5 Ways To Create Daily Summer Relaxation Rituals With Essential Oils

It¹s summertime and the living is, well, not so easy. Your social calendar is booked. Your daily calendar is crunched with extra outdoor activities and chores. Even your work calendar is overloaded to make up for holidays and to cover colleagues' vacation schedules.

Squeeze those summertime-easy-living moments into your life with daily relaxation rituals. By adding essential oils and a relaxation focus to your everyday activities, you establish a healthy routine that brings you peace and makes daily tasks more enjoyable and restorative.

Here are five summer rituals for you to try.

1. After work ritual: Set the tone for the evening with essential oils.

Bergamot, lavender, geranium, ylang ylang, patchouli and sandalwood are all excellent choices if the goal is relaxation. Diffuse the oils in your space for a minimum of 20 minutes, and your home will become a sanctuary of relaxation instead of an arena of chaos. Keep the artificial lights at a minimum, and let the long summer days fill your home with natural light.

2. Mealtime ritual: Diffuse oils at dinnertime to help transition into the evening. 

Citrus oils are perfect for summertime and offer a pleasant, uplifting and focusing aromatherapy effect.

3. Bath-time ritual: If you have small children, use essential oils in the bathtub to calm them and yourself. 

Lavender and chamomile are both calming and soothing to the skin ­ and they can make a child's bath more enjoyable for parent and child alike. Of course, these are great oils for your own relaxing bath as well.

4. Study-time ritual: Kids are now encouraged to keep up with their studies over the summer. 

Help make this time more enjoyable and focused with essential oils. Diffuse some focusing oils like rosemary or sage at the kitchen or dining room table instead of sending them off to their rooms to study. Turn off the television, open the windows and turn on some soft music — ­you'll be able to focus and so will they.

5. Outdoor activity ritual: Summer brings a lot of outdoor time. 

Make a simple essential oil mist to take to a ball game or soccer practice to keep nerves at bay and to make sitting on the sidelines a calm, happy experience. Or, make a mist to soothe skin affected by the hot sun. This recipe does double duty in that it combines calming lavender with refreshing and uplifting peppermint and spearmint. Not only will it influence your mood, it's soothing to the skin.

Suncare Mist

Directions:

Pour ingredients into a spray mister bottle. Essential oils and water will separate, so shake the bottle vigorously before misting lightly over sunburned skin. To increase the cooling effect, store bottle in refrigerator.