Star Anise Summary
Star anise has a history of helping people to feel better. It is a powerful herb that soothes digestive and bronchial complaints while promoting your sense of well-being. It is a wonderful addition to both your spice cabinet and your family’s medicine cabinet of natural preventative and healing herbs.
Incorporate star anise in your family’s diet by trying one or more star anise recipes. Bluelady recommends starting with Mother’s Milk (recipe below) to get star anise’s full impact and flavor.
Over the years, people have done all types of things with star anise: eaten, pulverized and placed in capsules, burned as incense, brewed for tea and distilled for its oil. Natural medicine hails its soothing abilities for digestion and cough, and folklore/magic describe star anise’s calming and intuitive properties. Once again, medicine and kitchen witches agree.
Star anise’s ability to relax your mind and body supports its use as a fountain of youth and success charm. After all, don’t we all feel and look fresher after a great nights sleep? And doesn’t connecting to spirit practically guarantee success? It makes sense to believe that the same chemicals that help your body also have an effect on your mind.
It also stands to reason that star anise’s chemical composition affects you no matter how you prepare it. Oils, smoke, or ingesting star anise will each have the desired effect, perhaps to varying degrees, depending on your intent when you use the herb.
So go ahead and focus on what you want, then think, pray, smoke, eat or smell your way to wellness with star anise.
Virtues
Description
Looks like a wooden 6-armed star with each arm holding a lovely, glistening seed. The way the little seed sits comfortably on the star pod looks like a beautiful pearl sitting within an oyster.
Smells like strong and spicy licorice that you found along a footpath in the woods.
Tastes like it smells, but the spicy part kind of sneaks up on you at the end. Eating a whole anise star pod is rather like chewing on a stick in that it feels like wood and continued chewing mashes it into a pulp. The real ‘star’ of the taste-bud sensation show is the little seed – licorice-like, hot and spicy! (Easier to chew, too.)
Feels rather magical in your hand. How did mother nature know you would one day want to hold a star? Read the rest of this entry
