inner wounds

Upon first reading this, I thought, "This means your life will become better as your inner wounds heal."  Would not anyone think that?  I then made a connection to what I have learned about the brain recently.  I had seen first hand that connecting to inner wounds does NOT reflect goodness to the outside world.  And upon this reflection, it made more sense.  My initial thought was one that came from being slightly naive or thinking with rose-colored glasses or even slightly immature thinking.

It goes back to a post I wrote that included a blip about building community within my classroom.  I was trying to encourage more community within my classroom by diffusing an oil: Cedarwood.  What I found or experienced was mad chaos the first few days of diffusing....not the type of community I had in mind.  I reflected on it a bit and realized that the children were not used to feeling a desire of community so they did the most comfortable thing for themselves- fight against it with each other.  That makes sense, right?  The oil targeted memories in the brain that deal with community which brought feelings of discomfort to the surface.

I recently watched a webinar where the lady was explaining the brain, emotions, and oils.  She told a story about a friend that put a certain oil on every few hours.  After four days she asked her friend how things were going with using this new oil.  Her friend shared that she had been crying for the past three or four days since using the oil but was beginning to feel better than she had in years.  This at first confused the lady until the friend shared that the smell reminded her of a close family member that had died years ago.  Feelings and emotions that had been buried for years were resurfacing and her brain was able to release them.  The brain amazes me!

This also happened in my classroom last week.  There was quite a bit of tension as the children were trying to work together with word games.  After putting a bit of Peace oil on a few of the children's wrists (those that wanted it), one of my students said, "It smells like baby diapers."  I thought, "That's odd.  It definitely does NOT smell like that to me!"  Then I made the correlation.  This child, age 7, is the oldest of 5 siblings.  He has many care-taking attributes that he fulfills in the classroom as a safety plan (i.e. washing cups, folding blankets, etc.).  He feels safe with the smell of baby diapers.  His brain correlated "peace" with the smell of baby diapers.  Crazy!

Referring back to the inner wounds within us, our emotional brain is within the Lymbic System.  The Lymbic System feeds into the Hippocampus, which is where memories are stored.  Smell cells affect the Lymbic System which governs emotions, behavior, and long-term memory.  The only way to stimulate the emotional brain is through your sense of smell.  And, all smells and oils affect each person differently based on the memories we have stored.

So, those memories we have buried can be resurfaced with a small aroma or an oil that targets emotions within us.  Inner wounds reemerge from within and sometimes the outcome is not pleasant at first.  Sometimes it is scary or sad or hate-filled.  Without repressing them again, there is the opportunity to release them and our outer world will reflect that.