Wow! The topic picked for this month is HUGE!
The body is such a complicated and mind boggling creation! There is such an amazing interplay between the various organs and systems of the body. Perhaps that is why I love the study of anatomy and physiology so much! I love trying to understand, as once expressed by Einstein, what God was thinking during the creation process. The study of the body, its organs and systems, and how they work together has consumed a great deal of my life, and almost every bit of knowledge and understanding has been a blessing in my life!
The liver is responsible for, to the best of my knowledge, over 500 different functions in the body. (No, I won’t be attempting to describe each one of them here! Rather, I will group them together a bit and try to highlight the most important ones. Most important? Eh.) The most important one, obviously, is the one that is creating havoc in your own life or in the life of someone you love.
IMMUNITY AND IMMUNE BUILDING
Energetic Responses During a Zone Session
I love learning myself! I simply can’t get enough of it on any topic at all . . . AND . . . I am, and have always been a teacher. (I began with my first class of 4-year-olds in a church setting when I was only an eleven-year-old myself! Shortly after that, I was asked to be the music leader in the weekly children’s meeting.) I love writing these newsletters and trying to share with you things that I have found useful in my own life and my years doing Foot Zones. And Butterfly Expressions, LLC is about sharing and educating!
This month’s topic and sale items for the general Butterfly Express, LLC Newsletter are “Immunity and Immune Building”. As Foot Zone therapists, I am making the assumption that each of you understands how critical an understanding of anatomy is to the work you do! I am also assuming that you have made your own study of anatomy and how the Immune System works, so as to enable you to better recognize and understand those things that the feet can reveal about the physical and emotional health of those people you work with.
I have been informed that the majority of you (Foot Zone Therapists) also receive the general Butterfly Express Newsletter. I have gone into quite a lot of detail about the Immune System in that newsletter, and I have also discussed some of the properties of this month’s ‘on sale’ Immune Building products at Butterfly Express, LLC there. I will not be taking the time or space to re-discuss those items here. If you do not get that newsletter sent to you and you are interested, the monthly general Newsletter may be accessed online at ButterflyExpressions.org.
Additional items, more specific and chosen by myself, based on my favorites for possible use during a Foot Zone treatment, will be the topics of this article. I will, however, be including a slightly shorter summation of the General Newsletter here along with a list of those ‘on sale’ items at the end of this article/newsletter. (The promised summary of the Butterfly Expressions General Newsletter can be found at the very end of this article, if you are interested in accessing it that way.)
The Zone, although very ‘energetic’ in nature, brings about real changes in the physical body. Of course, you have all seen both the physical and energetic balancing and healing that the Foot Zone treatment is capable of bringing about! As you can see from the title of this article/newsletter, I will be focusing on energetic responses during a Foot Zone session and how those responses may affect the body’s physical immune system.
The Spleen
A Vital Organ in the Human Body
After a bit of pondering, I chose to discuss the spleen for this month’s Foot Zone Focus. I did this for several reasons. First, I wonder how much the majority of us, including foot zone therapists, people in general, and even medical doctors, really ‘know’ about the spleen. By ‘know’ I mean understand both how important this small organ is to good health, and how much trouble it can cause if it should rupture.
When the words ‘self-care’ or ‘self-improvement’ are heard, people tend to conjure up different trains of thought, especially if they apply them immediately to themselves. For some of us, the idea of ‘caring for ourselves’ may get confused with ‘caring too much for self” and/or “caring too little for others”. But failing to look out for your own health can result in a decline in physical and/or mental health in so many gradual and insidious ways! And your poor health, or even lack of optimal health, can impact those around you in so many ways.
The end of summer and the upcoming return to school for children, teens, and college students can be a stressful time for everyone involved, including parents. This seems to be true to some extent, no matter the age of the child or even how well the previous school year went. And then, the school day usually requires the student to focus and pay attention while sitting at a desk—something many children find quite difficult. Then there are the issues of getting homework done and back to school with the children, young or old!
The remedies focused on as specials and offered at discounted prices, were chosen with these issues in mind. However, as you will quickly see from the product descriptions, they address energy levels, the ability to focus and pay attention, and handling anxiety from any cause and in any type of situation.
Before we begin today’s discussion of essential oils, herbs, and Blessed Waters (homeopathics), I would like to provide a little bit of extraneous, but I feel quite necessary, information. I searched both the Butterfly Express and Butterfly Expressions sites and was disappointed to find that the information I have written and taught in various places over the years on the topic I am about to summarize briefly below is not to be found on either site. It doesn’t seem to be in any of the books I have written, either. (However, I made only a rudimentary search, so . . .) If this oversight is actually real, I intend to remedy the situation as soon as I can find a minute (or a few hours, as it will likely be).
