Jasmine

I used to absolutely hate Jasmine until I realized I was using the fake stuff.

We ran out of sandalwood soap, and I was busy when Tim asked me what I wanted as far as soap, and I said something along the lines of *grunt* "eh? uh... yeah." And so he grabbed... a-this!:

Bee & Flower Jasmine Soap. Holy frikken moley. Yes, I just said Holy Frikken Moley. Well, typed it.

And it smells REALLY RIDICULOUSLY WONDERFUL. Granted, I know it's all natural fragrance, but I don't know if it's all only Jasmine fragrance, but since Jasmine essential oil is uber expensive, it's probably "enhanced" by some other flower. So anyway, me smelling all good after getting out the shower got me all curious in Jasmine, enough to write a short post about my findings, and other tidbits of knowledge I picked up from various places throughout the years.

According to Wikipedia, Jasmine is actually a genus, not a species. But there are specieses of Jasmine. Just, more than one like I had previously thought. Like, 200 SPECIES!!! And they're native to "the old world" (I chuckled when I saw Wiki say that) in tropical/warm places, mostly in Asia and Southeast Asia, but also popping up in the Middle-East, Africa, Europe, etc. It is also apparently related to olives, which is just weird.

Totally not an olive. Totally gorgeous photo of a blooming Jasmine by BarbaraDin on sxc.hu

You can make tea with Jasmine. I admit, I'm not a big green tea fan, and the only tea with Jasmine I can ever seem to find is green. Oh but to find some black or white tea with jasmine in it! But I digress. Apparently it's really awesome and sometimes the actual little petals are in there, not just some dumb flavoring and it's all smelly and pretty and sensuous and I really want some tea. Now.

Multiple sources cite Jasmine as an aphrodisiac, and I think I've heard about it as a really good remedy for menstrual cramps as well, both of which I have yet to try. All I know is when I shower with the jasmine soap I feel all soft and feminine and it makes me wanna put on harem pants.

Ok that's all for today. I'm not gonna lie, I didn't put much effort into that. :)

Love,

<3 Sapphire Orchid <3

Om Shanti Naturals Salt & Sugar Scrub Review

Last birthday, my sister completely broke character and told me in advance what she was going to buy me in advance. The reason she told me was because she wasn't sure what SCENT to get me.

I've been on this green beauty kick for a little over a year now, thanks to Julie Gabriel's Green Beauty Guide, which has become my bible for avoiding the noxious, harmful chemicals that cosmetics, hair products, body and facial care products dump into our delicate systems every day. (Yeah, pretty much anything you can pick up in your local grocery store beauty aisles contains petrochemicals, harsh irritants, carcinogenic compounds, and other lovely things that support your un-health.)

Anyway, Jenni was aware of this, and she did her homework. She found this company called Om Shanti Naturals, and got me a Patchouli Vanilla Sugar and Salt Scrub. The company is run by this wonderful, creative lady named Kate, who I met in person at the Collegeville Winter Farmers Market after having already used all of the Patchouli Vanilla scrub and loving it to death. Sadly, I did not get the opportunity to meet her Vice President of Marketing, an orange cat named Loiosh, but here's to staying hopeful!

The company logo. And it IS all crap-free. Not a single bad ingredient, it's all pure.

The stuff is amazing. I love it. It's basically a scrub made of sea salt, sugar, moisturizing oils and essential oils to make you soft and smelling delicious. It comes in this cute, re-usable wide-mouthed jar with a screw top, and when you're in the shower, after you've washed, you take a handful of this stuff and rub it all over your body. The result is that you get a REALLY awesome exfoliation, and it leaves the oil on your skin.

I know what you're thinking, OIL on my SKIN?? But don't panic. It's not greasy at all. The oils are natural, like grapeseed and apricot kernel oil -- these are the kinds of oils massage therapists use, the kinds that glide over your skin and feed it moisture and trace vitamins and wonderfulness.

So here's the thing, when you rinse the scrub off, the salt and sugar will go down your drain (it's ok, it won't do any clogging, I promise, but it will make your shower floor slippery, so be careful) and the oil will remain on your skin. When you dry off, it will transfer to your towel. Again, these are massage-therapist quality oils, they will not harm your towels at all. The towels will take off the excess oil that your skin doesn't need, leaving a slight amount still on your skin. Stay in the bathroom for another minute or five, and it will soak into your skin leaving you lightly scented, soft, supple, and simply lovely to touch. And you will stay SMOOTH all day long.

