my mom's emotional healing with tea tree (melaleuca) essential oil
my mom's emotional healing with tea tree (melaleuca) essential oil
Tea tree oil and emotional healing? It’s storytime!
When I was really little, my mom would let me take hour-long baths almost every night.
Bubble bath was a must, and usually food coloring too. It was so fun--but over time, I developed some gnarly skin rashes.
In retrospect, we live in TEXAS and if you're soaking your skin in water for hours each week, and not using lotion or oil of some sort to rehydrate/seal in the moisture, your skin is gonna get extremely dry!
My mother did not think of this, however.
She was worried, and for her, worried meant "driven".
She bought all sorts of ointments, creams, disinfectants, anti-virals, anti-bacterials--whatever you can think of. Prescription creams and all...but nothing helped.
My mama was already skeptical of the medical model of care, and so she started researching.
Finally, she learned about something all the way from Australia, called TEA TREE OIL.
Mind you, this was 1985. My mom was researching this in obscure home-printed newsletters at the health food store, and dodgy-looking ads in the back of natural health magazines that she had to mail away for.
Essential oils were NOT a thing yet, and neither was holistic living, really...
She ordered some tea tree oil, who knows from where.. She was so excited about it, and went on about how it would not only cure my rashes, but sanitize the house, get rid of fungus, viruses, mold, and every other scary thing that might come into her home.
When we got it, OMG the SMELL...I thought it was horrid.
But my mama loved it, and the entire house smelled like tea tree oil for basically the rest of my childhood.
Somewhere in there, my plague of skin rashes disappeared, and of course, my mom praised the tea tree oil.
Now, it was probably a combination of things....but tea tree oil was cemented in my mind as something useful, STINKY, and very important.
Now, fast forward a bunch of years, and I use all sorts of oils for both physical and emotional issues.
In fact, I'm currently writing a guidebook on emotions and essential oils as part of my latest project.
In the research I've been doing, I came across the emotional implications and benefits of Melaleuca, which is of course another name for Tea Tree oil.
I never thought about it beyond the physical applications, for things like cleansing and physical issues.
In reading the page about what EMOTIONAL ISSUES Tea Tree oil supports, I was just blown away. No wonder my mama loved it so much.
Far beyond skin issues and cleaning house....she felt so drawn to this oil that is all about clearing energetic baggage...about protecting oneself from toxic, codependent relationships.
Tea Tree oil encourages you to release all forms of self-betrayal, and create healthy boundaries to protect yourself from "energy vampires."
This was exactly what my mother needed, and while I don't think she ever fully recovered from her psychic wounds in this life...
I'm just so inspired by how she called that particular oil into her life, long before anything like emotional aromatherapy was commonly practiced.
Good job, Mama.