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Start Early Today · Daily Wisdom from the Past · April 29, 2026
She wrote about gut health, the healing power of plants, music as medicine, and the body as sacred ground — eight centuries before any of it became a trend.
Today’s Teacher
Hildegard of Bingen (1098 – 1179) German Benedictine abbess, composer, healer, naturalist, theologian, and one of the most astonishing creative minds of the medieval world
The Teaching
“There is a power that has been since all eternity and that force and potentiality is green.” — Hildegard of Bingen, Liber Divinorum Operum (The Book of Divine Works), c. 1163–1174
In Her Own Words
“Holy persons draw to themselves all that is earthly.” — Scivias (Know the Ways), 1151
“Glance at the sun. See the moon and the stars. Gaze at the beauty of earth’s greenings. Now, think. What delight God gives to humankind with all these things. Who gives all these shining, wonderful gifts, if not God?” — Meditations with Hildegard of Bingen, Matthew Fox, ed., 1982
“The soul is the freshness of the flesh, for the body grows and thrives through it just as the earth becomes fruitful through moisture.” — Causae et Curae (Causes and Cures), c. 1150–1160
“A person who does work that is agreeable to the soul thrives; but one who does work that troubles the soul withers.” — Physica (Natural History), c. 1150–1158
Who She Was
She was given to the Church at the age of eight — not cruelly, but practically, as the tenth child of a noble family for whom religious life was a reasonable destination for a daughter who seemed, from very early on, to inhabit a different kind of inner world. She grew up in a Benedictine monastery in the Rhineland, learned to read Latin, studied the natural world through the monastery’s herb gardens, and began receiving visions she would spend decades working up the courage to describe.
When she finally began writing, in her early forties, she did not stop for thirty years. She produced two major works of theology. She wrote the first natural history encyclopedia by a woman in recorded Western history, cataloguing over three hundred plants, animals, and stones with their medicinal properties. She composed over seventy pieces of music — still performed today — in a soaring, distinctive style that sounds like nothing else from the medieval period. She founded two monasteries. She went on four preaching tours in her seventies, at a time when women did not preach publicly. She corresponded with popes, emperors, and abbots who wrote to her for counsel.
The word she returned to again and again in her writing was viriditas — the greening power, the vital force she saw flowing through every living thing. It was her name for what we might now call life energy, nervous system vitality, or simply aliveness. She believed it was the single most important thing a person could tend to, and she spent a lifetime teaching others how.
Why This Teaching Matters Today
The biggest turn in the 2026 wellness conversation is the move away from optimization and toward something far more elemental: the question of how fully alive we actually feel. Researchers, therapists, and trend analysts across every major wellness survey are pointing toward the same realization — that data-driven self-tracking and performance metrics cannot replace what Hildegard called viriditas: the felt sense of being green, growing, genuinely nourished.
Her prescriptions for daily well-being read like a 2026 wellness curriculum written in advance. She wrote about the gut and digestion as the seat of health eight centuries before microbiome science. She prescribed time outdoors, contact with soil, music, beauty, meaningful work, and adequate rest as non-negotiable conditions for a flourishing life — not as luxuries, but as medicine. She understood that a person doing work that agrees with their soul grows, and a person doing work that troubles their soul withers, and she wrote it down plainly at a time when almost no one was asking such questions out loud.
She is the patron saint of starting early. She believed the morning hours, the first quality of light, the first moments of genuine attention, set the tone for everything that followed. That belief has not aged a day.
Your Morning Practice
Before any task or obligation takes hold this morning, pause for one minute and ask yourself a single question Hildegard carried through her entire life: Does what I am about to do make me feel more alive or less? Not more productive. Not more impressive. More alive.
You do not need to act on the answer immediately — simply noticing it is enough. Hildegard called this listening to the viriditas, the green force that knows, before the mind calculates, what nourishes and what depletes. Ask the question honestly every morning for a week, and notice what begins to shift in the choices that follow.
“The soul is the freshness of the flesh — tend it as you would a living garden.”
Continue Reading on Start Early Today
- 14,000 Things to Be Happy About — A daily practice of noticing beauty, in exactly the spirit Hildegard intended
- Power vs. Force — David Hawkins on the difference between energy that drains and energy that sustains
- Grit — Angela Duckworth — The science of staying devoted to work that agrees with your deepest nature
- Life Beats Anew Every Second — On choosing aliveness, one morning at a time
Frequently Asked Questions
Who was Hildegard of Bingen and why does she matter today? Hildegard of Bingen was a 12th-century German abbess who was simultaneously a theologian, composer, healer, and naturalist — one of the most productive and original minds of the medieval world. She matters today because her central teaching, that human well-being depends on tending the body’s vital force with beauty, rest, meaningful work, and contact with the natural world, anticipates what 2026 wellness research is only now measuring and confirming.
What is viriditas and how do I apply it daily? Viriditas is the Latin word Hildegard used to describe what she called the “greening power” — the living force that animates healthy bodies, fertile land, and flourishing souls. In practical terms, she meant the quality of aliveness you feel when your work, relationships, rest, and environment are genuinely nourishing rather than merely functional. You apply it daily by honestly asking whether what you are doing makes you feel more alive or less, and gradually moving your choices in the direction of more.
What did Hildegard of Bingen say about health and healing? Hildegard wrote extensively about health in her works Physica and Causae et Curae. She believed that the gut was central to overall health, that music had measurable healing properties, that time in nature was medically necessary, and that meaningful work was as important to well-being as food or sleep. Her approach to healing was holistic — she saw the body, mind, and spirit as a single living system that required tending in all its dimensions simultaneously.
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