Archivi tag: emotional aromatherapy

Aromatherapy, Emotional Aromatherapy, In English

Scent, Taste, and What the Mind Cannot Say

There is a language older than words, and it lives in the nose and on the tongue. Scent and flavour travel a direct route to feeling, arriving at the body before thought has time to build its usual story around them.

A note of bergamot, benzoin, a trace of vanilla in the air: these reach us the way a memory does, whole and immediate, long before we have named what we are sensing. Taste works the same way — one bite carries us somewhere specific, a kitchen, a season, a person, faster than language ever could. Both senses seem to answer directly to emotion, bypassing the analytical mind and speaking straight to something older and more embodied.

This is, perhaps, the deepest gift of working with raw aromatic materials: they offer a form of knowing that sits outside explanation. A material can hold real, verifiable qualities and, at the very same time, carry an emotional charge that no amount of description quite exhausts. Both are true together — the precise and the poetic, standing side by side rather than competing for the same ground.

Practising emotional aromatherapy means trusting this dual nature of scent: factual and felt, concrete and resonant, all at once. It offers the body a direct route to emotion, one that asks for nothing more than a single breath.

Aromatherapy, Emotional Aromatherapy, In English

vanilla, a soul hug

Known and used in Aromatherapy for its olfactory and emotional qualities, Vanilla is a real ‘soul support’.

If you want to know its true smell, you have to take the pods and open them. You will then smell a scent that is not the cloying one we often find in perfumes: Vanilla actually smells sweet, but also has bitter and liqueur-like undertones. If you have the oleoresin, or a dilution of it, you will smell an enveloping and inviting fragrance, and depending on the geographical origin of the Vanilla you are smelling, there will be floral notes, or perhaps sweet, or deep (in case it comes from Mexico).

When smelling real Vanilla, we will generally find density, warmth, and full but never cloying sweetness.

“By ‘listening’ to its scent, you will notice its calming and enveloping activity – even scientific research confirms its anxiolytic qualities. If you like to create perfumed blends, Vanilla blends well with flowery scents, but also with incense, resins and some woods (such as Sandalwood essential oil), as well as spices such as Cinnamon.

This orchid has had a curious fate in that it is native to Mexico, where it is now minimally harvested, while production in Madagascar is extensive (although not native, Vanilla here is ‘transplanted’). It is also produced in other parts of the world, for example in Tahiti (if you love aromatic raw materials, check Materia Viva, the aromatic ezine).

What we know as vanilla pods are actually the pods picked from the plant, which are dried and fermented for at least three months, at which point we get the pod we are used to using in cooking. If we open it with a small knife, we will find the seeds inside, which are the most fragrant and tasty part, and with them we can indulge in flavouring.