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Tuesday, January 16, 2007

A Note on Energetics (with a little help from a friend...)

In my last post I said
"I've also noticed that the temperature conundrum is also common to
many mint family plants, as is their strange tendency to be called
simultaneously stimulating and sedating." (it's so much fun to quote myself).

But then Great Lakes herbalist Jim McDonald (http://herbcraft.org) commented to me that a better way of understanding this supposed conundrum is to realize that stimulation "refers to bolstering the body's vital force" and that relaxing/sedating "is acting not on the vital energy as much as on the resistance to the free flow of that energy in the body." Jim says that a good visceral way of understanding this is "vigorously scratch your head; it relaxes that tension and stimulates circulation and energy."

So no more condundrum! Those smart Mint family plants, I knew they knew what they were doing...

But what about the simultaneous hot & cold energies?

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hello beautiful ...I am delighted to hear a clear account! This has been a perplexing topic for quite some time .... I remember talking with you about it several times :) I feel the same dual - properties about Yarrow. I feel it to be cooling, astringent, and drying. Susun sais it is warming and moving and that she wouldn't hesitate to use it for a cold dry chest cough. Whaddya know!
Keep up the green path my friend...
ananda

Darcey Blue said...

I didn't know you were blogging! What a loverly little place!!
How exciting!!

Unknown said...

Guys, read William COOK's book on Therapuetics. It will explain all those energetic wierdnesses very well!

:)
yay for smart physiomedicalists who wrote books!

Oakmoss Changeling said...

Cook's book is quite enlightening bot the therapeutics and the materia medica, though I don't find I agree with everything and his accounts are at times very incomplete. However, he does shed enormous light, especially on giving us Western herbalists a foundation for therapeutics etc. A very important text for every herbalist.

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