Oh how I love my Lapacho Extract

So it has been a bad week for us , Brandon has been home for 2 days now, with a sore throat and a cough and Brenna just got picked up from school with a tummy ache and started throwing up as she got here.
Ahhh the fun times of mommyhood... lucky for me, I have my loved Lapacho Extract I use for pretty much everything.
For people who don't know much abour herbs, the Lapacho tree, mostly known here as Pau d'arco ("bow stick" in Portuguese), is a tree that grows in some countries in South America, one of those countries being mine, Argentina. The bark of this tree has certain properties that can be used to treat a great variety of illnesses.
When I was little my dad used to drink big mugs of Lapacho tea. My dad has got to be one of the healthiest people I know.
Very anti doctor himself , he helped his immune system by drinking a mug of tea a day, he had a great variety of herbs stored in the cupboard and a strong smell emanated everytime I opened it up to peek in there.
Of course being a child I thought herbal teas were yucky, but I grew to understand their properties and how to use them myself to help me with my health problems.
I am so very thankful to my dad for that knowledge. Everytime I tell him I give my kids Lapacho extract I can picture him beaming.
So it has been a Lapacho Extract week here and let's hope they are all better in a couple of days.
Here is a good article on Pau D'Arco, if you care to read it
Pau D'Arco

For those interested, I usually buy all my herbal stuff at
www.presentmoment.com
since they carry all my cleansing tea mixes I use and such.
Hoping for a healthier week ahead.

Check out what I just got in the mail!! I have a busy reading week ahead of me .
Cheers!
Silvina @ The Chicken Coop Blog

Sleeping at the right time.

On my quest to health this past year, I realized that eating a plant based diet wasn't the only thing to achieve good health and prevent disease.
There are many other aspects of life we tend to ignore that are just as important.
One of them being sleep. Now coming from a latin country I had never in my life gone to bed before midnight and much less acquire 8 hours of sound sleep.
I am a firm believer that our bodies are syncronized with the earth and the time zones with live in ( thanks dad). And when we eat out of season foods, eat late or stay up until midnight, it affects us a lot. But I was too busy to follow this belief.
This theory, was confirmed by one of the Andreas Moritz books I read. He explained that melatonin, the sleep hormone we release when it is dark, is essential to our health, aging and stress levels.
He said that if we go to bed around 9:30 or 10:00 when our melatonin levels get higher, we will indeed fall asleep faster and easier ( hello insomniacs!) than if we ignored these gentle promptings we get when the hormone starts to peak.
Now I had to put this to the test because like every child, I did not believe my dad and like I said before, I had never gone to bed that early, not even when I had to be at work by 5:00 AM.
I started going to bed at 9:45 or so, and it worked!! I fell asleep in about 10 minutes and the next day I was a new person. I kept doing this and it kept working like a charm.
Much to my amazement, I feel better than I did my entire life of sleep craziness.
I don't know about the antiaging, but I guess we will see.
Mind you, if you go to sleep at this time you will wake when the earth wakes (dawn) and your body will keep it's syncronized pace with the earth. Ayurvedic medicine refer to these as Vata, Pitta and Kapha times of the day. Here is a nice article about it, if you care to read it.
Vata, Pitta, Kapha times of day

Now I know there are people who work at night like my husband and I wondered how will they get this special sleep?
Well, doing some research I found an article by Doctor Mercola ( alternative physician) and he says that if you sleep in a completely dark room, melatonin will be released and benefit the person the same way. Here is the article .

Melatonin Natural Hormone

Anyway, I just thought I would share this important fact I discovered on my quest to health.
Cheers!
Silvina
www.thechickencoopblog.blogspot.com