INTUITIVE SALVE MAKING AND GIFTING

Salve is a healing concoction blended through warmth, applied to the body to nourish and heal. It is absorbed through the porous boundary of the skin and travels to where it is needed. Salve honors the plant as primary healer. It is given and received.

Bring the medicine, the organ, and the disease together; see them touch your imagination and begin to flow into one another.

-- Stephen Harrod Buhner, The Secret Teachings of Plants

Women have always experienced the reality of self and community, known it, and shared it with each other. Yet, living in a world in which they are devalued, their experience bears the stigma of in-significance. Thus they have learned to mistrust their own experience and devalue it. What wisdom can there be in menses? What source of knowledge in the milk-filled breast? What food for abstraction in the daily routine of feeding and cleaning?

-- Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy

We are all healers in the Wise Woman tradition. Self-healing and self-loving, we co-create our allies. Our allies are our problems; they bring us gifts of wholeness. Our allies are wise women; they support us in our transformation. Our allies are green allies, wild plants; they supply us with optimum nutrition.

- Susun S. Weed, Healing Wise

A woman making dinner is invisible. To claim that she is engaged in healing her family and her community and keeping her universe in balance is a lot to claim for dinner. This is the Wise Woman way.

- Susun S. Weed, Healing Wise

“Woman as healer” is antithetical to the cosmological structure that binds the Western world. Throughout civilization, scientific, civic, and ecclesiastical bodies have closely watched the activities of woman healers. Vigilance has been followed by legal restraint, persecution, and finally, the enactment of laws and customs that prohibit women from practicing publically. This cycle can be traced from the European heritage into the American tradition of allopathic medicine, Women and the values associated with the feminine were deliberately expunged from the institutions of society. In order for true progress—true healing in a global sense—to take place, Western cosmology must change. Women can no longer be seen as the problem, but part of the solution to the crises facing the health of humankind.

- Jeanne Achterberg, Woman as Healer

Some salve ingredients:

Beeswax
Extra virgin coconut oil
Olive oil
Cocoa butter
Shea butter
Calendula
Lavender
Rosemary
Vanilla
Cinnamon
Cardamom
Scotch Pine
Lemon
Vegetable glycerine

Heat oils and melt solids in them (i.e. beeswax, cocoa butter). Different ratios create different consistencies. Play/experiment with ingredients to find the salve that is needed

Simple nourishing blend (completely edible):

Coconut oil, Cocoa butter, Vanilla & Cinnamon

Kim Parko

INTUITIVE SALVE MAKING AND GIFTING

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