Lemon Balm | Herb of the ages | Yarrow and Terry Willard

Today we're going to talk about a potent plant here, one that's been used for thousands of years. Do you guys know what it is? It's lemon balm. And this has been helpful for nervous anxiety, sleeplessness, all kinds of tension in the body, and just a really gentle, awesome herb. It has this really nice lemony fragrance, and it really calms you down. I think that's all for me. First thing I want to share is how to identify and find this plant. Now what you'll see, lemon balm, first off, it has this lemony fragrance, and if you check your smell-o-vision, you'll be able to smell that no matter what. That'll be your main indicator that you have Melissa officinalis. But the big thing about this is it's in the mint family, so it has these square stems and these opposite leaves, like this. It produces a small flower that has a very lemony fragrance as well, but really anything in this family is going to be edible or medicinal or useful as medicine. So once we know we have these square stems, opposite leaves, in the mint family, we know we're good to go. The lemon balm in particular is something that's been used for thousands of years. I think it's about 2,000 years. It goes back in Greek medicine as one of the more potent plants for all types of nervousness, anxiety, tension, digestion, cramping, all this kind of stuff. With rich tradition in herbal medicine, this also was a really magical plant. In fact, it helped bring in all kinds of different kind of aphrodisiac and potent magical medicines. So one of the things it was used for was alchemy. In fact, poof! Hey, Errol. Hey, Papa. You're looking at one of my favorite plants. No way. Yeah. Yeah, when I was a little alchemy sprout, when I was first studying alchemy, this was the plant that we used to make the first plant stones. When you're making an alchemical plant stone, you want to separate it into its body, its ash, its essential oil, and its spirit, its alcohol. And because this has a lot of scent in it, it was very easy to get the scent out of it, it involves hot oil. So what you do is separate it into those three things. So one of the reasons this herb is so sacred and used by so many people, it was a good practice herb for alchemy because it was the easiest way to make the plant stone. The plant stone is one of the most potent ways you can ever have a herb. If you have a plant stone of one herb, let's say the Melissa here, you can actually potentize any other herbal formula or any other herbal thing because it works so great as an overall energizer of the various things. What I really like about lemon balm is its ability to help calm down anxiety, stress, and this kind of overwhelmness. I feel every time I smell this plant, I mean all the lemon scents do that to a degree, but especially lemon balm just really calms me down. And that in itself is a great signature of it. Oh, yeah. I mean, it takes the anxiety out of anything. You don't even have to take it into your body. No. That actual aroma coming off of it can be used as an incense, it can be used as an essence oil, or it can be used in a tea as an aroma, especially on one of those cold winter nights when you're... For sure. In the middle of winter, you take a little bit of this and it just calms you down and helps you snooze away. Well, they say that it really helps with relaxing the muscles in that sense, so it can calm the muscles down. And this way it can be used for chronic fatigue as well. So this is a great herb for communication because our society is a society that is so full of anxiety and so full of lack of communicating. Yeah, we communicate through Facebook and Instagram and stuff like that, but we don't really communicate with people as much as we should. And Melissa will help that communication. So again, it can transmute a person into a community person so they don't have to have as much anxiety. And again, just smell that aroma. Oh, I definitely feel that it calms the nerves down, makes you a little more present. Every time I smell it, I'm like, I'm here, I'm embodied, I'm right focused. So I think that is a piece of that communication. And being affecting to the thyroid, it's going to help just kind of calm the whole body down. Now, as we know, with all of these endocrine glands, they're all related to each other. So we put this in our stress balance blend. And part of that might be because it just kind of calms the body down, ups, lifts the spirit, and allows the nervous system to be relaxed and more present. Yeah, I like to call it a herb of the age because literally it's a herb that has thousands of years of history, but it's really important for us now so we can communicate with each other. And just calming down our own sort of hysteria, dementia, whatever that might be. I mean, they've used it for things like dementia and Alzheimer's and ADD and all these kinds of things. Geez, that sounds like communication, doesn't it? Sounds like modern day communication. Yeah, yeah. Well, thank you, Yarrow. I'm glad you brought me in to look at this lovely plant. It's one of my favorites, you know. Spending time with it, I just really enjoy it and it grows so abundantly. It's so easy to grow. These herbs that grow abundantly, like literally when we harvest this plant, we chop it down two to three times in one year and harvest off the same plant and it still grows back quite potently. So I'd say there's a lot of chi in this medicine holding in the roots. It is a perennial herb and it'll pop back up every year in the same place. And really what we're looking for is these leaves. The lemony scent is one of the most volatile oils we know. In fact, if you go like this over lemon balm, it'll start to lose that smell