Stay Strong and SOAK!

We’re heading into winter, my friends, and here’s something you can do for yourself to stay strong through the cold, and emerge into spring stronger than ever:

You need to soak your feet.

That’s right. Soak your feet. Foot soaks as preventive medicine are used all over the world, have been from, well, probably about the time someone figured out how to make a bucket. Fill the bucket with water, heat a stone in the fire and drop it in the bucket, add feet and bliss out.

Then someone figured out that you could up the power of these soaks by adding herbs to them. Then salts, and minerals, and aromatic oils. If you add these things in various combinations, you have simple, powerful medicine that can be absorbed through the skin of your feet. Plus it just feels so good.

I’ve read stories, mostly from China, of how people would gather with friends and family at the end of the day, hang out and soak their feet. I’ve been told that, in Asia, the first intervention for a winter cold is a foot soak with herbs from the local apothecary.

And it’s not just Asia. Read any history books of any country and you’ll find references to soaking your feet when you’ve got a chill or are coming down with something. People in the US were doing this right through the last century. You get your medicine through your feet, and a hot foot soak will help you sleep – the two things you need to work through an illness.

In these days when we are rightly leery of popping a pill as a solution for anything, isn’t it good to know about this simple thing you can do for yourself?