Rose helps to balance the warming of all the other herbs so that the whole formula isn’t overly heating. The cooling nature helps to calm inflammation. It is effective at wound healing including in the digestive tract to improve the efficiency of the digestive system, and is also an antimicrobial and has great anti-viral properties. It is particularly helpful for its calming, comforting, protective effects. Rose is a tonic for a wounded heart, trauma and grief so I have included it in this blend for the kindness and love that the people receiving the herbs on the herbcare stations and anyone else may need.
Ginger
Energetics: hot, drying, relaxing
The dried ginger is centrally heating, warming the core and digestive system. It is often given if someone is experiencing digestive upset and since a large proportion of our immune system is in our gut we want it to be working effectively. It is also an antimicrobial and so is helpful to support the body should there be any pathogens present. It is also useful if someone is feeling nauseou, which can be a side effect of a cold and post nasal drip.
Cinnamon
Energetics: Warm, moist, tonifying
The moistness of the cinnamon helps to ensure that the blend isn’t too overly drying. It is great for cold conditions, to improve circulation, and it’s essential oils help to stop bacteria and fungal overgrowth in the digestive system. It is also very helpful for helpingj to lower blood sugar levels and aid our body to more receptive to insulin. When combined with Rose it is very comforting.
The immune system is a system in the body that is fundamental to survival it mediates our body and the outside world. Multiple layers to it – 3 layer – if trying to protect a location you would build a fort – skin is an important barrier, internally the skin becomes a mucous barrier, it is stop thing getting into our body that shouldn’t be there. Layer 2 – cells like macrophages and cytokines are the police officer cells and messengers who travel around the body checking that everything is ok macrophages eat foreign cells they come into contact with, this happens constantly. We also found Proteins here that help us against viruses. Layer 3 – advanced part of the immune system – MI5 – t-cells and B cells specific threat that they have been alerted to and at the same time creating a memory to it so that it remembers it for next time, mostly this long lasting, which is why don’t keep getting chicken pox for example. 70% of our immune system is in the gut, so if this isn’t working properly your immune system is compromised.
Immunity is not just protecting us from infection. The majority of the time its role is to do housekeeping in the body, all your cells have a lifespan and it is the job of the certain immune cells to clear these away, keeping the body tidy, and they repair any damage that has happened. We have a lot of influence over how effective the immune system is. Our immune system is the main system which clears up cancerous cells from the body.
Your microbiota are the interface of your digestion and the rest of the body are one of the key educators of the immune system.
Every cell within the immune system has a receptor for Vitamin D. There are lots of unknowns still about why this is, but one thing we do know is that Vitamin D plays a regulatory role in the immune system at the level of cytokines. They are messaging systems. At the initial stage of infection we get a localised release of cytokines which triggers inflammation, this produces a rapid dilation of blood vessels in that local area. This makes it easier for white blood cells to get to the site of infection and the cytokines are sending out distress signals to the white blood cells. When they get there they need to easily get in to tissue and that is the role of the inflammation, it opens gaps in the vessel walls to enable the white blood cells to easily get to the infected tissue.
Microbes – bacteria, viruses, fungus – are not single-handedly responsible for an infection they seek diseased tissue to be able to replicate easier.
When we are in a state of stress our body changes how it operates and so it priorities the defence systems so immune systems are being supressed, we are also more vulnerable to infections if we have fear as we are depleting our immune system rather than nourishing and empowering it.
Sleep – crucial if we don’t sleep well our immune system takes a huge hit, one study of people who slept 4 hours a night compared to people who had a longer good nights sleep found that there was a reduction of natural killer cells of 72% these are your bodies best defence against tumour cells.
Refined sugar depletes our immune system glucose and vitamin C compete with one another, so if we are flooding our body with sugar it will get into our cells at the expense of Vitamin C.
Exercise – both under and over exercise can dampen the immune system.
Nutrient deficiencies – bland western diet will be low in all the vitamins and minerals.
Stimulants–A cup of coffee or two in a day is not a problem, but high intakes of caffeine lead to adrenaline surges. Adrenaline inhibits white blood cell formation, and when chronic, causes the thymus to shrink. Alcohol depletes the body of antioxidants.
Chemical drugs & pollutants–These are a load on the liver. Remember, it makes your complement system. Other more direct effects of pharmaceuticals & pollutants may include various endocrine disruptions, as well as iatrogenic (drug-induced) immune suppression / dysregulation.
Sedentism–Inhibits immune resilience due to impaired lymphatic flow, malnourishment of tissues, and deficient mechanoreceptor activation. Habitual sedentism amounts to a physical & mental stressor.
Suppression–Chronic suppression of acute symptoms tends to result in chronic symptoms. This warning applies mostly to pharmaceuticals(e.g. taking aspirin or Tylenol when a fever is present), but in some cases it also applies to herbs, like taking Echinacea at the right time.
