This week we decided to get together with a dear friend Aasha Rose to ask her all about her experience with self care and the natural world. She has been helping us with some herbal home remedies to keep us healthy this winter.
Learn below about different ways you can treat yourself with self care rituals.
Find out more about Aasha on our November YTT page here
Aasha what sparked your interest in the natural remedial world?
My own struggle with ill health, from having a very sickly childhood and not finding that the western medical system was able to help. Luckily my family were always inclined towards natural therapies and healthy eating. Naturopathy and Yoga were huge stepping stones in my teenage years that enabled me to start taking my health and wellbeing into my own hands.
What are some self care things that you include in your daily routine and why?
I work with plants daily, making herbal infusions, teas, tinctures, flower essences and essential oils.
I practice Hatha yoga and self Reiki
Everyday I practice self massage, I was introduced to this ritual called a body boost by my aunty who has an essential oil and self care company called Twenty.8. Combining different essential oils, some of my favourite are frankincense, geranium, rosemary and ylang ylang mixed with a base oil and magnesium oil. This helps to settle my nervous system, helping my lymphatic system to flush toxins out of my body, I find it also really helps my circulation, strengthens and tones my skin and since our skin has zero barrier (meaning anything we put on our skin gets absorbed straight into our bloodstream and vital organs!) to anything we put on it its a great way to absorb the powerful benefits of the plants in the oils. Recently with over harvesting of favourite plants like frankincense for oils, incense etc I am really enjoying starting to use native/local plants of where I am living.
Part of my daily routine is to practice Arvigo massage - Mayan abdominal massage. (Aasha will be offering this treatment on our next YTT - details here) This has been an incredible discovery for supporting my sensitive digestive system, balancing my hormones and just generally helping to keep my body running well.
Before I shower everyday I like to dry brush which has many similar benefits to self massage.
Spending alone time in nature is the best form of self care for me!
Crystal healing- Gridding
Can you tell us about one experience you have had with the natural world that has been profound for you?
Going to the Snowdonia national park area in Wales when I was 21 and spending two years living between there and Scotland was a really profound experience in terms of going to my place of ancestry. It was the first time I felt really connected to somewhere and experienced a sense of belonging, I experienced the mythology and folklore as my own stories, stories that connected me to the land and myself in it in a way I had never felt before, they called back parts of myself I hadn't known were lost and in that landscape I felt more whole than I had ever been. That is where my journey with crystals started, I was spending a lot of time journeying with Oak trees. One night I had a dream that had a giant oak tree in it and there was a door in the tree, I went through the door and into the tree. The next day when I was walking in the woods I came across a big oak tree with a mossy slab of stone at the base of it, something made me feel like lifting it up and digging underneath it... and when I did this I found a huge piece of quartz crystal!
Ever since then crystals have been a beacon on my path and I have found them in natural places all over the world - Portugal, Ireland, Wales, New Zealand and Australia. Crystals feel like a very important part of my medicine journey, often for me finding a crystal is like a sign from the universe that reminds me I'm in the right place, I work with crystals daily on my altars, in grids and amulets they are incredible keepers of the Earths knowledge.
In your line of work as a body therapist what has been the biggest thing that you have learnt through working with people?
I have realised that so much of the time when people come for a treatment what they really end up appreciating is the space and the tools that it provides for them to really drop into their bodies and become more aligned with themselves. Every person is so individual and there is such a wide range of healing modalities and schools of thought to choose from these days, however there are common threads throughout all of them that help to empower us to a place of deep embodiment and meaning in our lives - the breath, our energetic body, the balancing of all the sacred elements within ourselves and the world around us and the importance of ritual in our lives.
