Home Made Almond Soap Substitute

Soap Allergy?  Then try this Almond Soap Alternative:

Almond – Prunus communis, Prunus amygdalus, Prunus dulcis

People with soap allergies might find that this soap substitute does not irritate the skin as normal soaps do, although it still may not suit some people with severe allergies.

Even if you do not have an allergy, this almond soap substitute is effective as a rejuvenating face mask, and as a deep cleanser.

Ground almonds have a nourishing effect, as well as a deep cleansing and toning effect on the skin. This almond soap substitute will leave your skin looking fresh and youthful. It is soothing on the skin, and can be used to relieve irritations of many kinds.  It is helpful as a remedy to relieve sunburn, where it would be applied gently over the sunburn, left for five minutes, and then washed off.

Almond Soap Substitute:

Two tablespoons of finely ground almonds.

Two tablespoons of fine white clay, or kaolin.

One tablespoon of rose water

1 teaspoon of borax powder

Enough almond oil to bind the mixture together.

Blend all ingredients together, and put into a jar.  This can be used as a face pack, in which case you would lie down to relax and let the almonds do their rejuvenating work on your skin.   Five to ten minutes should be sufficient for a pack. For use as a soap substitute, use a dollop before you have your bath or shower, and smear over the face, or area of sunburn to be treated.  Leave on for five minutes, then shower it off.

Home Made Conditioner To Stimulate Hair Growth and Garden Plants and Valuable Herbs

DSC01941Yarrow Herbal Hair Conditioner To Stimulate Hair Growth

This is a very good multi-purpose conditioner which is recommended for hair growth, because it nourishes the hair follicles, as well as helping to make the hair shiny and glossy.  It is especially good for removing excess oil from the hair. The recipe is shown at the bottom of this article, which is mainly about wild medicinal herbs such as yarrow,  and how we should be protecting them.

Yarrow is the herbal ingredient for this hair conditioner.  Yarrow is one of our valuable healing medicinal herbs which used to be common in grassland.  Unfortunately, the makers of herbicides have seen to it that all these wonderful herbs used in medicines for thousands of years, are being eradicated from all our grasslands and wild places.  You will have to hunt for yarrow now, if you live in New Zealand, where agricultural chemicals are used excessively all over our beautiful country, in the cities,  in the parks, and even in the bush.  No remote, way-side place  is safe anymore  from the herbicides and pesticides of the grim reaper.

Hardly any foreign plants and trees are allowed to exist here now, and the Auckland City Council appears to have  a policy of ‘NO COLOUR – NO IMPORTED TREES OR FLOWERS’ in its plantings around the city and its big bus centres.  In these places, you will see just  bland greens everywhere,  smallish trees and shrubs, with large areas of strange brown or green grasses  growing in groups, which nature never intended anyway.  It seems that these gardens are designed to subdue and depress us.

After all the trouble taken by our ancestors to bring beautiful, colourful, and useful medicinal herbs, plants and trees here, now many of these specimens are almost non-existent.  The absence of colour is the dominating force around many parts of Auckland, and in the  newly created bus centres, which have no flowering trees at all, such as magnolias, or camelias, or flame trees, and certainly no lovely cottage garden plants such as we used to see in abundance around our city gardens.  Colourful trees and flowering plants are all being punished because they require more work than these self-maintaining wiry green and brown plants. These things are symbolic of the New Zealand-Auckland psyche now, as perpetuated by the current government:  Thriftiness  and harshness over beauty and delicacy and generosity. Note:  To be fair, though, these ghastly mono-plantings were begun by the Auckland City Council,  and are not the responsibility of the government.

If we want our medicinal plants to survive, we have to start cultivating them again.  If everybody kept just a dozen potted medicinal herbs, letting valuable weeds such as dandelion, yarrow, plantain, dock, and pennyroyal have their place in our potted gardens, then there would be no danger of losing them.  To plant these things in your garden in certain areas, to let them flourish there, would be even better, but, sadly, not everybody can own their own house and garden these days.  Try to plant a magnolia, or a wild rose, somewhere around the place. Tell other people to plant some of our old garden plants and trees, as well as some of those wild medicinal herbs, called weeds.

Back to the Recipe For Yarrow Herbal Conditioner:

Make a brew of strong yarrow tea.  Use a cupful of chopped yarrow, put into a small saucepan.  Add one and a half cups of boiling water. Infuse on the stove, on a low heat, for 5 minutes.  It should not boil, but just stay warm.

Now let the yarrow tea cool.  When it has cooled, mix half a cup of yarrow tea with half a cup of rum, and 3 egg yolks. Do not use the white of the egg for your Yarrow herbal Conditioner, but put those in the fridge to use elsewhere.

Beat all three ingredients together.