because it volatilizes so quickly. This is partly what makes the essential oil of lemon balm one of the most expensive essential oils on the market. It has really tiny chemistry that is hard to capture. Today I'm planning on harvesting some of this to use as medicine. So we're not going to harvest this one right here. We're going to check out a different one. So come along. The ones we're going to work with I think today are here in the garden. But since this is a bit of a veggie garden and they're taking up some of the space, we're going to harvest this one right here. It's in the way of the raspberries. So we pop that down. We'll get a lot more foliage and a lot more sun to these raspberries. I'm going to take a few moments just to kind of connect with it. In this case, I'm going to try one of the smallest young buds that are coming off. And I find that these growing tips are where a lot of the medicine is in these plants. So, man, we really want to bring in the plant spirit whenever we harvest plants. And lemon balm has such a beautiful spirit that we don't want to lose any of that in our process. Thank you, plant. We want to bring you home as medicine today and help you share what your blessings are with those who need it. Join us in creating herbal medicine for the modern age. This has been used as an aphrodisiac, too. In fact, to increase libido, to increase connection between two people, to bring us into the present. This is one of the things we might use it in a love potion, a little lemon balm love potion. And I think that's one of the magical uses of this plant has been. It's really considered energetically to be more feminine as well as to be more heart opening and connecting. So we're going to use it that way. But we're also going to use it as a nutritive plant in some of our blends to kind of bring up the energy. So when we harvest this plant, we're going to go right from the bottom. What we're going to do is we're going to harvest just like so. I'll just take a couple for now to show you. As it dries, I'm going to hang it upside down in small bundles like this. Let that dry. Once that's partly dried, I'll just use one as an example here. We will pull these leaves off of the stem like so. Now, I'm not going to do that too early because I don't want to bruise all the leaves. If we bruise all the leaves, we're going to lose more of the essential oils. So we're going to just kind of lightly dry with low heat and pull them off the stems. This is the medicine we're going to use is these leaves as they become dried. The other way we might want to do this, which is something I really enjoy with lemon balm, is making a fresh tincture. Because it's so fragrant, making a tincture fresh with this is the best practice. Literally, if we harvest it today and blend it up in our Vitamix with alcohol in the same afternoon, that's where we'll get the best medicine out of this plant. Taking a tincture like that can be two to three droppers full twice a day. Or what I like with plants like this that have to calm down anxiety, open up the heart, is just to take small amounts regularly. So we'll take maybe three to five drops, six to seven times a day. It's just a nice reminder to bring us back into the focus, back into flow. What else can we use lemon balm for? A big one is it's used for cramping and for digestion too. As I said before, it kind of calms down and relaxes the muscle tissue. So for female cramping as a uterine tonic, just to kind of calm that area down, this is a great one for PMS, but also for upset digestion. So drinking a little lemon balm tea after a meal can be a great way to work with this plant, just to calm down and open up the stomach, get things moving. As well as if we've got sore muscles, we might do like a lemon balm oil. In fact, one of the things that I accidentally made once, we thought we had nettles and we were making a nutritive oil, and it was lemon balm, and we macerated it in olive oil. And we're like, oh no, we made a lemon balm olive oil. But you know what? We started using that in some of our cooking. We started using that on our hair, and it was just like such a nice essence. So sometimes when you screw up in herbal medicine, you actually make the more interesting, fun applications that could be a great way to work with plants. Some people wonder about ethics around harvesting, and do I take the whole clump? I'd like to propose that herbs don't mind being pruned and trimmed and prodded a little bit, but it's better to take the whole clump and leave two or three other clumps around, versus just take a little bit off each one. That way this one's down to ground level, reset, and can grow back up. And these other ones can go all to flower and get to that place where they're able to reproduce. So take one whole clump, not one to two pieces off of various clumps. That's my two cents, or Raina Dahl's. Lemon balm is one of the age-old plants that has been used for so many things. Its essential oils are its main medicine. You've got antibacterial, antiviral compounds in here. The calming down of the system can use this for anxiety, stress balancing, uplifting the mood, and just kind of making us feel a lot better. So we'd also use this in a common cold, or in any kind of viral implication in the sense that it has those antiviral compounds. So I might put this in one of my blends for working with any type of kind of out-of-balance viral impact or bacterial impact, or just to kind of bring us into a better state of being. You guys have an awesome day, and just get out, connect with plants, because the best piece of the medicine is being with the plants themselves. This is where we learn the most about ourselves as well. We'll see you guys soon. Have a great season.