Holistic Care for Stemians (HCS)
Part 4: This week the theme is BITTERNESS
Who’s Afraid Of The Big Bitter Wolf Lion?
Contemporary cutting-edge, state-of-the-art, empirical, laboratory research is ever doing it’s best to catch up with holistic medicine. Three stars for effort!
The latest research shows
that we have receptors for bitter principles in our LUNGS, and throughout the digestive tract and in almost all other extra-intestinal organs of the metabolic system. In holistic science, bitter herbs (notably from the gentian family, but also the taraxaci) have had a place in the vademecum for asthmatic complaints, along side the more typical digestive ones in traditional herbariums, from the start.
What some of us already knew
In anthroposophical medicine the lungs belong to the element of earth (in Chinese medicine to metal) and have a relationship to the carbon picture, which corresponds to the digested food in our intestines. It all revolves around the body-building principles: making life out of dead matter. This is a dynamic process and needs astral stimulation (directing forces which are cosmic). They can be gathered by our organs, either through breathing or eating or sensing/experiencing.
Taste experience
Apparently, we don’t only taste with our mouths. In the 1920’s, Rudolf Steiner already said that, tasting continues on throughout the body. Every organ has its own specific taste experience, so no surprise to the anthroposophical doctor there. Herbalists have always used bitter herbs to treat liver ailments, dyspepsia and loss of appetite. See also the lore of the common “digestivo”, the tail-end companion of the “apertivo” around a meal, is originally a bitter liqueur ( think of the Italian, medicinal tasting Amari, a concoction of herbs and spices, including orange peel; or the Hungarian Unicum made from over 40 herbs and spices! In Germany we come across Jägermeister.) I don’t want to promote these comforts as benefical to health, however! They have a high alcohol percentage which comes with its own set of health hazzards….but the principle is there.
For the Epicurians and Gourmands, however, a beginner’s guide to digestivos can be found here Memorie di Angelina ▼photo found there.
Sensory impairments leave us clueless
Taste is one way to get a grip on our external world. We develop ourselves with the help of our sensory system. The impressions captured by the senses (we have twelve in anthroposophical science) effect our organism and informs our consciousness of who we are. The senses bring us into contact with the five basic questions we need to ask for every action we undertake: who, what, where, when, how? People with autism or those living with those who have autism know, first hand, how these questions must be satisfied for even the most regular action (like brushing your teeth). For autism there is an accumulation of sensory impairments and deficiencies which leave the individual often poorly informed of their outer and inner environment and therefore anxious, confused or blatantly out-of-the-loop.
Food is Posion
Taste is not just a sensation on the tongue. It is a complex interaction between inner and outer worlds. Food is one major bridge. Culture another. The foreign elements alien to our intergral self is never simply absorbed into our being - or where it is it can be deadly. It first has to be tasted, chewed, swallowed, digested and metabolised. This takes the whole human being's involvement. But eating and partaking in general of this world has become a fragmented affair, sadly. This causes ever poorer constituional health. Our wellfare society of easy, homogenously tasting (sweet or salty) snacking is making us weak and threatening our immunity.
Keeping variety in our taste sensations is life-saving.
When we are unable to transform alien substance (plant, animal, mineral, progressively with less effort) and we allow foreign substance too deeply into our organic integrity, its intrusion will start to break us apart: one becomes ill, intoxicated, or poisoned.
This can already happen for ordinary, good food when your stomach is too feeble to break down a simple slice of bread. It is a growing issue that our bodies have become lazy or truculent when it comes to tackling the tougher jobs of turning plant sap into blood (a lot more work than a burger). The intestinal system has to be robust enough to do its own cooking and deconstructing of the integrity of the plant for it to become nourishing substance that can be pumped as fuel into the bloodstream. How this process exactly works, by the way, is still, regading some bio-organic-chemical details a scientific mystery.
It is well-known that babies and children are particulary wary of or even reject the taste of bitter (the brussel-sprouts problem explained): many poisons will be signalled by a bitter taste. It is a little more subtle than a basic instinct which kicks in at the taste of a sprout, for if it weren’t, no child would ever eat a sprout (and mine always did, but there is an appropriate age to train up the intelligence of the body). The body can be left to its natural sensitivities, which will certainly welcome a hint of bitter (or a shot of an elixer especially in spring!) to spike its organs into thorough action. More on how that works below.
