Want to Feel Better

After fifty years as a nurse and fifteen years as a registered aromatherapist, Susan Brougher has packed her knowledge about the medical benefits of lavender into Want to Feel Better—Keep Lavender Handy: Essential Oils, Energy, Safety, Support. Perfect for gardeners, therapists, and people interested in both the beauty of lavender and its biology and chemistry alike, Want to Feel Better—Keep Lavender Handy lightens its instruction with images to color and inspirational quotes to encourage relaxation and introspection. Brougher has also included a chart of twenty-four essential oils, purposefully keeping the list short so that it remains understandable and practical.

Read Reviews

5 stars – aromatherapy basics brought to life – Whynotthis

For the love of lavender! This book is a wonderful read on the benefits of

lavender and aromatherapy in general. It covers some theory, science and

specific how to of the art in a well-written, easy to read format.

5 stars – your body, mind, and soul will thank you – Grady Harp

Tennessee author Susan Brougher is well known and well loved by readers of her books – her memoir THE STRONGEST BOND, and her children’s books THE MAGIC OF CHRISTMAS – THE MAGIC OF LOVE and THE MAGICAL KINGDOM OF ING. As this reviewer has stated before, Susan Brougher shares – with everything she creates she offers joy, restores Christmas, offers love, solace, and memories. She both writes and illustrates so that her entire soul is open to us – and a more beautiful welcome could not be imagined. Stories, memories, humor, tears – they are all part of what Susan brings to her books.

Now Susan gifts us with her life journey as a Registered Nurse, having experience in hospitals, the Army Nurse Corps, and in Developmental and Behavioral, Environmental, and Home Health venues. She is a Healing Touch Practitioner-A, and a Registered Aromatherapist, having earned her diploma in Aromatherapy and Oriental Medicine from The Institute of Traditional Herbal Medicine and Aromatherapy. In this sensitive book she focuses on the medical benefits of lavender.

Continuing her warmly gentle manner of writing, Susan opens her book as follows: ‘To meet lavender is to breathe her magical, sweet, floral and herbal aroma. Lavender helps your skin, muscles, joints, and nerves. She enters your everyday life to improve sleep, reduce stress, and lift depression. When lavender’s essential oil is distilled from the freshly cut flowering top, she is floral. When the leafy stalks are distilled with the flowers, she is an herbal green…Lavender is associated with the element of air, which reminds us of our true divine self and takes us beyond our conflicts and into harmony.’

With those words, Susan has magnetized our attention and our desire to learn. After a fine history of her chosen subject, lavender, Susan expounds on the attributes of lavender – how to grow into the realm of the essence of the flower, how to select from the various forms, how to use lavender (and for what goals…), and an excellent survey of all essential oils and their impact on our health and spirit and soul. Her words of wisdom are accompanied by some fine quotations and drawings.

More than an instruction guide, this little book is a sensitive introduction to a new level of response to life – and love.

4 stars – lavender love and wisdom – Brittany

In-depth research and love of lavender fill the pages. There was a little bit of everything in here: Wisdom on safety, support, plant energetics (which my beginner herbalist heart loved), and so much more lavender love.

I’ll never forget how the author, Susan Brougher, wrote about essential oil being the life force of plants, the equivalency of what blood is to us. Plants offer their ‘life force’ to us, being medicinal. My gratitude and love for plants, herbalism, and aromatherapy increased immensely.

I loved that she touched on, something you may or may not have ever heard of before; plant murder. I haven’t conducted any polygraph tests myself (an amazing study shared in the text) but I have seen plants react and protect themselves first hand:
When I approach our overgrown Prickly Pear Cactus with an attitude of less than love: “I’m going to chop you down whether you like it or not, you’ve got to go!” I’m always injured, the cactus protects itself by releasing tons more thorns at me than when I lovingly have the intention of “I’ll only cut what is needed, you are hurting anyone that walks by. Please allow me.” I always come out way more unscathed, if any injury at all, compared to when I go about it ‘King Kong style’. Energy matters. “Want To Feel Better – Keep Lavender Handy”, shared multiple studies and results of research conducted to share impactful visuals to better understand and back the text.

I learned so much from this, having worked with Lavender quite a bit in the last few years, this surprised and thrilled me!

Here’s just some of what I’ve learned:

• How to make signature scents by letting oils “get to know each other”, as the author calls it (I loved that) over several days vs taking 5 seconds to make an essential oil blend.

• Plants do communicate in frequencies humans can’t hear and also release scents as a way to communicate with other plants.

• I deepened my relationship with Lavender, but also included at the very end are 24 other essential oils, their energetic properties, medicinal properties, safety concerns, +.

My only wish is that this would have been longer. It didn’t feel like 110 pages (ebook). Give me more, because this was GREAT info.
—If the author laser-focuses in on individual plants as she did here, I’d love a big huge binder compilation of all of them together to refer to over and over again throughout the years, (once done) one wouldn’t need much else to study from. I look forward to seeing more from this author. 🙂

*Essential oil recipe blends were not a focus.

Much gratitude to publisher Outskirts Press, Inc. and author Susan Brougher for the ARC (ebook) I won via the Goodreads Giveaway Program. I was under no obligation to write a review, my honest opinion is freely given.