This year, I will have been qualified in aromatherapy for thirty one years. It's been ten years since I published my first book. And in that time, I have spent so many hours checking safety, thinking about essential oil quality and thinking about contraindications. A few months ago, it struck me that none of that really gives me that much pleasure any more. While I do love the scientific aspect of aromatherapy, when it really comes down to it, there are other things so much more interesting that I want to explore. I'm interested in the holy oils, the sacred oils and in how to use essential oils as magical tools.

I want to extend a life jacket to those parts of aromatherapy that seem to be getting left behind. The parts that perhaps do belong to history, but most assuredly ought not to be lost.

To try to peice together the magical writings....those connected to sprituality, alchemy, sensuality...Sacred Scent.

At a time when interest in ritual is on the rise, when people are really starting to engage with the idea of spirituality as a means to health, I think it's very important that we don't dumb down the metaphysical aspects of essential oils.

There is a whole healing modality that is being missed and I wish to claim that as my own. This is where my work will be for a while.

So consider these video courses to be like my books but in video.

The weighting of this work is very different.

There is very little about the physical medicine of the plant, it's the other stuff I am to elucidate. I'll do that mainly with dusty old tomes, but also with imagination. Especially where there might be an aspect of an oil that seems related to a therianthrope - that is a mythical being that seems to change from human to animal at times. The obvious example will be the work I have previously done with the bee women, but this also applies to Egyptian gods like Anubis, who is a jackal. What could that animal have to show us about the oil?

Additionally, I am aim to consider these Plants of Sacred Power in all of their medicinal forms. Perhaps they are essential oils, or maybe teas, elixirs or other ways to use them as magical tools. While the focus is not on the physical medicine, I do aim to mystify which extraction of a plant will do what. But the essence of the work is to understand in what ways these holy oils were and perhaps still are considered to be sacred. What is it they do that makes them special?

Once that is assertained, a practitioner can help their client more easily slip into the energy funnels that somehow, thoughout the ages, we have somehow forgotten.

A large part of this work came about because I would repeatedly see people who were interested in doing priest and priestess work, being frustrated because they could not work out which oils to use and why sometimes they were listed as being for one or more deity. Worried they might offend divintity, people are often paralysed into missing scent and oils out of their work completely.

That's such a shame.

Scent is the oldest and most immediate of all of our senses. Nothing can move us through time and space like fragrance can. From the earliest of times, people have believed that divinity is attracted to fragrance. My work helps the practitioner to strip back the layers to understand how those associations have come about and to design much more effective rituals by choosing essential oils as magical tools that can amplify the intention of the practice.