This is my first post on a new category on my blog — ESSENTIAL OILS! For about two years now, I have been using essential oils as a wellness support in our family.
You know what they say. Nothing happens by chance. Things happen in our lives for a reason. I guess that is how my oily journey using essential oils began.
Sometimes, one needs to make mistakes before discovering what is truly good for one’s wellness. I made mistakes. For years.
About a decade ago, I thought I was using the right kind of aromatherapy for my home. I had joined the membership club of a well-known French brand offering fragrances. It used a glass lamp burner that dispensed fragrance after the wick was lit. I often lit those lamps in the living room and in our bedrooms thinking I was doing aromatherapy right. But something was wrong. It was causing some issues at home. My nose hurt and it felt like a choking sensation. Then my girl came to me one day and told me not to light the lamps up anymore because it irritated her nose and throat. That was it! I abandoned the brand altogether.
Next, I shifted away from burning fragrance to ready-made fragrance sprays thinking it was safer. I had a bottle or two of what I thought was great linen spray (lavender) purchased from a mall stall. At night, I would spray my pillows and sheets, hoping it would help me have great sleep. I eventually stopped that also because frankly, my nose hurt when I used the spray.
It was only when I was already into essential oils that I learned why the brands I used were not good for us. The fragrances were synthetic. Toxic to our bodies. My nose knew it and was sending me a message but I did not get it. What was I thinking???
My oily journey came early 2017. In a Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) class I was taking together with some yoga teacher friends, a couple of them brought out their essential oils — Young Living essential oils.
It wasn’t love at first sight for the oils. I was still very interested in aromatherapy (does owning over 50 ebooks on the subject count?). However, the OC (obsessive-compulsive) in me wanted to check the brand out first. I took time to learn more about Young Living (the company, the people behind it, the vision, the processes) because I knew nothing about them. I also checked out other essential oil brands’ websites. Long story short, what finally convinced me to dive in was Young Living’s Seed to Seal process. For me, knowing that they controlled the whole process from seeding to sealing the bottles was critical. Trained as an accountant, I value transparency, quality assurance, and accountability. What made Young Living stand out in my mind was the fact that it actually owned a number of farms, allowed members to visit the farms AND participate, and established clearly defined standards that made it accountable to the public.
Fast forward to two years later and I continue to be thankful for the oils. They are a great support for me physically, emotionally and spiritually. I use them on my family, including our household help. My move to natural household cleaners from commercially available products now incorporates essential oils and I am still continuing to check out more ways to make our home as toxin-free as possible. I know the mistakes I made early on with my aromatherapy choices may have had an impact on my family’s health conditions but rather than dwell on that with regret, I choose to move forward knowing I now know better and am in good hands with these essential oils.
The science behind these oils continues to intrigue me. Currently, I am taking courses prepared by scientists and aromatherapists using essential oils. Fascinating stuff! But that isn’t all. I’m exploring other modalities as well. As we are all energy beings and everything in the world is energy in one form or another, I am also taking a course on energy and its effects on wellness. Let me reserve these for future blog posts. One thing is for sure. Our bodies are so much more complicated than we realize and it interacts with, and is affected by, everything around and inside it.
I have one final word. As I learned in my yoga and TCM classes, there are no shortcuts to wellness. No amount of external support can truly bring us to the realm of wellness if we don’t first work on fixing what is inside us. We need to examine our lifestyle choices (food, sleeping habits, gut health, physical activity, mental attitude, emotional state, and other similar internal factors). Back to the basics. Essential oils are here to support us but we also have to do our part to examine all aspects of our lives that may be negating the body’s natural healing process.