Pocket Guide to Essential Oils: Using Aromatherapy for Health and Healing

by Kathi Keville

Overview

A revised and updated, accessible and practical guide to using essential oils for physical and emotional healing, with more than 50 recipes.

With traditions dating back more than 6,000 years, aromatherapy and essential oils are powerful tools for treating ailments, boosting the immune system, and helping relieve insomnia, anxiety, and stress. In this easy-to-use guide, you'll find a list of the best essential oils for each particular condition, tips on making your own formulas, and more than fifty recipes for improving your complexion, treating pain, and refreshing your home. Simple recipes include relief from:

stress

problem skin

tummy troubles

colds & flu

diaper rash

bug bites and more!

Also included is a glossary of more than sixty common essential oils. All you need to know about aromatherapy is right here!

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781984857828
Publisher:	Clarkson Potter/Ten Speed
Publication date:	06/02/2020
Series:	The Mindful Living Guides
Pages:	144
Product dimensions:	4.00(w) x 6.00(h) x 0.44(d)

About the Author

Kathi Keville has been teaching and writing about herbal medicine, aromatherapy, herb gardening, and ethnobotany for more than four decades. Her seminars are presented throughout North America, including at her Green Medicine Herb School at Oak Valley Herb Farm in Nevada City, California. Her fourteen books include the newly revised Aromatherapy: The Complete Guide to the Healing Art. She has also written 150 magazine articles and consulted for numerous magazines, such as National Geographic, Newsweek, and Woman's Day. Kathi can be heard on The Garden Forum: Herbal Edition on KVMR Radio, and as co-host on the aromatherapy show Everybody Knows on Veria Holistic Health Channel.

Read an Excerpt

What are essental oils?

Essential oils are potent aromatic substances extracted from fragrant plants for physical and emotional healing. Today, herbalists, body workers, cosmetologists, chiropractors, and other holistic healers are discovering how using these oils in a multifaceted and versatile healing art called aromatherapy can enrich their practices. You can use the same principles of aromatherapy as a natural remedy in your home.

Interest in therapeutic essential oils continues to grow. They are pumped into offices, stores, and even some hospitals to make the atmosphere more relaxing. Large corporations are turning to fragrance to keep their workers alert and more content on the job now that certain scents have been shown to lower blood pressure, relieve anxiety, and improve mental focus.

There are many approaches to using essential oils. Applied externally, they penetrate through the skin into underlying tissues to reach the bloodstream: compounds from lavender oil have been detected in the blood only twenty minutes after it was rubbed on the skin. As a result, one can treat a wide range of physical conditions using essential oils. For example, rubbing an aromatic vapor balm containing eucalyptus on the chest relieves lung congestion and fights infection through inhalation deep into air passages and also through absorption of the oils into the chest.

The beauty of essential oils is that you can take advantage of both their physical and emotional effects in the same treatment. A chamomile body oil massaged on the abdomen to soothe indigestion can also calm nervous conditions. A body lotion that improves your complexion can also contain essential oils that relieve depression.

In this book, I describe these methods, providing recipes along the way to get you started with essential oils. For even more detail about using essential oils and making your own products, look for Aromatherapy: A Complete Guide to the Healing Art.