In the seventh episode of Love Life, Live Well, our host Emma Cartmell is joined by Sally Blease, a qualified aromatherapist who previously worked as a clinical physiologist in respiratory medicine.
What do you love about your life or life itself?
I’m gonna have to start with my family, I’ve got two beautiful children, they are just such a joy to me. They’re big now,15 and 12 but they are just the most wonderful little creatures who bring me joy and laughter every single day. So I have to say, as a mom, I have to go straight in with my family, but I’m a huge fan of nature as well hence the whole aromatherapy thing. Mother nature, I love forests and plants and just generally being outdoors that’s where I’m at my happiest and because of that I live in Fuerteventura because obviously you don’t get to spend much time outside in the UK. I’ve lived here for 17 years now and I just love it. It’s just such a wonderful lifestyle, a wonderful climate, obviously, year round sunshine, but it just means that you can spend the majority of your time outdoors and not locked inside. It’s just a wonderful place to live. So for me, everything is just fabulous, my family, my life, I’m very happy.
Can you just share with us a basic level of what essential oils are and what they do?
Essential oils are basically the oil that is extracted from a plant. So all different parts of plants, depending on obviously the plant itself. It can be the leaf, the flower, the bark. The oil that is extracted from that plant is then bottled, and that is what your essential oil basically is, so depending on what benefits that plant has, is what benefits the essential oil has. One example of an essential oil is lavender, which is a relaxing oil. We have things like lavender pillows, lavender papers that go in your drawer, and we’ve seen that lavender is associated with relaxation.
How did you get into aromatherapy?
I worked as a clinical physiologist in the respiratory hospital when I lived in the UK and I knew that I wasn’t gonna be able to practise that here not just because of the language, but also because my qualifications wouldn’t be valid and things like that.
So for my love of all things nature and all things medicine, I decided to train to be an aromatherapist and for many years I used essential oils to help my son with his asthma. He has allergic asthma and rhinitis, and because of the blockage in his nose he snored every evening, and I mean like a proper man snore. This was when he was like two or three and at the time, his allergy specialist wanted to vaccinate him against his allergies, which would be a vaccination every month for the rest of his life. And I didn’t want to go down that avenue straight away because I spoke to my colleagues back in the UK and the vaccination wasn’t really trialed in children that young. So I turned to my aromatherapy. I got all my books out again, and I started simply just diffusing a mixture of eucalyptus and peppermint and lemon with Edward and noticed such a huge change straight away that, that I started to reignite my love for it.
Can you recommend somewhere that people can go or what to read when thinking about trying aromatherapy?
I’m a quite a book fan. I know that not everybody is, so I would like to recommend a book for anybody that really would like to start to learn about aromatherapy, and it’s a book called Advanced Oil Magic. It talks about all different types of problems, sleep problems, stress, anxiety and tells you which oils would be good and it also breaks down each individual oil to say, lavender is good for this, this, this, and this and it gives you diffuse and mixes.
I know a lot of people do everything online nowadays, so I would highly recommend the doTERRA website as there are so many resources on there: videos, blogs, and information about individual oils. Each individual oil has got a PDF connected to it that tells you what it does, what you can mix it with, the chemical constituents behind it etc.
And of course, if anybody wants to contact me on Facebook, message me and I would be happy to chat with anybody if they wanted some advice. I do free consultations all the time, and send out samples as well.