Herbal Humor, Week Ten

Herbal Humor, Week Ten

Well, after a few week hiatus because of lack of humor, Bridget was back with some funny comments for our last night of class. After turning in my final project in the end of class, I have my official certificate of herbal medicine, for whatever that’s worth. Without further ado…

1. Bridget: “When I first heard about color therapy and aroma therapy, I thought it was a bunch of hoohoo. I thought it was about as beneficial as getting your aura massaged. Have any of you had your aura massaged? Well, there is a person in Boulder who does it, of course, and so he gave me a free aura massage once. I have to say, it was not impressive. It’s certainly not something I’d suggest anyone pays to get done.”

2. After discussing the benefits of color therapy, Bridget suggests different ways we can use color to our benefit. If you are feeling blue, you can wear bright clothing to improve your mood. If you are feeling upset, blue and purple can be soothing. You can even make a bath and add the color you want to the bath so you are taking a blue bath or a red bath. “Oh, boy,” Bridget warns. “I just have to tell you to take caution with an orange bath. Man, I just laughed and laughed when I took an orange bath. I couldn’t stop laughing. So, only take an orange bath if you want a hilarious time.”

3. In case you want to coordinate your wardrobe to the planets as Bridget does, here is the way to do it.

Sunday is the day of the sun. Wear white, the combination of all colors. White will make you more contemplative and prayerful, as Sunday is the traditional day of the Sabbath.

Monday is the day of the moon. Wear blue or yellow.

Tuesday is the day of Mars. Wear red or, if you don’t think you can stomach red, pink.

Wednesday is the day of Mercury. Wear purple. (Ironically, our class is on Wednesday nights, and Bridget has worn purple every single Wednesday except this Wednesday, the day she is teaching on color therapy.)

Thursday is the day of Jupiter. Wear blue or purple.

Friday is the day of Venus. Wear green.

Saturday is the day of Saturn. Wear black.

4. Bridget normally passes around class informative things like tinctures, salves, and supplements. Tonight, she passed around anything she could get her hands on. A fun-looking ball. A magnet. Her granddaughter’s doll. Colorful sunglasses. “I have to pass out everything I can,” Bridget said. “I don’t know when I will see you again.” Also in the course of the evening, I smelled approximately sixty different essential oils. My head was spinning when I left.

5. Bridget: “My friend Cha Cha got married, and at her wedding she had seven tables with foods of different colors on each table. You could go to the blue food table, the yellow food table, the red food table, etc. It was really nice, I suppose. Well, I mean, I have to say, leave it to Cha Cha.”

6. Bridget: “My friend and I were thinking the other day how awful it would be to be black. I mean, think about it. Poor black gets associated with so many negative things. Black magic. Black death. Black plague. Black is not bad. We should really have a lot more compassion for black. I just think it would be awful to be black.” (Clarification: She meant the color black, not black people…at least I don’t think she meant black people.)

7. Bridget: “My friend used to be a nose for Aveda. She can really tell the difference between all sorts of subtle scents. It’s really quite amazing. Aveda paid her $100,000 a year to be a nose for them, but unfortunately she recently got laid off. She wants to move to Boulder again. I mean, there is really no reason at all to live in Minnesota unless you are being paid $100,000 a year. Or at least we can say, it isn’t nearly as fun to live in Minnesota as it is to live in Boulder, unless you are being paid $100,000 a year.”

8. At the end of class, Bridget opened it up for questions. “Please ask anything,” Bridget said. “This is Boulder! The more unusual the question, the better.”

Old, Bold Shroom Hunter raises his hand immediately, “I have a psychedelic question. How do I turn psychedelic mushrooms into a tincture?” (A tincture is basically an herb (or herbs) concentrated in alcohol. Rescue Remedy is a tincture.)

“You don’t.” Bridget said. “But I do have some candy bars in my freezer that I can assure you don’t want to eat unless you are a very brave person. Please don’t eat them, Abe. Your mother will kill me.”

