Matty The Medicine Man
We run a cool little boutique hotel in the jungle of Costa Rica. It’s in Nosara, a small village on the Pacific Ocean – where more sea turtles lay eggs than we have residents. It’s become a haven for surfers, yogis, tennis and just healthy people. There is so much to see and do like zip lining and 4 wheelers in the jungle. People from all over are finding refuge in our little jungle.
The residents here are interesting too. I find it fascinating how tuned into nature this bunch is. Many enjoy birding and mountain biking jungle trails. They just want to be off the beaten path.
We bring an expat in to teach plant medicine. Aya who owns Cura Sana, talks to you about the plants that are right in front of you and their medicinal properties. It’s new to me – but I’ve already experienced a few things that I wouldn’t have believed unless I witnessed it. A few weeks later I was playing tennis with a Camilla on the red clay courts at Colibri Tennis Club and I noticed her lips were bloody from the sun. They were so chapped that she had blood on her hands. My fiancé gave her the same salve to put on her lips and the next day – she looked like a different person.
One evening I was making dinner and I sliced the tip of my finger. It started to bleed profusely. You know what the tip of your index looks like with a deep cut – it’s no fun and it takes some work to get it to stop. Well – not this time … I put some salve made by Aya (Cura Sana) on it & it stopped immediately. By the morning – it was fully healed and I played tennis without any bandages. Actually – I didn’t use any bandages at all.
So this week when a guest came back from surfing – he was pretty beaten up. He is a pretty tough guy and he didn’t complain at all. But honestly – he looked like he really irritated Neptune – the Roman god of the sea. He had duck tape on bruised ribs and brought back a piece of drift wood to make a splint for a finger that he tore a tendon. The next day he stepped on a stingray. He came back and sat patiently in the kitchen as Matty – (our resident medicine man) ran to the beach and cut a local plant that grows by the ocean.
He quickly tore it into pieces and added boiling water and adjusted the temperature until our guest Brad could soak his foot in it. After about 45 mins of soaking his foot in this bath Matty prepared – he pulled it out and put a flip flop on and went to dinner. He said from that point on – he felt no pain. The foot bath Matty prepared pulled the venom out of his foot and Brad had no infection.
