It’s early autumn. There’s been a fall of rain in the night, and the sun is coming through the trees now in long slants of dappled light.
Wet bark. Pine resin. The dark, sweet smell of last year’s leaves going back into the earth. The ground is soft underfoot and gives a little as you walk. A wood pigeon somewhere. Water is still coming off the leaves.
The place is alive — green and dripping and very well established… and at the same time completely still. I feel quenched and relieved after the summer’s dryness.
Imagine This is Where You Are Right Now…
This may take you to times when you are in the woods or in nature. Notice what happens to your body even when you simply feel into such a scene… your breath can drop, your shoulders can come down. Your steps slow to the pace of the trees. Your attention leaves the noise of the day and moves into the smell, the light, the ground beneath your feet.
None of us needs to be told how good the woods are for us. An hour under the trees and something has eased, and we come out steadier, roomier, more ourselves.
The trouble is when life feels full, and we can’t get there. Life rarely hands us the forest at the moment we most need it. There’s the working week, the school run, the inbox that refills as fast as you empty it, the people who need you. And the days when the one thing that would set you right — an hour under trees — is the one thing there’s no time for.
It presses harder in a year like this one. Some years ask more of us than others, and this one, I think, is asking a great deal. The ground under the world seems to have been shifting more often than it used to, and a great many of us are quietly holding ourselves together while everything around us moves. When so much outside feels unsteady, there is really only one place left to build.
Within.
So, How Can We Do This?
How do we bring something of what the forest gives us into the body on the days the forest is out of reach?
Plenty of things carry us part of the way — time in nature when we can find it, a good talk with a friend, an hour lost in the garden. But it can feel empowering to have a simple resource to go to, one that can instantly take you there — and with use over time, it helps you access that steady, grounded place more instantly. For me, this can be experienced with pure essential oils when you know how to use them in a precise way on selected points of the body to achieve a desired effect.
Something genuinely shifts.
And this month, the plant I would like to share with you — exactly for this building of our internal structure and steadiness as we go towards the autumn — is Cedarwood.
Who Cedarwood Is
A good part of what the forest does to us comes through fragrance.
We breathe in the scent of bark, resin, leaves and earth, and something in us responds.
You know this already — cut grass, the first rain on dry ground, a perfume worn by someone you haven’t seen in years. Scent can move us very quickly, taking us somewhere before we’ve had time to think about where we’re going.
As well as understanding what an oil is “good for”, I feel it is equally important to understand who the plant actually is, its character, its qualities. When we know this, we can begin, as we work with each oil, to make the remembering of these qualities more easily accessible in our bodies and beings.
Cedarwood has a definite character.
Warm. Dry. Woody. Deep.
She has weight.
Spend a little time in Cedarwood’s company, and you sense something old and steady.
Cedarwood has been prized for thousands of years for the longevity of its wood. It built sacred temples, tombs, and things meant to last. It holds off decay. Its scent can remain in a drawer for decades. It stands through storms that flatten softer trees.
Something of that essence is in the oil.
Cedarwood doesn’t sparkle or lift; instead her energetics travel downwards — gathering scattered energy, drawing your attention back towards the body and towards the ground.
That downward, gathering quality is what I work with, with the points — bringing the forest into the body.
Where Essential Oil Meets the Meridian System
Chinese medicine has worked with precise points on the body for thousands of years. My work lives where those two meet — the pure essential oil’s essence and the acupoints of the Chinese medicine meridian system.
By understanding the essential oil’s ‘Soul Nature’ — so in this instance Cedarwood’s steady, woody, grounded qualities — and by beginning to understand its ‘Biodynamics of Fragrance’, the way its fragrance moves within our bodies — so in this instance it settles and grounds us — and then by learning which points on the body are the perfect marriage to support these rememberings within us, we can empower ourselves. As we learn and experience this firsthand, we begin to know which oil to work with at any given time and where to apply it to achieve the desired effect instantly. And over time, with regular use, we begin to change our baseline, as we can more and more easily access these qualities within ourselves.
What This Means in Practice
The forest gives us the slowing, the grounding, the sense of somewhere steady to stand when we happen to be there.
Working with Cedarwood on the right point lets us explore those qualities deliberately.
A slightly different road to the same country — with one important difference. Of course, it’s not quite the same as actually being in that forest, but how wonderful that…
We can choose it.
On a Tuesday. In ten minutes. In the middle of an ordinary week.
