A description of Grasspink’s unique ability to heal frayed nerves that in panic are not reporting the cause of the problem, resulting in hemorrhage, skin diseases, muscle and tendon chronic pain like Fibromyalgia, repetitive strain injury.
Ed, this beautiful amazing stunner, commonly called Grasspink is an orchid native to the Eastern North America.
It’s infusion was used to repair horse’s knees that had gotten injured through overuse and repetitive injury. This particular place, the knees, are not so easy to heal because whether its us or our pets, our knees are always bending and then straightening. Unless we stayed IN bed it would be very difficult to keep our knees without bending.
You can imagine how impossible it is to keep’s horses with injured knees – frayed muscle, nerve and skin – from bending their knees.
A warm water infusion of these beautiful flowers was called in every time there was fine muscle or nerve injury.
The treatment is not put on externally – as far as I know – but taken internally.
It has a sort of astringent effect, very mild, like drinking rose petal infusion. It settles the throat and the stomach, making the internal linings feel calm as the nerve endings there all calm down.
You could say it has a mild sedating effect. Very mild.
And then about ten minutes after you have the infusion you feel a change of consciousness. The relief in the frayed muscles, tendons, nerves… everything frayed in the body is palpable. It triggers off the processes of the body that make the brain realize that this place and this place and this place need to be cushioned and tenderly repaired.
Whereas flowers like the Butterfly Bush (Buddleja) work to heal nerve frailty and fragility, Grasspink works to heal frayed nerves.
This is invaluable in cases of heavy bleeding and hemorrhage due to nerve damage.
An example was in the case of a diabetic woman, about fifty, who had a heat stroke one warm summer. She had the normal signs of a heat stroke and was treated for it, when the person treating her realized she was bleeding profusely through the nose and was almost passing out.
Her brain’s nerves, weak from the sort of blood pressure instability that diabetics have, over the years were not able to deal with the force of the blood supply coming up from the heart. Her brain was bleeding internally.
They were at the horse races and on every side there was a crowd that made moving out quickly difficult. My Granddad was there with a sprig of Grasspink in his pocket. He also had his bottle of Scotch (wouldn’t be caught dead without it). He crushed the flowers, stuffed them into the bottle and shook them as vigorously as he could.
Alcohol causes a heat reaction in substances it is exposed to, breaks them down and absorbs them. So you can always make a quick light tincture by putting something in alcohol and shaking it about vigorously.
By this time the woman had passed out. There was no sign of the person who’d gone to call for a stretcher and first aid.
Luckily she’d passed out with her mouth open. Granddad poured some of the Scotch in her mouth and then held it shut.
This was by now quite messy and people around were behaving like she’d died because she had bled so much from the nose and her arms were hanging limp on either side.
She recovered consciousness in about a minute after the tincture of Grasspink was given her. A stretcher and a doctor arrived for her five minutes later, but she said she didn’t need it. The bleeding had lessened and stopped.
My Granddad obviously had not known that she had had long term nerve weakness, was diabetic (you got be very careful because diabetics’ nerves can’t take much pressure so you must use only the gentlest of medicines). Granddad had taken a chance because Grasspink was the only thing he’d had on him at the time.
But from then on he used Grasspink on those with long term nerve damage, like the elderly, those recovering from extremely exhausting ordeals – athletes training to swim the English channel – and all those with repetitive strain injuries.
Granddad used it in combination with Apple Blossom for a case of dysentery caused by an unknown poison. Granddad reckoned that Grasspink had an unusual and unique intelligence.
This beautiful plant could heal those in situations where the body and psyche were unable in the moment to remember what exactly the problem was.
Have you ever been in such a state of shock or anxiety that you simply couldn’t in the moment focus on or know what exactly had caused the shock and anxiety?
That’s Grasspink’s comfort zone.
Granddad used to say that it was a sort of neuropathy or nerve numbness where the nerves were all reporting pain without reporting exactly what was causing the pain.
In such a situation, the brain does’t know what exactly to do and sends all guns blazing blood supply and infection fighting agents and what not to the area.
It’s like someone reporting a “calamity” without saying what sort it was. It would result in all the different kinds of disaster management forces coming in, causing more trouble and stressing the already weakened area.
This is what causes hemorrhage – too much blood pressure in the area – not really necessary.
Grasspink works wonderfully in such situations to help the nerves report what’s causing the problem, so the body’s response can be balanced.
A good number of skin diseases of the imbalanced pigmentation, leprosy and so on, are associated with nerves not able to report a problem accurately. They are all helped by Grasspink, in combination with other herbs to rehabilitate the nerves.
I have used the energy essence (distilled steam from the flower infusion) to relieve inflammation in my limbs caused by radiation exposure.
A lot of modern “chronic pain” like Fibromyalgia is nothing but tissues exposed to radiation being too nerve damaged to report what happened right. So the whole area and then the whole body aches. We’re unable to say what’s causing it.
What happens with repeated radiation exposure is the nerves and nerve endings get frayed and it often feels very much like the muscle is frayed, when it’s actually the nerves. A lot of people treat Fibromyalgia as a problem with aching muscle and frayed muscle and tendon cells, but it’s more of fine nerve damage issue than muscle trouble.
Grasspink is wonderful comfort and healing.
It has to be taken regularly, twice a day, for some months. Just add a few drops of the tincture or the distilled essence to your water bottle (that’s not exposed to bright sunlight)or with your other herbal tinctures.
Most of the time in three weeks, you feel the difference. However that would only be the start. You keep taking it for as long as your instinct feels right. It’s about teaching, coaching, your nerves to heal and then stay healed by accurately reporting what’s happening, instead of panicking. It can take a while sometimes.
Grasspink Illustration from 1899 – more on the red side than the violet side.
New York,F. A. Stokes [1899]
