Just how does this combination come together?
I've had an interesting month researching, reading and learning about the theory of chinese medicine behind what is going on with Covid 19 and our immune system, or to break it down further, our lung energy and kidney energy.
The quality of our lung energy relies on the strength and stamina of our kidney energy, our core vitality and constitution.
In my previous career I have exhausted myself emotionally and physically, I used to be so stressed, then every time I had a holiday I got ill. This was my nervous system relaxing and allowing my body to repair, and so I always got ill. Looking back over my career I realised I wasn't very good at looking after myself and it took me becoming a full time practitioner and hitting the perimenopause to really start looking at my own health and immunity.
I'm pleased to say I feel in a lot better shape now than 4 or 5 years ago, I used to think I ate relatively healthily but it's not until you learn what we are nutritionally depleted in and how that affects us that it all begins to really make sense and then you know what you need to do more of.
TRADITIONAL CHINESE MEDICINE TO FIGHT THE VIRUS
A shiatsu practitioner friend told me a few weeks back that there was a lot of research and trialling being done in China to see if TCM (Traditional Chinese Medicine) could help fight Covid 19; and it really is fascinating! Shiatsu, means finger pressure, but the theory system that your shiatsu treatment sits on is completely from Traditional Chinese Medicine. TCM covers multiple disciplines- acupressure, acupuncture, breathing techniques and exercise (Qi Gong), moxa (acupuncture with heat), cupping and herbal medicine.
Treating Covid in the UK, if you're in hospital you're given broad band antibiotics if they fear pneumonia, plus painkillers. With TCM in chinese hospitals they break down all the energetic actions that are taking place at the time of the virus. Terms such as lung qi deficiency and damp heat and many other components that in coming together are the symptoms brought on by the virus.
As TCM sees that there are many different elements to how the virus is affecting the body, it then applies many different elements to work on alleviating the symptoms. On a few websites from the far east I found a TCM recipe for beating Covid along with claims that TCM was being used which around 90% success rate. This makes me wonder if at the end of all this there are 2 things to consider:
1. Are we an unhealthy population in the UK and therefore have a high infection rate.
2. If we don't have such a good recovery rate as the Chinese was the difference in their use of chinese herbal medicine.
I translated all the latin (?) terms and found they were using fungi, herbs, roots and flowers. You'll spot cinnamon in the mix, which is good for our endocine system and can help support the insulin process with sugar. It is also warming and expelling, who doesn't like cinnamon in something in the winter?
Also liquorice root powder popped up, and it stated that this had been particularly effective. It's another ingredient I have to hand as I use it when testing the dogs as part of my canine shiatsu. I've also taken it myself when recovering from a gut parasite that impaired my liver. It turns out that liquorice is great for strengthening lung function, and especially if you have asthma. You can buy liquorice from a natural food store and it most likely has been combined with molasses, another ingredient I've looked up in chinese food energetics and guess what? It's used to strengthen Lung Qi!
Just before Easter I had started to feel under the weather, low energy, wanting to eat carbs, and going to be early; I got through a bag of natural liquorice in 2 days! Then I followed the advice from a lecture I'd watching on 'Essential Oils and TCM for Viruses', and I gargled with Tea Tree and Lemon oils, and my sore throat stopped immediately and that afternoon I felt more energised and 'not under the weather', I really felt I'd seen off a bug of some kind.
WE HAVE NATURE'S MEDICINE IN OUR KITCHEN CUPBOARDS!
If you like italian foods then you'll love herbs like basil, rosemary and oregano, and you'll probably have a generous serving of garlic too. All 3 of these have energetic properties for expelling from our lungs, strengthening and opening airways. We can inhale them to help us breathe better, that's right you don't need to eat them for the lungs, you can inhale their scent. When distilled into essential oils these ingredients are turned into very potent medicinal options.
Eating processed foods leeches the good nutrients from our bodies, like Magnesium, In turn this has a detrimental effect on our immune system. Right now with time on our hands we should be cooking well, we can add in the herbs that are good for us (all herbs are good for us that's why we developed them into our cooking over the years). Make a good spaghetti bolognese and pack a punch with the garlic and keep the bugs out!
Spices play their part too, they're 'expellants' or they 'raise our Yang Qi', you know it as 'sweat it out'/ 'fire us up'. You have to trust what your body is telling you it wants. Herbs can be cooling and so you may not feel like eating something with them in, and that is perfectly fine, you're listening to what your body wants. If you feel like having spices, really feel what level of spice you want, don't just up end the pot, do it to taste, you'll find the flavour that you want is the strength of spice that your body needs. This goes for citrus flavours too, there is a caveman reason why some of us prefer spices, and others herbs, and some people want very plain food.
All foods have an energetic property and if we listen carefully we'll pick the foods that our body needs, unfortunately processed foods (and in this I do include cake!) have learnt to override or bypass our signals as to whether we want to eat those ingredients. If I gave you a bowl of sugar and a bowl of butter, how much could you eat from each bowl before you said 'ugh'? However if I beat them together, you'd be able to eat more, then if we baked it with an egg and flour chucked in, suddenly it becomes delicious....
This is an example of a processed food bypassing our senses as to whether we want to eat it or not!
For your health and immunity, especially at this time, cut back to basics, remove the processed food so that you can taste ingredients and decide if it's right for you to have them. Go and try some liquorice (not the allsort sweets, the natural stuff), do you like the taste, do you have asthma or allergies, does it help you breathe better afterwards? If you don't like the smell or taste then don't eat it :)
COVID 19 ONGOING SYMPTOMS
Sadly there have been a few cases around me now and something has struck me about the 2nd phase, especially after I saw it mentioned briefly on the news the other week. The symptom cycle of Covid 19 is 28 days - 5 days of incubation, 7-10 days of fever, then comes the lung deficiency part which in turn could degenerate into pneumonia and will leaving you in bed for 2 weeks at least.
We've been made well aware of the sore throat/ dry cough start. Then the fever stage comes, and then there is a 3rd phase which I believe Boris Johnson probably faltered at, as did my cousin. Out of the fever stage you either recover or you don't, The symptoms for not recovering are feeling cold, a banging headache that painkillers don't touch, and your hands going cold, if not blue fingertips as well. Any of these symptoms and you should go into hospital, they are a sign of lack of oxygen to your brain, hands and body. Don't call the GP or 111, you are valid to go into hospital as you need oxygen, the longer you hold off doing this, the longer you will be in hospital on oxygen, and the longer your body will take to recover.
Now here's a thing to note, if you get a sore throat, you can expel the ensuing bug, you do not have to be ill, you just need to know that you can expel external influences and how to do it.
If you haven't already downloaded my Top 10 Immunity Boosters it's here.
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