An Inspiring Day of Yoga and Medicinal Plants

I have an image of your typical yogi in a perfect state of yoginess - an old bearded geezer sitting cross-legged, wearing a few bits of material, with his eyes shut. Like this in fact (although this one's not so old):

Yogi Bhajan

What possible yoga relationship could he have to someone like me? Or anyone in the real world? Can you imagine your next door neighbour sitting in his front garden doing this all day? How would he eat, work, deal with the tax man, social security, power cuts, the washing, kids being sick etc. etc.?

So it was with interest that I went along to St Martin de Londres, to their little cinema (with very comfy seats) to listen to a talk given by one of the founders of the Institut Français de Yoga, François Lorin (b. 1941).

François Lorin

Big difference!

He talked for an hour about yoga, and why doing it is such a good idea. If I remember rightly (but don't quote me), the essence of yoga is that it unites the physical body with the mental. We have a tendency to think that our hands, for example, have nothing to do with our psyche. In yoga, you accept that your whole being is in close association - a oneness of mind and body.

The ultimate aim of yoga is to banish perturbing thoughts which have such a negative effect on our mental well-being. Both of these aims can be achieved by doing the postures, meditating, and learning how to breathe. When you concentrate on a movement, you are not letting those nasty, destructive little thoughts perturb you. There's a description of Ashtanga Yoga here.

I forgot to ask if François has got to the stage where he has an absence of perturbing thoughts, but I did ask if being a yogi is compatible with everyday life, and he said it was. Not that I have such lofty aspirations, but I've always wondered how they cope with the stuff the rest of us have to suffer. François told me the story of Patanjali (300BC) (who compiled the yoga sutras, one of the classical yoga philosophy texts), who would run around after his son in order to get him to study. So he obviously didn't spend all day looking like this:

Patanjali

It was a fascinating morning, and my enthusiasm for yoga went up considerably. I even have a mat now, and try to do some postures every day.

My yoga group was at the conference too, and whilst speaking to another of the women, I learned that she was going to a talk on medicinal plants that afternoon. Oooh! As my DB was sick in bed, I had all the free time in the world, so decided it was just the thing for me and to go along too.

The talk took place in Clapiers' mediatèque and was given by Montpellier's Dr Laurent Chevallier who is a nutritionist, herbalist, botanist, and fervent believer in the healing power of plants. It was another absolutely fascinating talk from a man who is often on the radio, and thus totally at home before an audience.

Dr Laurent Chevallier - doesn't he look a sweetie?

I took notes, but I think he's bringing out a book soon on the subject. Here are the essentials:
1. To help sleep: take Elusanes Passiflore, available in pharmacies. Also aubépine (hawthorn) which relieves stress and is good for the heart.
2. If you're on statins, you'll need chardon marie (thistle) to help boost your liver.
3. Depression: if you've got the blues, take capsules of valériane, and/or millepertuis (St John's Wort).
4. Cellulite: take reine des près (meadowsweet); also for squeaky joints (I'll remember this one).
5. Immunity: to ward off colds and flu, take échinacée (echinacea), cassis (blackcurrant), and églantier (eglantine). I took propolis this year and have not gone down with the flu 'epidemic' that's swept across the whole country this winter. Fingers crossed...

Someone asked why there is no herbalist diploma in France because there is increasing interest in herbal medicine. Dr Chevallier told us that he was part of a group that wrote the material for a herbalist diploma, but that the whole thing has been shelved indefinitely. Why? Because the government doesn't want to open up a 'new' branch of medicine. After all the trouble they've had with osteopathes, they have decided not to provoke any more by developing an official herbalist medicine. This means that practitioners can tell you what to take, but they are not supposed to write it down, and, of course, the items won't be reimbursed.

Yet another potential job creating sector is squashed, something this government excels at!

NB Of course, if you're already on medication, you should always check with your doctor before taking herbal remedies.

