A Simple Recipe to Calm Your Mind

How to calm your mind

A bowl of petals from a Jazz Festival rose bush at Evergreen. Just looking at these can comport (calm) your brain!

I love simple recipes. The less ingredients the better.

Last week i found a simple recipe that promised to "comport my brain" so I'll share it with you.

Comport is an old-fashioned word meaning to calm something or make something behave.

My brain could do with some comporting. It doesn’t always behave as I wish. So, I was excited to find this unusual and cheap recipe to this ongoing problem in an old book.

How to Calm Your Mind

Forget meditation, yoga, chanting, candle watching, dancing beneath the moon, or dreamless sleep. Just follow this ancient recipe.

All you need is five cups of dried rose petals and several spices sewn up in a cute little bag.

I discovered this recipe in a book Rob found in the Denmark Tip Shop, paid a dollar for, brought home, and presented to me as a gift. It was called: The Ross Guide to Rose Growing, written by Deane Ross. Sometime during its career, the book had either been immersed in water, or at least heavily rained on. Its warped pages were turning brown, and a damp smell hung about it like a dense fog. However, its contents were invaluable.

Deane Ross had sourced an original recipe by William Penn in his Book of Physic (written in the late 1600s or early 1700s), and it said thus:

To comport ye brains and for ye palsie, and for ye giddiness of the head. Take a handful of rose flowers, cloves, mace, nutmeg, all in a powder, quilt in a little bag and sprinkle with rose-water, mixed with malmsey wine, and lay it in ye nod of ye neck.

An online search revealed that malmsey wine is a rich, sweet beverage, giving off a musky, fragrant smell, which sounds a bit like a sherry. I could find no reference to what ye nod of ye neck was, so I assume one places the little scented bag beneath the chin and keeps it there by dropping the head forward as if one were making a single, permanent nod to indicate ongoing agreement.

William Penn forgot to mention the final detail, which was that to comport ye brains ye must take deep breathes through ye nose in order to access the smells emanating from the bag trapped beneath ye chin.

Here is Deane Ross’s modern interpretation of the recipe:

100g (5 cups) dried rose petals

1 teaspoon powdered orris root

1 teaspoon cinnamon

1 teaspoon nutmeg

1 teaspoon allspice.

Mix together and stir well. Place in a tightly covered jar, large enough to allow occasional shaking or turning of the petals during the six week ripening period. A few drops of oil of roses or rose perfume will strengthen the fragrance.

I prefer William Penn’s idea of putting the mixture in a bag rather than a jar. Holding ye jar beneath ye nod of ye neck could be awkward. But whatever ye chose to do, breathe deeply from the contents.

It’s the deep breathing that does the healing.

Breathing deeply brings ye awareness to ye body, to this moment ye are in, and this is where ye will be able to comport ye brains and cease ye giddiness in ye head.

With love to ye, Marlane