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Sandalwood
One of the loveliest gifts the Orient has given to the Occident is sandalwood. Its warm, spicy fragrance suggests tropical forests, Oriental palaces. Sandalwood helps release us from tension, confusion, and a hectic pace—carrying us on its wings to a place of calm and expanded well being. Rosemary helps us journey toward the inner Oriental space within all of us.

Sandalwood’s calming, harmonizing, and balancing effect acts like deep, slow waves. It contrasts with the quicker, higher, and more driving energies of lemongrass, grapefruit, and lemon verbena. Sandalwood has the opposite effect on our psyche. It embraces emotions with a warm. woody fragrance.
With sandalwood the experience of warmth and balance fills the human heart with joy. This makes it an ideal remedy for nervous depression, fear, stress, and a hectic daily tempo. When you react to others with aggression and irritation, it is time to reach for sandalwood. Relaxation and distancing from inner stress takes place in slow, progressive stages.

Since sandalwood’s effects are slow and powerful, like an Indian elephant, it should be avoided by people who are slow and phlegmatic hy nature. For them, oils with a faster pulse would he more appropriate. Sandalwood aids people who want to make human contact and overcome isolation. Sandalwood helps them accept others with an open heart and diminish their egocentricity. Personal contact is a largely subconscious process guided by tiny fragrance signals. Sandalwood fhsters openness, warmth, and understanding.

Sandalwood has been long considered an aphrodisiac. Scientists are researching old applications of sandalwood. About the erotic quality of the oil, they have discovered a connection. Men’s underarm perspiration releases androsterone, a substance very similar in chemical structure to the male hormone testosterone. Androsterone in light concentrations smells similar to sandalwood. It seems that sandalwood—like underarm perspiration—sends out barely perceptible, but rather effective, erotic signals to the opposite sex. Maybe that’s why men have chosen this fragrance to increase their attractiveness to women.

Another aspect of sandalwood’s mysterious effects has assigned sandalwood to the root-chakra, seat of the fertility organs and sexuality, as well as to the highest chakra or energy center, seat of wisdom and insight. Yogis describe sandalwood oil as the fragrance of the “subtle body,” the center of the highest insight and enlightenment. It is also considered the aura of a person who has overcome all superficiality.

How can a fragrance be assigned to both the highest and lowest energy centers. In the school of tantric yoga sandalwood oil is recommended for transforming chakras of sexuality. It is used to awaken the power of kundalini and to connect that energy with the highest enlightenment. The tantric school, however, keeps this practice hidden from the uninformed. Students do not undergo this process until after long periods of preparation. Swahra-Yoga, a theory that involves studying ways to combine cosmic rhythm and brain function, recommends that the fragrance of sandalwood be used for achieving union of the body’s delicate energy centers.

It is possible to experience the connection between the chakras in a simple, harmless way with a sandalwood oil massage. The massage should be carried out in a relaxed atmosphere. You experience gentle warmth flowing through the body. The massage may be particularly beneficial for people who have lost equilibrium or whose energy centers are unevenly burdened. The oil helps reconciling contradictions and supports the delicate give-and-take between the two chakras.
It is easy to see why Oriental culture considers sandalwood a sacred fragrance.