The cedar and lavender

There is a small diffuser on the table by the bedroom door that I run for thirty minutes most evenings, around eight o'clock, with three drops of cedarwood oil and two drops of lavender added to the water. The combination is not, by any aromatherapy convention, a standard pairing. I came across it slightly by accident, by trying two oils together that I had both bought independently, and discovered that the combination produced an effect that neither produced alone.

The cedar gives the room a low warm woody quality. The lavender adds a small floral lift on top. Together, the smell is, in some way, the smell of a small wooden cabin in early summer, with the windows open and a small lavender plant on the sill. The smell is recognisable but not specific to any particular place — it has, over years, become the smell of our apartment in the evenings, and the cumulative effect is the small specific quality that the smell of an evening builds up over years.

What this does for the evening

Creates a small olfactory cue that the day is closing. The body, after years of evenings that contain this smell, has come to recognise it as the small signal that the practice block is about to begin. The breath, on smelling the cedar and lavender, drops slightly. The shoulders soften. The whole small parasympathetic transition that I want to happen in the evenings has, in some way, become triggered by the smell.

This is the most useful thing I have learned about aromatherapy. The specific smell matters less than the consistency of using it. A simple two-oil combination, used at the same time most evenings for years, becomes a small powerful cue that the body and the mind both respond to. The smell of cedar and lavender, in our apartment, is now the smell of the evening winding down, and the smell does some of the work of the wind-down for me.