A herb for all ages

Our natural cycles influence us physically and emotionally as we move through each phase of life. Holly Davis looks at how herbs can help us manage each stage.

A healthy reproductive system is of key importance to us as it dominates our lives and influences our relationships. However, as we journey from daughter to young woman to lover to wife to matriarch, the great Goddess of the moon also directs and influences our physiological growth and our appreciation of life.

Science would have us think otherwise, referring to these events in our lives as mere physiological programming, but there is another awareness of what drives us. On quiet nights when children are sleeping, when partners are gone from us, when houses are still and there is only the sound of our own hearts beating, then we might hear our intuition speak to us of deeper ways of knowing. These whispers tell us of an understanding that lies beyond technological efficiency and domestic practicalities. It is an understanding that lets us know when to be concerned and when to trust, when to act and when to wait.

This kind of intuitive knowledge is accessed more easily when we are in good health, as it is then that the channels feel clear. But a woman’s health is so easily and often challenged, and before we even take into account the speed of modern-day living and the high expectations we have of ourselves, we often find we’re also at the mercy of our hormones, which can change the way we think, feel and respond to the world in which we live.

How herbs can help

Herbal medicine has a very long and important history in helping people deal with and manage illness. In times long past, women were the custodians of herbal lore. They grew and dried the herbs, concocted teas and tinctures, and combined them to create healing prescriptions. The reputation of these healers grew so much that there was a time when they were seen as dangerous to the status quo. Named as witches, many thousands even lost their lives in the purges that followed to rid society of their ‘evil’ ways. Thankfully, much of their knowledge survived and has been passed on to the men and women who practise herbal medicine today.

Herbs have a plethora of applications and may be used to prevent and treat any manner of ailments – from simple treatments such as chamomile tea to soothe, or lemongrass
and peppermint tea to uplift; to more complex concerns such as the healing of a wound with calendula and goldenseal tinctures, or easing a troubled mind with St. John’s wort.
When it comes to the cycles of a woman’s health there are many effective remedies, some of which are mentioned here.

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