The other thing is, if you've never had a bathing experience with essential oils, you're in for a real treat. We're so used to synthetic fragrances in our lives, that essential oils can be a little overwhelming if you aren't expecting them. They truly are, however, a lesson in luxuriousness, and to boot, each essential oil has its own physical and emotional health benefits. When you take a bath with essential oils, they work into the steam in the room, swirl all around you, and envelop you. For me, I always have a keener, more vibrant sense of smell whenever I'm through showering with essential oil-infused body oils.

There are more scents than just the Patchouli Vanilla one, though. Personally, that one is my favorite so far, with its earthy, sweet scent-hue. I close my eyes and I'm standing under a sparkling waterfall in a magical forest with vanilla beans hanging from the lush greenery, and the smell of clean, pure soil below, nourishing the sky-high trees.

However, my boyfriend is not so fond of Patchouli. Right now, I have the Kyphi scrub, and it too is delightful; she uses a simplified, delicately beautiful balance of the main scents that make Kyphi smell like Kyphi: frankincense, myrrh, cinnamon, and spearmint. It too is delicious, but I do love the Patchouli Vanilla.

So, long story short, you need to try this stuff. And her other stuff. Up next on my list of Om Shanti products to try? I'm particularly keen on trying the Tangerine Vanilla Lip Balm, Cinnamon Vanilla Massage and Bath Oil, and the Spearmint Calendula Soap.

You can find her website here: http://www.omshantinaturals.com/ and she's on Etsy too.

Love,

<3 Sapphire Orchid <3

Totally skipping last week. J is for Jacuzzi Magick!!

Seriously. Who doesn't love jacuzzis??!

It is a pure crying shame that there is a jacuzzi in my own bathroom and yet I rarely use it, mostly because of the sheer amount of water required to fill it up. And I was brushing my teeth this morning, thinking these thoughts along with the fact that I hadn't done a PBP post for the past two weeks (oops) and I suddenly realized, I'd never really heard anything about jacuzzi magick or lore or anything.

A jacuzzi is basically a modernized version of a hot springs with lots of mini geysers. Most people would automatically tag an elemental association as water, however, the jacuzzi is uniquely poised to be associated with all elements: water fills it, air bubbles flow through it to make it jacuzzi-y and awesome, heat is applied (fire?) and of course, the jacuzzi itself is the vessel that holds it all together. So if you're doing any sort of elemental workings, it would suit particularly for water, or for a balance of all four elements.

I'm not big on spell-writing, nor too good at ritual writing, but I am decent at offering suggestions on what to do with things! So here are some ideas for using a jacuzzi in your magickal workings:
--Cleansing energy work, since jacuzzis are essentially a bath and baths are for cleaning
--Relaxation, meditation
--Beauty energy work, particularly if you also indulge in a facial and hair mask, and really let the steam set in and open everything up :)
--For energy working that may involve a hot spring of any sort, a jacuzzi is a more accessible (and sometimes safer) way of working with these energies.
--Love and sex energy work, to heat things up a little ;D
--Releasing and banishing. If you sit in the water and meditate upon shedding all of your cares into the water, then pull the plug, everything will release down the drain.

Pretty much any bath magick can be performed in a jacuzzi, except for one warning: any herbs, spicies, oils, or any form of additive to the water might gunk up or harm the motors in your jacuzzi. Don't ruin your jacuzzi. It's probably super expensive.

Love,

<3 Sapphire Orchid <3

Pagan Blog Project: I is for Imagination!

This was my most fun post to do so far. :)

When my friends and I were about middle school age, we discovered Wicca. This led us into a whole slew of experimental things: spells, rituals, scrying, meditation, but the most vivid, fond memory I have of this point in our lives was past life regressions.

We would sit there in the dark at sleepovers, bathed in candlelight, and Person A would lay her head on a pillow, Person B would sit and stroke the forehead of Person A, and Person C would hold her hand, helping to ground Person A. B would then talk A down into a trance, open doors, and ask questions about who the person is, what's going on around them, etc.

The friends who thought it would be dumb were always the ones who got really into it, and pulled past lives out of their psyche that they simply could not have made up. They always wowed themselves. Others would be skeptical, and say, "Well, how do you know I'm not just making this up?"

