Fall, snot and digestive fire.
It’s the first day of Fall.
The temperatures are fluctuating dramatically between night and day and have been for a few weeks. Are you or your kids feeling snotty? Do you have mucous? Does your tongue have a white coating? You might be craving warmer foods and naturally moving away from salads. It’s a great time to be incorporating more warming foods into the day with spiced and stewed fruits, oatmeal and broths, soups and stews.
Mucus and snot is common this time of year, but what if I told you it was avoidable?! I have a new relationship with snot now that Miles is around. I can see direct correlations between what he’s eating, how he’s sleeping and pooping and his emotional and physical health.
According to Ayurveda, colds start in the digestive system. Your tongue mirrors your digestive tract and can clue you into the health of your digestion (and your kids). Start taking a peek at your tongue for indications of a sluggishness in your digestive track, like a thick, white coating.
Would you like to minimize the goopy, snotty, mucus in your house this year?
It starts with paying attention to our digestive fire.
If we can maintain the inner heat while the weather turns cold, we are better off. In ayurveda it’s referred to as agni. Dr. Vasant Lad, the Founder of the Ayurvedic Institute, writes about how agni’s primary function is “digestion, absorption, assimilation and transformation of food and sensations into energy.” That’s a big job. He’s not just saying our ability to digest food, but also emotions, which is a huge factor in how we feel on a daily basis.
I started to notice Miles’ runny nose on a Saturday morning and it was gone by Monday. Miles goes to the Children’s Garden two days a week to play and frolic with kids his age. Some friends shared with me that he’d likely get sick more being in a communal environment, which I understand since Dan teaches 3rd grade and comes home telling me about what’s “going around” the class or school. I’ve since heard that kids who go to school get 9-12 colds a year. That’s a lot of snotty noses and not feeling good.
So, in classic form a few weeks into school, one morning I heard Miles having a sneeze attack in the kitchen. A day later I noticed a slightly runny nose. I immediately reached for the honey and spices. I’ve been making this every year since I learned about it in 2010. It’s a mainstay on the counter at our house when the seasons change and the best thing is, it’s for EVERYONE. It’s seriously AMAZING!
How to make Spiced Honey:
- Grab a cutting board and a dull knife
- Measure 1/2 cup raw honey and pour on to cutting board
- Add 3T turmeric powder (dry roast it first in a skillet for added benefit)
- Add 2 tsp ginger powder
- Add 1/2 tsp clove powder
- Cut the spices into the honey with the knife until it’s smooth. Play with the amount of spices for your taste and store in a glass jar on your counter for easy access by all.
When to use Spiced Honey:
- Sneeezing
- Runny nose
- Bad breath, white coating on tongue
- Traveling
- Changing of the Seasons
- After indulging in too much dairy or cold food
How to use the Spiced Honey:
- Eat it straight with a spoon.
- Roll it into small balls for kids.
- Add it to hot water with lemon.
- Add it to oatmeal or other warmed grains.
It’s important to note that honey is not meant to be cooked. It’s fine to add it to a hot cup of tea, but don’t cook or bake with it. Dr. John Douillard in his book Perfect Health for Kids talks about honey as medicine. He says, “one of its actions is emulsifying mucus, but it also helps to carry other nutrients and herbal medicines into the deeper tissues”. He also talks about how cooked honey hardens mucous, making it harder to eliminate from the body, while raw honey breaks it up and removes excess mucus.
What I love about the Spiced Honey is that we let Miles eat as much of it as he wants. For the 2-3 days of runny nose he would ask for it directly or he’d ask for “yellow oatmeal”. And then one day he didn’t want it anymore. He was done with it and no longer had a runny nose.
It was cool to watch him know when he needed it and how much. We’d talk about the Spiced Honey as medicine and even as candy. We started to have conversations about how our food and even water is medicine. Kids are so smart. Over the past few weeks he’ll pick up his water to drink and look at me and say “water IS medicine mama” and I smile the BIGGEST smile and say “yes, yes it IS!”.
-----
Rachel Peters is a yoga teacher, yoga health coach, lifestyle and habits expert, easeful living advocate, and lover of wild places. She leads others towards Embodying Ease through a yearlong wellness & lifestyle journey to dissolve perfectionism, embody daily habits that promote mental clarity, overall ease, and deeper connection to life on this wild ride of modern living. Learn MORE today!