9. I’d also like to share that I was looking up something in Bridget’s wonderful book Beauty by Nature, when I came across a chapter on how to keep your hands looking young. For those of you who are worried about this particular concern, the very first step is to always hold your hands in elegant positions. Do not lapse into ugly or graceless hand positions. You will be aging your hands by years. Please keep this in mind next time you are shoveling the driveway or washing dishes.

And although these aren’t from herb class, I’m going to share them.

1. I was in Boulder this weekend and offered a colonic from a woman named Nanana (emphasis on the first “na”). I declined, and if you look up what a colonic is, you will know why.

2. I read in the news that ketchup and pizza are considered vegetables in school lunches. Potatoes are considered a “gateway vegetable.” Similar to gateway drugs, school cafeterias are hopeful that if children consume enough potatoes, they will be enticed to eat other vegetables, like broccoli, or pizza.

After a Baltimore school district imposed a “meatless Monday” policy in the school’s cafeteria to encourage healthful eating, the meat industry protested, saying the policy was intended to “brainwash young kids.” Mm-hmm. Because Meatless Monday is what brainwashes kids, not endless advertising and two-story McDonald’s playlands. Additionally, I feel like telling a kid to eat her vegetables and then handing her a packet of ketchup is more confusing and even deceitful than Meatless Monday.

Now, if you excuse me, I have to go eat a salad (i.e. pizza, french fries, and ketchup).

3. A drug called krokodil is sweeping across Europe. It consists of codeine, benzine, paint thinner, hydrochloric acid, and red phosphorus. Users’ skin rots, and unsurprising (since this is the equivalent of drinking your way through Home Depot), users die within three years, but most within a year. I feel like the name itself should be a warning. I mean, a name like heroine at least sounds enticing, but krokodil? There is nothing encouraging about that name. Crocodiles are dangerous, cold-blooded killers, with bad skin and slow metabolism to boot. What about them would people want to emulate?

Herbal Humor, Week Seven

Herbal Humor, Week Seven

So, this week the class was titled Addiction Free. I expected craziness, but I got a surprisingly serious class. So, I am giving you some normal Bridget stories. It’s about time we gave her some credit, right?

1. Before herb class, I had to run a few errands, and on my way out of the store, I had a woman running (literally) after me calling for me to stop. I turned, and she said, “Hey, I have to give you my card.” She pulled her business card out of her purse. “Have you ever had a psychic reading?”

“No,” I said, “but I’m okay. Thanks anyway.”

“But you really must have it.”

“No, thanks.”

I should have told her I was getting my dosha read tonight, and I can really only have one person at a time take glimpses into my psyche. But we went our separate ways. Still I thought it was a great start to herb night.

2. Bridget: “I am going to say something that I know a lot of you are going to find very outrageous, but I’m going to say it anyway. Many cultures around the world have rituals to initiate their adolescents into adult life. I find it extremely disappointing that we do not have any ritual like that in America, and I believe that is why so many teens create their own rituals. Because we do not take time to acknowledge their transition into adulthood with a strong public ritual, teens create rituals for themselves. Usually these rituals involve things like getting drunk and high and going to a music festival, for example. My daughter Sunny became a Grateful Dead groupie for a summer when she was a teenager as her ritual. These rituals our teens create for themselves are incredibly stupid. Drunkenness? Mixing substances? Going to places where they could easily lose their friends? Driving recklessly? We cannot entrust our teens to make their way into adulthood responsibly with this kind of behavior, and I really think we need to start creating rituals for our teenagers that acknowledge that we recognize their independence and adulthood. If we acknowledge it, maybe they wouldn’t act so recklessly to get us to notice it.” [Commentary: Out of all the things Bridget has said in class, I don’t think this is the one that needed the disclaimer of “outrageous.”]

3. For your information, there are 81 marijuana dispensaries in Boulder. To put this in perspective, Boulder is home to 293,161 people, 402 restaurants, and 44 coffee shops.

