Konstanze: Hello, Rehmannia. It’s so nice to see you.

Rehmannia: Hello, Konstanze

Konstanze: I thought that it would be really interesting for my readers to listen to you talk about your knowledge since you are so connected to my company. That’s why I asked you if you would take this time to sit with me, and I can ask you a few questions.

Rehmannia: Sure. Sure.

Konstanze: My first question would be, what inspired you to do what you do?

Rehmannia: As a youngster, everything about China fascinated me. I remember one time I found there was a little Chinese vase in the laundry room at my aunt and uncle’s house. It was a little pewter cut glass Chinese vase, one of the antique ones, and I grabbed it, and I was a little kid, I grabbed it, and I went, “I want this. I want this.” And I wouldn’t let them take it out of my hands. I wanted it so bad. It was like that.

Then when I first found out about Chinese culture, I’d get these shivers, you know, and then I met a Chinese woman. And when I was 21 years old, I was in a rock and roll band, and I met a Chinese woman, and she did my astrology, and she told me that I had been a Chinese doctor in a past life. And I started going like this, “Oh.”

And so we wound up getting married, and we went to China on our honeymoon in 1985. And I got there prior when China was full-on Communist. There were no skyscrapers at all in Beijing, but curiously they kept taking us to herb farms. And they’d always wink and blink at me in a certain way too. Now later, in retrospect, I think, “Did these people know my destiny or something?” But, you know, the tour guides were always kind of giving me a [vocalization]. But I was fascinated by the herbs.

And one night, we were staying in a town in northern China called Jilin, which is where the herbs are collected and brought to that town as the main hub in the northern Manchurian province of China. And by the way, this place is very clean. Most of it is now a U.N. biosphere. It’s got a geography similar to Vermont and New Hampshire. It’s a very clean place. This is where our herbs come from, just so people know this right away because there’s a lot of propaganda about Chinese herbs being tainted.

Well, we happened to go to that region, and I just saw the people who lived in that town, and I was like, I didn’t know much about health at that time or recognized how vibrant the people were, particularly the male and the female energies. The women were extremely thin and beautiful. The men were really masculine, big square jaws and 5 o’clock shadows and Elvis thatches. And I just noticed this beautiful dance between the genders, and I thought, “God, that’s really something to be envied, you know, I wish we had that in America better. It’s so fractured here, you know, our ability to communicate with each other and the genders you may know.” I saw these things, and I recognized that all these people were taking the herbs because they came from that region.

So one night I went out, I had insomnia, I left my hotel room, and I walked out, and I passed this alley and all these mule carts I’d seen coming into town that day with herbs on the back, they all had parked in the alley behind my hotel right there. And I stumbled into this place, and they had butane flames for light, and these all peasants sitting on their carts looked like they were wearing burlap bags for clothes and pieces of burlap wrapped around their heads and their feet for shoes and hats. And they’re sitting there like this with little butane flames with like wet ginseng roots and stragless [sounds like] roots and Reishi mushrooms all over their mule carts, you know, and I just went stumbling into this place.

And I thought, “My God, I just went back thousands of years in here.” And I was again shaking. And, you know, I was like, “How did I be here. How am I here?” So we came back to America, and she said, “Let’s make some Chinese herbal tinctures.” And we lived in San Francisco. We lived right down on Lower Nob Hill around here, in Chinatown. So we walked in Chinatown, and we knew a Chinese bookstore. We found a book called “Chinese Tonic Herbs” by a man named Ron Teeguarden. This was in the year 1986.

Now, I have that very book, and I’ve gone back and looked at it and realized that we bought that book one month after it was published. So I may have bought one of the very first copies that book ever sold. And I have yet to tell my teacher that, Ron Teeguarden. Anyway, we bought his book, and we started making tinctures from this. And then I just noticed we were making little liquid extracts of ginseng and He Shou Wu and stragless and reishi, and I remember taking them every day. My wife would give me them before I left. She’d give me a little shot. We called it Shou this little shot of herbal tincture. And I would get on my bike and ride to work up a trail of hills going [vocalization] like this, you know, wow, man, this stuff is real.

And so we broke up in a really miraculous way. One day she said to me, “Your lessons are done.” She was my first great guru and teacher. One day she said, “Your lessons are done. You can go.” And I went back to Los Angeles, got right back into music.

Well, fast-forward to the year 1998, I had been doing some healing work as a green juicing therapist working with people who were really sick. I’ve been doing that for five years at this time, and I wanted to learn a deeper thing. I actually prayed one morning for a teacher to teach me something. I had set some conditions. I was like, “I want to learn the deepest healing system that exists. The most profound healing system. That’s what I want to learn.”

