Essential oils for meditation

Before you meditate with essential oils, you need to decide whether to use a burner, room spray or a meditative mood perfume. Using a burner or electric vaporizer of some kind is generally best, because the effect of the essential oil is more powerful than it is with mood perfumes or room sprays. However, meditative perfumes are useful if you wish to meditate outside, or practice the walking meditation. If you want a very subtle effect, then a room spray is a good choice.

Using room sprays and mood perfumes

You can achieve a more subtle effect from essential oils as you meditate by using a room spray. Choose your essential oils as described above, add them to the water in your spray bottle and shake well. Spray the area you will be meditating in just before you start.

To use a meditative mood perfume, choose your essential oils as described above. Blend them into base oil, then apply behind your ears, at the base of your throat and on the inside of your wrists.

How to use a burner

You will need a blend of essential oils of your choice, cotton wool buds, a burner or electric vaporizer, and matches or a lighter.

First, decide which essential oils you are going to use. Analyze how you are feeling and what you wish to gain from the meditation. For example, you may feel tired and want to feel refreshed after your meditation and not fall asleep. In this instance you would choose a mentally stimulating essential oil, such as rosemary, cardamom or basil, and would blend it with something uplifting such as bergamot, orange or rosewood, and with a balancing essential oil like geranium.

Second, choose three or four essential oils according to your feelings. Then do a sniff test, using cotton wool buds, to make sure the blend is pleasing.

Third, fill the burner’s bowl three quarters full of cold water and float the essential oils on top. (This method allows you to begin your meditation as the water slowly heats, so that the essential oils diffuse gradually. If you would like a more instant effect, start with hot water.)

Last, light the candle once you are ready to begin meditating.

Bookmark:

Meditation

Since ancient times aromatic plants have been used for religious and spiritual purposes. Regarded as sacred because of their magical healing properties and divine scents, they were ‘sacrificed’ by being burned and the fragrant smoke was offered to the gods. These ceremonies also benefited the priests because inhaling the aromatic smoke often brought about mystical and spiritual states.

Incense and other aromatic compounds are still offered on altars in temples throughout Asia, parts of Africa and South America in a similar fashion to the days of old. All types of incense contain a significant proportion of aromatic plant material, traditionally including sandalwood, cedar wood, juniper, frankincense, myrrh, pine, sage and cypress.  These are combined with other aromatic substances and with locally grown aromatic-and, for special rituals, hallucinogenic and psychotropic-plants.

The sweet aromatic smoke from burning incense can still help to create a suitable environment for meditation, introspection, contemplation and prayer. However, in a modern and more secular context, using individual essential oils (or mixing specific blends) allows you to create more precisely the atmosphere and mood you would like to achieve to complement and assist your meditation.

Using Essential Oils

The most effective method of practicing meditation with essential oils is to use a burner – not dissimilar from the ancient sacrificial method. Burners vaporize the essential oils effectively, but gradually, thereby allowing meditation to calm the mind for a few minutes before you are affected by the essential oils vaporized into the atmosphere. However, you can also use a room spray, practice informal meditation in an aromatic bath, or wear a mood perfume created from suitably meditative essential oils. You could try sprinkling essential oils onto a tissue and keep it in a top pocket.

You can also meditate to ground and center your energies and to focus your mind before you undertake an aromatherapy massage. Meditating for ten minutes or so is a wonderful way to prepare yourself for giving massage, either to yourself or another person. It helps you to connect with your inner self, deepens your concentration and lengthens your attention span, all of which can improve your massage technique.

Bookmark:

Depression

The term depression covers a wide range of emotions with differing psychological states, feelings and psysical beharior traits. One depressed person may be lethargic an apathetic, feel numb and fatique all the time and do very little, maybe sleeping, feel anxious a lot of the time and have bursts of feverish activity. Obviously these two cases require different techiques and remedies with different essential oils.

Useful remedies

When apathy and lethargy characterize depression, then enlivening, uplifting essential oils are called for. In this case, taking baths with suitable oils is good idea, not least because it makes you do something positive for yourself, rather than relying on someone giving you a massage, which might increase you passivity. Self-massage, however, can be helpful-agai because it makes you do something actively to help yourself.

The most suitable essential oils for depression characterized by apathy and lethargy are both stimulating and anti-depressant. They include bergamot-perhapst the most sunny, elevating and cheering can clear the head and blow away emotional and mental cobwebs. Melissa can help you find a renewed interest in life.

When depression is characterized by anxiety and nervous tension, then calming, soporific essential oils are called for. Receiving a full body massage from an aromatherapist is probably the best remedy here, but diffusing suitable essential oils in your room and using them regularly in the bath are good supplements.

The most suitable essential oils in this instance are both sedative and anti-depressant. They include roman and german chamomile, neroli, sandalwood, ylang ylang, frankincense and clary sage. Including no more than one drop of narcissus, jonquil, linden blosson or violet leaf in a blend adds a deeply calming and slightly hypnotic influence, which helps you ground yourself and find your centre.

Bookmark: