Aromatherapy Courses

Stimulate Your Senses And Awaken Inner Peace With Aromatherapy Courses

Everywhere you go you will find ads for scented candles, room fresheners, fabric deoderizers and scented oil plug-ins. The sense of smell is a very powerful thing, and by adding the right scent to an environment, it can drastically change your mood and well-being.

Certain scents are even connected to quitting smoking or weight loss; stimulating something in our brains to move us into action. By taking aromatherapy courses, you can learn how to incite different feelings through smell and share your knowledge with others.

Job Description

As an aromatherapist, you will work with clients to help them achieve relaxation and heal their ailments. You will consult with them about their lifestyle, medical history and any current medical or anxiety problems. You will then decide which essential oils can be used to help them and blend the appropriate scents.

You will then apply the oils, often in the form of a therapeutic massage. An aromatherapist also often works in collaboration with the client's family doctor when necessary, depending on the patient's affliction.

Training and Education

Aromatherapy courses and schools don't usually have a standardized curriculum because there are no national requirements or guidelines for aromatherapy. In an aromatherapy course you will most commonly learn to work with essential oils, which are oils that are distilled from flowers, roots, stems or other plant parts.

You will use these oils to detoxify and relax the mind body and soul, for beauty or medicinal purposes during therapies like massage, reflexology or reiki. You will learn the different properties in each smell and how to extract them. You will also be able to detect the difference between real and synthetic fragrances and to work with the tools to attain them.

In your training, you will also learn how to make balms, salves, lotions and poultices. You will learn what parts of the brain are affected by what smells, and the spiritual history of aromatherapy.

Although aromatherapy is best studied in person, there are many online courses you can take to complete your studies. Online courses will teach you which oils are used for which purposes, and will fine tune your skills in creating different infusions and aromatic products.

You could also study an introductory class in extraction and theory classes in physiology and chemistry. For the best exposure to scents and blending though, aromatherapy schools are recommended.

Getting Your License

It is not regulated or mandatory to get an aromatherapy license, although most aromatherapy classes are usually taken to achieve certification once you already have a massage therapist or other holistic science license. Aromatherapy certification is offered by The National Association for Holistic Aromatherapy and does establish credibility and competence, which is attractive to clients.

There are 2 levels of certification you can achieve: the first being knowledge of the history, basic physiology and 20 essential oils. The second is much more in-depth, requiring you to have completed botany, ethics, organic chemistry, and advanced blending and application techniques. You will have advanced understanding of the body's systems, and you will need to write a 5-10 page course paper, pass the exam and do 10 case studies to get your certification.

Aromatherapy is an area of study that is relatively new in terms of being widely accepted and therefore is not very regulated. It is however, an alternative method that many people are interested in, helping the field gain popularity. When combined with licenses in other holistic sciences are massage therapy, a certificate in aromatherapy is very attractive to clients and can help your business gain success.

Aromatherapy courses can help prepare you to enter this world without dedicating a lot of time, since most programs can be done in a matter of months. Your salary expectations can range anywhere from $15,000 to $45,000 depending on if you're combining your aromatherapy with an existing degree, but your creativity and degree of satisfaction will make the career choice worthwhile.

Request free info from Massage/Wellness Schools

Alternative Medicine Schools |