The Wise Woman tradition of Herbal Medicine, its peoples' medicine, it's self-reliant medicine. It's cost-affective medicine. It's medicine that puts us back in touch and in charge of our own health. It's preventative medicine and it's medicine that gets us back in touch with nature. Herbal medicine the wise woman way, focuses on keeping ourselves healthy. One of the primary ways that we do that is to drink nourishing herbal infusions. The wonderful thing about drinking nourishing herbal infusions is it doesn't require that you change your diet at all.
You can eat exactly what you are eating exactly as you have been eating and add to it. You are nourishing herbal infusions by adding these nourishing herbal infusions to any diet at all. You'll begin to nourish yourself optimally. What do I mean by that? Well let's look specifically; one of the nourishing herbal infusions that I especially like is stinging nettle. I making my stinging nettle infusions by drying the nettle, actually of course I'd buy it, already dried as you will. I weigh out one ounce of dried stinging nettle that's the equivalent of a quarter pound of fresh stinging nettle, but the drying process has broken the cell walls thus allowing the vitamins, the minerals and all of the protein and other important constituents of the plant to go into the water, when the plant is fresh, that cell wall was in tact and it's very difficult to get the nutrition out of the plant.
So we weigh out one ounce by weight of the dried stinging nettle, put it into a quart jar, fill that jar right up at the top with boiling water. Put a lid on it and let that steam for four hours or overnight. For me, it's easier to do at night. Go to sleep, wakeup in the morning, strain it out, squeezing the herb to get all of the good out of that herb and then I have a jar of stinging nettle infusion. I drink that first thing in the morning. Some times I just don't have the time or the inclination to sit down and eat breakfast. My life can be pretty busy between the kids and the apprentices correspondences course students and the herbs that have to be harvested.
So when I start my day with a big glass of nourishing herbal infusion. I know I have got the nourishment of a really good breakfast by drinking it. Some people say, wouldn't it just be better to go at and harvest some green plants and make a green drink, I actually don't like that and I have some very specific reasons. First of all, I told that when the plants are fresh, the cell wall is in tact. So when we make a green drink, we aren't getting any vitamins and we aren't getting minerals and we aren't getting proteins. Okay we are getting some flavoring and we are getting some coloring, and we are getting some of the sugar out of the plant, so that really makes us feel like we have gotten a lot of energy. But the truth of the matter, it's just about as stimulating to make one of those green drinks as it is to drink a cup of coffee, it pumps it up and it drops us back down a few hours later.
Also if you remember back to when there was a contamination of the spinach, the very first person that died of that, E. coli contamination in the spinach was a young boy whose mother has taken the spinach put it in the blender and mixed it up with some water and served it to him as a green drink.
No one who ate the spinach cooked was affected at all. So if there is any pathogen in our food and we eat it raw and that way especially for children, it's going to cause a worse reaction to those pathogens, then if we had actually cooked the food. That stinging nettle infusion is my companion all day long. I may start the day with it but I am going to have some more with my lunch. I am going to have some more in the afternoon. I am going to have some more with my dinner, and I am going to have some more before I go to sleep at night. I asked the apprentices who've come and live with me to drink a quart of nourishing herbal infusion every single day.
One way to do this I say is to not drink anything else until you have drunk your quart of nourishing herbal infusion. So if you are used to starting your day with the cup of hot liquid then take your herbal infusion and heat it up, have a nice hot cup of nettle. The nettle taste very green and if you would like it to taste a little differently then when I suggest you should put a little bit of salt in it. If you like miso, a spoonful of miso in your nettle infusion, first thing in the morning is a really wonderful way to start your day.
You can drink your infusion warm or you can drink it cold. If you want to start your day with a cup of hot infusion that's a great way to go. My prentice B (ph) really wanted her husband to start drinking infusion and her husband, L (ph) was not into it at all. One morning he came to breakfast and he said B, my coffee taste funny this morning, and she said L, I don't have time to mess around grinding your coffee beans and perk in that coffee for you. I have bought instant coffee. Well he drank it without saying much of anything. I bet you have already guessed that what B did was put his instant coffee in a cup of hot infusion. She said within a couple of weeks L was feeling really, really good, and he said is there something about that instant coffee that's making me feel so much better. And she had to confess to him what she had been doing and then he was willing to drink those infusions on his own.
He filled up his thermos with infusion and drop some ice cubes in there and took it to work with him and he said when everybody else was having the coffee break, he'd have an infusion break. He really liked it because it allowed it to come home from work and be ready to do all of those chores at home too. The one that B gave Larry was oatstraw. Now most people really like because nettle gives a lot of energy and makes your skin beautiful. And it's just great for hair. But let me tell you the favorite thing that I have heard someone say about Oatstraw.
I was teaching in California and a woman in her 60s told us she said after menopause, down there it was kind of like a desert, camels and sand dunes. She said I started drinking oatstraw infusion, well talk a about change it's now dancing girls and date palms down there. Everybody laughed and I think a lot of people went out and bought some oatstraw and started drinking their oatstraw.
Oatstraw is the primary sexual tonic throughout all of Europe, especially in Switzerland. Avena which is the botanical name of oatstraw is known for giving men as they get into their 40s, 50s, and 60s, and even 70s a lot more interest and a lot more ability to follow-through. So it's not just date palms and dancing girls for the women, it's for the men too.
The Wise Woman tradition of Herbal Medicine nourishes us fully and nourishment is preventative medicine. We are looking at how to ourselves in the pink of health, we are looking for how to keep ourselves feeling really good on a daily basis and drinking a quart, that's four cups of nourishing herbal infusions is one way to really do it. You know what a cup of nettle tea has five milligrams of calcium but a cup of nettle infusions has 250 milligrams of calcium.
Nourishing herbal infusions from the wise women way of Herbal Medicine, offering us green blessings.
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