Growing stronger for bitterness
What makes a plant poisonous is the “foreign astrality”, or cosmic information we are unable to process and neutralise/metabolise by means of the metabolic/digestive system. It remains alien and “too much” for our organic processors. If you are lucky the middle-system of stomach-pancreas-liver will emit the baleful substance or if it is slower to make its noxiousnouss known the bowels may, as yet, kick in to extrude it. Otherwise, there may be surreptitious build-ups, slowly compromising the inner organs.
Fortunately, often the skin, too, will play its exudatary role, sweating it out if possible (with the help of fever) or causing other detox-pictures in the many varied extopic skin conditions. The skin in this can be a great signal for deeper organic malfunctions (or sluggish activity). Rather than treat the skin (only) try to get to the root of the dysfunction and stimulate recovery or increased activity there (often at the site of the liver for many types of eczema, hives, even acne, but also overall digestive stagnation for rheumatism and diabetes). This treatment will go hand in hand with the improvement of psychological well-being and mental processing, where the tap root for the digestive issues may lie.
Bitter in our daily diet
Bitter is the signature of excessive “astrality” or cosmic influence absorbed by the otherwise sweet plant. What makes it go and do such a pernicious thing, you may well ask? Well, cosmic energy is not good or bad, it just flows, and the expression some plants give in response to it are just aspects of consciousness, and certainly very powerful and healing in some cases. Think of quinine in penicillin (its taste can be known from tonic-water). Or dandelion, artichoke, dark green vegetables, fresh spring shoots - and all those herbs and spices. No wonder Chinese Five Element or Aryuvedic nutrition and medicine include bitter as an extremely vitalising element.
We don’t like bitter much on any level. Bitter people, bitter after tastes, bitter pills, they all sound rather negative to our ears. The hyssop in the Scriptures comes with heavy prophesies. Myhrr, another healer, is also powerfully bitter. Notwithstanding, it is a disconcerting problem that, overall, our palet has become adverse to bitter, and we are purposely filtering this flavour out of our foods. We modify many of our vegetables and fruits to taste ever sweeter.
Likewise, we must not shy too much, too often, always, away from bitter experiences in life. We cannot only float around on candyfloss clouds and hope this will make the world a better place for everyone.
Inded, were we only to pay attention to the positive and uplifting, rose-coloured experiences and stories in life, this would weaken our earth-dwelling skills. We will lose the grave diggers of this world, and a ghostly mountain range dump of intellectual rubbish will bury us alive. Without wanting to sound facetious, trite or pedantic, from a holistic perspective, the rubbish and e-waste dumps around the world’s favelas are pictures of how little we understand the bitterness we must learn to swallow. You may add the carbon-emission issue, too. There will come a time when we will have to take up the big nomer of pollution and study its true and cosmic root cause if we are ever to fundamentally heal this planet.
more disturbing pictures and storiesm from Africa here
This is a site which has loads of spring greens ideas
Yes, please, more bitter for me!
Here you go then: all you need to do, with Ash Wednesday coming up, the end of Carneval, the start of Lent, is to take a 2-6 week cure of a bitter elixer, like dandelion juice. I would rather not call it a detox, but it is one of sorts. (I have detox-fatigue! It is medically not an accurate term for an unproven result, and holistically speaking the story needed to accompany detoxification is a few tomes long).
By all means, keep your eye open for the first brave spring leaves of dandelion and rocket, hunt for the herbs you trust and know (very well and not by dirty road sides) or shop for organic radicchio and cress, or grow your own sprouting-sprouts (if you like, I’ll show you how in a blog) and make your own salads full of vitality and zest. Gently start to shake that body out of its hibernation. (It's early days yet, go slow, but be strict where you need to be, the time of Lent is conducive to this).
When spring is more in schwung I’ll give you a delightful birch elixer-juice drink (also bitter, but works slightly differently than the gentian or dandelion family). For now, wake up your senses with a few shots of dandelion juice a day (before meals) or at least once a day in the morning before breakfast. It may take a little training to be able to swallow it at all, but then, try diluting it with water (but remember one sip is swallowed sooner than half a glass). Do not, however, try to mask the bitterness, for it is precisely the training of your senses you also want to achieve.
If you’ve been a good girl or boy, and taken your daily dose of bitter, you may treat yourself to a super envigorating but dreamily mild drink of birch water (not at all bitter!). A long drink of birch water has the same effect on me, as a day in a spa might (if not quite the same as an enchanting walk in the Finnish forests). You can just feel the electrolytes massaging your inner juices into a joyous flood of light.
For your brain go here:
Please spike your inner juices by reading today’s edition of Brainpickings, from which this picture, fortuitiously, has been taken)
Previous posts in HCS:
(3) Sore Throat Care
(2) St.John's Wort
(1) Dry-Brushing