“As aromatherapy grows in popularity, more people are using essential oils outside the cosmetics and perfumery industry. People are re-visiting ancient and cultural uses of aromatics for rituals, space cleansing, healing, spiritual connection and dreaming. Many people today have broken ancestral lineages due to colonization, fragmentation, displacement, or adoption. They have minimal to no guidance on which herbs and aromatics were used by their ancestors of blood and/or place but wished to incorporate them into their practices rather than appropriate from other cultures.
Are essential oils used solely as a tool to reach a meditative state, or can they be the focus? How can we create a living connection with particular aromatics? This paper explores cultural uses of aromatics from Europe and my personal experience with Azores bay Laurel (Laurus azorica) (Seub.) Franco, in meditation and creating a living connection to my paternal ancestors through this endemic aromatic.”
A fantastic article from Deborah Hladecek, who is a graduate of the Aromatic Scholars program of the The School for Aromatic Studies. Deborah is a certified clinical aromatherapist and a botanical perfumer in Zürich, after having retired from her 30 years of massage therapy practice to rekindled her love and study of ancestry and herbalism. Exploring the broader palette of perfumery materials with the Grasse Institute of Perfumery, she began to integrate her research about the ethnobotany of Europe. She is working on her first perfumes under the brand Ancestral AromaticsTM for an autumn 2022 launch and is working on her book titled Ancestral Aromatics: An Olfactory Pilgrimage.
Read the whole story and study from the lovely Deborah Hladecek in our AUTUMN issue of AROMATIKA Magazine (9.3.). If you don’t have your copy yet, get our super informative e-journal from our online shop. And if you like this article, please come back and let us know through our Testimonials page.
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