Two key factors in understanding essential oils are recognizing the differences in healing properties among plant families and understanding how various parts of the same plant can offer different therapeutic benefits. It probably doesn’t surprise you that the medicinal properties of the conifer family (spruce trees, for example) are very different from the healing properties of the various herbaceous or ornamental plants (such as the Lauraceae, Labiate, Compositae, and Umbelliferae families).
Even within the same plant family, whether an essential oil has been created from the wood, the seed, the root, or the leaves, dramatically affects the healing properties of that essential oil, and does so to an incredible degree.
A well-built blend allows us to combine, synergistically, the benefits of several plant families as well as the healing capacities of various plant parts, all with the goal of increasing the capabilities of each single essential oil. Just as a chocolate cake is more pleasing—and tastes better—than the varying ingredients separately, an essential oil blend has the potential of being so much more than any of the single oil ingredients by themselves
Let’s keep this information in mind as we discuss various essential oil blends in the pages of this (and every) newsletter.
Essential oils, herbs, and homeopathic remedies can be great natural options for keeping your skin safe in the sun and keeping bugs away. Products like lavender essential oil and Neutralizer help soothe sunburns, while things like Sun Shade lotion offer sun protection. For bug bites and stings, herbs like calendula or plantain can calm the itch, and essential oils like citronella, catnip, and kanuka help keep mosquitoes and other bugs at bay. Homeopathic remedies like Apis or Ledum can also help with swelling and itching if you do get bitten. It’s a simple, natural way to care for your skin and stay comfortable when you’re outside.
The digestive system is a very intricate and complex system. To my mind, it is much like a fragile ecosystem. There is a constant need for balance in the digestive system, just as there is in nature. The balance between the organs and among the different types of healthy bacteria found in the digestive system is absolutely essential to good health. When the digestive system is not working properly, the body becomes either malnourished or toxic. As a result, all the woes of poor nutrition and/or a toxic system eventually show themselves in the overall health of the body and mind.
Due to the many different organs included in the digestive system and their specific roles in the body, there are a lot of essential oils and herbs which have an ability to impact this system and bring about improvements. This month’s newsletter targets only a few of them. (I know from the length of the article that it seems like we surely must have mentioned them all. Not so—but it did feel like that to me as I wrote it.) I hope you find something useful to you or your family in the information I have tried to present here.
I was absolutely delighted to see what had been chosen for this month’s topic! February can be such a hard month for so many people, and this coming one promises to be harder than usual for me and those around me. As some of you may have heard, our family experienced the devastating loss of a dear loved one recently. I am very grateful for the opportunity to refresh my own mind, study the remedies that deal with depression, grief, and other emotional and mental issues a bit deeper and then share with you what I know and learn. The use of some of these remedies has already had a profound effect on my own mental health recently.
On a lighter note, my older brother, an advanced mathematics professor, told me once that his classes in February were simply used to play fun (and mildly educational) number/math games. Why? Because, he said, students are just up to too much else in February and they need a bit of fun to cheer them up! I suspect that the darker days of winter and, perhaps even in sunny climes, the let down following the holiday season affects us all. See the full list of topics.
There is, absolutely and without doubt, no road to good health (or recovery from illness and chronic ailments) without good nutrition being a priority every day!
Studies done at the School of Gerontology, University of Southern California, indicate that if a person has a sub-clinical nutritional deficiency, he or she might appear ‘perfectly normal’ except for increased susceptibility to disease, longer recovery time from surgery, adverse reactions to vaccines, extreme fatigue that interferes with normal functioning, depression, insomnia, and irritability.
Richard Revlin, M.D., of the Sloan-Kettering Cancer institute says,
“In the United States today, we rarely see cases of classical vitamin deficiency, such as scurvy and pellagra—to name just a few cited in this article. However, we are now beginning to recognize a vast new series of marginal deficiencies related to disease. Marginal deficiency, it now appears, may be a surprisingly common phenomenon.”
One very important reason herbal remedies work for a particular problem is that the herb has provided one or more vital nutrients that are missing in the diet.
It is important to understand, and remember, that vitamins and minerals chemically constructed in a laboratory cannot fill the nutritional needs of the body. Man has been unable to produce a single molecular structure that is exactly identical to those produced in nature. Laboratories can assemble the correct components in the correct amounts but somewhere in the joining of the atoms will be a rotation to the left that should be rotating to the right. The resulting isomer (that is the scientific word for it) is not bio-identical, no matter what the advertising says. This is as true of hormones and amino acids as it is of vitamins. (Hint: If the supplement you are buying says “L-something or other”, the ‘L’ is a warning that this supplement has been artificially produced in a laboratory and will not be providing the nutrition you think you are getting!
There is a great deal of information about the nutritional components of herbs in the book, Butterfly Miracles with Herbal Remedies which can be purchased at Butterflyexpress.shop. Nutrition and health is a topic that has fascinated me for years. See the full list of topics.