Kick Off 2019 With A Health-Minded Resolution!

Good Witches Homestead

All of us want to live happy, fulfilling, and creative lives. How can we achieve this goal? Undoubtedly, creating and maintaining good health is key. Most importantly, we need to pay attention to what is unfolding in and around us. This means regular internal “check-ins” to determine what we need – rest, nutrients, emotional and physical contact, stretching and movement – as well as the daily practice of healthy habits. We must literally “practice to be healthy,” rather than practice to be sick. This requires effort, knowledge, support, and repetition. In today’s world, it also necessitates knowing how best to manage the daily stress that is part of our lives in a way that works for us personally and individually.

Reducing stress and its effect on health is a challenge for nearly everyone. Some of us turn to pharmaceutical medications, which often not only fail to truly reduce stress but…

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NYC’s largest student-built hydroponic farm leading students and Bronx community to healthier futures

Life & Soul Magazine

A hydroponic farm at a Bronx school is New York City’s biggest student-built, indoor, vertical hydroponic farm.

DeWitt Clinton High School campus students teamed up with Teens for Food Justice (TFFJ) to build an indoor, vertical hydroponic farm in an unused third-floor lab in the school building.

Students will grow more than 25,000 lbs of produce annually to feed their entire school and its 1,300 students daily and the local community on an ongoing basis, while mastering key STEM concepts and skills needed in a green workforce economy.

TFFJ works to ensure universal equitable access to healthy, fresh, affordable food. The organisation train youth in 21st century hydroponic urban agricultural farming techniques, entrepreneurship, and health/nutrition education and advocacy, empowering them as change agents who can lead themselves and their own food insecure communities towards healthier futures.

DeWitt Clinton High School is located in one of the most food insecure communities in NYC. Around 125…

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The Essence of Your Essential Oils

Good Witches Homestead

About Your Essential Oils…

The Essence…

- Essential oils are organic, volatile, liquids that are secreted by tiny structures in a plant’s various parts such as the seeds, leaves, fruits, flowers, resins, and woods.

- An essential oil gets its name from the plant from which it is derived.

- These oils were given the name “essential,” because they were believed to capture a plant’s essence, that is its odor and flavor. They lend plants their distinctive fragrance.

- Essential oils act like their original plant’s defense mechanism and are more powerful due to the concentration of healing compounds collected in the oil.

- The specific ratio of the constituents in an essential oil gives it its specific wellness-enhancing and therapeutic qualities.

- Fragrance oils are artificial and synthetically created by chemists, thus they do not contain the same therapeutic benefits as essential oils.

- It is best to avoid essential oils under specific circumstances, especially when…

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The Practice of Aromatic Alchemy

Good Witches Homestead

When we approach an essential oil with concentration and mindfulness it begins to reveal hidden dimensions of beauty, power, and intelligence that are not ordinarily noticed. As we integrate these new perceptions into a greater awareness of our own physiological reactions to the plant’s essence, we begin to understand how we are deeply connected to all of life, specifically to the photosynthetic beings that give us nourishment and medicines. By exploring this biological unity through our own senses, we come to realize directly that the processes of life occurring in and around us are truly the expressions and manifestations of an underlying miraculous and profound consciousness, as so eloquently described by the language of Ayurveda. For that reason, we call this practice “Aromatic Alchemy.”