Essential Oils &Yoga
Yoga and essential oils are not modern inventions. Used and implemented for ages, both essential oils and yoga are still considered ethereal. Combining and integrating their powers is only the beginning of flourishing well-being.
Why using essential oils for yoga can be an effective addition to your practice?
Pure essential oils contain herbal fragrances that can be absorbed by the sensory cells in our noses. This information reaches our brain via the limbic system and is processed there. This area of the brain is responsible for regulating emotions and determining the respective effect of the scents on our well-being.
Our sense of smell is partly responsible for our well-being and is closely linked to our emotions. Certain scents also ensure that memories awaken in us. We usually associate many positive moments in our lives with a corresponding scent. If an ethereal scent is used regularly in the yoga class, our brain connects this after a while with a calming and relaxing effect. The scent alone can awaken this feeling in everyday life and lead to more relaxation outside of yoga exercises.
Natural essential oils can be a wonderful addition to yoga practice. According to respective exercises, they can have a revitalising effect to help us breathe deeper or relax longer. Pure essential oils can help us bring our minds, bodies, and soul into balance. They also wonderfully solidify our connection with nature.
Using essential oils during yoga improves muscle tone and strength, which eventually helps you prevent and protect yourself from injuries.
It enhances your stretching actions and leads to flexible joints and a greater range of motion. This consequently leads to increased blood flow.
Using pure essential oil while practising yoga helps you focus more and ease stress.
Best Essential Oil for Yoga
Although it depends on what effect you try to achieve when using essential oils during yoga, some essentials have an invigorating effect while practising Yoga.
Lime
If you need a boost in motivation and want to simultaneously lift your mood and happiness, the lime essential oil is the best to use during yoga.
Frankincense
Frankincense essential oil is suitable for cleansing and having a spiritual effect during yoga. It ensures the relaxation of the body and soul.
Lemon Myrtle and Sandalwood essential oil
Essential oils like Myrtle and Sandalwood have a relaxing effect. It also provides focus when your mind is anxious and scattered.
Essential Oils for Meditation
Meditation helps you unwind and relax, gain perspective in life, and give you a new direction. It is the most inexpensive way to handle and curb stress, anxiety, and worldly woes. With essential oils, meditation brings deep relaxation and a tranquil mind.
Why using an essential oil during meditation can be an effective addition to your practice?
The calming and stress-relieving properties of essential oils are no secret to the world. Scents can create an aura of joy, fear, happiness, excitement, fear, and all kinds of emotions in oneself. As humans, we associate smell with emotions. This is precisely why essential oils and essential oil blend are all the more essential for meditation.
Essential oils can act as a positive reinforcement during meditation, as the impulses sent directly to the brain during meditation can immensely help you relax and destress.
It helps clarify your thoughts and doubts.
It helps the mind clean the negative energies.
It helps improve memory and concentration.
It removes emotional balance and feelings of enlightenment.
The use of essential oils during meditation has a grounding and balancing effect.
You could either use the essential oil in the aroma diffuser in the meditation room or put a drop on the palm of your hand, rub it in your hands and commence with deep breathing.
Best Essential Oils for Meditation
We meditate to enhance the feeling of concentration, calmness, and centeredness. Essential oils inspire these emotions and encourage an insightful experience by reducing negativity and elevating optimism, determination, and gratitude. The best essential oils for your meditation ritual include-
Myrrh—Myrrh oil promotes spiritual opening, mental focus, tranquillity, and rest, as well as reducing toxic emotions and feelings.
Lavender—Using lavender oil during meditation helps enhance optimism and provides enlightenment. It reduces self-doubt, emotional imbalance, anxiety, and restlessness. Most importantly, it promotes mental clarity and stability.
Sage – Sage oil is best used to ease respiratory discomforts. It strengthens and stimulates the mind and spirit. Often, the waning energy within us leads to an anxious mind, using sage essential oil cures it.
Essential Oils & Sleep
A well-rested body is essential, and skipping it could lead to many prolonged health issues. Sleep is medically proven to help enhance the functioning of the body, and essential oils aid in inducing and enhancing its numerous benefits.
Best essential oils for Sleep
Lavender oil – Lavender oil is best known for muscle relaxation and calming heart rate— thus enabling peaceful sleep.
Bergamot oil – Though bergmot oil is from the citrus family, it has a calming effect on our senses. It is also known to lower blood pressure and relax the nerves.
Another great soothing essential oil is the Ylang Ylang oil, which is known to alleviate stress and promote deep relaxation and sleep.
Why using essential oils can help you get better sleep?
While there are various ways to monitor undisturbed and sound sleep, using essential oils can be wise as they are affordable, more effective, and easy and safe to use.
Apart from this, including an essential oil in our lives has stood the test of time as it has been the most ancient way for the body and mind to attain peace and calm. The best part is that along with sleep, you get other health benefits. Undoubtedly, it is the most natural and easy way to get a good night’s sleep.
Staying connected with these essential herbs coming from the different plants is a way to extract the goodness, the therapeutic properties of nature, the mother earth which is the best healer to any problem of the living beings and so by inculcating the essential oils in our sleep regimen, we can subtly imbibe the healing vibes of nature.
Essential Oils set the perfect environment for sleep with their soothing sensation around your sleeping space. While you go for all the costly ways to hit a perfect sleeping ambience, from lighting to mattresses, these affordable bottles of herbal extracts are the convenient ways of achieving that at an inner level. Their ability to calm the mind and relax the body penetrates through the ‘smelling sensation ‘ within each one of us. Therefore, they work at an inner level rather than superficially. Even though the study behind aromatherapy remains inconclusive, there is no denying that they do stimulate a relaxing effect on us, which is why topical cough suppressants contain essential oils.
The best way to use them is to mix them in a drop of carrier oil and rub them on certain body parts such as your wrists, hands, neck, forehead, and chest. Use carrier oils like coconut, grapeseed, sweet almond or jojoba oil to reap the best benefits. Another great way to use them is by pouring a few drops into an air diffuser and placing them in your bedroom. You could also pour a few drops of the essential oil into water and spray it on your pillow and room.