Chapter 1 Fundamentals of Aromatherapy Your oils have a pleasing fragrance, Your name is like purified oil; Therefore the maidens love you. How beautiful is your love, my sister, my bride! How much better is your love than wine, And the fragrance of your oils Than all kinds of spices! --Song of Solomon 1:3, 4:10 Imagine yourself walking through a beautiful garden. After brushing up against a rose, you faintly smell the floral scent. You bend over to get a better whiff and encounter an aroma that stops you in your tracks. This, my friend, is the essential oil. Or, imagine making homemade lemonade as a refreshing treat after working in the garden on a hot summer day. When you''ve finished cutting all of the lemons and juicing them, you are pleasantly surprised to find your kitchen permeated with an uplifting, citrus aroma. This, too, is the essential oil.

Essential oils represent nature in its most concentrated form. They are extracted directly from the bark, flowers, fruit, leaves, nut, resin, or roots of a plant or tree, and just one drop contains a complex network of molecules that deliver myriad effects to the body. They are entirely, utterly natural. Used medicinally for thousands of years through a variety of nonconcentrated forms, the true power of these oils is not in facilitating one-time therapeutic effects (as drugs do), but in addressing physiological disharmony and helping your body achieve the inner balance it needs to heal itself. And their power to facilitate healing is so effective that the scientific world has begun to take note--thousands of peer-reviewed articles published in databases around the world discuss their efficacy. Laying the Foundation Before you dive into the therapeutic use of these precious plant-based compounds, you need to understand the basics. I welcome you along a journey that I hope will prove not only insightful but also empowering. Think of growing your understanding of essential oils as a project similar to building a house.

If the foundation isn''t set properly, the entire structure will soon crumble, particularly when a storm hits. And storms always seem to hit at the most inopportune moments, don''t they? Using essential oils requires patience, study, and practice and should never be seen as a "quick fix" for your health problems. You need to learn how to use them properly. If you''re not armed with the foundational principles of essential oils, you won''t know what to do or where to turn for answers if the results aren''t what you expect. You might give up on using natural solutions far too soon, or fall back into the prescription medication trap, even though many drugs have long-term consequences, including, for some, a risk of addiction. When you take the information and instruction in this book to heart, I trust that this will never happen to you. Setting the Record Straight On coming to the house, they saw the child with his mother Mary, and they bowed down and worshiped him. Then they opened their treasures and presented him with gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh.

--Matthew 2:11 While it''s not an exhaustive study of the subject, consider this section my very best attempt to distill six thousand years of recorded use of essential oils down to a Reader''s Digest version of aromatherapy history. Are you ready? OK, let''s put first things first with a myth-buster that may shake up your essential oil theology: Jesus didn''t use essential oils. It''s actually one of the more pervasive delusions among lay people and students of biblical health. I can''t tell you how many times I''ve heard people say, "If it''s good enough for Baby Jesus, then it''s good enough for me!" Truth is, the magi gave the Christ child gold, frankincense, and myrrh resins. How do I know this? Because essential oils as we know them didn''t exist back then--the essential oils that we use today require highly advanced distillation techniques that weren''t yet invented. Of course, crudely distilled alcoholic beverages have been around since our earliest recorded history--museums have three-thousand-year-old terra-cotta distillation apparatuses on display--but the likelihood that anyone could have extracted essential oils from plants is slim to none. What we do know is that virtually every culture dating back to the beginning of time used aromatic plant materials in their sacred rituals as incense, in their body care as ointments and perfumes, and in their medicine as poultices, salves, and tinctures. Could Mary have created a healing salve or ointment from the frankincense resin that the magi gave her? Certainly.