With that in mind, here are Bridget’s thoughts on marijuana: “I am not totally against marijuana when it is used for some chronic pain conditions. The unfortunate thing about drugs like marijuana is that we don’t use them properly. Marijuana, in its natural form, has some incredible healing and medicinal properties. Unfortunately, we are now hybridizing marijuana so that it is predominantly THC, which is the compound in pot that gets you high. In doing so, we are eliminating or minimizing some of the other wonderful medicinal compounds in it. Westerners are notorious for doing that.

“For example, South Americans used to chew on coca leaves, which are extremely nutritious. Europeans got their hands on them, and instead of using them for their nutritious properties, they refined them into cocaine, which is terrible for you. We see the same example with opium, which is a wonderful plant in its natural state for pain relief. We refine these drugs until they are no longer what they were intended to be, and they become dangerous and stupid.

“The Bible talks repeatedly about holy anointing oil, which was comprised of olive oil, frankincense, myrrh, cinnamon, and cannabis. The original translated texts were translated calamus instead of cannabis, but scholars no longer believe this is the correct translation. For one thing, calamus does not grow in the Middle East, so people in Egypt and Israel would not have access to it. They believe now that the correct translation is cannabis. Using cannabis in its original form in holy anointing oil would have had some healing and comforting properties for those anointed. I truly believe God meant what he said when he instructed us in Genesis that he gives us every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed on it for food. I just do not believe his intention was ever for us to isolate properties in these plants and use them as mind-altering drugs.

“I’m incredibly disappointed that Boulder, which is at the forefront of so many health and natural food movements, is idolizing marijuana the way that it is and making it into something it was never intended to be. We should be setting a good example for the rest of the country about how marijuana can be used responsibly and healthfully, and we are not doing that.”

4. Bridget: “I got a call one night from a hospital in Colorado Springs. The doctor said that they had four teenage boys hospitalized because they had eaten poison hemlock while hiking. Poison hemlock, as you may know, is what killed Romeo and Juliet. It looks a lot like wild carrot seed, and that is what the boys thought they were eating. The doctor said they had been able to save two of the boys, but they knew they would lose the other two within hours despite their best efforts. They were calling me as a last resort in the hope that I had some desperate measure they could try. I told them to have each boy drink ten cups of coffee quickly. Both boys survived with no lasting damage. The reason it worked is because poison hemlock slowly shuts down all your organs until nothing is functioning and you die, but coffee is a strong nervous system stimulant and encourages adrenaline production. It can be really hard on your adrenal glands, but if you have eaten poison hemlock and your systems are shutting down, coffee will work as a cardiac stimulant, forcing your organs to start operating again.”

5. Because there was not a whole lot of funny business in herb class, I made sure to take advantage of getting my dosha read by Tom after class. I’m still not 100% sure what a dosha is, but here’s part of mine.

Tom: “Lindsay, I can tell that what you need to know is that you’ve never made a mistake in your life. There are tons of people who live in dark, cold cave in the rainforest. You are one of them. Everyone in the cave is freezing to death or starving to death, and you look out on the rainforest and decide that you are going to try your luck in the rainforest. Everyone in the cave shuns you for this, and tells you that you are stupid for going into the rainforest, and you say, ‘So, my options are to die of cold and starvation in the cave or to head out into the rainforest and be eaten by a wild animal? Well, I guess I am going to take my chances and die the exciting way.’ So, you head out into the rainforest and you are so hungry and you see a mushroom and decide to eat it. The mushroom turns out to be poisonous, and you are sick and seek shelter in the cave. Everyone says, ‘I told you so.’ The next day, when you are feeling better, and so you head out into the rainforest again, and again you need to eat and notice a mushroom. You eat the mushroom, and this is a wonderful mushroom full of psychedelic properties. It gives you the ability to see more clearly, and you notice all the wonderful food that is in the rainforest for you to eat. You go back to the cave and show all the starving people in there all the wonderful food to eat. So, see? When you thought you were making mistakes, you were really making discoveries.” And then, as Tom is holding up a mirror to me after telling me my dosha, he says, “Do you even recognize this person in the mirror? Probably not. You probably don’t even recognize yourself anymore. I don’t recognize you either. People shape shift in front of me all the time.”

