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Relaxation

  • Sebastian Pole
    Sebastian Pole

    I am a registered member of the Ayurvedic Professionals Association, Register of Chinese Herbal Medicine and a Fellow of the Unified Register of Herbal Practitioners. I qualified as a herbalist with the aim of using the principles of Ayurveda (the ancient art of living wisely) and the Herbal tradition to help transform health. I have been in clinical practice since 1998.

    Having co-founded Pukka Herbs in 2001 I have become experienced in organic herb growing, practitioner grade quality and sustainable value chains. I am a Trustee of the FairWild Foundation, a Director of The Betonica School of Herbal Medicine and an Advisor to The American Herbal Pharmacopoeia and The Sustainable Herbs Project. Fluent in Hindi, a qualified Yoga therapist and passionate about projects with a higher purpose, I am on a mission to bring the incredible power of plants into peopleā€™s life. And that is why I started Herbal Reality and what it is all about.

    I live in a forest garden farm in Somerset growing over 100 species of medicinal plants and trees. And a lot of weeds!

    Author of Ayurvedic Medicine, The Principles of Traditional Practice (Elsevier 2006), A Pukka Life (Quadrille 2011), Celebrating 10 Pukka years (2012) and Cleanse, Nurture, Restore with Herbal Tea (Frances Lincoln 2016).

    Listen to our Herbcast podcast with Sebastian as the host.

  • 10:54 reading time (ish)
  • Cleansing & Metabolising Digestion & Nutrition Energy Mobility & Fitness Mood & Mind Stress & Sleep

Written by Sebastian Pole

Life can ask a lot of us sometimes and our whole system is constantly under pressure to perform. And just as we need to train to keep fit, so we need to hone our skills at relaxing at will. Of course, some of the stress we experience is very helpful. The grounding stress of gravity keeps us on the earth. The force of the sunā€™s gravitational stress holds the earth in an ellipse so perfectly placed that our planet can flourish in an atmosphere ideal for life. The pressure of an important performance can heighten our senses and improve how we play. As we can clearly see in Nature, too much stress pushes any ecosystem to its limit.

And so it is with our own inner ecosystem; intense or consistent departure from the bio-rhythms, repair and rebalancing we need and symptoms are quickly felt in our sleep, skin and digestion. Stress is implicated in so many health problems from insomnia to dermatitis to IBS to overt anxiety and beyond. Ayurveda perceives this as ā€˜living beyond our thresholdā€™ or ā€˜living beyond our meansā€™. So, if we are living in the red we need to recredit our reserves so that we can process, absorb and purify the stresses we encounter. Nature holds many gifts for helping us to manage our daily stresses from simple breathing exercises, to soothing massage, to a spectrum of healing plants that can sedate, stimulate, nourish, feed and/or relax the nervous system.

Sebastian Pole

I am a registered member of the Ayurvedic Professionals Association, Register of Chinese Herbal Medicine and a Fellow of the Unified Register of Herbal Practitioners. I qualified as a herbalist with... Read more

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