Yoga can help work miraculous results:

NEVER EVER GIVE UP!!
NEVER ,EVER GIVE UP! Arthur's Boorman inspirational Transformation!! A must see story everyone should watch!Video credit to DDP Yoga
Posted by Frank Medrano on Tuesday, 22 April 2014

Odds and healthy sods

I don't know if it's the weather or advancing age, but my joints have felt recently like they need oiling. I can no longer leap out of a chair and dash to answer the phone, I get up and creak my way over. Bizarre. I'm hoping it's the weather.

Just in case, I went to a herborist last weekend with a recipe for remineralising ye olde bones that I got from a magazine I subscribe to called Plantes & Bien-Etre. If you have joint pain, tiredness, breaking nails, hair loss, these could all be due to a lack of minerals which is due to an excess of acidity in the body rather than poor nutrition. The stresses of modern life block the elimination of acid so a helping hand is needed.

The shop, located in the old part of Montpellier, in a beautiful stone building, was fascinating. There wasn't much room to move about because it was filled with goodies. The walls were lined with jars of herbs of every description. My recipe posed no problem to the experienced herborist. She suggested she make three times the amount which would give me a cure of about one month. The bag cost me about €15 which I thought was very reasonable seeing all the good it was going to do me.

La Quintessence, Montpellier

The recipe is designed to stimulate the hepatorenal function and remineralise the body.
Mix 15gr of the following:
Nettle leaves
Horsetail
Birch leaves
Chicory roots
Strawberry leaves
Boil a bowl of water with one tablespoon of the mixture. Turn off the heat and cover for ten minutes. Filter and drink one to two bowls per day for six weeks, once or twice a year. Or you can drink it one week per month over several months.

The article in the magazine says that you should act in three ways only one of which is drinking the tisane. The others are removing the sources of acidose: stress, milk products, animal proteins (bugger!) and industrial food (no probs, I don't touch the stuff); and increase vegetal sources of minerals - nuts, leafy veg.

Tonight we're having roast chicken... with some leafy salad.

But, on Friday I made a tasty nearly veggie meal for which I'll share the recipe. I had a potimarron (small pumpkin) so made a stuffed dish:
2 potimarrons (I had one)
30cl crème fraiche
200g lardons
100g chestnuts (from a jar/sous-vide)
Cut the top off the potimarron(s), and empty out the seeds. Pepper the inside. Fry up the lardons. In a bowl, mix together the cream, cooked lardons and chestnuts, and add salt. Cook at 180°C for an hour and a half.
What I did: I used less cream and lardons, added turmeric and garlic to the mix. It was very tasty.

Served with roasted Brussel sprouts and chestnuts in Balsamic vinegar which were delicious:
Some sprouts
Olive oil
Balsamic syrup (boil up cheaper Balsamic vinegar until you get 1 tbs of syrup).
The recipe calls for lardons but I left those out.
Toss the sprouts in the oil and salt & pepper. Roast the sprouts in the same oven until cooked. Add the chestnuts for the last ten minutes or so. Take out of the oven and dribble over the vinegar. Toss. Check the seasoning and serve.

I've also been doing yoga nearly every day during the holidays as my yoga teacher has been absent. Just ten or fifteen minutes, based on exercises she sent so I don't have to start all over again after a two-week break. If I didn't work, I'd do more, especially when I look at this impressive video of a guy who started from a really desperate situation:

Post by Collective Evolution Lifestyle.

Who knows, I may even end up standing on my head again. I haven't done that since I was about eight. Or not.

More Odds and Sods, but mostly food...

What's been going on recently in your life?

Sandwich jambon-beurre

I might not be in Britain, but I can answer the Daily Mail's cri de coeur: "Is there no one left in the UK who can make a sandwich ? Or rather my youngest can. He went off on a school visit to Lac de Salagou with a Festive baguette-jambon-beurre, as requested. No tomato, no lettuce, no pickle. Just ham and tasty raw organic butter. The ham came from Hyper U. No one's perfect... The Festive baguette sarnie is one of the simple pleasures of living in France, and certainly better than an industrial triangle in a plastic box full of salt and fat that those poor Hungarians were being brought in to make.