With Cedarwood, one of the points I come back to is Kidney 3, the Supreme Stream — on the inside of the ankle, in the soft hollow between the ankle bone and the tendon. And I can feel more centred, grounded and able to take on the world.
And for those of us who at times feel that particular tiredness of holding too much for too long — wound tight and worn out at the same time, running on empty while still keeping everything in the air.
On those days, what we need first is a place within ourselves to stand.
That is what Cedarwood is for me.
Some inner scaffolding — a structure inside the city of yourself, strong enough to hold you and roomy enough to live in.
Enough of a centre that you can stay open to a demanding life and keep your feet under you.
And it matters most on exactly the days it’s hardest to find — when everything pulls at once, and there’s nothing solid underfoot.
You don’t build that in an afternoon.
You cultivate it.
A few minutes with a plant becomes a small practice of remembering.
In the wood, something in us remembers how to slow down.
With Cedarwood on the point, we can call that quality up on purpose — and little by little it grows familiar.
We begin to recognise what grounded feels like and how to find our way back to it.
So that when the ground does start to go, we’ve built a little more of it to stand on.
There’s a seasonal logic to her, too.
Vata Season
In Ayurveda, autumn is the beginning of Vata season — air and space, movement and change — and when those qualities run high, we can feel scattered, restless, blown about.
Cedar is the counterweight.
Warm where Vata is cold, deep where it is light, steady where it turns mobile.
Which is perhaps why she feels so right just now.
This is the heart of the Aromatic Soul Journey — my Online Live Experience
Each month, we explore a different plant, met through its fragrance and through the body – a real experience.
I Invite You to Join Me for the Cedarwood Aromatic Experience Online
Thursday 10th September 7.30pm – 9pm
Fee: £35 — a 90-minute live session with me, from your own private space.
You will also receive an invitation to join the Ayurveda Wellbeing Platform, along with reference videos, resources, a recording of the live session, and a ready-to-use, diluted, high-quality Cedarwood pure essential oil sent to you upon sign-up, for you to use in our session and to keep.
Please join me here: https://ayurvedawellbeing.corinnakitchen.com/cedarwood-aromatic-experience
Something New This Autumn
From Wednesday, 16th September
And every Wednesday, 8 – 8.30 pm
I will be offering a Free Online Weekly Meditation open to everyone.
A simple place to pause and gather yourself in the middle of the week — come just as you are.
Sign up here: https://ayurvedawellbeing.corinnakitchen.com/midweek-meditation
Finally, if this way of working with Pure Essential Oils is new to you and you would like to understand more before going deeper, my complimentary ‘First Steps into Your Enchanted Garden’ is the place to begin.
The Enchanted Garden is simply the name I give that quiet place within, where our steadiness, our peace and our own true nature keep growing — it is already there, only sometimes it is hard to reach.
Tending it is how it blooms.
And working with oils this way is one of the simplest, most fragrant ways I know to help ourselves to bloom.
Begin here: ayurvedawellbeing.corinnakitchen.com/first-steps
Sometimes we need the forest. And sometimes, when life is full, and the ground feels unsteady, what we need is to carry a little of it with us — with the oil — with the slowing, the grounding, the sense of somewhere steady underneath — and to know we can bring it into the body on purpose, consciously, on the days it matters most.
Cedarwood is a beautiful place to begin.
Next Month
Cardamom, the Oil of Enrichment — supporting deep nourishment and true digestion and integration of life. Live Session: Thursday 15th October 7.30 – 9 pm https://ayurvedawellbeing.corinnakitchen.com/cardamom-aromatic-experience/
Corinna Kitchen
Corinna Kitchen is a Licensed Biodynamic Psychotherapist, Ayurvedic Food and Nutrition and Lifestyle Consultant and Pure Essential Oil AromaPoints Therapist. Explore her online sanctuary at Ayurveda Wellbeing, where she offers online programmes, one-to-one Biodynamic Psychotherapy and Ayurvedic Consultations: ayurvedawellbeing.corinnakitchen.com
In-person Biodynamic Psychotherapy and bodywork are available in Lewes by appointment.
Email Corinna directly: corinna [@] corinnakitchen.com
- About the Author
- Latest Posts
Our Editorial Team are writers and experts in their field. Their views and opinions may not always be the views of Wellbeing Magazine. If you are under the direction of medical supervision please speak to your doctor or therapist before following the advice and recommendations in these articles.