But she didn''t use a drop of myrrh essential oil to cure Jesus of a sore throat. Big difference! The CliffsNotes Version of the History of Aromatherapy Moreover, the Lord spoke to Moses, saying, "Take also for yourself the finest of spices: of flowing myrrh five hundred shekels, and of fragrant cinnamon half as much, two hundred and fifty, and of fragrant calamus two hundred and fifty, and of cassia five hundred, according to the shekel of the sanctuary, and of olive oil a hint. You shall make of these a holy anointing oil, a perfume mixture, the work of a perfumer; it shall be a holy anointing oil. --Exodus 30:11-25 Burning leaves, resins, and other aromatic plant materials for incense has been a religious tradition throughout recorded history. As far as we can tell, these practices ushered in the dawn of aromatherapy. The first records of essential oils as we know them today come from ancient Egypt, India, and, much later, Persia. Both Greece and Rome conducted extensive trade in aromatic oils and ointments with the Orient.1 It''s safe to assume that these products--not unlike the holy anointing oil recipe that God gave Moses--were extracts prepared by soaking flowers, leaves, resins, and roots in various fatty vegetable oils like olive and sesame.

It is presumed that fatty oils and alcohol were exclusively used to extract the essential oils from aromatic plants up until the golden age of Arab culture (eighth-thirteenth century AD), when a technique was developed using an alcohol solvent.2 History tells us that Arabs were the first to distill ethyl alcohol from fermented sugar, which could have been used to replace vegetable oils to create aromatic extracts (more on the difference between extracts and essential oils to come). The history books are in disagreement over the exact dates and to whom we should give credit for first inventing hydro (steam) distillation, but it seems fair to say that we can thank Arab alchemists from the ninth century AD. One of the first dated references to the "quintessence" of plants (i.e., essential oils) dates back to The Book of Perfume Chemistry and Distillation by Yakub al-Kindi (803-870).3 Many credit Ibn-Sina, more commonly known as Avicenna (980-1037), for discovering distillation, but that''s still debated. In either case, he has gone down in history as being the one of the first to document using essential oils in his practice, including an entire treatise on rose oil!4 Fast-forward to early-twentieth-century France, when the renaissance of aromatherapy was birthed after chemist René-Maurice Gattefossé suffered a laboratory explosion and stumbled upon lavender essential oil as the remedy to heal the gas gangrene that ensued on his hand.

Gattefosse devoted the remainder of his life to researching the therapeutic nature of essential oils and reported using many--such as chamomile, clove, lemon, and thyme, which were also used to disinfect surgical equipment and to treat infected wounds--on his patients during both world wars.5 The science of aromatherapy was recorded in print with his seminal work Aromatherapie: The Essential Oils--Vegetable Hormones. Commonly misunderstood today to refer solely to the inhalation of essential oils (i.e., diffusing, nebulizing, enjoying their aroma), the term aromatherapy is more properly defined as the therapeutic use of essential oils. Sciencey Information for Essential Oil Geeks Let''s take a moment to walk through a couple of key terms, starting with the most fundamental of all: fixed oils and essential oils. You may wonder why the essential oils you''ve come in contact with don''t seem all that, well, oily. That''s because there are two different types of oils, which have different chemical (and, therefore, therapeutic) properties.

*Fixed oils. Also known as expressed or fatty oils, fixed oils are derived from both animals and plants. Common examples are cooking oils, including coconut, olive, and other vegetables oils that you see at the market. They contain fatty acids such as triglycerides, as well as certain phytochemicals, including vitamins, minerals, and a host of others. In contrast to volatile oils (aka essential oils), fixed oils do not evaporate (they will leave a stain on an absorbent surface), and thus cannot be distilled. Obtained by expression (the act of squeezing or using pressure) or extraction (drawing out using a solvent), fixed oils vary in consistency depending on the temperature and can be solid, semisolid, or liquid.6 *Essential oils. Also known as volatile oils because they evaporate readily, essential oils are the lipophilic ("fat loving"), hydrophobic ("water hating") volatile organic compounds that are found in aromatic plants.

Meaning, they have the tendency to dissolve or combine with fats or lipids, while repelling or not mixing with water. Somewhat of a misnomer, essential oils aren''t "oily" like the fixed, culinary oils just descri.