When sadness hits, your energy may be low or you might feel paralyzed. In these times, you might just skip making a fancy inhaler or spray. Just grab the bottle of oil and take a couple sniffs every couple of hours, being careful not to spill it. If you’re going to be out and about, a spritzer is nice, as it’s easy to use and less of a disaster if it leaks in your bag.
There are close to 90 million dogs in the United States and an even higher number of cats. While these pets—for many of us, companions, best friends, and loyal members of our family—often go on to have full lives, their passing is unfortunately inevitable. Burying our loved animals in the backyard is often the best choice, but is not always practical or possible.
I recently wrote on citrus essential oils, my favorite oils for scent. Now, we’ll move on to conifer essential oils, another group I love. These are uplifting and motivating, and they blend beautifully with citrus oils for both scent and energetics.
Cypress essential oil is distilled mainly from the leaves and twigs of Cupressus sempervirens, the cypress tree. If you’ve seen the pointy evergreen trees in Van Gogh paintings, then you know what cypress looks like. The scent is warm, woody, green, and balsamic with some spiciness and sharpness. The leaves themselves have a wide variety of traditional medicinal uses, from the respiratory tract to the reproductive system.
The May Tree in the Celtic calendar, Hawthorn is the powerful grandmother of the Rose family and was thought in Europe to be the home of faeries. “Haw” means berry and “thorn”—well, that’s pretty self-explanatory. “Crataegus” derives from Greek…”kratos” means strength and “akis,” sharp. The thorns can be an inch long. Ouch!
So why does the heart hurt? It’s not a physical pain unless you are having a heart attack. The heart itself is not hurting, or wounded, or even broken. What happens is a physical manifestation of the emotional pain that you are feeling. There is an intense sadness because a loved one has left you or deserted you. And you end up channeling it into small bombs of pain that seem to hit you everywhere. You are sad and depressed, and want life itself to end. To compensate, some of us tend to build walls around our heart.
Recently, I learned of the unexpected death of a colleague. In addition to grieving, I’m learning a lot about intimacy.
So often when I think about intimacy, it’s in the context of a romantic relationship, but the truth is, intimacy is not confined to a romantic partner. Real intimacy is like unzipping yourself and displaying your insides, and that can be done with anyone, something I’ve witnessed in this process.
For many of us, death is not something we think about until someone close to us passes. We may find ourselves ill-equipped to handle the intense emotions that come with losing someone we love. We may not want to think about death as it could make us upset or frightened, yet it is the people who reflect upon dying that find both a deep gratitude for being alive and an urgency to focus on what matters most in this life.
In a previous article, When you need Rajas: The Ayurvedic Element of Change, the three main elemental principles (or Gunas) of yogic and Ayurvedic philosophy (Sattva, Rajas and Tamas) were introduced and spoken to. In this article I want to explore the tamasic nature of stagnation, decay and death and how honoring this element in our lives can serve us wildly.