How To Do Aromatherapy

Learn how to do aromatherapy and embrace the wonders of essential oils to reduce stress and promote wellness. Get started here with some basic aromatherapy methods.

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by AdobeStock/Madeleine Steinbach

Learn how to do aromatherapy and embrace the wonders of essential oils to reduce stress and promote wellness. Get started here with some basic aromatherapy methods.

Aromatherapy involves the use of essential oils to reduce stress and promote healing and wellness. According to practitioners and devotees of the craft, these essential oils — extracted from the roots, stems, branches, bark, leaves, fruit, and flowers of various plants — carry medicinal properties that are activated when massaged into the skin, inhaled, used in baths, or diffused throughout a room.

“Aromatherapy may take a little bit longer to work [than do Western medicines],” says Carolyn Sajdecki, lecturer of aromatherapy at the College of DuPage in Illinois. Its power works quietly, she explains, but the changes it can bring about are far more lasting — addressing the root cause of a problem, rather than just masking the symptoms.

Sajdecki makes a clear distinction between cosmetic fragrances and essential oils. A lemon-scented fragrance, though it may smell like pure lemon essence, does not have the essential oil’s antiseptic and astringent therapeutic properties. “Aromatherapy is more than just messing around with pretty smells,” she says.

Aromatherapy can ease pain, kill bacteria, and cleanse the body of toxins, say its advocates. Each of the 130 or so varieties of essential oils used by aromatherapists is believed to have specific healing properties that can help relieve life’s everyday pressures, stresses, and ailments, from sore throats and winter colds to more serious problems like bronchitis, sinusitis, and rheumatism.

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