Tag Archives: health

Launching Hands to Hands

by thealpacasviolet

We are delighted to announce that the August 29 Wild Herb Day will inaugurate our new Hands to Hands project.

Do your hands become chapped in the winter? Imagine what it would be like to live on the streets during the winter. Your hands would be so chapped that they would be badly cracked and bleeding. This is the case for many homeless people in the Greater Boston area.

I live in a warm, heated home during the winter. I am only fourteen years old, but my hands often become chapped and dry. It’s painful. My father’s are even more severely chapped. For me, salve has always been the most comfortable and soothing way to handle the pain. It feels good, isn’t too sticky, and the skin absorbs it quickly enough that it doesn’t leave my hands oily for hours. And every time, after it’s gone, my hands hurt less and are less chapped. When I remember to apply my salve regularly, my hands heal.

I want to extend the comfort and healing of our salves to homeless people in our area. That’s why I am starting the Hands to Hands project, which will distribute salves to homeless people in Greater Boston.

We need your help to make this work, and our first Hands to Hands salve making project will be part of the August 29th Wild Herb Day. We will make Hypericum oil to use in this project during Wild Herb Week.

Please share and consider signing up to help us on August 29th!

MRK

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New Year’s Resolution

by herbqi

This year, I’m going to take better care of myself. I’m going to pay attention to my body, give it the food it needs when I need it (and not give it the other kind), figure out some kind of exercise that works for me, and feel better as a result.

If your New Year’s resolution sounds like that, I can help. (Even if it doesn’t, I may still be able to help.)

If you want to feel better in the new year, address whatever chronic aches and pains you imagehave, deal with chronic health issues, learn better ways to handle stress, integrate herbs and qigong into your life, receive shiatsu treatments, or simply integrate your whole self so that you’re no longer thinking of your body as a slightly alien creature who happens to share your living space… please get in touch. I’d love to help you, and be your partner on this new journey.

 

 

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Superfoods

by herbqi

Superfood, n. A food or category of foods that provides greater nutritional or medicinal value than commonly associated with food.

Marketers introduced the term “superfood” to help them sell expensive products, and most often they use it to mean:

  • A rare or expensive food that provides greater nutritional or therapeutic value than normally associated with food.

Foods of this description may benefit their sellers more than they do their consumers. Many people resent this, with good reason, and some therefore assume that there are no superfoods. I prefer to think of a superfood as:

  • An affordable or readily forageable food that provides greater nutritional or medicinal benefit than is commonly associated with food.

Examples of affordable or readily forageable foods that pack an extra nutritional or medicinal punch include nettle, red clover, dandelion, burdock root, garlic, ginger, seaweed (particularly whatever kinds grow near you), mushrooms, kimchi, miso, and sauerkraut.

If you have access to a community garden plot or if you have a yard suitable for growing vegetables, then we may add any vegetable that is easy to grow and has particularly strong nutritional and / or medicinal value to our list. Brussel sprouts, kale, okra, raspberries, and beets come to mind. If you can easily raise free-range poultry on your land, their eggs would also qualify as a superfood. If you are able to raise bees, so would your very own, very local honey. If you can raise goats or sheep, raw, fermented goat or sheep milk products would apply as well, if they agree with with you. If you raise free-range animals for meat and can deal with eating their organs, these, too, would qualify as superfoods.

However beneficial a food may be, if it doesn’t agree with you, it’s not a superfood for you. We may generalize about the nutritional and medicinal perks of our food, but there are always people for whom the food that keeps us growing will be unsafe, as well as others for whom it will be unacceptable. A good diet should include a daily dollop of respect for different needs, understandings, and tastes.