This is where the notion of imagination comes in. When you are past-life regressing, scrying, divining, astral-projecting, are you just making it up, even if you think or worry that you might just be making it up? I know I have a hard time quelling the skeptic in me. You may just think you're imagining things and that what you're experiencing isn't truly real.

I have two approaches to answer this issue, based on the same principle, however, to bridge the gap between imagination and reality. First: are they so different? If you are imagining something, who is to say that the thing you are "imagining" is not real? Define real. Define imagination. You probably said something like, well, real things are tangible things you can feel. Desks are real because you can feel them. Smells are real because you can smell them. The problem with this is that reality doesn't equal tangible, necessarily. Emotions aren't primary physical (even though they induce physical responses) but they are real. Ideals are real, such as beauty, justice, truth, even though the definition thereof may vary from person to person. Just because something isn't tangible doesn't mean it isn't real.

Everything that happens to you happens in your mind. Tangible things are really inside your head: your hand physically touches the desk, but your mind is what feels the desk, through the conduit of your brain. Shoot some Novocaine into your hand, and you can touch the desk all you want, but you can't feel it because it's not making its way to your mind.

Therefore: what is in your mind is real to you. Your mind defines your own reality. Some realities are shared: you can touch a desk together with someone else. Other realities aren't shared: perhaps you don't like desks and the other person loves desks; how you feel about things is a part of what defines reality. This is a different reality for you, but each reality is equally valid.

Therefore, again: anything you imagine is real... possibly only to you, albeit, but still real.

Second argument: Let's say you spend some time on the Astral plane and hanging out with some faeries, and you come back to the physical plane and disbelieve the entire thing, dismissing it as, "Oh, that wasn't real, I just must have made it all up inside my head."

BUT who is to say that reality does not impress itself upon your memory and imagination? Who is to say that you have that much control to make up such a rich environment yourself? Is your imagination really yours? Or do you draw the things you imagine from things that already exist, that already happened? Is it even possible to imagine something that doesn't exist? Imagine a color that doesn't exist. Imagine a shape that doesn't exist. It's almost like you can't imagine something without it existing, or at least with the idea of it existing.

So next time you're imagining something wishing it were real, who knows? Maybe it is, somewhere.

Love,

<3 Sapphire Orchid <3

H is for Herbal Healing

So, I've been reading a lot lately about Herbal Healing. Part of this is because of the fact that I'm starting to synthesize my An Leabhar Súilíneach (working title for my Book of Shadows, since I didn't like the shadow part, so I went with a light theme... Book of Shimmers! Except in Irish Gaelic since it sounds cooler, which, by the way, I absolutely do not speak a lick of, so if this is incorrectly translated/adjective-conjugated/whatever please let me know :D it's a work in process.) and I really wanted to have something sort of guide on how to use the fruits of nature to heal what ails you. Modern medicine worries the crap out of me sometimes, particularly with things like antibiotics, blood pressure meds (which I was prescribed at... 23??!) and other such drastic measures that are really having a slippery slope effect on our health, when things can be treated in natural ways.

So anyway. I've been gathering information from several different places. I'm loving the Medicine Woman's Roots Blog (http://bearmedicineherbals.com/), and the following two books, both of which interest me but I am somewhat taking with a grain of salt until I can actually see some of these things in action:

Heinerman's Encyclopedia of Healing Herbs & Spices by John Heinerman

and Indian Herbalogy of North America by Alma R. Hutchens



I guess what weirds me out about it is that one herb can have a whole slew of problems that it helps to correct. Goldenseal, for example, Heineman lists as being useful in healing eye inflammations, candida, mouth sores, drug addiction, poison ivy, insulin dependency in diabetics, sinus relief, and preventing blood clots.

And I'm sitting there, reading all that, going, "...what?" and trying to figure out if it's a miracle plant or just completely and utterly overstated and overinflated.

I also like to try and look for different sources giving the same information. For example, both books list the entire blackberry plant (roots, leaves and berries) as being useful in treating diarrhea. Both books also refer to cotton root as being helpful in delayed/obstructed menstruation.

Some of the claims are a little bit tall-tale-seeming. For example, Heineman lists a magical headache cure as making a tea with water and dried basil, cooling it and adding a little witch hazel and dabbing it on the forehead. I believe it a little more now that that medication you put on your forehead, with the annoying commercials on the Weather Channel, Head on (Head on! Apply directly to the forehead! Head on! Apply directly to the forehead! Head on! Apply directly to the forehead), exists, but I still have yet to try that one.

