Last weekend, I taught a little workshop on nourishing yourself with essential oils and with the idea of essence. Essence is a big idea to me both in the sense of what is the essence of something and the sense of a substance itself that nourishes. A few really interesting things emerged from the discussion. One of the most interesting to me is the idea that we might embark on nourishing ourselves long before we develop deficiencies or what some might call pathologies. In some ways, this is the notion of prevention, but I think it is even more than that.
Nourish
Nourishing, first of all, requires you to acknowledge that you need something. Interesting, no? How many of you are comfortable with that? And in the framework I created for the discussion, nourishing really means making a relationship, making contact, like saying hello. That is the first step. In Chinese medicine, this first step, this making of a relationship results in what we call “qi” or energy. It actually is more akin to an exchange or a flow of energy but suffice it to say, you will feel it. This is the basic way we begin to create nourishment.
Tonify
The second step is to choose to add something that will enhance, enrich and strengthen that exchange. I call that tonifying, a word that comes from herbal medicine and really means to add substance. Adding substance is just like enriching the soil if you were planting, how you would add sand, peat moss or minerals to the mix. The most common and easy way you take this step in daily life is with your food and water. Each time you eat and drink, you can think about how you are tonifying, strenghtening your relationship with yourself. Yay!
Heal
The result of tonifying is healing. Healing can mean so many things, but the common denominator of all healing processes is changing the nature of the relationship. Where it might have been blocked, stopped or congested, it becomes freed, where it might have been thin, slow or small, it become rich and ample. When you change the nature of your relationship with yourself, so much healing can happen. By bringing your conscious attention to the places in your body and spirit where this is happening, you enhance the exchange even more. Your presence in your own healing process is a vital nutrient for the next and perhaps most important step, growth.
Grow
Growth is where you begin to see, feel and look different because you have nourished yourself. And you see your world differently, you hear, see, smell and taste differently. It is almost as if you’ve grown a new sense, the sense of thoroughly inhabiting yourself. This is the power of truly nourishing the essence. To make the relationship with your own essence means you can inhabit yourself fully, whoever you are, wherever you are, and no matter what is happening.
In the discussion over the weekend, I was talking about using essential oils to awaken, engender and support this process of making a nourishing relationship with yourself. For a start, you can always begin with just using your senses, listening, looking, smelling, tasting what you find in your world. For more support consider using Eucalyptus essential oil. Eucualyptus can help you to open yourself to new possibilities by supporting the letting go of things, the shedding of skin if you will. You might also experiment with Peppermint essential oil to open your eyes, nose and ears to new experiences and to support adventure and exploration. To use either of these safely, just put a drop on a cotton ball and smell gently. You won’t need more than a drop. Each drop is the essence, like your own DNA, each drop contains the entire message of the plant.
Each time you follow through this process of touching in, nourishing, tonifying, healing and growing, your essence becomes stronger and it will show in the shine in your eyes and the glow of your skin. Through this process you are making your own essence visible, in a way, offering your most precious self to the world, without giving a way a thing!
