There are 5 factors needed to learn essential oils. When you gain a personal connection, understanding and experience with essential oils, a whole new world opens up. You learn things about yourself. You can heal things for yourself, head to toe and inside to out. You nurture and support yourself to handle and manage stress.
Why learn about EOs
When you have knowledge about how essential oils help, their properties, benefits, personality, and everything that makes them work the way they do, you have true understanding of their pure nature. It not only builds knowledge (aka scentillect), but it also builds intuition (aka scentuition). So, when it comes to formulating and blending for yourself and others, you will be guided more precisely on what to use, how much to use, and for how long to use it.
Here are my 5 main factors to help you learn essential oils.
- Smell the oils. When you do this, it is best to close your eyes as you inhale the scent. Feel where this scent is connecting to in your body. Is it your throat, stomach, back, or someplace else? Wherever you feel it, this is the oils way of telling you where you may have a “block” and that it can help you create balance there.
- Connect with their personality. When you feel what the scent can do for you, it helps you build a stronger relationship with that oil. As you are smelling it, consider what thoughts, feelings & emotions come. This oil activating those thoughts and feelings, means it can help you release any burdens and make way for you to find balance. Scents have a unique way of finding what I call “hidden gems” or “buried treasure”. These are situations and feelings you pushed in or buried some time ago, so you didn’t have to deal with it, or feel the pain associated with it. Peppermint for example is “loud”, strong, powerful, and can knock out a headache, nausea & dizziness rather quickly. All 3 of these issues are related to the liver, so you know this oil’s personality is for a “liver” person. It can boost a deficient liver, while cooling off a hot liver, at the same time. What you pair it with (other oils) will make the difference in what else it can do for you.
- Understand their role in nature. There is something called Doctrine of signatures. I go into great detail about this in my certification courses and give a brief overview in my Holistic Aromatherapy Comprehensive guide, page 38. When you learn how a plant acts in nature, in its real habitat, it lends insight into how it can help you physically, mentally and emotionally.
- Blend them together. Practice. Get to know how certain scents smell when combined with other scents. I remember blending peppermint and pink grapefruit together for the first time in 2003. OMG! This was like cotton candy to me. I remember what I doing, what I was wearing, and where I was at when I put this combination together. I was making a fun & rejuvenating bath salt recipe for a holiday gift basket project. I experimented with different scent combinations, however, this one won. And I sold a ton of them. It is still a favorite combo for me to this day. So…Blend! Practice! Play!
- Learn about safety measures. Being responsible and safe using essential oils is extremely pertinent. As with anything, too much of something, especially used in the wrong way can cause some unfortunate issues. If you use them right, follow the right dilution ratios, application methods, and review contraindications before use, aromatherapy is a beautiful and healing modality.