The Missing Link: Kauai-Grown Reishi Mushroom
For 15 years now, I have immersed myself in the nurturing healing qualities of Kauai grown tropical plant medicine. I humbly began my plant medicine experience eating raw herbs and drinking herbal tea, and thereafter organically ventured into more curated raw juice extract, oil, alcohol and honey infusions, skin therapy applications, steam distillations, superfood spices and more. The profound learning and expansive healing experience continues to this day.
The daily plant medicine journey has cultivated a relentless devotion and connection to self-healing, the land and plants, as well as to the gardeners, alchemists and herbalists that have chosen Kauai Farmacy as their life path. However, approximately 10 years into the journey, I began to realize that our offering at the Farmacy was somewhat incomplete. There was a giant void that I was feeling not just in my personal healing journey, but also in the Kauai Farmacy medicine cabinet and gardens.
We grow, cultivate, and alchemize plant leaves, roots, fruits, flowers, seeds, nuts, and more into herbal medicine products, but no mushrooms of any kind. There have been no medicinal fungi whatsoever in our gardens. From Turkey Tail to Reishi to Cordyceps - we tried and failed time and time again to cultivate them, as so many other farmers on Kauai have. The great “wood wide web” of nature was missing from the Kauai Farmacy plant medicine cabinet, and I could feel a blatant energetic void in my healing journey. I wanted to go deeper, expand into another plane of plant medicine, and felt I needed the unique power of medicinal fungi in order to do that.
According to Mushroom Mycologist, Paul Stamets, “What makes fungi so unique is the fact that their cell walls are made of a molecule called chitin instead of cellulose that you’d find in plants. Chitin is bendable yet tough. Its ability to defend itself from outside pathogens makes it valuable in medicine and food.”
I admittedly first tried the Kauai Grown Reishi Mushroom with much trepidation but soon found myself immediately forced to surrender to the process. For if there is anything the Reishi mushroom medicine combats is resistance, fear, and a perceived lack of anything. It rather profoundly teaches how to accept what is, allowing the unfolding and surrendering of the busy mind, whether you like it or not!
Restoration is its vibration. A retreat within, irrespective of the outside circumstances. Sounds so wonderful, doesn’t it? And somehow, someway, as we accumulate our rest, everything still continues to get done with a relaxed laser-like focus. It's like “being” on a spiritual retreat, but the “doing” of everything around you becomes more efficient, productive and easeful - as the doing becomes being.
If there was one word I would use to describe what Reishi Mushrooms cultivates within us, it would be grace. Can you imagine? A plant medicine that can be used to cultivate grace? So after much persistence and patience, we have gratefully seeded at Kauai Farmacy and sourced Kauai grown Reishi Mushrooms from Kauai’s own mushroom grower and mycologist, Joell of Tropical Fungi.
According to Adriana Ayales, in The Herbal Astrology Oracle, “Reishi Mushrooms are synonymous with retreat, recovery, meditation, hibernation, spiritual contemplation, and replenishment of spirit.” Ganoderma multipileum in Latin. Called lingzhi in Chinese, Reishi represents immortality and is considered the “herb of spiritual potency,” meaning success, well-being, divine power and longevity.
Said to have been discovered in 396 B.C. in the Changbai Mountains of China by Taoist monks, it is one of the oldest mushrooms used in medicine. It has long been called an anti-aging mushroom used to nourish the spirit.
In China’s oldest materia medica – The Herbal Classic, written around 200 C.E. – Reishi held first place above ginseng. The text says Reishi helps:
- Stabilize qi in the head, assisting in mental activities
- Tonify the spleen
- Increase wisdom and improve memory
- Lighten the body, increase vitality, and delay aging for years
“Reishi’s borderline miraculous properties include how the mushroom profoundly relaxes the nervous system, calms the mind, and induces a state of relaxed focus. Another known attribute of the Reishi Mushroom is the spiritual experience it unlocks when in meditation.”
In my experience however, Reishi Mushrooms as a healing medicine requires a trust in the process that exists outside the physical realm. An over-the-counter plant medicine that delivers “spiritual potency” is certainly unique to the prescription vocabulary in the west.
When crafted using a double-extract method (which involves both alcohol and water) to capture a wider range of bioactive compounds, Reishi Tincture has been scientifically supported to help:
- Modulate the immune system and fight infections
- Reduce cortisol; helping the body adapt to stress
- Detoxify the liver and improve overall organ function
- Reduce effects of aging with powerful antioxidants
- Increase strength and stamina, and reduce chronic fatigue
The Missing Link, Kauai-grown Reishi Mushroom.
- Doug Wolkon
