It has begun! Since spending spending Christmas and New Years in Japan in 1962-3, I have observed a three-day transition into the new year. There is much to consider about the coming year, and it cannot be covered in one e-mail; but I want to take a few steps through Memory Lane and then comment on some issues facing all of us. As we know, 2020 was beyond strange, and this pattern will persist until the necessary changes are made. The questions are who decides what will change and what role do we want to play in the coming year. It will be tricky so my prayer is that we will adhere to what we know is right and thus assure the desired outcome.
The Long Winding Path
Much of 2020 was for spent on the technical issues of web hosting, e-mail security, and deliverability of posts to you. In addition, there were numerous upgrades to various web sites, some details are viewable and some are not yet visible because a lot has been going on behind the scenes. The most visible changes have been on BioethikaOils.com. Petar has been amazing and many new products have been added so I want to waltz down Memory Lane a bit and recap my personal journey.
As a child, I was probably very sensitive to odor, including my mother’s White Shoulder perfume. However, I knew nothing about the intricate ways in which blends are created. That piece of the puzzle unfolded very slowly, starting actually with Nostradamus. As a medical astrologer, I was always interested in the prophecies as well as how Nostradamus himself survived the Plague. His life was fascinating, but I was reading books before the advent of the Internet. Now, of course, there are more sources and also much more need for discernment.
Nostradamus was a French doctor and astrologer whose family was in the perfume business. In those days, perfumes were “natural” and often medicinal. Going back to very early times, flowers and scented oils were added to bath water and lotions. Of course, some plant products were also used medicinally. These are mentioned in ancient manuscripts as well as the Bible. The French word for wash is derived from the word for lavender, a flower often used in public bath houses.
Little anecdotes find a way of sticking in my brain and years may pass before I recognize how and why the impressions got embedded in my memory. Little could I have known in 1972 that the world would face epidemics of AIDS, Lyme disease, and whatever else is making the rounds that has human fingerprints all over.
Nostradamus lived at a time of enormous censorship and book burning, but he had the ear of Catherine de’ Medici who was arguably one of the more powerful women of her era. The widow year, 2020, obviously had many parallels to the events in the 16th century, including irrational Christian prejudice against people of other faiths, a force that has sometimes resulted in at least outer conversion from Judaism to Catholicism. Nostradamus was himself raised a Catholic, but his grandparents were Jewish. Surrounded by a wide variety of dangers, Nostradamus managed not only to navigate the perils but to cure many people. His visions were published; and, according to some sources, are the second largest seller after the Bible.
Let’s say the seed was planted and little by little, I became more involved in diet, then herbs, and later essential oils, but many years have now passed and a little perspective is necessary. It may help others to suggest that the four food groups we learned in school are more or less irrelevant to the systems I later went on to study. To be honest, I didn’t pay much attention to them in school, perhaps because eating habits are instilled in us before we enter school and they tend to follow ethnic and family traditions more than textbooks. That said, as time went on, I realized that many people grew up on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and never really learned to cook. My mother was, however, a gourmet cook who loved to play around in the kitchen as well as to visit interesting restaurants, a talent utterly wasted on my non-adventurous father.
At some point, I became a vegetarian. I would say the handwriting was on the wall from childhood, but balking at food did not allow me to escape the edicts of either parents or teachers. Living in India was however transformative; and little by little, the plant sources of protein and eventually even omega-3 and -6 fatty acids became clear. Though I began reading Ayurvedic and Tibetan medicine books in 1968, it took more than a decade to organize the details in my mind and eventually (1983) to develop the material for Kitchen Doctor. I went from culinary herbs to medicinal herbs, starting, I think, with herbal bitters and other carminative digestive aids and then eventually to very strong immune enhancers, parasiticides, and anti-fungal herbs. These are the most complicated because fungi are very tenacious. I believe they can only be inhibited, not destroyed. I learned many years ago that the survival instinct is very strong so mutation is sometimes necessary if one is to endure. For example, let’s say that a tree is planted in a place with heavy wind. To survive, it must become more flexible and less brittle or send very long underground roots to safer locations so that its offspring will survive. Or, if you take the Michael Pollan view, plants have to endear themselves so much to humans that we cultivate them in exchange for their treasures: nutrition, beauty, aroma, timber, whatever. To clarify this a bit, we could say that becoming delicious is one strategy and being dazzling to the eyes is another. Teasing our hormones obviously has huge rewards as does producing medicine, and I will maintain that in certain respects, plants are more divine than people because they have retained a connection to Source whereas many people have lost this treasure. Obviously, plants do not like to be uprooted or chopped down, but they make huge sacrifices on behalf of their progeny so my heart goes out to them.
