Sandalwood Oil has been my secret weapon in combatting spacey and unfocused thoughts and fuzzy emotional grey areas.  When you feel un-hinged from the ground, floaty and less effective in your daily life, you may need a little grounding.

In feng shui, the element of Earth is most grounding. Earth element is the “mother” of all elements, the creative, the life-nurturing and stabilizing.  In aromatherapy terms, sandalwood is the most fragrant of the earthy scents.  Thus, sandalwood oil is both very wearable and fantastically versatile to layer with other more “floral” or “woody” essential oils.

Used to treat everything from depression and sadness to dry and irritated skin, sandalwood essential oil is balancing and healing.

Precious sandalwood oil is very expensive.  It can run over $70.00 an ounce for extremely high quality pure oil.  If you are a budding aromatherapist, this is a worthwhile investment.  Should you sniff this pure oil from the bottle, it would be overwhelmingly potent.  Just a drop or two of pure oil will do the trick in most applications, and if you plan to wear the oil on your skin, it should be mixed with an oil like coconut or grape seed or jojoba so that you avoid skin irritation.  I prefer to get sandalwood oil pre-mixed with with jojoba oil,  which is the cheaper way to go if you are a casual or non-professional user.

My top four ways to use sandalwood oil to get grounded:

1. 10 drops of sandalwood oil mixed with a carrier oil, or three “pure” drops of oil in a tub full of hot water.  add the oil just before entering the bath so that it doesn’t “burn off” and diffuse into the air before you arrive.

The root chakra is shown here in RED

2. I like to put sandalwood mixed with jojoba oil on my wrists and near my tailbone/ lower back to help open up the root chakra. Adding a few drops of rose oil can turn this into the best perfume ever!

3.  Because it is so expensive, its impractical to diffuse lots of sandalwood oil into the air.  But, a few drops on an unglazed piece of pottery can do the trick for your personal use.  Unglazed pottery is easy to find at your local garden store or Home Depo: just get a few bottoms of unglazed flower pots.  They cost next to nothing and work beautifully!  This pottery-oil-diffusing method is a good thing for lunchtime at the office if you are eating at your desk.  Try to sit for a few minutes with the aroma to calm down and decompress before eating.

4. You can drop a few drops of sandalwood oil blend (pre-mixed with carrier oil) onto a damp, hot washcloth.  Run a clean cotton washcloth under a stream of hot water until it is soaked and quite warm.  Wring it out quickly, add a few drops of the sandalwood essential oil blend, and lay it over your face while you recline for a few minutes and breathe deeply.  If you have a dry or irritated patch of skin, try adding ten or twelve drops to the cloth and applying it directly to the skin as a compress.  Brilliant!