Have you ever driven a familiar route in your car, one you drive regularly to work for example, and when you got to the destination, you couldn’t remember driving it at all? Well that’s because you were operating under the influence of a network in your brain called...

by Florian Birkmayer MD   Jung resurrected the term ‘Enantiodromia‘ from Heraclitus to refer to the hidden patterns by which the psyche evolves. Enantiodromia literally means things turning into their opposite. While Heraclitus felt that this applied to the...

What Does Grounding Even Mean? Although we all seem to have an intuitive sense, the longer I (Florian) have thought about it, the more different definitions or aspects become apparent to me. One common meaning of grounding is being connected to the ground, to the...

“When the going gets weird, the weird go pro.” Hunter S. Thompson I (Florian) don’t know about you, but to us it’s recently felt like the earth changes have been turned up a few notches. It feels that familiar power structures, social structures, political structures...

One of the major causes of trauma that we are witnessing in our work here at AromaGnosis is what is known as Cognitive Dissonance and we recently realized our work could be described as being midwives of the soul. Cognitive Dissonance is when beliefs and what is said...

by Florian Birkmayer, MD   Psychedelic therapy can be considered one of the oldest forms of therapy for soul healing and at the same time is now considered cutting edge in biomedical medicine after decades of being shunned. Using essential oils for psychedelic...

One of the themes that has been central to my life is abusive relationships with men. The aromatic wizard and good friend John Steele said that knowing me today, he couldn’t understand how I could have been in such destructive and abusive relationships. For some...

by Florian Birkmayer MD   I wanted to share and express my gratitude for a spontaneous guided ceremony I was guided through for the 2020 summer solstice for letting go of defensiveness. I was looking forward to driving to Las Vegas from Taos because the road...

A core part of our work is using the seven alchemical stages of transformation as a framework for the processes that our psyches are continually going through. Maybe the most important and most challenging stage is mortificatio, in which we need to embrace dying to be...