Still on the subject of food, I actually bought a couple of paper recipe books recently rather than print off the net. One is the Oh She Glows Cookbook by Angela Liddon and the other is YumUniverse: Infinite Possibilities for a Gluten-free, Plant-Powerful, Whole-Food Lifestyle by Heather Crosby. Not that I'm either gluten-intolerant or a vegetarian, but I like variety, and my DB would prefer to eat as little meat as possible. Both books are written by successful food bloggers whose recipes I've tried and enjoyed, with lovely appealing photos. Funnily enough, both women came to veganism after years of eating extremely badly resulting in increasingly poor health that popping pills did nothing to cure.

The YU book is a guide really on how to incorporate more plant-based food into the average diet. It has sections on the importance of soaking beans, grains and nuts to remove anti-nutrients, how to sprout, how to cook with new ingredients, how to make it all happen. It's quite a challenge to change habits and it's only by taking it in small steps that you avoid reverting to the old ways after a few months.

She gives recipes for homemade spice mixes (Ethiopian, Chinese, Taco, Chai etc.), different sauces and vinaigrettes (Kale and Walnut Pesto, Cashew Sauce, Sweet Potato Sauce, etc), sandwich ideas (Smoky Lentil and Dill, Crispy Eggplant, Sprouts & Tomato, etc.), snacks, and so on. This weekend I soaked some mung beans and amaranth to start sprouting them, and I've just put some pumpkin seeds in a jar of water as I add them to salads almost every day and didn't realise they should be soaked.

I also made a soup from Angela's OSG book: 'on the mend spiced red lentil-kale soup' which was surprisingly tasty. You can find the recipe here. It looks really simple, but the flavours blend together beautifully. I also made her black bean burgers which I forgot about in the oven so they came out rather well cooked, but crumbled perfectly over a kale salad that my DB was delighted to eat after driving back from his Zen retreat in Toulouse.

Talking of Zen, my yoga classes are going well, but I don't think I'm ready for one of the full-on weekends they organise. My DB is taking a couple of Zen courses in town and has been on two Zen weekends. One was too religious-based for his liking while the other concentrated more on meditation. I enjoy yoga for the physical element and the peace, but the group yogi is president of the southern France yoga association and she gave me a magazine to read to encourage me to join and go further into yoginess. It was a bit too much for my superficial taste...!

To help us in our pursuit of regular walks, I bought a couple of blue 1/100,000 IGN maps of the region - the ones that show GR routes and other paths. I love maps and spent some of the weekend poring over them. In searching for the link, I came across a site called VisoRando where you can create an itinerary based on these maps! Just what we need!

At the other end of the health spectrum, we spent part of the weekend the other week at Domaine Puech at the Weekend Cave en Fête where we ate charcuterie, cheese, and oysters, drank the Noémie red wine and were très merry. The producers of the cheese, charcuterie, oysters, champagne, and Alsatian wine were there all weekend and available for tastings. We ended up buying... cheese, charcuterie, wine and oysters. The oysters were 7€ the dozen, so I bought two (dozen). We had a feast on Sunday night!

On a sadder note, last week I had to take my cat to the vet after he developed an abscess in his mouth. He was kept in overnight to have it drained, and came home wearing a plastic Elizabethan-style collar to stop him scratching. He's not pleased at all. It comes off on Thursday, and not a day too soon as far as we're all concerned.

When I bought my sofa a few years ago, I didn't expect it to be so badly made that the back would be falling apart after a bit of rough treatment from the boys... I paid about fifteen hundred euro for it so it wasn't exactly cheapo crap. This weekend my youngest and I turned it on its front (where you put your legs) and I cut the material underneath to reveal... bad quality wood held together with STAPLES! Honestly, it looked like an amateur had thrown it together on his first day at a furniture-making class. My son got out the No-Nails glue and, while I held the sofa up, he gunned the glue into place. While he was working away, we had this conversation:
Me: "Oh it's so nice to be doing this with you. It's really cool that you volunteered to help and didn't have to be press-ganged."
Him: "It's only because I didn't have anything better to do..."
Me: "Hey, don't spoil it...!"
That put me in my place! We left the sofa upright with the packet of cat litter, a dictionary and four books weighing it down over twenty-four hours. Today, we put it back in place, and lo, the sofa-back is no longer wobbly! Result!

