Aromatherapy

I just got back from another fabulous aromatherapy weekend with Jade Shutes and Michelle Thibert.  We learned about Aromas and the Mind, which basically means the effects of essential oils on psychological and emotional issues.  It's in this area, the mind, where aromatherapy can be most impactful. 

A lot of people, if they think about aromatherapy at all, think it means perfumed candles and lavender dish soap.  But true aromatherapy has to do, very specifically, with the use of geniune and authentic essential oils on the body to impact and improve health. 

Essential oils are the volatile oils that come from aromatic plants, trees, and seeds.  The oil is distilled from these botanicals under very strict guidelines...and nothing else is added to them.  That lavender dishsoap or that ginger hand cream?  Quite likely synthetic perfumes, which can be made to smell very close to the real thing but contain none of the therapeutic benefits.

Here's an article by Dr. Andrew Weil offering his opinion on aromatherapy.  While I obviously have a deeper belief in this modality I am pleased that he, too, sees it as having strong benefits.