Mikael Zayat is a clinical aromatherapist who has been working with oils for the past twenty years. He lectured at New Life in 2002.
MZ: It is very nice to be here again for the third time. I am so happy to share these moments with you. Today is a holy day. It's the day of rejoicing and I went in to St. Michael's here just by chance. In Egypt it is a big holiday. Here they make a celebration for Christmas. It is a mature feast day for people who feel what the resurrection is. It is all about new life. When you talk about the new life, this is the new life... to see what this new life is all about.
For me, when I speak about the essential oils, I try to relate this to the essence, to who we are. Once we know more about who we are, then we can relate to others from within and not only from the external, from the masks, or the persona, or from playing the game.
For me it is very important to speak the way I feel and walk my talk. When I came to North America, thirty-two years ago I came to New York. I wanted to study education in order to teach in school. I also wanted to be a social worker to help people. But I also wanted to become a doctor, and I didn't know how to put all of this together. But after doing some thinking, I believe a good doctor is the one who disappears from your life as soon as possible because you become healthy and you don't need him anymore. A good teacher is the same, you become your own teacher after awhile instead of depending on somebody else.
If we want to be responsible for our health, we need to use our own internal judgment and knowledge and not let someone else tell us how we feel. How can we be happy, if we are not close to ourselves? How can I speak about peace, if I don't carry it in my heart? The talk today is about essential oils but I do not want to take an oil and replace medicine, let's say Advil, with an oil. That is not the point. And I do not want to be sued by a company who says "Why does he talk like that about our medicine?". The point is that essential oils are not a replacement for a drug. They are a means for us to be in contact with our power, our love, with our health and with our inner child. The plants that produce essential oils are unique because not all plants produce essential oil. In the plant kingdom you have thousands of species… so many that people have stopped counting. Now with the newer technologies in plant identification, you have more and more different plants genus, or sorts, maybe 100,000, and only a few thousand produce essential oils.
Essential oils are produced by parts of the plant. It is not like the sap, it is not an extract. It is not like apple juice concentrate. It doesn't have anything to do with this. Take an orange, for example, in the orange peel you have these tiny bags which you can see when you open the orange. If you crush the peel, you have substances that come out. It is the same with mandarin or tangerine. If you squeeze the peel in front of a lighted candle, the oil will ignite and create sparks. That is the essential oil. And if you put a branch of pine in a campfire, the sparking and hissing sparks are done by the essential oil.I heard on a cassette people talking about essential oil as the blood of the plant. For me, it is not the blood of the plant, because the plant circulates all over. But the essential oils are just in the tiny cells that especially produce these molecules and these molecules are made up of all kinds of essences put together to produce the mix of different scents. We can separate them. It's like with a perfume, you smell the perfume when you first apply it to your skin and then, a few minutes later, you may smell different scents from the same perfume because it changes with the skin. But touching the skin is not the main reason the scent changes.
Of course, the perfume interacts with the acidity of the body, but the main reason the scent changes is that you have different notes, different molecules that evaporate at different times. So the first smell you get is from the top notes, which are the first molecules to evaporate. When this top note evaporates, the next scent is the heart note, the middle note. And if you smell your skin (a) half hour later or so, you get to the base note. From one drop of essential oil you have all these notes, but they are not just one-two-three. It is the whole dance, you see. You have the three main steps and then you have the movement between the notes!
In one drop of, let's say, an orange peel essential oil you have leaf essence, orange leaf essential oil, and we have the orange flower essential oil which is called Neroli which is very expensive, let's say a dollar a drop, when you can get thirty drops of the leaves oil for a dollar.. In the orange leaves the essential oil is in the small part of the leaves. If you take the leaf and make a juice with it, you will hardly get a drop of essential oil. You have to have a (whole) big bag full of leaves to get one drop, and you will get a lot of the juice, of course.
Essential oil does not mix with water. I wonder why people say that it is a good idea to put them in the bath. It is not a good idea to put them as they will float. That is why if you get them in the eyes or in a very sensitive area, --and I don't want to go into details here--, it will burn, it will really hurt. Be careful because using water to wash the essential oil off will only spread the oil and create a wider area of burning. If this happens, take a piece of cloth, or towel, and put some oil on it, like Mazola oil or olive oil - any edible oil you might have around the house,(except lamp oil) and use the oil-soaked towel to wipe away the essential oil. It wicks it away fast, even from the eye.
See how we jump from subject to subject? When I teach I would go to part one and then to part three, and I say part two will come after. The way the Orientals think and the way the occidentals think are different. You go into oriental villages, and you will see that they are in circles. They are in the desert and they look at the sky where everything is in circles. Everything comes back and eventually everything turns around. You see, it is not linear. How they write also, they write in loops. It is not written like occidentals - one letter after the other. So should our thoughts be more circular it all will come back. This is when we look at reality, it is all in circlesunless we are in cities and looking up at this wonderful Empire State building which is so sharp and linear, straight up in the sky. If you go into the woods, where I live in Canada, the hills are all smooth-looking and the trees are in circles.
