Thursday 23 January 2014

The Power of the Human Mind


Many years ago, as a trained herbalist and naturopath, I was attracted to a small advertisement advocating Aromatherapy.  For some reason, this little advert stuck in my brain and began my long road as a devotee of the subject.

For some reason the idea that smell or aroma had therapeutic qualities jumped out at me.  A whole series of little gears in my brain said “That sounds eminently sensible and very obvious.  Why don’t people use smell more to make themselves better”.  Perhaps this came about because as a youngster I had become very sensitive of the power that smell had over one’s feelings.  I had been in and out of hospital for a variety of reasons, mostly connected with my propensity for adventure and resulting accidents and I had come to hate the smell of ether.  The smell of ether made me feel sick.  If near a hospital I would cross the road.  Even in later years I would cross the road to avoid the smell of ether.  I could smell a hospital a mile off and I do not exaggerate.  So the idea that aroma had therapeutic qualities made absolute sense.  If “bad” smells had a physical effect so then the opposite must be true.

It seems to me that the 20th century in which I was born had no place for smell apart from some kind of fashion statement through the perfume industry.  Following the second world war, many countries voted for governments with left leaning tendencies – Labour, Social Democratic etc. which had little time for free thought or individuality, having a distinct tendency to bureaucracy and technocracy.  They built huge institutions like the British National Heath Service, which, though having merits, gradually became like the Civil Service – a career path, an employer rather than a service.  Across the world old methods and smaller units were thrown out in favour of new technologies and large complexes.  Old agriculture did not produce enough and new high input farming became normal.  Chemistry and pharmacy in particular benefited from this technological approach and today we reap the consequences in health, well being and soil structure.  We are still afraid to admit to our own responsibilities in this area.  The chemical giants and the pharmaceutical giants have us all by the throat.  We are at least partly responsible for ruining the earth by our greed with a social conscience face.

Perhaps industries rooted in chemistry more than others have benefited from the ideas that Renee Descartes put forward.  As a philosopher/scientist, he is attributed with changing the way that we think.  It is his world view that is said to have become our world view.  We have become rationalists and analysts.  It seems strange to think that mediaeval humankind was not so interested in analysis.  To us cause and effect are paramount.  The enquiring mind cannot accept one or the other alone.

Such thinking has given rise to idea of the mass – mass medication, mass education, treating all individuals as standard.  This has given incredible benefits such as the production line motor car and machine made clothing in regular sizes.  Pause for a moment and consider how well a size 10, 12, 14 or 16 actually fits or whether men’s legs really do go up in 2” jumps from 29, 31 and 33. 

Once we think outside the mass we have to consider the individual and that brings us to holistic practice which requires the thoughtful consideration of the patient, client, person as a unique entity like no other seen before.  Descartes was not too keen on the senses.  Allowing that we have five of them, his view was that sight was our most valued sense, followed by hearing.  Touch and taste were quite low class and smell was somewhere in the middle.  Viewing the body as a human mechanism he still had to accept that certain bodies floated through the air giving us various odourous feelings of the soul.  Of course Descartes argued that all the senses only exist in an intellectual way.  In other words, nothing exists outside of the mind, proposing that feeling and thinking are a single phenomenon. It is only in very recent times, with a better understanding of physics rather than chemistry,  that we are sometimes better off accepting effect rather than looking for cause.

At the beginning of the 19th century, Jean-Jacques Virey, in his book The Natural History of Medicines, Foods and Poisons said “Aromas are proper to the principal virtue of every substance.  There are even medicines whose sole efficacy resides in their odour:  flowers, lime blossom, the majority of the mint family, aromatics, anti scorbutics, musk in all which, loss of effectiveness accompanies loss of odour.” 

Such an idea pervaded my view of Aromatherapy.  Of course, it is the antithesis of an analytical review of the chemistry of essential oils.  Today more and more emphasis is given to the chemistry of an essential oil.  This is leading inexorably to the further industrialisation and standardisation of essential oils.  In truth, many aromatherapy students these days have never actually smelt or handled anything but an industrialised chemical soup purporting to be an  authentic essential oil.   A great number of their student days are spent in learning the chemical effects of individual components of essential oils and their safety.  Increasingly we are taught that essential oils contain irritants and allergens so should be used with increasing judicious caution because they cause x, y and z.  All this flies in the face of the fact that Aromatherapy has an excellent safety record and that the majority of materials have been in use one way or another for a good few centuries, if not millennia. 

 And where, I ask, does smell come into the equation?  Less and less attention is being paid to the aroma itself.  Whilst Virey’s attitude is considered long gone dead unscientific, this has never been my experience in Aromatherapy.  I have always found that smell has an incredible effect and that different essential oils, particularly those artisan grown and authentic, with provenance, have a certain vitality and zing that moves people and so, indirectly, their immune system with a cascade effect  This does not seem to be the case with their chemical cousins.

