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Reishi: The Mushroom of Immortality and Its Healing Power for Skin and Soul
Written in collaboration with Menteath by James Dodson | Mushroom Disciple and Founder of Golden Horn Farm, Barcombe East Sussex, UK.
Reishi – The shining, glossy, red ruby of a decomposer, turning wood into soil and new life, growing like a mantle shrine out of the sides of trees. When I spent time in the Pacific Northwest Old Growth forests, I noticed that Reishi shelves growing out of Hemlock trees were often bustling animal congregation areas… I saw squirrels perched atop its ripples, eating their nuts and leaving cute little piles of shell constellations, birds resting for a while on its vantage, and bear droppings littering the floors where they grew. Encountering it in the wild is a bit like a meeting with an extraterrestrial – when we bring examples of live, growing Reishi to markets, we’re often met with astonished awe-gazes and calls of ‘that CAN’T be a real mushroom?!’ Or the unbelieving ‘what a wonderful sculpture!’.
It’s a mushroom with millennia of medicinal use and reverence, the subject of much folklore and myth, described in China as the mushroom of immortality, decorating the arches and balustrades of temples and palaces, carved into the sceptres of Daoist monks and prized and sought after by the rich and noble. It has, just as with the bears and squirrels, pulled us into its glowing orbit for many, many years.
But this little piece is a slightly different look at this powerful mushroom, something that is less talked about but hidden in plain sight. It’s about how we might bring Reishi into our daily use and turn our attention to its healing and reparative effects on our skin.
Hidden in plain sight, you say? Well, Reishi’s scientific name, Ganoderma Lucidum, comes from ancient Greek ganos (γάνος), meaning ‘brightness, sheen’, derma (δέρμα) meaning ‘skin’, and the Latin Lucidum, meaning ‘light, bright, clear’. So… bright shining skin. A skin (on the mushroom) that dazzles as it grows, especially when wet, forming a shell-like lacquer, a hardened surface to use as a miniature squirrel dining table. This skin protects it from rot and waterproofs the mushroom from becoming a soggy slop. It is composed of chitin, a tough, fibrous polysaccharide, the same material that insects and crustacean shells are made of – and it is bound within this chitinous wall where we find the compounds that are so good for us.
From skin to skin, Reishi is full of anti-inflammatory, immunoregulatory, hormone-balancing, and hepatoprotective compounds (1,2,3). It can help to ease anxiety and calm our nervous system, helping us get better sleep and feel more rested (4,5) – something that shows clear links to healthy skin (6). It can lower our blood pressure and balance blood-glucose levels (7). It quickens the repair of skin damaged by UV rays, promotes skin wound healing, and has clear age-slowing effects (8,9,10). On a personal note, I have close friends who used to suffer from yeast infections, with antifungal creams being too harsh and infections recurring time and again. However, since they started using Reishi as a topical treatment and dosing with tincture daily, they haven’t had a recurrence.
And all of these modern biomedical explorations are backed by ancient use. For millennia, it was used as a tonic for longevity and enhancing resilience, grounding and stabilising emotional disturbances, and promoting ‘Qi’. It makes perfect sense to me that something so beautiful, with skin so radiant and strong, is such a close ally in protecting our own skin from its barrage of attacks during our current age of synthetics and high-stress lifestyles. Reishi offers us a symbol of protection and community, its fruit as congregation areas deep in old-growth forests, its skin allowing support and stability, and its colour reflecting the heart within as a path to calm and balance. When we walk into our fruiting rooms at Golden Horn Farm with its deep-sea antlers and shelves glowing, it is undeniably a grounding and calming influence.
The Reishi in our tinctures has a special story too – we found the specific Reishi that we use in our tinctures 4 years ago growing from the base of a hornbeam tree less than a mile from our farm. I was leading a foraging tour at the time and was so excited to find it I became a bouncing ball, jumping with joy, leaf mulch raining down around me. We were successful in cloning it and have been working with it to this day, now growing it on a mixture of oak sawdust and hemp shiv. We grow it with gratitude and heart because that’s the way we found it.
I could go on and on about this mushroom that I am enamoured with, that indeed changed my life, but I’ll save that story for another time. And so, here’s thanks to the skin and to Reishi for offering protection, balance, and strength in the deepest, darkest forests.
A little note from us at Menteath...
We are delighted to partner with our dear friends, James Dodson and Adrian Peckett, the guru of all things mushroom, to bring you the incredible benefits of Reishi Mushroom!
For an exclusive 15% off Golden Horn Reishi Mushroom Tincture - CLICK HERE to shop now!
Use code: MENTEATH at checkout.
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Interested in reading up some more? Here are some further reading to wet your mushy appetite:
1 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0308814620317957
2 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30317947/
4 https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/pharmacology/articles/10.3389/fphar.2024.1390294/full
5 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31078150/
6 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4082169/