There was a quantum leap forward when I faced my own mortality after mold exposure. I cannot tell you how sick I was. I couldn’t sleep and my memory was going south on me. I could not remember the name of my best friend. I was slurring, and if I had even 10-15 productive minutes in a day, it felt like a Herculean achievement. The first really helpful clue came from the rain forest where trees must be resistant to fungi in order to survive in such humid conditions. A few herbs stood out as remarkable, but all must have the same properties to some extent just to withstand termites and fungi. Most of the protection is obviously in the bark and/or the resins that heal the damage to the outer layer of the trees. Bark usually has a lot of tannins, astringent chemicals that are rarely pleasant to the taste buds. Taste and usefulness are not always separate. Gums and resins are however really deceptive because they often smell heavenly and taste incredibly bitter, warning us not to overdo anything, Just to help people connect dots, astringency is associated with tannins. These are drying and therefore make good styptics. Bitterness comes from alkaloids, some of which have profound detoxifying benefits.
Little by little, my affection spread from one resin to another and another. If one grew up as I did in a temperate climate, we perhaps remember how sticky pine sap is, but believe it or not, there are really wonderful resins from scraggly desert plants also. Just think of frankincense and myrrh. Let’s just say I am crazy about resins so in addition to the very famous frankincense, there are some lesser known frankincenses varieties plus, of course, myrrh, and then a host of others: Peru Balsam, Gurjun Balsam, Galbanum, Copaiba, Elemi, Guaiacwood, and a number of new ones arriving soon.
Some people are born studious, some are born observant, some are born with wisdom, some with a love of sports or music or engineering. I think I was born curious and gradually learned to address challenges. This is difficult for sensitive people, but patients would explain their histories to me, and I would think of ways to avoid some of the problems encountered. I would say that my motivation has nearly always been to solve problems and the greater the challenge, the more likely I was to pick up the gauntlet. Essential oils came to the rescue when patients told me that their cancer first began to spread after biopsies and usually appeared in the scar where the biopsy was performed. I had to find a solution and tree resins came to the rescue since many are antitumoral as well as disinfecting and tissue healing.
Barks proved to be helped with fungi, but we needed something to go deep into the lower lobes of the lungs to minimize the mold inhalation risks to our health. I spent years and years on each of these challenges and would really like for others reach the level of confidence I now have. In short, it’s time to get on a first name basis with oils.
2021
We are entering new times, very challenging times because the divisiveness we saw in 2020 is taking a turn that is perhaps even more dangerous. In my view, whether we favored one political party or another in 2020 did not really make a huge difference in terms of the challenges facing us today. The parties have some differences, big enough differences to be polarizing, but they were essentially on the same page in terms of epidemiology and technology. I felt at times that I was hammering on deaf ears about how one ring of the circus was distracting from the action in the other two rings. In terms of the impending technology, there were practically no differences in the positions of the parties.
Setting records on the stock market means that business as usual is expected to thrive, but how many farms and restaurants are listed on the stock exchange?
We are hearing more and more open discussion about transhumanism . . . and we must go back to understand that what we hear is largely what manages to pass the censors. There is nothing new about censorship, but when the information is readily available, it is almost certain that it passed the censors. If you have to dig to find the nuggets, then you realize you are in the minority. In the past, I have referred to the destruction of Lyra by a group of scientists who did not understand that synthetic creations have no capacity for survival. What I see now is that mad scientists are convinced that the technology can be designed to procreate and that immortality can be attained by forfeiting free will and independent thought to software and machines that manipulate genes and information. It is amazing what fierce discussions took place in 2020 over these ideas. I found the interactions much more polarizing than politics, actually totally alienating because there is really no avenue of appeal if a person is convinced that we will be enhanced by technologies that allow us to become superhuman.
