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Nature of Aromatherapy By Val Lariviere At its most basic, the practice of Aromatherapy is the use of essential oils to restore or enhance mental, emotional, physical or spiritual health. It is about balance in the same way that illness is about imbalance. It is the return to the center, the essence of health. Essential oils are held in pockets between the cells approximately 20% of all plants. They are released by the plant in response to stressful situations, i.e. drought. They act as the plant’s immune system and are the essences that a plant uses to heal its own body. For human use, these concentrated extracts are harvested from the plant by a number of different methods, one of which is steam distillation. Current scientific research has confirmed the beneficial effects of essential oils. These oils are 75-100 times more concentrated than dry herbs. Each drop contains natural hormones, vitamins, antibiotics and antiseptics as well as trace elements not found in medical preparations and synthesized oils. Various oils have found to be anti-fungal, anti-inflammatory, anti-neuralgic, anti-rheumatic, anti-spasmodic, anti-venomous, anti-depressant and much more. Plus, they’re all natural! The history of Aromatherapy intertwines with the history of man. When archaeologists found the skeleton of a 60,000 year old man in Iraq they also found it contained the fossilized pollen of eight different flowers that the burial site itself contained the remains of medicinal plants still use din Iraq today. It is speculated that early man began his use of aromatics after noting that when twigs of certain bushes or trees were burned, the smoke had a specific effect – people became more animated or more sedated or even more likely to have visions of a mystical nature! These results were repeatable. It is historically recorded that the use of special smokes has been used in all primitive religions and also as one of the earliest forms of medicine. How does Aromatherapy work? The human sense of smell has changes since the time of the hunter-gatherers, although the physical mechanism is the same. Smell was the sense most necessary for survival, so a much larger portion of the brain was used for these processes. But even with this downgrading of function, the sense of smell is still 10,000 times more sensitive than any of our other senses. It is the only sense that is directly connected to the midbrain area, called the limbic system. The Limbic system is the core of human sensory experience, processing memory, emotions, sex drive and hunger. It also controls our hormones and our rhythmic processes (heart rate, body temperature, etc.). Impulses from the olfactory nerves bypass the neo-cortex, the sorting systems of the left and right brain. It is because of this direct connection, that when you smell something you don’t think, you react. Smell also has the longest recall of any of the senses. As humans, we can process between 10,000 and 100,000 different smells and remember them. The system works like a lock and key. When your first smell a scent, you create the lock, and when you smell it again you have the key to unlock the memory. This is why, for example, the smell of cookies baking can easily transport us back to our grandmothers kitchen, or the smell of Lavender can remind us of our first grade teacher. But surely in this age of technological advancements there must be some synthetic chemical formulation that can duplicate the effects of these ancient oils. Not really. For instance, synthetic drugs are created for very specific usages. This is not true healing plants. One essential oil may work on a variety of levels at the same time. The mental, emotional, physical and spiritual needs of a person can be addressed simultaneously. In addition to this multi-layered approach, is scientific evidence that each oil has a variety of properties such as being antibacterial, antidepressant, etc. Oils do not remain long in the human body either, taking from three to fourteen hours to be excreted in manners dependent on the oil used. This greatly lessens the potential for toxicity. Furthermore, the natural chemicals found in aromatic plants are derived from the same naturally occurring chemicals that form the building blocks of our own bodies. For this reason we can be sure that essential oils are non-intrusive to the human species since we share the same natural chemicals. The same can’t be claimed for synthetic drugs. In this country essential oils are not taken internally, nor do they have to be, as the process of digestion changes the chemical make-up of the oil. The means for allowing absorption of essential oils are primarily by inhalation, massage and the aromatic bath. If you find it difficult to believe that such profound effects can be obtained by these methods, consider the use of inhaled anesthetics in the hospital and the now popular nicotine patch. We are living in a time in history when more and more money is being spent on research into synthetic drugs to deal with the symptoms of disease. The world of plants has much to offer us. It offers a chance to reclaim, and then to maintain a state of balance in our lives – a state of health. Maybe the present state of our health care is, as Barbara Griggs has suggested, a result of the reality, and trademark law, that you can’t patent a plant for financial gain, resulting from its research. We have the power within ourselves to use the plant world for our own healing (and also the planet’s). In 500 BC, Hippocrates, the father of allopathic medicine, is reported to have believed that “the way to health is to have an aromatic bath and scented massage every day.” That’s what I believe too. |