Aromatherapy is good scents for healing
Accountant Sonia Blondeau found relief from excruciating pain with essential oils — now she’s committed to promoting their use in medical settings
Now, when the old nostrils are stimulated by an unexpected fragrance, I find myself drawn back, in a kind of sensory recollection (mind and body), to that room/studio where I recently met Sonia Blondeau. A place of consummate peace. In it, a diffuser was feeding aromas of essential oil into the air, almost imperceptibly. Tranquil music, coming from the wall, rippled under our conversation like a breeze whispering in the curtains. Moka, Sonia’s chocolate Lab, breathed the breath of peaceful slumber at my feet.
But the most peaceful energy was emanating from a woman who, after six years, has recovered her essence, in a manner of speaking, her very self. A woman who has resurrected a happiness she’d largely lost, shorn from her by unremitting pain. The pain changed her, threatened to vanquish her best self, but now she feels she has conquered it and, in addition, found new dimensions of strength.
One feels that — in the room, in her presence. The peace. The serenity of a balance restored.
“Six years ago, I knew nothing about aromatherapy,” Sonia Blondeau tells me. Now, she has written a book. And this week — and into late November — Sonia is away at conferences she has organized in Quebec with aromatherapy nurse Catherine Maranzana, from France, who is the subject of that book.
Sonia had been enjoying life and a successful career in accounting, which took her from Quebec to chief operating officer (she so distinguished herself ) for the renowned SB Partners, based in Burlington.
But in 2012, she had a terrible fall from her bicycle while training for a triathlon. The damage was profound.
“It was a violent fall and left me with severe injuries — hip, shoulder, nerves.”
She couldn’t work for a time. After some recuperation, she returned to work, but the pain didn’t relent. One day in 2014, she was found in the washroom at work vomiting from pain. She went on long-term disability.
“I was not the same. I was angry with the situation. I’m a fighter, but here I was immobilized by my own body,” she said. She tried many conventional medications. Nothing worked.
At her lowest point, Sonia went, as a last resort, to a German pain clinic. “I was covered in cream and heavy blankets,” she says, and bathed in a pool of salt, her body absorbing minerals. It led her to explore complementary medicines, and so the world of aromatherapy opened up for her.
“It was the first time I felt real relief,” she tells me.
In her studio, she walked me over to a table on which vials and ampoules were displayed. Labels denoted their contents — sandalwood, camomile, wintergreen, ylang ylang, balsam fir and much more. She passed an open one under my nose; the effect was powerful.
Aromatherapy can be used holistically, as a complement to — not a substitute for — conventional treatments (at times called allopathic, though that word is seen by some as pejorative). This, for Sonia, was her passport and convoy back to health.
For two years after Germany, she travelled to Iceland to an essential oil distillery, to Bali, Italy, England, the United States, France and elsewhere in avid pursuit of knowledge about aromatherapy.
Sonia interviewed experts all over the world, while also becoming a certified aromatherapist, studying the science and molecular structure of essential oils in the United States.
But by far the most profound impact was the lengthy time she spent in France with Catherine Maranzana, who introduced a pilot project in French hospitals to use aromatherapy in conjunction with conventional drugs and practices. It was such a success that aromatherapy is available in many hospitals there for numerous protocols.
Sonia was so impressed by her that the book she began to write about her own experience-turned into the story of Catherine Maranzana.
The book is called Au coeur Des Essences: Lorsque les Huiles Essentielles s’invitent en Milieu Hospitalier (roughly translated as At the heart of the Essences — When Essential Oils are Invited into the Hospital Environment). It’s published in French by Le Dauphin Blanc; Sonia would love to see it come out in English.
Meanwhile, she is sought after as a speaker at conferences and also works from her Burlington studio/home, which she shares with Carmen Bourgouin and her husband, who helped her when she was ill.
“I am so grateful to them,” she says, and to SB Partners who were so supportive, Sonia adds, when she was dealing with her trauma and when she parted company with them to go a different way.
Sonia, who doesn’t make outsized claims for aromatherapy, advocates for its acceptance, evidence-based, as an option, in Canadian hospitals and elsewhere, in conjunction with conventional medicine.