What Are Adaptogens? Adaptogens are a unique group of herbal ingredients used to improve the health of your adrenal system, the system that’s in charge of managing your body’s hormonal response to stress. They help strengthen the body’s response to stress and enhance its ability to cope with anxiety and fight fatigue – slowly and […]
If you havn’t heard of Yoga by now then you have probably been living under a rock or you have misheard the name and thought that it was a small green man living on the planet Dagobah.
Joking aside Yoga is now one of the most popular forms of exercise around and is normaly in peoples top five exercises in the west, along with running, walking, cycling and swimming.
So why is Yoga so popular?
We hope thet article below from our guest writer Manmohan Singh a Yoga teacher from India can shed some light on the matter.
Lets get inspired!
Stress is a response your body creates when you’ve overwhelmed your nervous system. The body becomes flooded with chemicals that prepare you to either fight or run away. These stress responses are natural and are there to save your life in a dangerous situation. However, when stress occurs for the small things in life, it wears your body down and you can suffer consequences like high blood pressure.
In Japanese, reishi translates to divine or spiritual mushroom. At a recent conference, Dr. Willard stated, “The reishi is by far my favorite of the medicinal mushrooms.” Christopher Hobbs uses reishi extract daily, writing that it is a “deep level tonic” used traditionally as a blood cleanser. And, Paul Stamets classifies it as the most broad spectrum healer of all medicinal mushrooms.
For over 2000 years Reishi mushrooms (Ganoderma lucidum) have been recognized by Chinese medical professionals as a valuable remedy. Its Chinese name Lingzhi, means “spiritual potency”. Reishi mushrooms are regarded by the Chinese as the “Medicine of Kings”. Dr. Shi-Jean Lee, the most famous Chinese medical doctor of the Ming Dynasty, strongly endorsed the effectiveness of Reishi in his famous book, Ban Chao Gang Moo (“Great Pharmacopoeia”). He stated that the “long-term taking of Reishi (Lingzhi) will build a strong, healthy body and assure a long life.”(2)
People started to consume mushrooms as food and medicine more than 2,000 years ago. Besides being a potent anti-inflammatory food, we know that many of the fungi we use today contained active compounds that have anti-cancer, anti-hypertensive, blood sugar-lowering, and other potentially valuable therapeutic properties.
Pungent and bitter, warm in nature, it acts on liver and kidney channels. Being pungent for dispersing exopathogens, bitter and dry for eliminating dampness, warm for dispersing cold and tonifying liver and kidney, muscles and tendons, the herb is suitable for syndromes of prolonged wind-dampness disease, muscular spasm, deficiency of liver and kidney, asthenia of muscle.
We have all been told that in order to improve our health and reduce our chances of getting a lifestyle-related disease is to eat wholesome foods and exercise regularly. Exercise boosts our energy levels, improves heart, lung and muscle fitness, prevents weight gain and enhances our mood. Researchers in 2012 surmised that worldwide 1 in 3 adults and 4 in 5 adolescents did not meet the minimum, daily exercise requirements thereby contributing to a decline in global health