Perhaps our scientific community, before reaching for their keyboards and dashing off letters shouting “Voodoo and Witchcraft” should consider the better understanding that we have we have had in the last few years, due to Aromatherapy, of our sense of smell itself.  The new biology, like the new physics, throws up our better understanding of brain chemistry, demonstrating clearly that we are not a machine and that we have molecules of emotion and feeling.  Much of our existence is in the realms of electro magnetism, vibration and information packets.  With such ideas in mind, we can dismiss some of our earliest and rather crude views that if an odour molecule hits our olfactory bulb, it transmits a message to our limbic area, affects our memory and that’s it.  Or, if we are lucky, it produces a hormonal response on the way (which we have possibly learned through experience) and the real effect only begins when the molecule hits the blood stream via the lungs or ingestion, through the skin and so on.  That alone is where the real chemistry starts and therefore effect.  We can measure the bloodstream but not the mind. 

Whilst this analytical approach is indisputably valid in itself,  it is negating and missing the point of aroma in therapy.  People respond to aroma in different ways and it is quite wrong to suggest that aroma alone cannot influence disease.  Even following the French naturopathic approach particularly proposed by Pierre Franchomme and others, the terrain itself can be influenced by smell.  It is demonstrable that bacteria too can be influenced by smell, just as the smallest of insects are influenced by smell.  Whether this effect is the sense of smell in the human sense or, is, more properly, stimulation by molecular vibration, is another discussion but for this short article, let us just call it smell.

In my early training I was somewhat disappointed by the emphasis that was placed on massage in Aromatherapy.  This, of course, was before I learned the real value of therapeutic touch.  With the rise of standards in Aromatherapy it is, however, a shame that methods of massage have too been standardised and indeed have retreated from the original 19th and mid 20th century massages that accompanied Aromatherapy.  Today, massage is more mechanical than expressive and because it has become routine there is little resemblance to the nature of the essential oil being applied.  To illustrate – the nature of Ylang Ylang is completely different from the nature of Cypress so why should the nature of the therapeutic touch (the massage) be the same in the application of both?  Some essential oils evoke stroking, others evoke friction. 

This is not the way that Descartes thought, but it is the way that Aromatherapy was practiced in its original form before it became sanitised and adapted to the mass market, particularly by those who want to be considered health professionals and to work in the system in a standardised form.  Not that there is anything wrong in this, but in this process of acceptance one must allow for those practitioners who have a wider or broader perspective and who wish to practice in a traditional form.  It is well proven that they do no harm and those in the medical profession will recognise this as the first tenet of medicine.

The sense of smell in our training is correctly associated with that of memory.  Smell evokes memories.  Smell produces learned responses.  Here I want to focus on what memory is.  There are two activities connected with the word – that of storage and that of recollection.  They are not the same things.  This division has to do with what we may loosely call consciousness.  Memory itself is not just a brain function.  We are led to believe that memory is found in the limbic area of the brain.  Clearly the limbic area has to do with imagination, dreams etc. but there is no specific area that we can identify as “that is where the memory is” any more than we can identify the immune system as being found in a particular place. 

Such concepts are not new.  For example, we learn things off by heart.  This is just another way of talking about storage and recollection.  Physiologically speaking, as far as we know the heart does not store memory but we often use the heart as a metaphor for feelings. Feelings themselves are often recollections and feelings are what smells give us.

Avicenna, the great grandfather of modern day Aromatherapy was writing as long ago as the 11th century about the powers of the soul that translates sense, impressions into thought or memory from an external expression.  Note, please, then that a smell, viewed as an impression, is entirely individualistic.  It is what it creates to the individual that has impact on thought rather than what it itself is.  Smell therefore helps us to compose an image from material we have stored.  That image may well be one of recollection but along the way, from such a process, we develop an opinion and perhaps use a power of judgement.  This is an instinctive reaction and is often seen in animals.  A rabbit seeing a fox for the first time does not need its mother to analyse it and explain it in detail.  It is extremely difficult to link analytical thought or processes with instinct.  Instinct is something that is conscious but precedes pre-rational activity.  Isn’t that what Aromatherapy does?  Avicenna was certainly aware of this approach and just because he was writing in the 11th century I see no reason to disregard it because we are living in the 21st century.  Those of us who only look for a learned response are in the majority.  My experience  however and perhaps yours is that people have quite irrational responses to aroma that mostly, but not always, do good!  I used to think of memory like a filing cabinet whereby you simply open the file and get a picture.  Now through Aromatherapy I have come to realise that memory is a reconstruction, a synthesis of images.  This explains why different perceptions can often be found of the same event. 