Well, that very night, I was asked to go out and play some guitar at a place called the Besant Lodge founded by my hero Annie Besant, one of my great heroes in the late 1800s. And if you haven’t read about Annie Besant, read her life. Just go to Wikipedia and read her life. She organized the very first-ever strike of the young girls in a match factory in the 1880s. She was thrown in jail and released by Mahatma Gandhi, his first client as a young attorney. It just goes on and on, but a fascinating life.

So she had created this place in the 1800s like a little chapel up in Beachwood Canyon. I was asked to play guitar there. It was the year 1998. I played my guitar, about 10 people there. I played a little bluegrass for them, got done, and left. And they said, “Now folks, for your pleasure and enjoyment, master herbalist Ron Teeguarden is here to speak with you.” And I was like, “That’s the guy that I had the book. Man, that’s the dude we bought his book in 1986. Here he comes, man.”

Ron Teeguarden is walking through the room [vocalization] like this, and he comes up, and he stands there and talks about 10 minutes. He looked a little consternated, maybe because there was hardly anybody there, really maybe 8 or 9, 10 people, and he may have come a long way or something. I don’t know.

But I went up to him afterward and said, “Sir, I’m a fan. My wife and I have your book.” He looked at me. He goes, “Come tomorrow.” So he gave me his address, and I came over to his place the next morning. And I walked upstairs, and he looked at me, and he says, “Go downstairs and make a tea, and one of my assistants will show you.” So I made this tea that takes like three hours in these big pressure cookers, and it’s all steaming water, boiling, seal them in these little pouches and, you know, putting a giant hemp bag inside of this thing that was like a submarine and boiling it.

And I took it up to him three hours later, and he cut off the little tip of the rhetoric pouch, poured it in his cup, and took a sip and went, “Mm.” He goes, “You’re my tea master.” So I became his tea master. And then laughed about this, he said, “That’s the fastest apprenticeship in all history. It’s usually two years at least. You got three hours.” But anyway, I became Ron Teeguarden’s personal apprentice for eight years. And he taught me the precepts of the Gate of Life lineage, which is the lineage of Taoist tonic herbalism which you and I initiate now.

And so we sold, it was called tonic herbs. And tonic herbalism is the original nucleus of what is today TCM, China’s Traditional Medicine, Traditional Chinese Medicine. It’s the original nucleus. It wasn’t about sickness yet. It was about prevention and wellness and empowerment and longevity. It turns out that his TCM developed into a medical system about 1500 BC when a Yellow Emperor wrote the “Class of Internal Medicine” or had it written.

Our lineage was already highly advanced by then, and there were these masters in the mountains you would call immortals, and they were holding our lineage of using tonic herbs for ultra-empowerment, what we call health beyond danger, just everything in balance. To tonify means to bring the, tune the instruments, strings of an instrument, and hold them in balance. That’s what we wanted to do about tonifying the body.

Well, as TCM advanced, what we call the Gate of Life lineage, our lineage just stayed up in the woods by itself. But Ron Teeguarden was the first Westerner to receive that information when he had to work for quite a while as an apprentice for a master, an old Korean master who wound up teaching him this, and then he taught me.

So I’m one of his primary, you know, in the lineage, initiates. And that’s where it came from. So that’s where I’m at right now. I mean, I’ve written a couple of books on it, which I think you’ve read, “Healing Thresholds” maybe “Raw Chi.” It’s a fascinating thing. The philosophy behind tonic herbalism is the part that’s amazingly fascinating.

Konstanze: What makes you the most happy about the work you do?

Rehmannia: Well, the same reason. It’s just a wonderful feeling to know that you really did. Someone in college said, “My God. I really do feel better.” And we’ve always believed in natural medicines, you know, natural medicines are real medicine and the new medicine is the alternative medicine. It’s got its place but new medicine, you know, pharmaceutical medicine its origins are in Rome, but it’s actually referred to what we call heroic medicine, and its best application really in my mind is when you have a very, very, very perilous situation. Say someone has had a heart attack, you know, Western pharmaceuticals have their place.

But when it comes to the tonic herbs, I think when we get a balance in society, they will embrace the tonic herbs. I don’t know how much investment they would like to put into prevention. That’s the whole thing. But the tonic herbs can help prevent us from getting sick. The tonic herbs are very important in the diet of all people on earth now because when combined with a living food diet, you must eat well. You cannot take tonic herbs on their own and expect to have complete health.

