Your
sense of smell does more than help you determine when the cottage
cheese has gone bad in the fridge. Scents can evoke memories, help us
process our external environments and aid us in achieving tranquility.
Jamie Durner, an
Ayurveda practitioner, wellness educator and owner of Ayurveda
Wellness in Brookfield, integrates aromatherapy into her practice.
"Different aromas can absolutely shift the mood," she says.
Peppermint has a very invigorating essence for the mind, and it can
increase focus and give you a boost of energy. Sandlewood promotes
calm and peace and is often used during mediation.
Introducing a
scent can help us cope with the world around us. "It creates a
change in your internal environment so you can change the way you
function in your external environment," Durner notes.
The power of
scent can also have positive and negative effects on people.
"Smells connect to our memories, so when we have an experience,
it is embedded into our tissues and cells. If you have a traumatic
experience you will be repulsed by those smells because essentially
they will take us back into that trauma on a very deep level,"
Durner explains.
But sometimes
positive memories can also be triggered, such as the smell of
chocolate chip cookies baking in the oven evoking a happy childhood
memory.
People can
introduce scents into their environment through the use of essential
oils via a diffuser, on the body or in a bath. Make sure you don’t
have a reaction to the oil before you use it, she cautions. Durner
advises people to research the companies and the ingredients to make
sure it is a natural quality product. Unnatural scents created in labs
can be confusing to the cellular structure of your body, Durner says,
and your body will not know how to respond.
"If you
feel like you are getting a good response from something in the moment
or the next hour or day, then it is probably a good fit for you,"
she says. Since our bodies are constantly changing, something that
works for you today, may not work for you next week, she cautions.
