Rigid Aromatherapy Tips

Little known fact: I am into scented candles and incense and sachets and pot pourri and aromatherapy oils sprinkled on light bulbs and etc. and etc. and etc. I am into all of this stuff in a rather rigid way (which is rather amusing, if you think about it.) Like: you’re rigid about aromatherapy? Uhm … isn’t that kind of defeating the purpose? It’s like being stressed out about yoga class.

But here’s the deal: do not, under any circumstances, mess with my aromatherapy setup in my teeny apartment. It may appear random to you. But it is extremely well thought out. There are no accidents here.

Here are my tips. Try this at home.

1. Citrusy-scented candles in the bathroom. This is good for the early mornings, when you’re rushing to get ready. The citrus scent is energizing, and positive. It helps to get you going. You think I jest? Try it and see.

2. But – for the evenings when I want to take a long luxurious bath, I will be damned if there’s a citrus-scented candle lit anywhere in a 3 foot radius. No no NO. Citrus-scents should never be used when you are trying to relax. I recommend the Midsummer Night’s Eve Yankee candle scent for luxurious relaxing bath nights – that’s a good one. I also like anything that has to do with lilac or lavendar. Both of these are very good for sleep.

3. Speaking of lavendar, I place a little lavendar sachet thingie in my pillow. It didn’t help me the other night, during my restless 3 a.m. moment, but sometimes? After a hard day? Placing my head on my pillow, and getting the aura of lavendar suddenly … It’s beyond comforting.

4. For my mornings in the kitchen (as opposed to the showering brushing-teeth part of my morning in the bathroom), I have a big candle lit on the windowsill, with a this sugary cinnamon bunn-ish scent. This goes along very well with my coffee, and is especially cozy for dark winter mornings.

(Are you getting the idea of the rigidity here? I couldn’t put the lemon candle in the kitchen. It would be just plain WRONG.)

5. In my bedroom/living area, I rotate scents. Sometimes I get sick of one, phase in another … but there are themes: I like anything that has to do with roses. However, in an apartment as small as mine, it can get a tad overwhelming. You feel suffocated. You have to be very careful. In the summer, I like to burn candles with an oceanic scent. Anything to do with salt water, the bay, the sea.

6. However, all of this doesn’t hold a candle (groan) to my incense rituals that occasionally reach such a Byzantine level I don’t even know how to describe them. There’s a shop where I buy my incense on a regular basis. They know me by name now. I am on their mailing list. I am a geek. I complained about how they discontinued my favorite incense scent, or at least stopped ordering it, and they brought it back. Just for me. I pretty much don’t waver in what I buy. I am not adventurous when it comes to my incense scents. I balk at the thought!! The way I see it is … if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

The incense scents I buy have the following names: (and please feel free to laugh in my face … well, you probably already are doing that)

— Yin Yang (my favorite)
— Tibetan Orchid (a new scent. Delightful)
— Champa (the old standby … I get sick of it though)
— Arabian Nights
— Sensuality (bwahahaha. No, but seriously. It’s a great scent. My new favorite)
— If I’m feeling really wild, I’ll get Opium or Night Queen. But WOAH, only if I’m feeling really wild. Slow down, Sheil-babe, with the Night Queen, slow down.

If I don’t have incense in my house (and not even burning necessarily – I just mean, if I don’t have a stash of it somewhere in my house) I feel nervous and incomplete. I guess you could say I am addicted.

And lastly?

Here’s where things get really nuts. But I have to recommend this to you all as seriously as if it were a daily multivitamin:

Two words:

White Sage.

It comes in many forms, but in my rigidity I will tell you that the ONLY real form is the bunch-of-leaves format. Don’t buy “white sage” incense sticks, or “white sage” oil. No. These are bastardizations. If you buy it as a bunch of dried leaves, you are getting the pure deal, the pure sage deal. The leaves are a silvery white, and dried – so that they’re hard, and crumbly. You pluck a leaf off and light it with a match. The sage burns like incense – in that the flame itself dies almost immediately, but the leaf glows, burns, and clouds of sage-smoke come off of it. So then you walk around your house, holding the leaf up. The scent is beyond heavenly. It’s not even heavenly. To me, the scent IS peace.

It’s probably a Pavlovian thing to some degree. I don’t know. All I know is if I’m feeling nervous, edgy, or really stressed out – I do a little white sage walk-through – and feel a wee bit better. The problems don’t go away, but my mind has relaxed a bit.

White sage is VERY IMPORTANT. I cannot stress it enough.

I don’t burn it all the time, though. I save it for dire emergencies, when I really need it.

These tips work for me, in a rigid obsessive kind of way (God forbid the cinnamon bun candle gets placed in the bathroom – because who knows WHAT would happen then???) – and I thought I would pass on the wealth, because that’s just the generous kind of person that I am.