(part 4)
Susun: Red clover.
Justine: Red clover. OK.
Susun: Red clover. Everything you hoped
soy would be with none of soy’s problems. And we’ll
get back to that. Red clover has ten times more phytoestrogens
than soy in a much safer formulation. It’s the world’s
leading anti-cancer and cancer-preventing herb. Do watch
however if you’re in menopause because it’s
also a fertility promoter, and if you don’t wanna
have a surprise baby be a little careful with the red clover,
and especially be careful with Oatstraw.
Justine: Is that another one? Your third
one?
Susun: That’s another one. And I
also talk about Oatstraw in Healing Wise the 2nd Wise Woman
Herbal. I also call it my big green book for everybody.
And we know that people who are feeling their oats, so you
can imagine what happens if you have Oatstraw one day, feel
your oats, and then Red Clover the next day, you increase
your fertility.
Justine: OK.
Susun: But I did add a chapter to New
Menopausal Years on fertility after 40 and those are certainly
some herbs you could use. And then the last one is an herb
that I have used very consistently for more than a quarter
of a century, and that’s Comfrey Leaf. And you may
be surprised by that because if you’ve heard anything
at all about herbs in the past couple of years you may have
heard some warnings about Comfrey. What my studies show
me is that those warnings are true about comfrey root and
I don’t use the root of the Comfrey. But the leaf,
so far as I can tell is absolutely benign. As a matter of
fact there was a man named Henry Doubleday who worked very
hard all of his life to create courses of Comfrey that would
be completely safe to eat. And he set up a Henry Doubleday
Research Center in England where there’s a group of
people there who have been eating Comfrey as a cooked green
for three generations now, through pregnancies, lactations
and no harm to anyone.
Justine: This is just the leaf. Not the
root?
Susun: Just the leaf. Not the root. Exactly.
Comfrey contains the mineral acids that are especially helpful
in creating short-term memory cells. So I say to people,
“Remember Comfrey”.
Justine: Alright.
Susun: Right? It’s also called “knitbones”.
It’s a tremendous ally for keeping the bones flexible
and strong. And it lubricates all the mucus surfaces, and
especially for women, as we go through menopause and get
older, we sometimes find everything from our eyes to you
know what, getting a little bit drier. So Comfrey is a wonderful
lubricant. We just drink it orally and it lubricates from
the inside to all of those places.
Justine: So this is what you would recommend
for vaginal dryness, in menopause and post-menopause.
Susun: It’s certainly one of the
things that could be used. Yeah. But again, that’s
kind of a whole other discussion as to what’s happening
there with that.
Justine: People will have to go to your
website and pick up your books with all of that.
Susun: Exactly because as we said you
know, your relationship to your sexuality changed between
the ages of 8 and 15, and thus your relationship to your
sexuality is also going to change between the ages of 45
and 55, shall we say.
Justine: That’s right. That’s
right. We’re talking with Susun Weed who is the author
of New Menopausal Years the Wise Woman Way – Alternative
Approaches for Women 30 to 90. My name is Justine Toms.
You’re listening to New Dimensions.
[break]
Justine: We’re talking with Susun
Weed, author of Breast Cancer? Breast Health! The Wise
Woman Way. And also the New Menopausal Years the
Wise Woman Way – Alternative Approaches for Women
30 to 90. So I would like to ask you Susun about the
Six Steps of Healing. This is something that you outline
in many of your books, and so tell us what’s the first
one.
Susun: OK, well we talked about confusion.
The confusion that comes about from all the many choices
that we have. And I talked about one of the first things
I did was to say, well we can see the Scientific Tradition,
the Heroic Tradition, and the Wise Woman Tradition, and
within the Wise Woman Tradition there aren’t any rules.
And somebody said, “Well if there aren’t any
rules why don’t we just go out and have you know,
a cocaine hot fudge vodka sundae?” And I said, “Well
because if you listen to you body you’d only do that
once. You’d never do it again.” But I thought
that really it was a good question and was there some way
that I could give a better answer. And as I thought about
it, I asked myself is there any healing rule that everyone
all over the world would agree to, and I couldn’t
come up with anything better than first do no harm. That
seems to be a healing rule that we could all agree with.