6. Bridget serves us tea each evening at her class. The tea Bridget served us in this class was kava kava tea. Halfway through my cup, she announced to drink our tea early and only drink one cup because kava kava is nicknamed “cannabis light.” (I did not get high off it, by the way, and nor did anyone else; I think you have to drink like thirty strong cups of it to be impacted.)

7. Bridget passed out a flyer for an organization called MAPS, Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies. “We believe that psychedelics when used responsibly can make a beneficial contribution to the individual and society,” the brochure announces.

“An excellent psychedelic drug is called iboga,” Bridget tells us. “It’s only legal in the Bahamas and Amsterdam, but right now several American pharmaceutical companies are doing research on it. The story of iboga I know is about a friend of mine in New York City who was addicted to heroin. He was looking for his next fix, but he couldn’t find any heroin, and finally someone told him to go get iboga. He did, and after ingesting it, he was on a major trip for about 48 hours. When he came off the trip, however, he no longer desired heroin. He was so impressed with how quickly this kicked his addiction that he brought it to ten people he knew who were addicted to heroin, and eight of them kicked the habit after one iboga trip. They are having a lot of success with this in clinical studies in Amsterdam, and I hope to one day go there and learn how to administer it. The drug is potent, and you can cause damage or death if you aren’t properly trained how to administer it to people. People report sitting by a stream of water and watching their ancestors float by. They are able to have conversations with them. This is the most commonly reported hallucination with iboga.

“Like I said, American pharmaceutical companies are studying it, and my prediction is that they will find a way to harness the healing power of iboga with a bunch of synthetic garbage added to a pill. And without all the fun of tripping, of course.”

8. When you are trying to stop an addition, journaling and prayer both help. Another exercise is to look in the mirror when you are indulging in your addiction. For example, one woman who ate a half-dozen donuts every morning came to Bridget, and Bridget told her to help quit her donut addiction, she should sit in front of a mirror and watch herself eat the donut. And she should chew each bite of the donut fifty times. The woman did so, and was able to stop eating donuts. “This works for all addictions,” Bridget tells us. “Shooting heroin, drinking alcohol, drinking coffee. Well, it really doesn’t work with shrooms. Yeah, definitely don’t stare at yourself in a mirror if you’ve ingested psychedelic shrooms.”

9. A journaling exercise to kick addictions is to write a letter to your addiction and have your addiction write back. You can start your letter ‘dear donuts’ or ‘dear blow.’ Whatever it is that you are addicted to.

10. Another suggestion is to designate a sum of money and write an encouraging letter to an organization you can’t stand. Give the money and the letter to a trusted friend or beloved, and tell them that if you have returned to your addiction after six months, they can send the letter and money to the organization, and if not, they can give it back to you. You can burn the letter and spend the money on something fun. An example of a letter would be, “Dear KKK, I am proud of the racial hatred your promote, and I’m sure you are lacking funding for white hoods and burning people at the stake. I don’t want these activities to have to cease for financial reasons, and so I’m sending you $50. Please use it to harass the minority of your choice.”

11. “If it comes to it, you can hold one of those things where everybody gets together and gangs up on the person and threatens them will all sorts of awful things,” Bridget says. “What do they call those?”

“An intervention,” Waldorf says.

“Yes, that’s right,” Bridget says. “An intervention.”

12. And last, Bridget’s farewell on this last class before Halloween, “Hippie Halloween! Toke or treat! I’m kidding, but I had to say it. You have to get your hippie fun when you come to my 60s museum house!”