Now wash your hair with your regular soap or shampoo. I preferably use only sunlight soap instead of shampoo, because it does not contain harmful colourants, perfumes, and other chemicals.

Dry the hair and apply your home made herbal conditioner to the scalp and the hair.  Make sure the hair is evenly covered, and massage plenty into the scalp to nourish the hair follicles and promote circulation to the scalp.  This helps hair growth.  Leave the conditioner on the hair for 20 minutes, and then rinse off in warm water.  Make sure the water is not too hot, or else the egg yolk will coagulate.

The home made conditioner can be used once or twice a week to nourish the scalp, put a shine on the hair, and stimulate hair growth.

You can use the same formula for making another herbal remedy for the hair, such as nettles, or comfrey, or rosemary.  These are all silica-rich herbs which are beneficial for hair growth and the general health of the hair. Just follow the recipe as given above, but make your herbal tea with any of these healthful hair herbs.  Drinking a cup of  weak comfrey tea, or nettle tea, each day will help hair growth.  Make the Comfrey tea with only one leaf chopped up.  Infuse in 3 cups of  hot water for 5 minutes and drink one cup of this.

Home Made Eucalyptus Rub For Sore Joints

Eucalyptus Soothing Rub

Eucalyptus globulus can be used to make a home-made remedy which can be used externally as a massage oil to soothe aching muscles and joints,  rheumatic aches and pains, or to rub on tired feet. “Herbs For Health And Beauty”, by Margaret Roberts, Lowry Publishers, South Africa, 1986, recommends the use of eucalyptus leaves infused in oil to relieve aches and pains.

Simply take  half a dozen freshly picked eucalyptus leaves, put them in a jar, and cover with cooking oil, such as grape seed oil, or olive oil.  Let steep in a warm place for three days.  Drain, and your massage oil is ready to use.

If you live in Australia, where gum trees are indigenous natives, you will have many varieties of gum to experiment with.  The lemon-scented gum has a beautiful fragrance which is carried through in a home made oil infusion such as is used in this method above.

Eucalyptus Inhalation From Gum Leaves: Eucalyptus leaves, or gum leaves,  can be used fresh off the tree to make a hot inhalation for the relief of colds, flu, and other bronchial complaints.  Simply put a handful of fresh eucalyptus leaves into a bowl, pour hot water over, and your steam inhalation is ready.  I have used this steam inhalation many times to relieve conditions such as croup and other bronchial ailments, in combination with homeopathic remedies.  For young children, it is often a help just make the eucalyptus steam inhalation up, and to leave it in the child’s room at night.  Make sure that your children cannot reach the inhalation, and make sure that it is not too hot, just in case of spillage.

It is a while since I used eucalyptus gum leaves to make an inhalation, or to leave in a bowl in a room to treat an illness.  I often used a branch of leaves and simmered these in a pot of water for about ten minutes.  The pot can be left on the stove with the lid off, and the heat turned off.  The eucalyptus vapours will travel through the house.   This is a lovely technique for cleansing the house of anything negative.

Personally, I find herbs infused in oil to be very potent:  The active ingredients in the herbs are made more potent by soaking them in oils or water.  They will work homeopathically – the more these oils are diluted, the stronger the effect of the active ingredients will become.  So use just a little of your home-made eucalyptus oil at first, to try out its effect.  There is no danger of toxicity, used externally,  if the directions above are followed. If you find you cannot tolerate diluted eucalyptus oil,  made in this way from fresh leaves,  simply wash it off the skin.

Importance Of Medicinal Weeds, Comfrey, And How Fennel Tea Helps With Weight Loss

Fennel – Foeniculum vulgare: This is a valuable herb which is becoming more rare to find these days.  It used to grow in abundance near railway tracks, and along the sides of the roads in what used to be called hedgerows.  Fennel tea is good for the eyesight. It can be used, cool, to bathe the eyes.  Fennel Tea  is also  helpful in losing weight, because Fennel is a natural diuretic.  You can make Fennel Tea by using a quarter of a cup of fresh herb, and topping the cup up with boiling water.  Allow the fennel tea to cool a little, then drink.  Fennel tea is a naturally sweet-tasting tea which aids good digestion.  Just a teaspoon of fennel tea can be given to babies with colic. Good to take Fennel Tea before a meal, or in place of that coffee.

Many other valuable healing herbs have been lost from our environment – Comfrey, called ‘Knit-bone’ and ‘All-Heal’, is the Queen of all healing herbs.  Comfrey has been conveniently banned in many countries, simply because drug companies wanted to own, and manipulate for their own use, the healing power of Comfrey.

