I qualified in Aromatherapy in 2007. I was really excited about learning about essential oils! Well that was before I started my training though because I didn’t stay excited for very long… by the end of the course I was nearly put off using essential oils altogether… Why? Because this is what we learnt in class: “don’t take them internally!” or you might die… “don’t put them neat on your skin” or you might turn bright red and you skin will disintegrate… Always dilute them and never ever EVER put more than 2 drops for 5ml of carrier oill…. otherwise… i don’t know… the sun will turn cold and flesh-eating aliens will invade the earth?… and oh, I nearly forgot! don’t throw them in the sink or it could damage the drains (seriously??) pfff…. quel “tue l’amour…” (what a “love-killer” as we say in french…). Who wouldn’t be put off, right?

But anyway… I went by the rules and gave it my best shot. But after a couple of years I stopped using them as they didn’t seem to make much of a difference at all, apart from a nice smell.
Now… Fast forward 2 months ago: my aroma-enthusiast colleague Aileen coming back from a 6 months trip around the world brought back a little treasure with her: doTerra Essential Oils. To be precise, “doTerra CPTG essential oils”… CP what???

Certified Pure Therapeutic Grade… Which in a nutshell means the company guarantees that the oils are pure, that is to say free from any foreign particles, herbicides or pesticides, and that the process of extraction is respected to ensure the highest possible potency of each oil, granting them with medicinal grade. (It’s not me saying, it’s the american FDA). And the company went the extra mile by creating their own quality standard to reflect the amount of testing, third party and in-house, that they do to ensure that the purity and therapeutic properties of each oils are guaranteed for each bottle that is released on the market. Other brands are welcome to align on this testing regimen to benefit from this quality standard but so far no-one has been brave enough.

Anyway, that’s not how Aileen convinced me, CPTG sounds all great on paper but at that stage I was only vaguely paying attention to what she was saying. So how did she get me? first by giving me a glass of water… that I thought she had put mint syrup in. But no it wasn’t syrup at all it was peppermint oil…only one drop of peppermint oil in a whole jar of water. And the taste was so strong. To be honnest I was like… “You mean I can actually “drink” essential oils? (remember my training had nearly me convinced Essential Oils were nothing short of a “biohazard”). So anyway, yes! the answer is yes, you can drink them, eat them, rub them pure on your skin, BUT Aileen wouldn’t chance it with any other brand, and that is because she trusts doTerra for their purity and safety, precisely because of that CPthingey quality affair I wasn’t paying too much attention to at the beginning ;-). It is starting to make sense, right; it is true that on any bottle you find in the shop, even if the oil is certified organic, it always states “do not take internally” on the sticker. You can go check, I did. Anyway Aileen was starting to have my attention, because as simple as that I really like the concept of putting peppermint, lemon or lime in my water (I’m a bit lazy so would save me a lot of lemon squeezing, lol).

And my last mental block went down soon after, when she gave me the leftover of her peppermint bottle. I was just setting up my treatment room in the Holistic Center for a client and I already had put a couple of drops of I-can’t-even-remember-which oils in the burner (they weren’t smelling much at all), and since I had the bottle in my hand I added one drop, just one drop of Peppermint in the mix. And all of a sudden I was sitting in a field of peppermint… literally… I could smell nothing but peppermint all over the room. And I was astonished by the strength of the smell. That, people, is what sold me.

I have been buying doTerra oils since, (thank you Aileen!) and I have not been disappointed. I have been enchanted, amazed, baffled and maybe even flabbergasted (I love that word, so happy to find an chance to place it ). I have attended all possible classes organised by different doTerra enthusiasts, and I’ve met THE Lady, the lady who had the extremely good idea to introduce doTerra to Ireland 3 years ago, Becky Barney, and her husband Eric. Eric who is a young retired from the construction industry turned doTerra support team. Eric who could afford to close his own business because they’re doing so well working full time sharing the doTerra experience all over the world. Eric who was so anti-oils at the start that he actually thought his wife was crazy… but hey… how’s crazy now, right?

I certainly am! crazy about these oils, my interest and faith in Aromatherapy is back up 100%, and I keep being happily surprised by the results. And that’s the beauty of it, the surprises are always positive. As Becky says, they have no negative side effects, but they can have positive ones! For example when she started using the Anti-Ageing blend called “Immortelle” around her eyes, not only did she notice results in her wrinkles, but her eyesight improved too! Who doesn’t like that kind of surprises?

And I was thinking for myself, “you’d have to have been using them for years to have cool stories like that”, but not even, no later than last month did I have a “positive side effect” story myself: What happened was this: Julie + Paris + heat + metro + walk + walk + walk x high heels = pain + blisters! So as a desperate quick fix attempt, I decided to rub lavender on the ball of my feet… That’s all I had on me and since it couldn’t do any harm anyway…. So I rub it in… and yes, it probably helped to heal the blisters quicker and to numb the pain, but what shocked me is that after 5 minutes of applying the oil I started to breathe better and deeper, and I didn’t even think I was breathing badly in the first place, but suddenly my lungs opened up and it was like a rush of fresh air coming in. We could argue that the ball of the feet in reflexology is actually the location of the reflex point for the lungs, and that it was the result of massaging my feet… maybe… but i’ve massaged my feet before… and never did I experience such a difference in my breathing… The combination of the 2, the oil on the lungs reflex point, have proved unexpectedly successful and that, is a cool side effect I find.

These unexpected “side effects” are fun to write about but i’ve had a lot of very much “expected” results of course, like stopping stomach-ache and nausea in its tracks with DigestZen on multiple occasions, decongesting my nose with a Respiratory blend, stopping allergy crisis with Lavender lemon and peppermint, and more recently nipping a bladder infection in the bud with a protective blend. These are really cool for me because it’s already much more results in 2 months time that I’ve ever had for myself using other brands during the couple of years that I was practicing aromatherapy.

So please, if you too have had expected or unexpected results with Essential Oils, with or without positive side-effects, please share them!