Ayurvedic remedies for flu and other suggestions
For those of you also suffering with this rather ferocious flu virus currently circulating then these Ayurvedic remedies are really helpful. Thank you to the Ayurvedic Clinic for sharing. I have also popped some other suggestions at the end of the blog for those of you keen to avoid Pharma:
Ginger, lime and honey remedy
Dosage:
This is to be taken twice a day after any two meals
Ingredients (for 2-3 days):
100g fresh ginger
6 limes
6 teaspoons honey
3 teaspoons brown sugar
100ml water
¼ teaspoon of powdered black pepper per drink
Method:
Cut, peel and blend ginger in blender with half a cup of water or peel and grate the ginger by hand
Squeeze out the ginger juice from the pulp
Mix ginger juice with the juice of 6 limes, 6 teaspoons of honey and 3 teaspoons of brown sugar and up to 200ml water
To drink mix 1 tablespoon of the mixture with half a cup of hot water and ¼ teaspoon of black pepper
Storage:
Mixture can be made in larger batch kept for up to 2 weeks if sealed and refrigerated
Notes:
Take after meals only
Continue as long as you are experiencing symptoms of cough / cold / flu
Herbal Steam Inhalation
Dosage:
To be done for a few minutes (as long as tolerable) if possible 2 or 3 times a day
Ingredients (for one procedure):
Vinegar (any kind) – 3 teaspoons
Turmeric – ½ teaspoon
Boiling water – 750ml
Method:
Mix the vinegar and and turmeric into a paste in a large bowl
Add approximately 750ml of boiling water to the paste and stir
Place a towel over your head, lean over the bowl and gently inhale the steam
Try to inhale through the nose and exhale through the mouth for a few minutes
Notes:
Do the steam inhalation gently and take care not burn the nasal passages
Take air in between if needed by lifting the towel and breathing normally – remember to do this procedure gently
Continue as long as you are experiencing symptoms of cough / cold / flu
I also, highly recommend the following:
Epsom salt baths
Lots of rest and Yoga Nidra
Eating protein and as many fruits and vegetables as you’re appetite will allow
Lots of Vitamin C (I was taking 5k), NAC, D and B vitamins
Sambucol - elderberry extract, you can buy at Hansa
Reiki
Pine or thyme based cough medicine - you can buy at Hansa again
Berry teas with LOTS of honey
Spoonfuls of Manuka honey.
Lots of kindness to self!
I hope these remedies might help you too.
Love Emma x
Happy Winter Solstice!
Friday December 22, 2023 at 3:27 AM marks the winter solstice
On this day, the sun is at its most southerly point on the horizon as it rises, and it assumes its lowest position in the sky at noon. This day is called midwinter’s day and it is the shortest one of the year.
The annual solar movements along the horizon from one solstice to another describes a year. This apparent movement results from the earth’s orientation in space and the motion of the earth in its orbit around the sun.
Early man was conscious of these movements along the horizon, as evidenced by the many dolmens which are aligned to the sunrise on both the summer and winter solstices, and the equinoxes too.
One imagines that the winter solstice was especially significant, as confirmation that the light does indeed increase again. Until that point, one might have felt as if the world was descending into a darkness, from which there was no return!
Thus the winter solstice, known in the olden times as Yule, celebrates the return of the light, from now onwards the hours of light lengthen each day. It is also a time to celebrate our inner light, which keeps us going during dark days – there are inevitably times in everyone’s life when we feel as if the light may never return, but it generally does and we must not lose sight of that, everything is part of a whole, a cycle.
Our ancestors understood that winter is the hardest time of the year, so the solstice was also a moment to stop, to look backwards in inner reflection and to look forwards to a more active season as the sun’s returning power brings increased daylight, growth and indeed activity. From now on the days will lengthen and the warmth will return.
Megalithic monuments acknowledged the return of the sun. More famously, Newgrange in Ireland has a winter solstice alignment, when – quite remarkably – for around 4.5 minutes, the sun shines down the ‘roof-box’ of the Neolithic passage and illuminates the floor of the main chamber 18m away. Only lottery selected individuals get to experience this amazing event – pray for clear skies!
The outer Sarsen ring at Stonehenge also has a winter solstice alignment and it is possible to enter the site for free at sun rise – it is well worth the visit if you happen to find yourself in the area, to be able to access the stones up close only happens on the solstices unless you have arranged a private visitation. In Carnac in Southern Brittany, the majority of the remaining dolmens are aligned to the winter solstice sunrise – it was clearly a special time.