And so then I simply took every approach, every technique,
every substance and I said, “How much harm does it
do?” And I gathered them together into the Six Steps
of Healing. And so the first step of healing, which is actually
Step Zero, Do Nothing, causes no harm. Now, somebody has
said, “Well if you’re ignoring what’s
going that could cause harm” but in Do Nothing we
are not talking about the absence of something, but we are
talking about the presence of nothing. So we might say Vipassana
Meditation is literally a meditation on nothingness, and
hard to do isn’t it?
Justine: Yes.
Susun: The mind is so full of so many
things that to truly find the nothing is really a big deal.
And this has a huge following. Really up until the advent
of very scientific medicine, we would send people off on
rest cures.
Justine: That’s right.
Susun: Right?
Justine: That’s right. All those
spas, wonderful spas all over Europe and here in the United
States.
Susun: Yeah. What would happen if you
didn’t check your email for a whole day? That’s
doing nothing. What would happen if you slept that extra
half hour that you’ve been wanting to sleep? What
would happen -- well the apprentices get one day out of
their apprenticeship in which they are not allowed to have
any time pieces. We take all the clocks away, so they can’t
relate to time on the dial. They have to relate to nature
as their timing device. They also have a day of complete
silence where no-one speaks. So these are active ways of
doing nothing which really allows us to relieve many of
the pressures of our lives and in a way to fall into health.
Some people have quipped, “Well Step Zero, that’s
just giving up isn’t it?” And yet sometimes
giving up is exactly what we need in order to solve our
problem.
Justine: Sounds good to me, Susun.
Susun: Right. We think about the people
who desperately want to have a child, give it up, adopt,
and the next thing you know they’re pregnant.
Justine: That’s right.
Susun: So I call it creative giving up.
Justine: Yes.
Susun: So in Step Zero, it’s not
that we are ignoring what’s going on, but we are actively
bringing nothingness to us. The next step, Step 1, is to
Collect Information, but not just collect information. Also
gather wisdom, because information can be so very linear
and I’m sure that we’ve all engaged in this
process where should I do A or should I do B? Well A has
this going for it and you list 10 things, and B has this
going for it and you list two things and you say, I think
I’ll do B. Well how come? You know it only has two
things going for it. Because there are things that are happening
in B that you can’t even list, but you sense them
and you know them and you feel them. And that’s what
I mean by really gathering wisdom as well as collecting
information. And in collecting information I’d like
to, first of all, I suggest to people that they get their
health care information from sources that have little or
no advertising. The study that I told you about in the women
in Australia who were twice as likely to break a bone if
they took calcium supplements, was not publishable anywhere
in the United States because there was no magazine that
didn’t get a good revenue from calcium supplements
and didn’t want to publish the study. It wound up
being published in a very small newsletter in Canada along
with an editorial about why they were the only place that
would publish this particular study.
Justine: Yes, yes. People need to be aware
of that.
Susun: Exactly. Advertising really does
distort. Exactly. And so hooray for National Public Radio
and New Dimensions and other non-advertising sources. And
again, gather that wisdom that you have from within yourself
as well as from advisors. Then Step 2 is to Engage the Energy.
And that means to really have a sense of this wonderful
prahna or chi or as Hildegarde ?? the veriditas. The greening
force. In fact the thing that I find the most throughout
the world that is honored or considered sacred and that’s
the mysterious movement of life. We call it energy and that
could be anywhere from prayer - Larry Dawsey’s out
there doing such good work on reminding us that “Prayer
works. Look at the scientific studies. It works. It works.”
Justine: So if it could be put in a pill form it would
be you know, the miracle drug of the ages.
Susun: That’s right. But he has
such a hard time convincing people because Step 2 Engage
the Energy is the shaman’s playground, and scientific
medicine tends to really disregard that kind of playing
around, that kind of praying around, that kind of working
with color, working with sound, Reiki, hands on, all the
many different aspects that it has.
Justine: Creative expression.
Susun: Exactly.
Justine: You know, singing in the shower.
Susun: Yes. Music therapy. Art therapy.
All of those things that really engage our wholeness and
help us see what’s going on in a very different way.
Step 3 then is Nourish and Tonify. And of course we have
our whole foods diet and -- somebody called me up with New
Menopausal Years. She said, “There’s a typo
in your book”. I said, “Oh, we worked so hard
not to have typos but tell me where it is. We’ll correct
it”. She said, “Right here on this page it says,
‘Eat foods without ingredients’.” I said,
“Where’s the typo?” She said, “Well
you didn’t mean ingredients did you?” I said,
“Yeah. That’s exactly what I mean.” Eat
foods without ingredients. That’s how you can tell
if it’s a whole food. So what’s food?