I'm also curious about learning the Bach Flower Remedies. Those sound interesting.

So, without further ado, some cures for what ails you:

Heartburn? Boil 5-7 tablespoons in a quart of water, add honey to taste and sip.

Hypertension? Evening Primrose.

Hangover? Barberry.

Sexual frigidity? Damiana!!!

Enjoy!

<3 Sapphire Orchid <3

Reading Challenge and Elemental Magick

Tim had two books on Elemental Magick lying around, so I thought I'd give them a peek. They are as follows:

Elemental Magick by DJ Conway aaaaaaaaaaand...

Elemental Witch by Tammy Sullivan.

I quite fancied both of them. I had done a post on air magick previously, even though I'd never really personally worked with air magick too much, I really just thought of various items and practices that rely on the use of air, and thought, wouldn't it be neat to work this into a practice?

Each chapter in both books focuses on one of the elements, with DJ including Spirit, which I also found helpful. Tammy's setup is as follows: each chapter gives an explanation on what kind of personality traits, interests, skills, and positive and negative attributes a Water Witch/Fire Witch etc might have. She then continues with elemental lore, including aspects of nature and creatures that align with each element (i.e. Crossroads for Earth, Birds/Bees/Butterflies for Air, etc.), including explanations and myths. The next section for the same element includes practical uses, using the element in different states of being (i.e. sea, snow, ice, rain, wells, etc for water), some useful items and recipes associated with the element, and finally, correspondences.

DJ structures her chapters slightly differently. She begins each elemental chapter detailing how the element relates to us, and a little bit of lore. She briefly touches on correspondences, and then transitions right into a detailed list of elementals, spiritual beings and mystical creatures associated with the element. The final part of each chapter consists of a guided meditation (that you can record onto a CD if you wish) and spell recipes.

If I had to compare the two, I have to say, I really truly enjoyed Tammy's book. DJ's was good, and I liked all the detailed exploration of a wide range of different elemental beings, but I felt like Tammy's writing offered more varied information, instead of just focusing on beings and spells. Tammy gave more imagery that gives you an aesthetic sense of the element, while still touching on a practical side. I really enjoyed her writing and insight.

For future reading, Sullivan's Pagan Anger Magick: Positive Transformations from Negative Energies looks particularly interesting. Not many Pagans would want to come close to exploring that area, since anger is so unpredictable.

There are most certainly some books by DJ Conway that I very much want to read.  I've read By Oak and Ash and Thorn, and Celtic Magick. I'd like to read Moon Magick, Norse Magick, Magickal Mermaids and Water Creatures, the Ancient Art of Faery Magick, A Witch's Travel Guide to Astral Realms, and a whole bunch of others.

Anyway. READ THESE BOOKS! They're awesome. (I actually paused writing this and started reading a Witch's Travel Guide to Astral Realms already on Google Books! It's neat. Read it.)

<3 Sapphire Orchid <3

Handfastings is for H, briefly.

I didn't get a chance to post Friday or the friday before that or the friday before that because I'm super lazy.



So, Handfastings. This is an interesting term that can encompass a whole variety of meanings:

  --As a synonym for marriage

  --As a synonym for engagement (i.e. kinda like a practice marriage, or a test marriage, which I believe is its origin, at least in the Celtic world.)

  --As a fancy and/or meaningful addition to an otherwise non-Pagan wedding ceremony

Totally and shamelessly lifted from dailywicca.com.

All of these things are just fine, but handfastings really resonate more with me as a marriage in and of itself. Sure, the part with the cords are symbolic and fancy, like in the third meaning I listed, but I do think that one can be handfasted without actual handfasting cords. The idea is that you're giving your hand to the other person to hold forever. All the fancy stuff, cords and candles, something borrowed, something blue really all just kind of falls away when compared to the fact that this ceremony is happening because you want to make it so that someone you love is never lonely without you again. The fancy stuff is fun, but you are fastening your hand to theirs, before the earth, before the people, and before the Gods.

That being said, a kickass dance party afterwards can't hurt. ;)

That's all I can manage for today. I'm surprised I even did this considering my laziness.

<3 Sapphire Orchid <3