Yellow hearts for happiness
12/04/2011 at 10:28 am | Posted in Uncategorized | 2 CommentsTags: flowers, Health, nature, wellbeing
Cowslips are beautiful tiny medicine chests
If you are lucky enough to have cowslips growing in your garden or nearby, nurture them. These small, quirky relatives of primroses aren’t so common nowadays, and they carry with them the peace and slower pace of a more rural past – and a few related health benefits.
The garden around the Studio is old farmland, and so the cowslips never really left it. But it’s easy enough to sow seeds in any garden and wait for them to appear.
Just looking at them is instantly calming and relaxing. However, if you have an abundance of them, you can do much more than that…
Herbal medicine
Herbalists use cowslip flowers and roots as a nervine, to relax and calm; to help dispel chesty coughs and nervous headaches; and to promote restful sleep. Collect the flowers between March and May, and the roots before flowering time, or in the autumn. Add the flowers to herbal teas; or make a decoction of the dried root: 1 teaspoonful to a cup of water; bring to the boil and simmer gently for five minutes. Then drink three times a day.
Healthy salad
The tiny, sweet tasting flowers are a pretty addition to salads; you can eat the young leaves too, though we have yet to try them here. In the old days, many households made their own delicious cowslip wine from the flowers, which helped to clear winter coughs and was a popular night cap.
Flower therapy
But the best reason to grow them is probably just to look at them. Each flower is a tiny trumpet of five connected vibrant yellow hearts. Gaze into one, and take three deep breaths, and you will receive a small but potent dose of happiness, I guarantee.
Hitch a ride on the lightwaves, and be still
14/02/2011 at 11:22 pm | Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a commentTags: meditation, nature, wellbeing
Meditation word for this week is ‘Sky’.
Sky is a challenging word: how can we keep our minds on something vast that is constantly changing? And if we do manage to hitch a ride on the lightwaves, how do we stay calm and centred?
Actually, it’s a great word for meditation. And here are just some of the reasons why…
Looking at the sky with our mind’s eye is like looking at the skyscape of our own minds. Calm our thoughts, and the sky we conjure up in our mind becomes calm too… and yet always changing.
Meditating on sky helps us to understand the constantly changing currents of humanity… and find our own still point within the constant change.
Looking down at land from the sky, everything looks so ordered, and patterned, like a vast, intricate woven carpet. We know that the people way down below are a seething mass of emotions. We know we are too… and yet, from one mile high, it looks as though everything is just the way it is meant to be.
And then we may discover something interesting: what if our own lives are like intricate, hand-woven carpets? From our usual vantage point, on the surface, it feels like we’re struggling, sometimes getting nowhere, sometimes meeting a dead end and having to retrace our steps.
And yet… from the sky’s point of view, our lives look perfect, with colours, themes and motifs all placed exactly right. The U-turns we take and the mistakes we make may actually look like beautiful flowers from the air. The times we ambled along may look like silken mountain streams bringing much needed water to the flowers. And our most wonderful moments may look like bright woven diamonds, a stunning motif that recurs at exactly the right moments to help the pattern to look complete.
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Suzanne Askham 