Why we should smell the roses

                             

In his article Art Chester lists twenty-five senses. His thoughts are definitely worth considering. Here is a little introduction to get you on the right track.

"Science Fact: The five senses bring the world into our awareness. But who decided there were five senses, anyway?

Five Senses. In Western culture many things we think we “know” often come from ancient Greece. Sure enough, Aristotle, who has been called the “first genuine scientist,” enumerates the same five senses that we know: sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch. Yet the Greeks were not fixed on the number five: Aristotle sometimes leaned toward four senses, taking taste to be merely a form of touch; and his teacher Plato instead rattled off an impressive list of at least eight senses: hearing, sight, smell, sense of heat and cold, pleasure, pain, desire, and fear.

Nevertheless, five senses are engrained in our thinking. Perhaps because we can easily associate a physical structure (eye, ear, nose, tongue, hand) with each one. Perhaps because five senses were a frequent theme in Medieval and Renaissance art. Perhaps because the most casual search turns up mountains of hits on the subject of five senses, ranging from scientific discussions, to products and services, to metaphorical and poetic works.

Six Senses. When people speak of a “sixth sense” it’s as if they are talking about a third eye, or a fourth dimension, or a fifth cardinal direction – it’s shorthand for some mysterious way of knowing things that we wouldn’t normally expect to know. Advocates of extrasensory abilities such as telepathy would propose ESP as a sixth sense. However, even before the ancient Greeks, Buddhism counted six senses by including the mind as a sense organ. And the mind is about as mysterious as you can get!

Seven Senses. As Charles South pointed out in a note to me, we don’t have to get esoteric to justify more than five senses. Balance, the ability to sense and adjust to gravity and to perceive acceleration, is a fundamental sense throughout the animal kingdom. After all, knowing which way is up and being able to stay on one’s feet is necessary to find food or a mate, and to avoid becoming some other creature’s lunch." The Senses: Sixth, Seventh and Secret Written by Art Chester, US Scientist and author

Some of our senses are overstimulated nowadays and others are under stimulated. Our smell is one of the senses that is exposed to a lot of scents but we don't consciously work to improve it and to use it for our health benefit. Pleasant smells like the smell of delicious food, a scent of a lovely bouquet or inhaling the many perfumes of plants and flowers when walking in the forest are extremely invigorating and pleasant. However, many times our sense if exposed to pollution and unpleasant smells that we don't even realise how badly effects us and our mood or how it makes us sick even. We just take it for granted that this is how our life is in the city. However, there is a simple solution!

When a few months ago I started to use essential oils I became extremely curious how oils work and what is the benefit of using them by inhalation, topically or by ingesting them. Everyone knows that essential oils are pretty things that smell great although many people do not like to inhale them. Especially men have been conditioned not to enjoy nice smell or use essential oils. Definitely not in Australia. 

While in Europe wearing a perfume is a common thing and is part of being well-groomed, in Australia it is less of a part of the culture. At work places wearing perfume or after shave is almost discouraged because of the many people with allergies. 

We all know that the French were the leaders of using essential oils and creating perfumes. With that the scent and the health benefit got separated. There is a rediscovery of essential oils and their health benefits happening right now. There is an essential oils revolution taking place! People are returning to these gifts of nature and turning away from synthetic drugs that don't assimilate in our body and create toxins. 

People are taking back their power from the medical profession and the pharmaceutical companies. Knowledge, that once was common knowledge and was passed in families faded away in some cultures. For little things like cold or headache people did not pop a pill or take antibiotics every time used natural remedies that they had in their cabinets. 

One of the simplest and easiest way to elevate your and your family's mood, to remove unpleasant odours and even viruses, to enliven the air in your home and to protect the health of your loved one is by diffusing essential oils. You only need a few basic oils to deal with most common things in your home and to make an improvement in your health. 

These ten very handy essential oils are: lavender, tea tree, peppermint, chamomile, eucalyptus, geranium, rosemary, thyme, lemon and clove.  

In another blog article I will detail the benefits of these ten oils. 

Now, I would like to introduce you to the pathway of the essential oils in our body when we inhale them!

