We interact with what surrounds us through our senses. We have five traditional senses known as taste, smell, touch, hearing, and sight. The stimuli from each sensing organ in the body are relayed to different parts of the brain through various pathways.
With our sense of smell, or olfaction, we perceive chemical particles from food or else floating in the air, which are sensed by olfactory receptors in the nose. These signals are sent directly to the olfactory bulb in the olfactory cortex of the brain.
Our sense of smell has been long underestimated in our humble opinion. Our world is dominated by experiences that are mainly driven by visual and auditive stimuli.
However, if you think about it, your earliest memories often involve a smell: think about a baby smelling or hearing his or her mum before actually seeing her. A lot of mums might also become aware of their olfactive abilities and its potential when having children.
Moreover, your nose can be an important indicator of peril, think about the odour of smoke or gas, but also of food or drink gone bad.
Our sense of smell has an interesting way to interface ourselves with the world around us. Now with Covid, where the absence of smell is one of the main symptoms of the disease, the sense of smell is actually more in focus than ever before. You don’t know what you have until it’s gone…
Mostly, however, we do not give smells a lot of thought besides identifying them as good or bad, but what we do not know is that our mood and ultimately our physical and mental well being is affected by them. We can get energised by certain smells, relaxed and calm with others.
But it goes beyond that, due to the fact that in substance odours are chemical substances which enter directly into the brain’s olfactory system, which is directly connected to our brain, smells trigger an immediate and often a quite strong effect on us.
Once processed by our olfactory system, information is delivered directly to the limbic system, where your emotions and memories live. That means when you inhale a scent for example through an essential oil, the limbic system creates a response based on the memories you associate with that particular aroma. As these responses are based on memory, each person experiences something different from a scent.
It is thus not surprising that treatments with scents in their purest form, i.e. essential oils, can be so powerful. It is important though that the therapeutic blends are prepared with knowledge of the characteristics of the natural products constituting the essential oil (plants, flowers and fruits mainly), as well as care and attention to the individual stories and necessities of each person, to have the desired beneficial effect.
Some oils have soothing, calming, and grounding properties, while others are energizing, uplifting, or renewing. In a single day, we experience a wide array of emotions. Essential oils, with their various emotional benefits, can help us manage and maintain well-being. But this is a story to be told in a different post!
This post is the result of the collaboration between me and my childhood friend Chris who has a passion for essential oils and a more natural approach to life. If you are interested to know more about essential oils and their endless possibilities, have a look at www.thepowerofoils.com or check out her Instagram account @the.power.of.oils
Aug 24, 2021
My name is Elisa; I am a woman, a mum, a daughter, a friend and a wife… and a passionate ceramicist/potter. 
