Calendula - the Power to Heal | Harmonic Arts

All right, I'm here hanging out with this beautiful goddess, oh I mean Angelica, my beautiful sweet, and our good friend, Calendula. Calendula is a soft and soothing plant that we just love to work with. We put them in our salads and our family eats it up, really helps them enjoy their greens as well. May I try? That is delicious. Adds a little bit of color and flavor to the salad too. Well it's got those carotenoids in it, so it's very high in carotenoids based on when it's orange or yellow you can see that it carries that nutritional aspect. Yeah, so those are a flavonoid group, open up the capillary beds and work with deep cellular tissue damage. That's right, what works on the skin is it actually is anti-inflammatory, so this helps to cool the heat down in the skin so when there's rashes or burns or ulcerations. Like a sunburn? A sunburn, absolutely. That's why it comes out during our hottest months. I've heard that this is also anti-spasmodic and antibacterial, so we have a bit of an effect that way for killing bacteria if there's an infection on the skin, so wound healing in that sense. Like you were saying, ulceration, a wound that won't heal over itself. And also for rashes or diaper rash in babies, also for cracked and dry sore nipples when mamas have been breastfeeding a lot. It can be really helpful. It really looks like the sun, doesn't it? It's in that compositive family where we see a lot of the most amazing medicines coming. This family produces some of the best chemistry in the whole world of plants, so honour to be working with you guys. And it is an honour, it is a type of marigold and so in many cultures it is revered as a very spiritual plant, as a way of showing homage and blessings to the gods and spirits. One thing that was really cool that I did with this one, I was picking calendula and a bee flew in there and I didn't notice it. I picked the plant, the bee stung me right here. Ouch! I took that whole bee and that calendula, because the bee was dead and we were going to die, and I mashed it right into my sting. Within half an hour there was no more sting. It was amazing. So this plant, I can say from my own experience, is a powerful anti-inflammatory and good for pain and healing over wounds like such. And then how does it work internally? Does it do the same thing when you eat it? Yeah, well there is no dotted line between our lips and the inside of our body. So the outside and the inside are all actually part of our body. In fact, the inside is more like the hole in our donut. So when we work with the internal skin, i.e. the mucous membrane, it has the same kind of anti-inflammatory effect. So great for digestion or sore throat. We often make a tincture with this, one to two with the fresh flower and about a 70% alcohol to pull out all those active compounds. And then you can take the tincture internally and it has anti-inflammatory, anti-bacterial properties for anything that is going on in the skin. Yeah, especially people who have a lot of inflammation in the gut, in the digestive tract or in the throat, in any of those mucous membranes. In fact, the lungs as well it can help with. Do you use the tincture topically as well or how would you use it on your skin? Great question. How would we use it on our skin? Well, I guess we would probably want to put it in an oil or something fat soluble so that it would absorb more into the skin. So we would macerate it in an olive oil and make sure it's out of the light and it's allowed to breathe so that all of the moisture can breathe off and evaporate off. And then once that oil is ready, you will strain out the flowers and use just the oil on your skin or you can add some beeswax and make a salve so that it's a harder solution that you can carry around with you and rub on to any kind of rashes or burns or frustrations. In fact, this is one of the main ingredients in both our rescue healing salve for healing wounds and our trauma salve for deep traumatic tissue gap. That's right. That's Calendula. We love you. For more information on Calendula, check the description below. Hit the subscribe button here because we've got lots more videos on herbs to come.