1. Olfactory bulb, structure located in the forebrain of vertebrates that receives neural input about odours detected by cells in the nasal cavity. The axons of olfactory receptor (smell receptor) cells extend directly into the highly organised olfactory bulb, where information about odours is processed.

2. Midbrain
The function of the midbrain, or mesencephalon, is to control an individual's hearing, motor control, vision, arousal and temperature regulation. In addition, the midbrain also controls a person's sleep and awake cycle. (www.reference.com)

The various functions which involve brainstem mechanism are controlling the respiratory muscles, controlling the vocal cords enabling a person to phonate, controlling pharyngeal, oral as well as nasal passages that are known to cause resonance effect and controlling the palate, tongue, lips and mandible which are involved in articulation control. These all functions are controlled by midbrain periqueductal gray and the cranial nerves 12, 10, 9, 5 & 7. The coordinated activities of laryngeal and oral facial tissues are controlled by the midbrain periaqueductal gray due to which it has control over the way we laugh and cry. 

That is the reason why even if the remaining brain is dead, a person can still laugh and cry. Monamine neurotransmitters are manufactured by midbrain’s nuclei and neurons which are called as dopamine or DA and this DA is more profusely produced inside the midbrain substantia nigra as well as the tegmentum. This Dopamine plays an important role in motor and cognition functioning and the DA transmitter system disturbances are correlated with the development of Parkinson’s disease as well as psychotic abnormalities. (www.innovateus.net/health/what-function-midbrain)

To get your stimulating essential oils please visit www.doterra.com and quote ID:3424449

Heart or brain - who is your decision maker?

I am the type pf person who thinks with her heart. Always had very good intuitions, strong gut feelings and made decisions quickly, based on the impulse I felt from inside. I hardly ever regretted decisions and I don't change them easily. As a performing musician, yoga and meditation lover, I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to explore areas of our mind and heart where not many people dare to go. It can be an exhilarating and out of body experience to go so deep in existence. I could not even write: into our heart, into our soul, into our body or into our mind because this is something else. It is truly the essence of who we are as human beings. When we are in that place, we are centered, we fly, we are light, we know what is right and we follow our dreams and anything is possible. The energy and the charge we have is unbelievable and is unlimited source, we don't know normally. Once you experience this feeling and get to this place in yourself, you know that in our normal, daily life we run on a fraction of our potentials. Just as we know that we only use a fraction of our brain capacity.
During the years I have refined these intuitions and used them in so many situations that I perfectly can rely on them in any situations, under any circumstances. I have tested them in no risk situations and with people where I went against my gut feelings so that I can really see if they were right. Just to double check my feelings I went through the thinking procedure and reasoned for and against a certain decision. The end result was always the same because I have already made my decision. 
Your mind is a TOOL you can choose to use any way you wish. The thoughts you use create the experiences you have. However, you are much more than your mind. You may think  that your mind is running the show but that is only because we have been conditioned and trained to think in this way. You can also un-train and re-train this tool of yours.

One of the primary researchers in the field of heart and brain connection is Rollin McCraty, Ph.D., Director of Research at The Institute of HeartMath, located in Boulder Creek, California. McCraty found compelling evidence to suggest that the heart’s energy field (energetic heart) is coupled to a field of information that is not bound by the classical limits of time and space. This evidence comes from several rigorous experimental studies that investigated the proposition that the body receives and processes information about a future event before the event actually happens. One of these studies, conducted at the HeartMath laboratories, showed that both the heart and brain receive and respond to pre-stimulus information about a future event. But even more surprising is the finding that the heart seems to receive the intuitive information before the brain. They also found that study participants in a positive, emotion-driven, coherent state prior to the experimental protocols proved to be significantly more attuned to the information from the heart than those who were not in such a state. This suggests to McCraty that the heart is directly coupled to a subtle energetic field of information that is entangled and interacts with the multiplicity of energetic fields in which the body is embedded—including the quantum vacuum.
After deep reflection, McCraty’s continuously evolving vision took the concept of coherence and energetic fields to the macro level of the planet—and the very edge of science. “Coherence,” he says, “is a state of energetic alignment and cooperation between heart, mind, body, and spirit. In coherence, energy is accumulated, not wasted, leaving you more energy to manifest intention and harmonious outcomes.”
Enjoy this amazing video on the connection between the heart and the brain.