Ganoderma lucidum
The Illustrated Herbiary: Guidance and Rituals from 36 Bewitching Botanicals (Wild Wisdom)
Reishi mushroom is the Yoda of the plant world, helping you assimilate life’s experiences and turn them into wisdom. The Taoists teach that Reishi can show you where your power lies, which some might call your destiny. Reishi’s not some soft, clingy mushroom but instead a strong, structured, gravity-defying shelf. She asks no less from you; how can you defy anything keeping you from finding meaning, purpose, and health? Like all the best teachers, Reishi points to the path and lets you walk it, taking your lumps and bumps along the way. She doesn’t want you to rely on her strength; she wants you to find your own. But if you’re willing to do the work, Reishi will help you transform from the inside out.
Write and Burn {Ritual}
To find your path and step into your own power, you need to release whatever is no longer serving your highest good. If your home or workspace is full of stuff, call on Reishi energy and move along what you no longer need. Clutter, whether material or emotional, blocks you from stepping into your true work. If stale thoughts or ways of being need to be released, try this:
- Write down thoughts or emotions you want to be rid of. Don’t worry about spelling or grammar or handwriting – just write!
- When you feel emptied, take the paper and burn it to ash, setting the intention to fully release the thoughts and feelings that no longer serve.
- Sprinkle the ashes on the earth {or add them to the dirt in a potted plant}, where the thoughts and feelings can be further broken down and composted.
Step Into Your Superpower {Reflection}
Do you know where your power lies?
What gives you strength and vitality?
Oftentimes we think our superpower is the thing that makes those around us happy or comfortable. But Reishi knows that your gift, your strength, is the thing that makes you vital and alive.
To Be Clear: Reishi doesn’t care how you make your money. Your destiny may have nothing to do with how you pay your mortgage, but it has everything to do with how you feed your soul.
Reishi {Ganoderma lucidum}
Also, Known As:
- Ling Chi
- Ling Zhi
- Reishi
Known in Japan as the ‘phantom mushroom’ because it can be so very difficult to find, the reishi generally grows on old Japanese plum trees. Reishi is so rare that only about 10 mushrooms would be found growing on about 100,000 plum trees. Finally, it was the Japanese Shigeaki Mori who perfected the art of growing the reishi indoors. This art involved culturing wild reishi spores on plum-tree sawdust over an elaborate and arduous two-year time period. The fruiting body of the reishi can be used medicinally.
Also popularly known as the hing zhi “herb of spiritual potency”, the reishi is, in essence, a mushroom that can grow on old rotten logs, fallen tree stumps and other similar areas throughout the coastal regions of China. However, reishi is cultivated in areas as diverse as North America, Taiwan, Japan, Korea, and China for its medicinal value.
Medicinally, reishi is popular for its ability to relieve fatigue, weakness, insomnia, coughs, and asthma, because of the fact that it contains several major components including coumarin, sterols, polysaccharides, mannitol and triterpenoids called ganoderic acids.
The ganoderic acids present in reishi have the ability to lower blood pressure, diabetes mellitus, and cancer, and to decrease cholesterol levels, and they also inhibit blood platelets from sticking together as it happens in coronary artery disease. Reishi can also reduce the symptoms of altitude sickness, and chronic hepatitis B but studies have not been concluded on its effectiveness in these areas.
Plant Part Used:
Mushroom.
Traditional Chinese Medicine:
In traditional Chinese medicine, reishi has been popularly used for more than 2,000 years today, and this wonderful mushroom is often referred to as the “elixir of life.” Even today, the reishi is considered to be one of the more important and popularly used Chinese tonics in the world, and it would supposedly boost energy levels, and at the same time help the body to effectively resist disease and stress.
In the Western parts of the world, herbalists even today assume that reishi is an adaptogen and therefore, they often recommend it as an immune stimulant that would activate several different phases of immune defense in the human body. Its uses are manifold: it can be used to treat allergies, asthma, altitude sickness. Reishi can be especially helpful for calming coughs in people suffering from asthma and who have colds at the same time. It is known to have a great impact on persons suffering from mushroom poisoning, and it is effective against leukemia. Reishi can also be used to overcome age-related intellectual decline.
