Part 1
Part 2
Ben’s story:
Like many of the men who are watching this, I was first introduced to essential oils by my wife. She came home with these scented bottles and started rubbing oils on my head, tummy, or feet.
My initial reaction… “What the?!”
Using peppermint to alleviate an upset stomach? What happened to the medicine cupboard?
Why are you rubbing these things on me?
Why have I never heard of them since they are so great? And…
What are essential oils, really?
So, if essential oils are so great, why haven’t I heard of them before.
Let me tell you about my first experience with essential oils…
It’s easy to assume that ideas that are not widely accepted are not widely accepted for a reason. The normal response is that if some rave-idea is not mainstream, if we don’t see it on the news or something, there may be something not right about it. This skepticism is a natural and good human response.
However, at the same time, it can eliminate good ideas before they start to grow or limit our thinking and block our progress.
It is true essential oils are not mainstream, and by mainstream I mean widely used and accepted as useful. 66% of people in the US have never used them. 61% cannot even name an essential oil producer.
However, this is not as things were. Essential oils were mainstream, valued, and used by many unrelated civilizations and people thought the history of the human race. Evidence suggests that essential oils were used (although not in it’s purest form) for thousands of years.
We are all familiar with the idea of using plants for their ‘healing’ properties. Essential oils are the active ingredients that bring about the majority of the ‘healing’ benefits.
Essential oils are very quickly gaining mainstream use. It is not a question of ‘if’ it is only a question of ‘when’. And by watching these videos, you are becoming part of history. The comeback of nature.
Essential oils were used for thousands of years until we suddenly became smart and thought we knew a better way.
With the advent of the industrial age, we began to do so many wonderful things with science. I am always amazed by the wonderful breakthroughs we have had in understanding the world around us. And the progress technology has made.
The ultimate goal of science is to obtain and perfect a knowledge of the world around us. And through applying this knowledge we seek to improve the world we live in. Some of our ideas have brought wonderful improvements in our lives.
Some things worked out to be not as good as we thought: Drinking radioactive water, replacing wood with asbestos, baby formula replacing mothers’ milk, experimenting with our food supply in freakish ways, and who can forget soggy-resistant cereal (failure). There are many times when we have thought we can do better than nature. In this regard, we are often corrected and sometimes painfully. We discover that nature has been finely honed in many ways we are not aware of.
We remember what happened to baby formula. Everyone was so convinced that our nutritionists and scientists could produce a nutritious drink for little baby that would be superior than that naturally produced by mother.
Now it is universally accepted that breastfeeding is so much better both for mommy and the baby (and the dad, too, who doesn’t have to mix formula in the middle of the night or wash hundreds of milky bottles). The mother heals better, the baby has a higher immunity, the milk adjusts to the baby’s needs in ways science cannot easily replicate.
This is a great example of just how much better nature is than synthetic.
I do want to recognize the important role formula can play for mothers who have lactation problems (that, too, is a discussion for another time)
So, why the pull to synthetically produced remedies? The industrial revolution convinced us that we can do better than our ancestors did. However, our best philosophers, poets, and musicians lived hundreds of years ago. We have more advanced knowledge and technology, but are we necessarily smarter? Hmmm. That’s a debate for another video.
However, unmistakably we began to replace the old ways with more modern approaches that could by synthetically mass produced. This has been fantastically successful in many ways, but not every way.
Essential oils is a part of this story. As our understanding of medicine and health improved, society ran after the modern clean approach. We have almost forgotten the natural remedies, and the new synthetic remedies have become mainstream.
Some of the ancient wisdom about using natural plant remedies was lost to social consciousness and memory.
That’s starting to change now. Just as we discovered the ill-effects of baby formula, we are becoming unhappy living in a synthetic world.
After experiencing the many ills and toxicity from synthetically produced solutions and the pollutions of modern society, a growing community of our scientists are re-examining the way nature took care of ailments before science got involved.
We are witnessing in these scientific communities a return to nature. Many are now looking to nature for solutions. And this means, in many instances, a return to knowledge society has discarded, which has fallen from mainstream use.