Even here on Guernsey we have a winter solstice alignment, where the sun is directed by a little groove in one of the outer stones, all the way through the dolmen to where the male and female stones meet. It has been quite an honour to witness this over the years and I am grateful to the dolmen for revealing some of its mystery.
It is important to realise that this festival is not the beginning, in a linear way of looking at things, but a rebirth within a cycle of wholeness. Traditionally homes were decorated with evergreens such as holly, ivy, mistletoe, yew and pine, all of which represented the cycle of life. We would do well to remember this too – life is full of ups and downs, we just have to keep on keeping on and nudge our way back to the light.
Here are some suggestions for celebrating the winter solstice and honouring the return of the sun:
Go for a walk 🚶🏽♀️
The eve of winter solstice is a special night to go out for a night’s walk, embracing the changing energy of the land.
Watch the sunrise 🌅
Get up early and go to a special place to watch the solstice sun rise or the lightening of the sky in the South East. These are magical moments you will always remember.
Celebrate! 👨👩👧👦
With friends and family around a fire with a bowl of warming winter vegetable soup.
Add a yule log to the fire 🪵
This tradition began in Norway, where a giant log was hoisted onto the hearth to celebrate the return of the sun each year
Collect & decorate 🌲
Holly, ivy, evergreen boughs and pinecones, symbolising everlasting life, protection and prosperity. Use them to decorate a table or mantle or to make a wreath. You could always gift this to loved ones
Watch sunset…
…knowing that the evenings will soon be extending
Dance 🕺🏻
Put on your favourite music and dance on the energy of the new beginnings that the return of the light brings
Light a candle and make a wish 🕯
A powerful way to symbolise your inner light
Join a yoga class or spiritual celebration 🧘🏽♂️
There is a Yoni Yoga class to celebrate Yule for women of all ages and levels of experience, including absolute beginners, at St Martin’s Community Centre this Friday, 6-7pm
Delicious dairy-free chocolate biscuits
This recipe has been inspired from The Good Stuff by Lucinda Miller
A healthier option for a sweet treat!
Ingredients
175g organic oats
60g organic sunflower seeds
20g organic cocoa powder/cacao powder
40g organic coconut sugar
100ml organic maple syrup
65g melted dairy free butter or 65ml coconut oil
Method
Preheat the oven to 180c/160c fan and line two baking trays with parchment paper
Blitz the oats and sunflower seeds together in a food processor until you have a flour like consistency
Tip the mixture into a large bowl and stir in the cocoa or cacao powder and sugar followed by the maple syrup and melted butter or coconut oil
Combine the ingredients into a firm ball and leave in the fridge for 15 minutes
Then use your hands to make small golf size balls of mixture which you can place on the baking tray and use a fork to gently push down on the ball to create a biscuit shape
(The other option is to place parchment paper over the mixture and use a rolling pin to flatten it before using cookie cutters. I don’t find this works so well)
Bake for 11-12 minutes before leaving them firm up on the trays before transferring to a wire rack to cool
This recipe has been inspired from The Good Stuff by Lucinda Miller.
Balancing miso noodles
This recipe has been inspired from The Everyday Ayurveda Cookbook by Kate O’Donnell
A yummy recipe to balance all the festive food!
Ingredients
4 cups of filtered water
8oz organic tofu cut into cubes
2 cups of chopped veg including some green leaves, such as sea beet (which you can forage at Saints and L’Eree), spinach, chard or kale
½ cup of sea veg, wakame works well
2 handfuls of organic rice noodles
2 tbsp of organic red or white or brown miso
Method
Bring the water to boil in a large saucepan;
Add the tofu, chopped veg and sea veg;
Reduce heat to medium and simmer, covered, for about 10 minutes
Meanwhile, prepare the noodles and add for the last minute of cooking
Prepare the miso by mixing it in a bowl with some hot water (not boiling) to make a paste. Add to the soup and stir before serving.
Please note that you shouldn’t boil miso as this kills the enzymes
This recipe has been inspired from The Everyday Ayurveda Cookbook by Kate O’Donnell
The moon packed a punch!
Well that moon certainly packed a post-moon punch didn’t it?!
Most people I have talked to have had a really challenging week with lots of old urgh energy coming up, enough to make us question whether we have really cleared those old patterns or maybe we were just kidding ourselves!
If this resonates then don’t despair, I have a feeling it was a part of the Gemini theme - showing two sides, the shadow and the light, so that the shadow can become the light and in the process you become increasingly whole, as if reclaiming fragmented parts, those bits discarded because of the underlying feeling, which wasn’t always so pleasant so best not to look at it and pop it in the shadows, hoping it will go away.