Justine: Now you better help me on that
one too.
Susun: Yeah. What’s food, margarine
or butter?
Justine: Well food is butter.
Susun: Butter. Not margarine. Right. What’s
food, milk or soy beverage?
Justine: Well now that confuses me.
Susun: Right.
Justine: I would’ve said both.
Susun: Soy beverage contains first of
all calcium carbonate as a supplement because soy contains
no calcium. It also contains more sugar than a Coca Cola.
Justine: Just without it being sweetened?
Susun: No it’s sweetened. It’s
all sweetened.
Justine: It is sweetened? It’s all
sweetened.
Susun: See you wouldn’t drink it
if it wasn’t sweetened. It tastes very vile.
Justine: I see. I see.
Susun: And my Japanese correspondence
course students, I asked them about it. They have no idea
what soy beverage even is.
Justine: Right. But they do soy?
Susun: 90% of the soy, even in Japan,
is eaten in the form of miso and tamari. What’s that
mean for you in your life? It means for every pound of tofu
you eat you should be eating nine pounds of miso. That’s
a preliminary study. I’m certainly not saying that
it’s even a good study. But in a 30-year study just
completed of Japanese men, a Japanese man who ate tofu more
than once a week doubled his risk of Alzheimer’s.
Justine: Oh. And women too?
Susun: They only studied men. It was a
study just on men, so we really don’t know. But we
certainly know that if you start eating unfermented soy
products as a child right, so that at the age of 1 -- suppose
you start eating tofu at the age of 1 and continue eating
it through puberty, your breast cells are then made with
a natural resistance to cancer. If however, you start eating
these unfermented soy products such as tofu and soy beverage,
after the age of puberty, it has the opposite effect and
it promotes breast cancer.
Justine: And there are studies out about
this?
Susun: Plenty of studies out about it.
I didn’t bring my study book in with me.
Justine: Yeah. Right.
Susun: But yeah the thing on soy is very,
very --
Justine: Is this on your website?
Susun: Yes it is.
Justine: Do you go into it?
Susun: Yeah.
Justine: OK. And for those people it’s
susunweed.com. Weed, W-E-E-D.
Susun: Right. And it was one of the reasons
that I revised Menopausal Years you know. My Menopausal
Years the Wise Woman Way was actually published 11
years ago, and in the intervening 10 years there was so
much new information that came out that I totally revised
the book. Added another hundred pages to it.
WOMEN'S HEALTH:THE WISE AND NATURAL
WAY
http://www.wisewomanbookshop.com/
Audio tape , 1 hr. Today, Susun Weed is one of America's
foremost authorities on herbal medicine and natural approaches
to women's health. Susun engages in a fascinating, candid
and controversial dialogue about women's health, natural
healing and the "wise woman" tradition. Susun
exposes the illusion about menopause and hormones, addresses
the HRT/cancer connection and shares information about bone
density. She reveals her knowledge about powerful anti-cancer
herbs, and how to prepare herbal infusions with reverence.
(Interview hosted by Justine Toms). Topics explored in this
dialogue include: seeing yourself as a hologram keeps you
healthy; herbal infusions, how they fully nourish your body;
and, the six steps to personal healing.
Susun Weed's complete interview is available from Ash
Tree Publishing
Mail $12 to Susun Weed PO Box 64 Woodstock, NY 12498
or order online at http://www.wisewomanbookshop.com/
Go here to read The
Wise and Natural Way...part one http://www.susunweed.com/herbal_ezine/november03/herbalmedicine.htm
Go here to read The Wise and Natural Way...part
two
http://www.susunweed.com/herbal_ezine/december03/herbalmedicine.htm
Go here to read The
Wise and Natural Way...part three
http://www.susunweed.com/herbal_ezine/january04/healingwise.htm
Nourishing
Traditions
http://www.wisewomanbookshop.com/
Revised Second Edition,
October 2000
by Sally Fallon with Mary G Enig, PhD
The Cookbook that Challenges Politically
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Or order via mail: Ash Tree Publishing PO Box 64
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include a check or money order for $29.95 (Nourishing Traditions
retails for $25.00 plus $4.95 shipping