Herbal Humor, Week Six

Herbal Humor, Week Six

1. Tonight Bridget was wearing a velvet witch’s costume with red and black striped tights. “I like it when Halloween comes around,” she told us. “I get to go to the stores and pick out clothes that most people would only wear on Halloween but that I would wear all year round. And I got the tights in Iceland. If you ever need tights, Iceland is the place to get them. They have wonderful tights and socks in all sorts of different colors and patterns, and, well, yeah, that’s all there is for shopping there. In fact, there is so little shopping in Iceland that when the women need new clothes, they book plane tickets to Minnesota and shop at the Mall of the Americas. I guess it’s cheaper to go to the Mall of the Americas than it is to go to Europe and buy new clothes.

2. Looking around Bridget’s house, there are a lot of interesting decorations. Most predominantly there are fairies, but she also has a dollhouse displayed on a high shelf. The dollhouse has four rooms. In the first room there is Jesus and a wizard playing together on an Ouija board. In the second room, another wizard watches over two black baby Jesuses. In a third room, John Lennon guards the door as a fairy takes a bath. In the fourth room, Jimi Hendrix plays his guitar to three sleeping fairies.

3. “When Sunny and Rainbow were sixteen and twelve, they came home from what I thought was school, and they came running in to show me their new tattoos,” Bridget says. “Naturally, I was furious. ‘Tattoos?’ I asked. ‘You are twelve and sixteen! Who on earth thought you were old enough for tattoos?’

‘Mr. Wizard,’ Sunny and Rainbow told me.

‘Mr. Wizard? I’m going to kill him. How dare Mr. Wizard give you girls tattoos? He should know better.’

Sunny, you see, had gotten some sort of flower tattoo across her stomach, and Rainbow had covered her leg with dolphins jumping over a rainbow. I knew they would regret these tattoos in the future, and I told them that.

‘But, Mom,’ Rainbow replied, ‘We had to get the tattoos while we were still young and brave.’

‘Yeah,’ Sunny said. ‘And we thought you would be proud. Before we went into the tattoo shop, we took Rescue Remedy to make sure we should do it.”

I was furious, and so I punished them both, but secretly, I was a little proud that they had remembered to take their Rescue Remedy.”

4. In discussing common sense in first aid, Bridget discussed proper labeling. She shared several stories where improper labeling caused major medical emergencies. A grandmother who hadn’t labeled her bleach cup left it sitting on her kitchen counter. Her granddaughter, thinking it was Sprite, drank the bleach and ended up with major burns to her esophagus, throat, etc. She emphasized always labeling your items properly, and as incentive to do so, buy labels you think are beautiful because you will enjoy using them.

Later in the class, when discussing burns, Bridget pulls out a homemade salve from her refrigerator. The salve is meant to be applied topically after being burned. “Ignore the label,” Bridget says before handing it to KingSoopers. “It says that it is chocolate, but it isn’t. It’s a burn salve. You don’t want to eat it.”

5. “Using steak on a bruised eye like the Little Rascals actually does work,” Bridget said. “But let’s face it. This is Boulder. You are probably going to have to go to fourteen houses before you find someone who actually buys steak.”

6. Bridget suggests applying castor oil to warts to make them go away. Castor Oil, in its plant form, is called Palm of Christi (Christi meaning Christ) because it is a green five-leaf plant with a red dot in the center. It looks like the palm of Christ with a nail driven through the center. “When my children were little, they and Tom all ended up with warts at the same time. I told the girls to apply castor oil to it and pray to Christ for the wart to leave. I told them to visualize Christ healing them. I totally believe in Christ and His power to heal; after all, I grew up in a Christian home. Tom, however, does not believe in Christ, and so he applied the castor oil every day without any visualization or prayer attached while my daughters applied the castor oil every day while praying and visualizing the healing power of Christ. Within days, both Sunny’s and Rainbow’s warts had completely disappeared and Tom had seen no improvement in his. Within weeks, he still hadn’t seen any improvement and we had to try a different remedy to get rid of his warts. So, well, I’m just saying. That’s what happened. Take what you want from it.”