You must eat local, fresh, organic, and go to your farmer’s place. If they have more than two acres, I wouldn’t buy it. I go to somebody who has an acre or less than two acres. That allows them to hand farm. When it’s only an acre or so, they can hand pest control. If it gets bigger than that, they’re going to be using the chemical stuff. So you go there, and you get that living food, or you go to your local, you know, farmers market or health food store. They oftentimes support your local farmers. You get this, prepare it correctly. Do it the way the Chinese do it, really. I agree with them again. I was in the raw food for a while. In fact, I wrote a book called “Raw Chi.” It’s on Amazon. You can get it. It’s a very interesting book about how chi is happening in the blood actually for energy.

Now I learned that we take the food, you know, how the Chinese do it, they chop it and put it in big chunks, and they have a wok, really hot with a little peanut oil and water in there. And they throw their vegetable and they [vocalization]. Just steam out, and then they throw it on the plate. So the inside is still pretty much raw, but the outside, all of the potential microbial problems and all that, are gone, chilled out. And the outer cellulose, which is the skin, the protective skin of the vegetable, is now softened so that we can masticate and permeate and reach in and get the nutrients.

So now, you do those things, and you take tonic herbal elixirs. Actually, I give myself credit, it was my innovation to come up with bulk powder extract in a jar that you add into your drink, and you make it. Because it dawned on me, at one point, when working with Ron Teeguarden at the Tonic Herbs, it tastes great most of it. Like tribulus tastes awful, but a lot of them taste good. And so, you make an elixir with tonic herbs that go along with that living food diet.

And what the tonic herbs do is they’re supplying deeper nutrients. They’re more complex. So they’re called polysaccharides, polyphenols, ganoderic acids, and these kinds of things that are deeper and they’re embedded in that herb because the herbs are perennial plants, so the nutrients get embedded. So when we unlock them through the cooking, they’re called extreme [inaudible 00:12:41]. They survive the cooking process, and actually, it activates their bioavailability for us.

So we take in this whole other class of nutrients that are not found in those carrots in those onions and the potatoes. They’re perennial plants. So that the sugars are much more complex and nutrient-bearing, and they’re slow-burning. And they’re holding lattices of other nutrients. So then, we take that along with our living food diet, and the tonic herbs help take the nutrients deeper into replenish our kidneys, replenish our adrenals, regulate our immune response and regulate stress response to help modulate and regulate metabolism.

And the tonic herbs have a way of helping us have a very peaceful spirit, as you know about reishi mushroom, the great reishi. So when we take the tonic herbs along with a living diet, and we maybe take a little shilajit with that, so our [inaudible 00:13:35] acids every day, and we drink a little bit of pure salt and some water at night before we go to bed, and then take a little clay in there, get out and getting some sun during the day, look into the sun in the later afternoon, blink and look in the sun for about 20 seconds, when the sun is near the horizon or in the morning. Walk in the sun. Get sun on your back for 10 minutes.

We can attain what the ancient masters called health beyond danger. And they were the so-called immortals of ancient Chinese lore. And they say there are still immortals in the mountains and those immortals are Taoist tonic herbalists in our lineage. They live in the mountains still. My teachers’ teach insisted on it. Even with the toxins of our world, and here’s why the tonic herbs are unveiling themselves to us at this time because the toxins of the world have come to a place where we are imperiling our lives.

The genome, every cell in our body, is actually an antenna to a vast mind that science calls the genome, which is a silly word for it. You could call it God, and that master gardener, I call it the master gardener, sends us messages through every cell, those cells involved in our evolution as a species. Why do you have fertility cycles? Why does a young boy and girl suddenly at 12 years old, boom, just go into puberty? That’s because it’s a genetic design.

And then when we move into menopause and andropause later in our lives, that’s a genetic design. It kicks in. All of these are messages that are given. And those messages are unveiled, based on our vitality. So a woman or a man who is super vital might enter into menopause and andropause a little bit later. And then, even then after those phases, maintain the youthfulness and vigor of their younger years. That’s the kidneys.

So when we take the tonic herbs, we’re tonifying the energies of the organs to balance them. That’s our job. Then the [inaudible 00:15:43] job is to eat right, live right, get some sunlight, get some minerals, and drink good water. Get up in the morning and drink a glass of pure water with nothing in it. No lemon, no nothing. First thing in the morning, hydrate your body. Drink some saltwater before bed. Balance the forces [inaudible 00:16:00], and we can overcome the onslaught of the toxins and the stress that we face right now because that master gardener, the God, genome, does not intend for life to end. Too much energy has been put into this. When life is threatened, the message is current of our sustainment, you know, and this is the tonic herbs showing up now after 5000 years have been hidden in the mountains of China.

Konstanze: Thank you, Rehmannia.

Rehmannia: All right. Thank you, Constance.

Konstanze: I’ll talk to you soon.

Rehmannia: Bye.