Pesticides and Herbicides Kill Our Healing Herbs: These things are extremely toxic, bad for the environment, and cause diseases such as cancer, arthritis, multiple sclerosis, parkinson’s, and heart and circulatory problems.  They are also bad for the environment generally.  Another reason that they are harmful to us is that the world-wide use of pesticides and herbicides is killing  off many of the valuable  medicinal plants, called ‘weeds’,  which used to grow naturally on waysides and hedgerows in all so-called ‘civilized’ countries.  I believe that this is no co-incidence.  The same makers of pharmaceuticals are often related to the companies which make pesticides and herbicides,  or are just the same firm anyway, with a different brand name.  They do not want us to be making our own herbal remedies,  using Comfrey, or using homeopathy, or any other alternative medicine. Their herbicides kill off all the good weeds and leave their weak type of grass behind.   And those grass seed companies, and producers of agricultural food seed,  are just another branch of this collaborative empire of control:  Many of these same companies have vested interests in the companies which genetically modify our vegetable seeds, and grass seeds, so that they will not reproduce again all by themselves.

Commercial grass mixtures are another evil, as far as the regeneration of the natural herbs goes, because commercial mixtures  for grasses do not contain the variety of ‘stray’ plants in them, but are deliberately engineered so that they will not even seed to regenerate their own grass again.  Once you destroy the natural grasses on your soil, and replace them with these commercial mixtures, you will need to keep buying that commercial grass seed each year to keep a good head of grass on the land.  A Maori woman on New Zealand ‘Country Calendar’ a couple of weeks ago, Channel One TVNZ, complained about the paddocks of grass which had been planted with this commercial, weakened grass seed.  Her paddocks of grass which still had the original old grass on them, complete with all the stray ‘weeds’, were self-perpetuating, and regrew year after year without needing any fresh seed on them.

Relying on commercial grass seed which is engineered to die out, rather than reproduce, is not a sustainable type of agriculture.  This  benefits only the pockets of those international giants, the seed-sellers who market their ‘stuffed’ product. Apart from needing to buy more grass seed from those companies each year, the wide variety of natural herbs, such as dandelions, plantains, self-heal or prunella vulgaris, chickweed, and many others, are non existent in these seed mixes.  These natural herbs, or ‘weeds’,  all have an important part to play in keeping soil healthy, and in providing a variety of natural medicines for animals to eat.  They are also of enormous value in making herbal medicines for people.

to be continued……

Cayenne Pepper And Lime Tea For Cleansing and Pain Relief

Cayenne is a Natural Pain Reliever and Circulation Remedy

My friend Bernhard Petersen, who is in spirit, told me just yesterday that I should take Lime and Cayenne each morning, to stimulate circulation, to stimulate the appetite, to improve bowel function, and improve the vitality and general health.  His advice was not specifically as a pain relief, as I am not in any pain,  but I thought it was interesting to get information about cayenne, as later in the day, I  randomly came across a reading in a book which recommended cayenne as a natural pain reliever.  I figure he would like me to talk about the health benefits of cayenne, as well as to remember to use it myself.   Bernhard’s message about using Cayenne and Lime Tea prompted me to post up an article on using Cayenne for Shingles, yesterday, and now this one follows.

Cayenne and Lime  Tea For Internal Cleansing:  Bernhard’s recipe was to take a small lime, cut it up and put into a small saucepan,  cover with 2 cups of water, add 1/2 small teaspoon of cayenne, and warm it up in the pot, simmering gently for 10 minutes.  Allow to cool.  Take one cup of this warm mixture, ten minutes to half an hour before breakfast in the morning, before you have anything else.  Leave the lime pieces in the remainder to use later.  Warm this up before the mid-day meal, and drink all that remains.  I have  already tried Bernhard’s recipe,  using paprika pepper instead of the cayenne, to good effect.  Paprika is also good for the circulation, and  is a mild laxative as well as having antibiotic and antiviral properties.

The mixture can be made the day before, and left to stand.  This gets more of the active ingredients out of the lime into the tea.  Warm up next day before use.

Cayenne Pepper and Lime Tea Helps Alleviate Desire For Coffee:  I have an addiction to coffee.  I have found already, that the cayenne, or paprika and lime tea, helped enormously in reducing the desire for coffee.

Cayenne Pepper is recommended as a pain reliever for Shingles and arthritis.  Remember that if you have either of these conditions, that it is advisable to see a health practitioner for advice before using home remedies.  Cayenne as a pain reliever is mentioned in the book ‘New Choices In Natural Healing’, which is edited by ex-editor of ‘Prevention ‘ magazine, Bill Gottlieb.  Hot peppers contain an active ingredient, capsaicin, which has been used in the making of the pharmaceutical ‘Zostrix’, which is used to treat Shingles pain.  Adding cayenne pepper, or ginger, or paprika, to meals is helpful to Shingles and arthritis sufferers:  Bernhard’s recipe for cayenne and lime tea should be helpful to people with these conditions if they were to take it on a daily basis.