So we cannot look at the reality and say okay this oil is good for this. No, oil is made by the plant for two reasons: to attract and to repel. To attract what is good and to repel what is not desired. The plants will repel the insects that come to feed on their leaves and they will attract the insects that will come for pollenization. That is why we put perfume on because it attracts the other sex - we smell better so they will come closer. But some perfumes are synthetic and they repel. You wear them because you paid a lot of money for them. Why are they synthetic? Because the cost is cheaper by synthetic oils. The money the company thus saves is spent on the bottle and the packaging. An empty bottle costs twelve to fifteen dollars, and of course you need to add the price for the actor who is starring in the ads. Yes, it costs millions of dollars to put a perfume on the market. So, after all the packaging and marketing costs, there is not enough money left to put real essential oils inside the bottle. That is why they use synthetic oils that are carcinogenic etc…
Coco Channel was the first one to start the practice of using synthetic oils in perfume because she said she wanted to make a perfume that every person could afford to wear. Perfumes were very expensive with natural essential oils in them. She also made these very simple, chic suits. Her philosophy was that everyone could go to work with decent clothes without paying a fortune. Her designs became instant fashion. It was much the same with her perfumes.
Today perfumes contain laboratory-created essential oil replicas. If a company wanted to put a drop of the real neroli or the real rose in it, it would cost too much so they made a fake. How do they make it? With petroleum. You mix chemical products and you smell banana, change them and you will smell strawberry, green apple, all the smells. In candles, those fragrances are all chemicals and when you burn them, they disperse in the air. Research was done at universities to see what the worst carcinogenic substances are. So they took carpet, glue, cigarettes, tar, car exhaust and all these things. And the top category for carcinogenic and mutagenic substances was the candles and the synthetic perfume fragrances. But you do not see this published anywhere, except in juried scientific magazines. Try to publish this in a magazine like Cosmopolitan. These kinds of magazines receive hundreds of millions of dollars a year for the advertisements for the chemicals, primarily those from perfume fragrances. Do you know the synthetic fragrance that you are wearing can give you a headache, or stomach problems.
I tried to write an article about this and to present it to a new age magazine and they said: "We cannot put your article in our magazine, since we still get a lot of money from these kinds of advertisements,. So I decided to talk about it instead; I think word of mouth is better. But these articles exist, and if you want a copy of the scientific articles that have been researched in universities about these fragrances and how harmful they are, I can send you a copy. You will also be able to find them on the internet.
So when you light candles smelling like strawberry or green apple, it is a repellant. It will not be such a romantic evening, as the person will be upset. Now if we go back to the origin of these perfumes, we find that they were made for worshipping or for cleansing. Remember, in the ceremonies in the temples they burned herbs and plants and the fumes went everywhere. The fumes were one of the most purifying mediums. The ships were fumigated.
The word per-fume comes from fume. This is the way to purify a space. And now we can do it directly with the essential oils that are extracted. The first plants that produced essential oils were the conifers. About two million years ago pine trees, fir trees, spruce, hemlock - all these important plants - had their origin. They produced essential oils and the plants that grew around them benefited by being in a healthy environment. And when we were having a respiratory problem, you could go walk under these trees and you felt better. As a matter of fact, if you worked as a lumberjack in Canada, you probably never contracted tuberculosis. And people have asked how come? A person came up with the idea that it was due to cold, fresh air. They didn't make the real link until lately when the University of Quebec made a research project and showed that the conifer trees literally destroy all the bacilli that cause Tuberculosis. This was on the first page of a local magazine in Quebec, but it wasn't published in the widely distributed newspapers. It was published only for the profession. Since the information was not widely distributed, the people didn't know, or care, about the published results of the study. This is a shame.
Somebody asked if I know about Eucalyptus? Yes, but no Eucalyptus grows around here. See we have pine trees from New York right to the north. They know how to fight cold weather diseases. Eucalyptus is good for a dry climate, like in Australia. It grows in China, it grows in the Mediterranean where the winter is much warmer. So if you are coughing here and you take Eucalyptus it will make you cough more. Using the plants that are local will be more effective and efficient in fighting the local kinds of bacteria. Here everybody knows about the Tea tree. Where does it grow? It grows in Australia. An Australian university received funds from their government to research the effectiveness of Tea tree on certain bacteria. The research showed that Tea tree was fantastic. There are many kinds of Tea tree. It is like talking about conifer. Conifer doesn't mean Balsam Firor Pine, it means the whole group of species. It is the same with the Tea tree family. So the company now recommends to people that they can brush their teeth with it and put it on wounds, etc. If you take conifer oil and do an analysis, you also find very good results. This research at the University of Quebec wasn't done in order to promote one product, but to show that TB is completely destroyed by White Spruce. But, if you try Black Spruce it will have the same positive effect on the TB.
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Transcript was done by Karin G