Herbal Remedy for Congestion: Rosemary Herbal Steam

Hi, I'm Erin. I'm a clinical herbalist and aromatherapist based in the Pacific Northwest, and I teach herbal aromatherapy at florinella.com. I also grow and distill a lot of my own organic herbs for my apothecary, and I wanted to show you one of the herbs that's looking really great in our garden right now. It's rosemary. My husband and I garden in a zone 8b, which means that rosemary will survive the winter outside for us. It won't necessarily for you if you live in a colder zone, but for us, it's one of the things that looks really good even in the wintertime and then in the early, early spring slash late winter. It's one of the first herbs that I'm able to distill for hydrosol and essential oil. John and I just harvested some rosemary over the weekend, and we're going to be working with it over the next few days, so I thought I'd bring you along. The first thing we're going to do today is work with fresh rosemary and its essential oil to help soothe respiratory irritation and loosen up some mucus. So let's sit down and I'll tell you a little bit more about how you can work with it. Rosemary is really rich in a constituent called 1,8-sineol, which has beneficial effects for the respiratory system and in scientific studies has been found to be very anti-inflammatory. And one of the ways that I like to work with the fresh or dried herb for people who are experiencing respiratory congestion is to make an herbal steam with the rosemary leaves, and it's really easy to do. So if you're ever feeling really congested, you can do an aromatic steam or even just use steam on its own to help loosen up that congestion so that you can feel like you can breathe a little bit better. So one of the ways you can work with it in a steam is to just place a fresh sprig of rosemary into a heat-safe bowl. You can also strip the leaves from a sprig of rosemary into your heat-safe bowl. You could strip the leaves and chop them up a little bit to increase surface area that is going to be coming into contact with water, but the basic premise of this is that I am going to put this rosemary that contains volatile oils into my bowl. You really only need a sprig or two if you're working with fresh rosemary, one sprig, or a teaspoon to a tablespoon of dried leaf if you're working with dried rosemary. You're going to put that in your bowl and you're going to pour freshly boiled water over it. When that boiled water comes into contact with the aromatic molecules that are volatile in your rosemary, they liberate those molecules from the plant material and they rise on the steam just like they would during the distillation process if I were to distill this rosemary. As they're rising, if you hold your face over the bowl of steam, you're inhaling those molecules and they're coming into contact with your mucous membranes in your respiratory system and your lungs so they can have an anti-inflammatory effect there. They can also help you feel a little bit more decongested and the steam helps soften and break up some of that mucus so that you can expectorate it and ultimately be able to breathe a little bit better. Let's use just two sprigs of fresh rosemary, get it into our bowl, and pour some freshly boiled water over it. It doesn't take very much and you can see that as soon as I pour that water into the bowl, the steam starts rising and with that steam, some of the volatile aromatic molecules are rising also. What you want to do is if you wear glasses, take them off but basically you want to hold your face over the bowl like this. You don't want your face to be so close to the hot water that the steam is burning or feeling really hot and uncomfortable but you do want your face close enough that you can actually feel that steam entering your sinuses. The other thing you can do if you don't have fresh rosemary on hand is work with dried rosemary the same way or you can work with rosemary essential oil and if you're going to do that, you want to use only one drop of it because it's so potent that if you use more than one drop, it'll actually be really overwhelming to your senses and kind of irritating to your mucus membranes instead of soothing. So you would add just one drop of rosemary essential oil to your steam after you've poured your water instead of before like we did with the herbs. Rosemary essential oil comes in several different chemotypes and the type that you would want to look for if you're working with it for respiratory blends is rosemary chemotype sineol. That is the chemotype that is the richest in the constituent 1,8-sineol. There are other rosemary chemotypes as well that are better for other things but for the respiratory system, the 1,8-sineol chemotype is the best choice. When you do your steam, you'll want to just hold your face over the bowl for 5 to 10 minutes. You could go up to 15 minutes. You can also if you want to trap some of that steam in so that it's not just escaping. You can take a bath towel and put it over your head and kind of have a bit of a tent there to help trap some of that steam in so that you can breathe in a bit more of it and you might want to keep a box of tissues or a handkerchief at hand so that you can blow your nose if you need to. A lot of times if you are feeling really congested, holding your face like this makes your nose run and or get a little bit stoppy even. So you might want to take a break, blow your nose, have a sip of water and then after you've had your steam, just rest for a few minutes and usually within about 10 minutes after doing a steam, I'm feeling like I can breathe again and my sinus passages are all clear. You can also add other herbs or essential oils to your aromatic steams. So for instance, you could work with something like eucalyptus globulus, leaf or essential oil. You could also work with peppermint which is rich in menthol, both the herb and the essential oil. If you're going to work with an essential oil blend, you'll want to pre-mix that blend into its own little five mil bottle or a dram bottle and then add just one drop of the total blend into your steam bowl so that you still only have one total drop of essential oil in your steam bowl. That will keep it feeling really therapeutic and comfortable without being super overwhelming. If you want to learn more about rosemary and how to work with it therapeutically in your home apothecary, feel free to visit our website at florinella.com and check out our herbal aromatherapy certification program in which I teach you how to work with herbs and their hydrosols and essential oils from the garden to the still to the apothecary. I hope that if you're feeling congested or ill that you recover and feel better soon and I'll see you in the next video.