Unfortunately it doesn’t work like that. Those feelings we have stored in the shadows are what we might call Samskaras, or impressions from our past actions and they will get triggered from time to time by the external environment.
Sometimes we get so good at trying to keep the Samskaras hidden and not triggered that we will literally try and control our life and our life so that we don’t experience the triggers in the first place. It’s not that we do this consciously, just that the feeling felt so awful that we will do all we can to avoid feeling it.
This to the extent that even when triggered we will do something to distract ourselves again - maybe we eat something or drink something or go to bed or keep really busy, there are a myriad of ways that we disengage, disconnect and dissociate from our body and our reality to prevent having to feel that horrible feeling. But really this solves nothing, because if we don’t allow it to be there, if we don’t truly acknowledge and feel it then it cannot move through us and it is only ion moving through us that it holds its grip on us.
So we should be grateful then to the moon for coming in and shinning a light into the shadows so that we cannot ignore that feeling any longer. Not that its the moon per se but an external event that occurred around or over the moon that triggered your samskaras and brought them out into the open. They can be triggered by all sorts of things such as entering a place, meeting a person, reading about a situation, a particular experience, smelling something from then past etc.
Spending time with old friends I haven’t seen for years in old haunts I haven’t visited since Covid, actually brought up some lock down trauma, which until now had lain resting (or irritating) in the shadows, and the conscious me was none the wiser. It’s always heavy when our samskaras get triggered because the feeling is so unpleasant and there is no escaping it, at least not if one has committed to spiritual growth, one has to just work through it, feeling into it.
Remember our feelings, our emotions are just energy in motion, and hence need to be allowed to move through us, and not get stuck inside us. If suppressed or repressed, emotions play havoc with our heart and will find a place to get stored within the body, causing pain, tension and sometimes dis-ease.
Often there ism a correlation between the place in the body where the feeling is stored and the the feeling itself - overwhelm, responsibility burden will show up in the shoulders, fear of change in the elbows, feeling bitter will show up in the gallbladder, feeling empty in the stomach, feeling that life has lost its sweetness shows up in the pancreas, fear shows up in the kidneys, shame, unworthiness and humiliation in the pelvis, guilt in the throat, sadness, anger, grief and frustration in the heart and on the list goes.
Let us not forget too that we are not our emotions anymore than we are our thoughts, they come and go, come and go, all day long, and it is up to us which ones we give our attention. This is the reason some people err to the negative and some to the positive. Some have always just chosen a positive approach, placing more attention on happy and uplifting thoughts than on self depreciating and negative thoughts instead. It is the same with emotions, some people cling to a identify with some of them more than others and other people do a really good job of letting them flow without attaching anything to any of them.
Of course the emotion brings with it a story, which brings with it a mental imprinting such as a thought or limiting belief (all of this a part of the samskara). It is helpful then to pay attention to see what is held with the emotion, always there is a theme and without doubt, if we are open to it, then our angel, spirit and Reiki guides will be trying to get our attention, leaving oracle cards, books, coincidences in our path. Our job is to pay attention and not lose ourselves to the process but allow the process to change us, feeling the old feeling, noticing the mental imprinting and letting it flow, creating healthier samskaras in the process.
Yoga Sutra II.33 touches on this and it is recommended that deviant thought bombarding us, creating negativity, whether that be through doubt or fear etc, then we should change the perspective and focus instead on the positive. It is also recommended that at times like this we should practice yoga with the help of a teacher.
This of course because we can easily by-pass, not least spending our whole yoga practice thinking and not therefore being present to the body and preventing the union of body, mind and soul, but because we keep practising in a way we have done previously, always we should change things, even on our mat, in fact more so on our mat! A teacher won’t let us bypass, at least not knowingly.
Hopefully you have all navigated your way through but if not book for some Reiki, Reiki is amazing at helping us to understand the nature of our samskaras as they are triggered, getting to the underlying cause and source of any loss of wellbeing and helping to promote the healing process. It is in this way that we develop personally and spiritually and increasingly take responsibility for our health, wellbeing and vitality.
That moon certainly tried to move things through, lighten the heart, clear the solar plexus, strengthen the root, free the sacral, and open the throat. You might feel lighter now and clearer.
The Choice by Edith Agar is a remarkable read, not for the faint hearted in terms of the Auschwitz detail but if you can get beyond that, it is really interesting for those interested in psychology and healing and about our choices. Here’s the link to Amazon here
Enjoy the wane!
Emma x