The Sweet Smell of HEALING

The smell of sage and incense dance together in the air, then settle to the ground and wrap around me.  I am four years old and wandering the halls of the pet market in old town Qingdao, China.  

Now, I am fifteen years old flying out the door to catch the school buss.  I inhale a huge gulp of crisp air and nearly choke on the thickness of the soot.  It has wafted across the street from the fishing village where hundreds of miniature coal furnaces warm people's homes.  

The smells of incense and coal will forever teleport me back to these cherished memories of my childhood.  How is it that one whiff can so vividly send me back to a place across the world that I haven't encountered in years?

Your olfactory sense is the strongest sense attached to your memories!  The olfactory bulb  sends signals to the same areas of the brain as memories do--the hippocampus and amygdala of the temporal lobe.  This is how scents can unlock memories that you could not even access yourself, but were triggered by the olfactory bulb stimulating a long since forgotten pocket of your brain.

The hippocampus and amygdala are also responsible for feelings, therefore smells easily elicit emotional responses.  A study was done on one hundred participants wearing peppermint patches for six hours out of their day.  The cognition and mood assessments confirmed that the peppermint patches had a positive effect on the participants mood and alertness! 

The next time you need a boost of happiness, I suggest eating your favorite meal but allowing the aroma from each bite to waft into your nose.  When you are struggling to feel optimistic in a tough week, buy your favorite flowers to infuse your house with a pleasing scent.  A powerful way to put aroma therapy to use is to investment in a diffuser with essential oils.  Of course everyone has their unique set of neuro pathways that cause different smells to elicit different emotional responses, but with time you will get in tune with your own aroma responses.  Here are suggested scents and their properties that I specifically use when I work with my massage clients...