Modern day thinking suggests that memory too has some outreach facility.  Indeed, memory could be found in the field that surrounds us.  Before modern day computers, we didn’t even know that we had a field and now that we know that we have one, I guess that whatever name we may call it (depending upon our scientific or esoteric views) we can better understand why there are such phenomena as mass hysteria or perhaps shared memories, perhaps even on a national scale.

Odour molecules are incredible activators and I believe that we should be promoting the sense of smell far more in the practice of Aromatherapy.  Let people smell things, let them enjoy them and go back to some of the very crude but basic ideas in Aromatherapy, e.g. a few drops of essential oil on a pad in a pillow, essential oils in cars, in the office, using proper nebulising diffusers, essential oils on a handkerchief for panic attacks, creative perfumery with a therapeutic purpose.  Because of the memory aspect there is little point in trying to understand sometimes why a certain essential oil has made a person feel better.  A patient of mine with persistent tonsillitis, after a couple of treatments, spent about half an hour talking to me about some issue in their life and has not had tonsillitis since.  I was still in touch with that patient ten years later, with no recurrence of the problem.  What provoked the recovery from an identifiable illness was a response to an unidentified essential oil.  It was Coco Chanel who said “The most mysterious, the most human thing, is smell.”

We should remember that despite textbooks, we are still at the stage where there are three theories about how we smell.  The populist theory of stereochemistry is the one that has the most credence and is most often taught as fact.  My point is that we are still uncertain about the mechanism but we can be certain about the effect.  In the last 20 years we have seen a rise in the understanding of molecules and the emotion of consciousness and how our immune system works.  In this past century, we have seen anatomy change its views on the vestigial tonsils that were not needed or the vestigial appendix that was not needed into a better understanding of how these two organs are connected to our immune systems.  Jacobsen’s Organ as part of our smell system, too, has been dismissed as vestigial and was supposed to vanish even before birth, only being present in the embryo.  It was only in the 1990s that it was “rediscovered” although it had been known since the 19th century.  The function of such an organ is not yet truly understood but it may yet prove to be part of an “awareness” system that is related to our intuitive and instinctive behaviour, hence part of our sense of what we may loosely call smell.

I think Aromatherapy should be celebrating the power of odour, the power of aroma, the power of communicative molecules in aroma.  I accept that this is difficult if you use standardised industrial materials with little or no true odour.  These poor imitations of nature, these blends of chemistry that conform to standard reference texts – may never even have seen or been a flower or leaf or root, yet they are increasingly what pharmacies want.  Their dull flatness of fragrance does not expand the mind, do not make you tingle with anticipation or just do something inexplicable.  Rather like many modern day perfumes compared to their 19th and early 20th century counterparts, just give you a headache.  Are they banned and pilloried?  No.  After all they undoubtedly conform to umpteen safety regulations which essential oils in nature do not.

Sometimes one wonders if these safety scientists have a clue about the origin of some of the materials they study.  According to their theories and regulation, a person standing in a garden designed for the blind, redolent with the smell of roses, full of the fragrance of Jasmine, with the sharp smell of contrasting Rosemary should at least be sneezing and at least be in danger of irritation to cancer from the air soaked in methyl eugenol, methyl chavicol, camphor and limonene etc.  Information is there for us to use and note, placing that along side our human experience and much regulatory information needs considerable common sense applied to it.  Aroma is a powerful tool for our memory, for our immune system.  An essential oil should sparkle out of the bottle and give of itself a certain indefinable power. 

We should not be ashamed of such thinking, trying to hide behind quasi chemistry to justify the fact that smells work.  Essential oils can vibrate with life.  Not everybody living before the latter half of the 20th century was ignorant or unenlightened about such matters.  We owe much to people like Aristotle, Avicenna and Descartes.  They contribute to a fund of human knowledge that is part of the joy of human experience.  We should be grasping this knowledge and applying this knowledge but yet realising that in health and well being everyone is an individual, realising that the mass medication of the latter half of the 20th century has had phenomenally good results but strangely has not improved the overall position of what we call health and well being.  At the same as we have seen the rise of modern medicine we have seen the rise of disease, especially of the auto immune system and the so called mystery illnesses.  If mass medicine works, that doesn’t make a lot of sense. 

In the modern world, it would take a huge shift of thinking to get people to accept smell therapy, aroma therapy.  It is most unlikely to happen but we can work quietly, recommending the concept that smells do you good, make for a better life and simply give your body system a better chance of self correction where possible.  What a pleasure it is to smell a rose and drink in its perfume in the evening without having to worry about its methyl eugenol content, knowing that the real life experience of human beings is that we are great survivors with something that sticks out of the front of our head called a nose that tells us more than we probably realise.
 
© Jan Kuśmirek 2014

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