Using Food as Medicine ~ Devi’s Tantric Jungle Juice Recipe

Understanding food as medicine and creating your own delicious home remedies is one of the ways in which we can reclaim our connection to our natural world. The foods and herbs we consume have sentience. Understanding how to be in the right relationship with the foods and substances we consume is an essential part of cultivating a pre-Vedic tantra practice.

Pre-Vedic Tantra emphasizes our relationship with our natural world and all the sentient beings who reside here with us. Everything in our natural world, including us, is made up of earth, water, fire, air, and space. Just like our bodies, foods and herbs are physical manifestations of elemental energy and we can use food as medicine to support the health and well-being of our body, mind, spirit, and sex.

Devi’s Jungle Juice Tea is a lovely, lightly flavored medicinal beverage that you can easily make at home. The ingredients work together to support kidney and liver function, boost the immune system, help balance hormones and mitigate menopause symptoms, improve gut health and digestive functioning, the list goes on and on!

The process of making it yourself allows you to infuse this substance with your energy and intention. Along with the physical ingredients, I enhance the potency of my “food as medicine” by adding the energy medicine of Medicine Buddha Mantra, and/or chanting the elemental seed syllables to enhance the potency of the elemental energies I will be consuming.

From the standpoint of having informally trained in Tibetan Medicine for 17 years and formally trained in Tibetan Medicine for 1.5 years, there is no aspect of our human experience that does not have an impact on our body and mind, and therefore an impact on our spiritual essence. Understanding how to use our food as medicine is part of the indigenous wisdom that has been lost to many of us living in Western society.

Tantric Medicine is Holistic medicine in that it incorporates not just an understanding of the physical ingredients and how they work. Tantric Medicine also incorporates the interdependent relationship we have with every aspect of life – physical, emotional, energetic, spiritual, and sexual.

For a truly “tantric” medicine brew, you would ideally grow all of these ingredients yourself, feeding the plants your urine and bodily fluids so that they can bio-adapt their chemistry to best support the physical and energetic needs of your body. Unfortunately, that is not possible for many of us at this time, so you may have to resort to ordering them online and/or from local markets. You can “clear” and charge your tea ingredients by placing them on your shrine or altar before using them. 

This recipe is for 2 gallons of Jungle Juice using equal parts of each tea. You can adjust the recipe according to your needs. I drink this brew all day every day, which comes out to about 6-8 full glasses per day.

The results I have noticed from using this food as medicine are:

• Significant decrease in inflammation over my entire body
• Balancing of hormones
• Increased libido
• Increased energy

You will need 4 ingredients for your Jungle Juice Brew:

1. Dried Cocomelca Bark
2. Dried Hibiscus Flowers
3. Homemade Kombucha tea
4. Fresh Limon for garnish

The Process:

1. Make 2/3 of a gallon of cocolmeca tea. Purchase cocolmeca bark online or from an herbal shop. Follow the seller’s directions for making the cocolmeca tea.
   
   
2. Make 2/3 of a gallon of Hibiscus tea. I prefer to make “sun tea” to infuse my brew with the solar energy of fire element. But, in the event that the sun is not available, you can chant “RAM, RAM, RAM” over the tea as you pour boiling water over the leaves. “Ram” is the feminine seed syllable for the fire element in Tibetan 5 Element Tantra.
   
   
3. Homemade Kombucha – if you aren’t already making your own Kombucha, I highly, highly, recommend that you do. Most store-bought Kombucha is NOT medicinal and is little more than carbonated sweet tea. Store-bought Kombucha is a great substitute for soda, but that’s about it. If you are absolutely unable to make your own Kombucha then I suggest increasing the amounts of Hibiscus and Cocolmeca and adding the kombucha directly to each glass you drink, according to your tastes.
   
   
4. Once you have all of your teas assembled you simply pour them into the 2-gallon jar using the desired amounts of each medicinal tea.
   
   
5. Pour the finished brew over ice, add a squeeze of fresh (homegrown?) lime, and enjoy!