So that's what's been going on in my life. Living on the edge as ever...

I went to see a naturopathe

(To the tune of 'Half a pound of tuppenny rice')
"No more eggs and no more Pills
Hello steamy hot flush
Down below's a no-go zone
I'm menopausal"

Since reading Sherrill Sellman's book Hormone Heresy: What women must know about their hormones I've decided that I have to find a natural alternative to Hormone Replacement Therapy. I'm already not keen on medication, and the idea of pumping my body with a cocktail of synthetic hormones yet again (since I stopped the Pill) does not appeal.

At the first sign of menopausal symptoms (hot flushes, dryness you-know-where), I rushed to my doc. He advised HRT or I would be in danger of aging rapidly - find myself suddenly dried out and an old hag in a couple of years. There was a definite hint of 'your partner won't find you attractive any more and will probably dump you for a more luscious alternative because what can you do with an old prune?' Fun...

He prescribed estriol (a form of oestrogen) for down below, and, to his credit, instead of imposing HRT on me, suggested I ask my buddies about HRT, and to do some research on the internet. So I did. Well I did the internet bit because I don't have many friends who have hit menopause yet.

I discovered that HRT is not all it's made out to be, and that some women have disastrous reactions to it. Instead of taking it and risk becoming oestrogen dominant which is not a good thing, I wanted to balance out the hormonal imbalance between oestrogen and progesterone in my menopausal body as naturally and side-effect-free as possible.

Dr Sellman suggests seeing a naturopathic doctor, and as luck would have it, the Pages Jaunes for Montpellier threw up two: a man and a woman. I looked at the woman's web page and noted she has 25 years of experience, and, from her photo saw that she has very probably gone through menopause. It seemed an obvious choice to select her rather than the man who did not have a web site and thus was just a name on a page.

Today was the day when I had my appointment. I took along my blood test analyses (usual stuff plus FSH which determines whether you're in menopause or not because it's a reproductive hormone - I am) and found myself in a little outhouse in the doc's garden.

She started by looking at my eyes. Apparently you can tell a lot from eyes. Before she looked at my blood tests, she flashed a torch at me and asked me whether I had some intestinal issues, and some joint problems, and said I have an excellent 'hygiene de vie' which means I'm in roaring good health.

I was pleased to hear that because I have made a lot of effort in the past year, and it's obviously paid off, not that I was abusing my health before, but I'm taking more care now (organic fruit and veg, less meat, dairy and bread, sport).

I do have a little intestinal problem (she said it was some inflammation) and my joints get tired when I walk a lot, so top marks the doc! I also wake up too early which annoys me. We had a chat about my eating habits and she decided to prescribe a number of food supplements to rectify my hormonal imbalances:

• Houblon which is like oestrogen
• Salsepareille which is like progesterone
• Bourrache (borage) oil which, from what she said, is like an elixir of life
• plus a bit of Hydra 7 which will help things along
• Optiflore to get my intestines sorted out
• Rhadiola Rosea and Magnesium Marin to improve the quality of my sleep and help me relax.

I was in there for an hour and it cost me 65 Eur which should be reimbursed by my mutuelle. I have to get most of the supplements on the internet, and she indicated where I could go because there's such a variety out there.

I'll be chucking out the estriol which had revolting consequences.

In the same vein, I started doing a local yoga course this evening. It was a trial session, and although there was some noise from the other activities going on in the communal centre, I found it relaxing and pretty promising.

Then I came home and had sausage and spuds, broccoli, and a glass of wine for dinner. :)

Got to keep my strength up for all this healthy living!