(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
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 www.wisewomanbookshop.com
Click
here to read The Wise and Natural Way...part one
Click
here to read The Wise and Natural Way...part two
Click
here to read The Wise and Natural Way...part three
Nourishing
Traditions
Revised Second Edition, 
October 2000
by Sally Fallon with Mary G Enig, PhD
The Cookbook that Challenges Politically
Correct Nutrition and the Diet Dictocrats.
This well-researched, thought-provoking guide
to traditional foods contains a startling message: Animal
fats and cholesterol are not villains but vital factors in
the diet, necessary for normal growth, proper funciton of
the brain and nervous system, protection from disease and
optimum energy levels. Sally Fallon dispels the myths of the
current low-fat fad in this practical, entertaining guide
to a can-do diet that is both nutritious and delicious.
Order
Sally Fallon's book at our bookshop
Or order via mail: Ash Tree Publishing PO Box 64 Woodstock,
NY 12498
include a check or money order (Nourishing Traditions shipping