These can be the possible health benefits of reishi:
Reishi can help to prevent cirrhosis of the liver and also fatty liver, both of which are caused by the ill effects of excessive alcohol intake or alcoholism. Reishi can prove to be extremely beneficial to those individuals who are still in the early stage of the disease, and who have not yet progressed to an acute stage of cirrhosis of the liver.
Reishi can help in treating yeast infections and in bronchitis. The mushroom can help stimulate the maturation of immune cells within our body, known as macrophages, which engulf and eventually digest infectious bacteria. This would effectively prevent secondary infections from blowing up into cases of chronic bronchitis. Mature macrophages are extremely effective in fighting yeast, and this is why reishi can be used to fight yeast infections.
Reishi can help in fighting cancer. This is because the mushroom helps the body stimulate the production of interleukin-2, which also contains ganaoderic acids, which together would fight several types of cancer, and especially liver cancer. During a traditional cyclophosphamide (Cytoxan, Neosar) treatment, both red and white cell production are suppressed within our body, and reishi effectively counteracts this impact by simply stimulating the creation of protein in the bone marrow.
Reishi can help fight fibroids or uterine myomas. Reishi keeps the uterine lining from making basic fibroblast growth factor or bFGF, and histamine. While bFGF is a chemical that promotes fibroid growth, histamine is a chemical that causes inflammation.
Reishi can fight high blood pressure. Evidence shows that reishi can effectively lower both blood pressure and high cholesterol levels. According to scientists at Oklahoma’s Oral Roberts University, reishi can contain certain compounds that would reduce the flow of nerve impulses through the sympathetic nervous system, which is the part of the nervous system that is generally affected by emotional stress. Some Russian scientists trying to find out exactly how reishi can be utilized to lower blood cholesterol levels have found that this plant effectively stops the accumulation of cholesterol in the arteries of laboratory animals, and when similar studies were conducted on human beings, it was found that it was indeed possible to lower blood cholesterol levels with the use of reishi, as compared to trying to lower it with the help of a placebo. In other words, those patients with a high level of cholesterol had not responded to medication earlier, and now they did.
Reishi can fight stress. In the East, physicians have long proved the fact that those emotional outbursts that are generally caused by the impact of long-term stress on an individual can actually be reduced significantly by reishi. Although it is not yet known exactly how reishi works on reducing stress, it can be stated that it happens due to the effect that the herb has on the central nervous system. In fact, doctors in the Hijiki Clinic in Tokyo found that reishi was able to reduce physical pain dramatically in two separate groups of patients, one suffering from neuralgia, and the other, from shingles or herpes zoster. Perhaps it is this same quality that stops emotional outbursts after long-term stress.
OTHER MEDICAL USES
- Colorectal cancer
- Kidney cancer
Possible Side Effects and Precautions:
Reishi is the most widely available medicinal mushroom in the world, as it is available as foodstuff, but also as an important ingredient in teas, tablets, syrups or tinctures. However, one has to be careful to never use raw pulverized mushrooms; it is always a better idea to boil the reishi so that any bacteria that may have been living on the mushroom during cultivation may be eliminated.
There may be certain side effects when reishi is consumed. If reishi is used for three to six months continuously, then it may result in a certain dryness of the mouth, nasal passages, and throat, and also chronic itch, and stomach upset; or even nosebleed. These complications may occur very rarely, therefore, their exact causes are not known. However, they may be manifestations of an allergy to the reishi mushroom.
Therefore, reishi must be avoided by those persons who have a known allergy to any type of mushrooms or molds. One must also remember not to use it continuously three months at a time, and to always take a break of a month in between, and then continue. If you take blood-thinning medications such as heparin or warfarin (Coumadin), you should use reishi under a doctor’s supervision.
FUNGIKINGDOM.net is a frequently updated educational site created by Dianna Smith to provide the amateur mycologist access to informative lessons, presentations, photos and descriptions fungi common to northeastern NA. This website also includes a series of scholarly articles on the subject of fungi by writer/educator Bill Bakaitis.
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