Herbal Humor, Week Five

Herbal Humor, Week Five

I missed the last half of class this week because of my meningitis, but the first half of class was ripe for herbal humor.

1. Upon reviewing last week’s notes on immune health in order to find some tips to help me heal from meningitis, I found Bridget’s remedy for almost anything, except that I had written it down wrong. I wrote, “at the first sign of a cold or flu, mix 2 tsp honey, 2 tsp apple cider vinegar, and 1 cup warm weather.” Obviously, in case you plan to use this, it was supposed to be warm water, but maybe this says something abut how I feel l heal best.

2. I walked into class, and already a group of people were gathered on the floor around Bridget’s TV watching a video called Sacred Psychoactives, which Bridget and her friend Kimba created together. Kimba played therapeutic music during the video while Bridget read soothing meditations, all of which began with, “Can you float through the universe of your body?”

3. This week we were discussing common ailments, using the five element theory of Chinese medicine as our aid. The five elements within the five element theory are fire, earth, metal, water, and wood. “As you all must remember from first grade,” Bridget said. “The earth began as a big fiery ball.” I know I went to a very conservative Christian first grade, but this is not a commonly-taught creation theory in public school, is it?

4. “All you have to do is believe in yourself,” Bridget encouraged the class. “I have a neighbor, and every time I see him, he salutes me and yells, ‘I am going to be the first gay Jew on Mars!’, and then he goes on his way. And I figure, he’s young, why not? Why can’t he be the first gay Jew on Mars? He certainly believes he will be, and he is proactively telling himself that and building equipment in his backyard that is going to be able to fly him to Mars, so I figure, why not? That’s all you have to do. Believe in yourself.”

5. Bridget: “People who predominantly have the wood element in them are judgmental. They make judgments about people based on their appearance, for example. Like when Tom and I go to the gas station. I think every time Tom and I go to the gas station he gets approached and asked if he has any pot. It’s because he has long hair. Wood people just assume that a long-haired man who lives in Boulder carries pot with him. But Tom doesn’t smoke pot. He just says no, tells them they are wood people, and we go on our way.” [Commentary: If I approached someone for pot, and he told me, “no, I don’t have any. You are a wood person,” I would assume he had smoked all his pot, not that he did not smoke it at all.]

6. Bridget: Our daughter Rainbow was home for the holidays from Hollywood one year, and she was sleeping in Tom’s office. I was reading the paper, and the paper had a feature on the medical offices that burned down in Boulder. Do you remember that? The combination of essential oils and cleaning products the massage office was using caused a fire. So, I read the article, and then I went outside and put it in the recycling bin, and I came back and my whole home smelled like smoke. Well, good job, Bridget, I thought, you’ve honed in your psychic skills too well. You were reading about a fire, and now you have started one. So, I search around for the fire, and I didn’t see it, so I started going around to the neighbors and asking them if their house was on fire, but everyone told me no, so I came back to my house, and searched around some more, and I went upstairs where Rainbow was sleeping, and sure enough it was on fire. Luckily, I was writing a book on herbal first aid, and so I knew some tricks for putting out a fire and – oh, I should rephrase that Rainbow was sleeping in the room during her stay, not during the fire – well, I just dragged the burning mattress down the stairs, through the front door, and onto the street and then I ran back upstairs and put out the fire, so by the time firemen got here, there was just really nothing to see. But don’t buy halogen lamps. They are dangerous."

7. “If you want to calm your children,” Bridget said. “Try chanting to them. Chanting can even calm you, but it is wonderful for children, too. Pick any chant. You can choose a Christian chant, a Jewish chant, a Buddhist chant. Any old chant. Except I don’t really like satanic chants for calming children. I mean, we don’t really want to align ourselves or our offspring with Satan, do we?”