WELLNESS SERVICES:
Flower Essence/Aromatherapy & Reflexology

Flower Essence & Aromatherapy Consultations

by Durga: shantiyoga.sol@gmail.com

These complementary therapies can profoundly enhance physical, emotional, and mental well being. Together we will explore the issues in your life that require special care and attention. Physical complaints often start at the mental and emotional level, while mental and emotional tensions often manifest physically. Your unique situation will be addressed holistically, imparting a variety of helpful tools for your life’s journey. Please read below for more information.

What Are Flower Essences?

Flower essences are ingestible, non-aromatic homeopathic-like remedies specific to treating emotional and mental issues. Their effectiveness has been demonstrated empirically for almost 100 years to enhance the natural flow of life forces in the mind/body. Their applications range from the broad (eg., control issues) to quite specific (eg., childhood abandonment by father).

 They are extremely user friendly: safe enough for infants, and without possibility of overdose.  Essences are valuable used alone or to complement other healing modalities, including yoga, massage, psychotherapy, and conventional medicine.

Origins

Healing with Flower Essences is an art developed in the 1930’s by Dr. Nelson Bach, a homeopathic physician. Since physical illness has its roots in energetic, emotional, psychological, and ultimately spiritual imbalance, Dr. Bach saw it would be ideal to remedy imbalances at a subtle level before they manifest as physical illness.

What Is Aromatherapy?  

Put simply, Aromatherapy is the use of aromatic plants for well being: (physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual.)  It is an affordable, user-friendly, and effective way to manage our own health. 

What Are Essential Oils?  

“Essential oil” is the modern name for the aromatic essence that is extracted from a plant.  There is no “oil” in essential oils. They are a complex volatile substance, the older term is “essences” which is more accurate.  Only a relatively few plants of all plant species known produce an aroma. The essence serves one of two purposes for a plant: to attract (for fertilization) or repel (immune function.)  The essence may be derived from the bark, leaves, berries, branches, flowers, or fruit peels of a plant. Essential Oils are powerful and should be treated like over the counter medicines.

Self Care at Home

Click here for: Sample Aromatherapeutic Blends & Helpful Tips
Click here for: Lifestyle Suggestions for Optimal Well-Being to Use in Conjunction with Aromatherapy and Flower Essences

 PRIVATE CONSULTATIONS

Through guided personal reflection and one on one discussion, we will explore together the issues needing attention, weighing both their urgency in your life and your readiness to address them.  Typically one starts with one blend for about a month, and then as the first issues resolve, secondary issues often surface. Flower essences and essential oils can be used to address short term situations, or can become a life-time practice for gentle self-exploration and healing.

Fees: Initial Meeting: $45 (up to 90 mins) 
Follow-Up Meetings: $30 (up to 30 mins)
Essential Oil and/or Essence Blends: $8 each
 All first time meetings require a follow up.

To make an appointment:
E-mail Durga or call 301 654 4899
Click here: Preparing for Your Initial Meeting

Reflexology

REFLEXOLOGY FOR WOMEN by Saraswati: matasaraswati@yahoo.com
Reflexology stimulates reflexes in the feet and hands to improve general health and relieve tension. Therapeutic pressure is applied to specific points to balance organs and bodily systems. Has been shown to induce relaxation, reduce anxiety, ease depression and provide pain relief, Improved circulation (good for nerves) and promote better sleep.

More Information on the history of aromatherapy….

For millennia human beings have turned to aromatic herbs, for the most mundane and practical uses to the sublime.  In every one of the great early civilizations (Egyptian, Babylonian, Chinese, Indian, Mayan, Incan, etc.) and amongst indigenous peoples throughout time, aromatics have been prized as medicinals, perfumes, and elements in sacred ritual, and held an important role in cultural, social, religious, and economic life. Cave drawings, papyrus scripts, and ancient carvings attest to knowledge of aromatic plants dating back at least 2,500 years.

Avicenna invented steam distillation around 1000 AD; by 1200, 47 different essential oils were being distilled in Germany alone. By the 1500’s the perfume industry in Provence, France was producing essential oil of lavender. By 1837 forty-four essential oils were contained in Europe’s Codex Alimentarius. In 1887 the first clinical research into the antiseptic powers of essential oils was made.  So it can be rightly said that up until the early 1900’s, essential oils were the strongest medicine available.

But it was a French chemist and perfumer named Renee Maurice Gattefosse who, in the 1930’s, applied lavender essential oil to his hands that were affected by  “gas gangrene” after a severe burn. The oil promptly stopped the gangrene. Being extremely impressed, he undertook more earnest research into the chemical components of essential oils, and thus provided a scientific basis for what we know today as aromatherapy—a term he coined.

The other “father of aromatherapy” is also a Frenchman, Dr. Jean Valnet, who was a military doctor in WWII. He had read Gattefosse and used essential oils to treat very serious infections and injuries in army hospitals. Largely because of his work aromatherapy became part of French and from there European conventional medicine.

In the 1970’s Robert Tisserand translated Valnet and Gattefosse into English essentially making aromatherapy available to the English speaking world.