By Mikael Zayat
I recall being a young boy in times of spiritual celebration, looking at the smoke from the burning incense….smelling the pungent aroma, watching the white smoke rising from the incense burner. It was uplifting. I felt like the smoke was carrying our souls with it. Our spirits wanted to rise with the smoke soaring up the heavens. There was a sense of unity with all of those gathered around us. The products were extracted from various trees, frankincense, etc…and the memory, the feeling of goodwill and safety returns whenever we encounter these fragrances today, in incense and oils.
As an adult, one day I was in the mountains of Mexico near Popocatepetl far removed from pollution. I was visiting a friend and he took me to a small shrine where I met a master, a leader named Guru Macelli who was giving a meditation course. I sat and listened to his lecture. He was a very sensitive man, taking special care with each little object. He discussed incense and its importance to people throughout the ages.
Guru Macelli went on to say that now much of the incense on the market is manufactured from synthetic fragrances. Today, many people, when buying incense, are not careful to look at the origin. They just smell the box or envelope….If it smells like strawberries or vanilla, things that they like, they buy it. But these are just pieces of wood with a wood powder attached to it – dipped into synthetic fragrances….When these products burn, they do just the opposite of what we are looking for…they drag us down instead of lifting us up.
Long exposure to artificial products has the potential to be harmful. These can be found in many areas in our homes…candles, incense, cleaning products, soaps and many perfumes. The base of the scent is extracted from a petroleum product. Synthetic incenses have been tested in temples in India and found to be more toxic and more pollutant than the smoke from cigarettes. They try to fool us, but when you burn these over a period of time, they might make you feel ill…they tend to make you feel low…People don't understand this.
There is a truth in essential oils and aromatherapy. I believe that it is my responsibility, my duty, to educate people to the importance of pure essential oils in our lives. This is my mission.
Mikael Zayat is a distiller of essential oils in Quebec . He has been doing research for over 25 years. He is the president of Foundation du Havre, a foundation dedicated to promoting a healthy, balanced life-style.
An Introduction to Spiritual Aromatherapy
By Mikael Zayat
In the highly developed, technical world we live in, we have come to depend on many things that are not essential. Essential oils go to the essence of things. We are here in a garden created especially for us to be shared and enjoyed. We experience everything through our senses -touch, taste, smell, seeing and hearing- and through these we truly come to know our environment. There is a type of veil produced by our senses, our intuition, that is projected outward, and it is only by following our instincts and coming to trust ourselves that we obtain true knowledge.
The size and magnitude of this creation is beyond anything that we can comprehend. One cannot visit the garden all at once. You can view it all from above, but from that level youare not able to see all of the different stages of growth and the individual beauty of each flower, the subtle differences (colors, scents, shape of the leaves) that make each one unique. Some of the most fragile and delicate flowers are so tiny that you ave to be a small child to even notice them -under the shrubs and bushes. Usually we are so busy looking ahead and above, we don't notice the small gems on our path as we walk on them and crush them, unaware of the loss.
According to David tewart, smell is the only sense directly connected to the central brain, rather than the frontal lobes. Because that part of the brain deals with nonverbal and emotional functions, he says, "our first response to anything we smell can be emotional rather than ational." In other words, oils can also bring about emotional healing and increase spiritual awareness in ways we can't fully understand.
Alchemy is the transformation of our heaviness and darkness into light. Everyone has the potential to be an lchemist. It is through our heaviness that we come to know our lessons. We need to have this part of the balance in our lives so that we may experience the creativity of transformation. It is only with love and joy that we can do this, not by following any ormulas or chemical procedures. We must be present in a field of freedom to accomplish this.
Love is the only thing that can open our hearts. Our work should be accomplished with love and joy, not pressure. The energetics of our work are always ade manifest later.
Holding these principles in mind, you are now prepared to explore the Alchemy of Therapeutic Essential Oils.