It is not totally clear to me how the delusions of Lyra resulted in the particular blindness that was so devastating much less why scientists are hell bent on making the same mistakes again, with the same amount of egomaniacal confidence. What is most confusing to me is how people who were once profound scholars of esotericism converted to new theories of holograms, clones, and godless existence.
Rabbit Hole Experience
What is most curious is that when I fell into the rabbit hole some years back, it was precipitated by asking a simple question: why would the Church aka Inquisition care whether the Universe is geocentric or heliocentric. I thought it would take 15 minutes to find an answer online. It took years. Now, however, we have a Big Bang theory. It appeared, apparently out of nowhere, with all the cynicism characteristic of agnosticism or atheism. We imagine that superhumans or some absolutely arbitrary physics can explain everything. Meanwhile, the goal to shut off natural knowing proceeded at a galloping pace; and now we have this dangerous notion that we can be implanted with technologies that require constant updating because, well, you know how software evolves. This would, of course, all be achieved by a jab, and we would have to surrender rights and free will in order to comply with the new technological tyranny.
Back to Square One
As I have mentioned many times, I am always trying new approaches. I had about two or three weeks of terrible toothaches, very serious and dangerous. It got so bad that I flirted with the idea of seeing a dentist, but I decided to work even harder and then hit a home run. The history here is that the dental work in one quadrant lost the bonds with the teeth, all without explanation. I did not bother to see a dentist because I managed to regenerate the tooth that split in half so I decided to stay the course. I got a little lazy and then got very serious and very strict and all is well now: the teeth are regenerating.
For the record, I drank about half a cup of the concoction I made earlier this year. https://invisibleepidemics.com/garlic-protector/
Review it and see how the pieces fit together. I had other options. I could always take Indigo Drops or clove oil, but I wanted to push the envelope so went with something that had not been put to the test. I did not gulp down the concoction because, frankly, it doesn’t score very high on the taste barometer. I sipped it over several hours, but I drank a lot and knocked out the infection.
Commitments
So, while Petar was doing his magic with the graphics, I decided to bring a few more do-it-yourself projects to the fore. This, however, brings up another story from history. Think of your ancestors fleeing from whatever to seek a new life in an unknown territory. It was not enough to remain in Jamestown. Eventually, people traveled in covered wagons with their prized possessions, usually including heirlooms recipes and a little book by Samuel Thomson on homemade medicines. Over the last few days, even more new items have been added to Bioethika Oils, including several more carrier oils, some new dental oils, and something for what some people call aging spots or liver spots. I had six spots and two are gone now, still working on the other four. One was gone overnight. The second took about four days. They are all near where there were medical interventions which tells me that toxic substances remained in the tissue . . . which takes me back several decades, right? Stay tuned.
My goal this year is to make the big shift south and to continue to empower each of you to manage your health challenges with confidence. I hope I succeed and that the world becomes a better place soon. To be honest, 2020 was very calming in certain ways, very challenging but quiet. I think 2021 will see a surge of independent thinking and action. My prayer is that we will navigate the challenges and adjustments safely, sanely, and with reverence for Mother Earth and Her gifts.
Lastly, I did not get my music choices uploaded for New Year’s Eve, but I am posting here! Because Italy was hit very hard by the virus, I started by searching for an Italian waltz and I found a charming little tune, but the algorithms were at work and directed me to an Italian polka, which was by Rachmaninoff. It’s diabolically difficult to play, and after listening to many performances, I found a breathtaking one . . . played, of course, by Russians. In looking for red boots, I couldn’t get my mind off Coppelia. It is a tough act to follow but maybe the search engine is reading my mind so it prompted me to Carlos Acosta’s Don Quixote, not a mazurka, but definitely lively . . . and well, we have a Carlos Acosta encore. That said, the Nureyev production remains my favorite, the one revived from archival footage filmed in Australia! There, I think we nearly went around the world! Happy 2021. It will be an interesting year, but people have to be proactive!
Blessings,
Ingrid
Copyright by Ingrid Naiman 2021
First Posted to Subscribers on 3 January 2021
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