Just about everyone knows the golden rule of reassurance: "It does not matter than you fail. It matters immensely what you learn from your failure, how you get up and go on." Essential lavender apparently empowers you to benefit from your mistakes, learn from your failures, and start all over again. Simultaneously soothing nerves and stimulating the brain, it helps you feel self-confident and inspired.

Combine a potent dose of essential lavender with an MRI machine, and watch a patient's limbic system and right brain hemisphere light up like Christmas trees. Behold in wide wonder as it calms the cortices associated with stress and anxiety, limiting activity in the brain's logical and linear left hemisphere. Cognitive psychologists and psychiatrists have proven what grandma always already understood. Few essential oils rival this ones psychoactive powers. In their most recent research, psychologists studying motivation have documented how it helps people cope with and bounce back from their failures.

Because essential lavender opens pathways to the right brain and fires-up the limbic system, it increases people's capacity for "negotiating meaning" and interpreting experience. Stuck in their left-brained analytic frames of mind, most people will count-up the consequences of failure, concluding they have "fallen flat." With the benefit of this essential oil and other psychoactive aromas, however, people's in-built capacities for learning and growth emerge. "Failure" no longer has a pejorative tone, because people can recognize life-lessons and opportunities immanent in their failures. Most of all, lavender calms and focuses people, contributing to their strength and courage, as they find meaning and value in their failures and begin speculating, "What do I want? How do I get there from here?"

Imagination and the brain's right hemisphere have far greater problem-solving potential than the all-day, every day left-brain can muster. Linear, sequential, logical, numerical, and empirical, the left brain works according to the laws of probability, calculating what will happen. The left-brain thrives on strict conditionals-if this, then that; and if that, then inevitably the other. Under the healthy influence of lavender and its allied natural extracts, though, the right brain examines all things plausible-the stuff that could happen. The right brain and imagination know little if any censorship, running on the old radical slogan, "Be realistic. Demand the impossible." Instead of strict conditionals, the right brain and imagination thrive on simultaneity, synchronicity, and serendipity-If this, then maybe that, and possibly that, too, and maybe even that other, and, sure, that other thing after that. Speculating, planning, learning and growing with lavender stimulating their alternative problem-solving capacities, people discover how new ideas resemble spider webs. Each fecund concept links to prior knowledge, past experience, and plausible outcome in ways that defy logical analysis yet stand up well under rigorous scrutiny according to "the reality principle."

This research has expanded psychologists' and psychiatrists' theories of nature and nurture. In traditional constructs of motivation, most of them built on the presumption that the left-brain governs choice and behavior, "talent" was taken as given, and professionals counseled, "Apply your gift!" Using insights from their experimentation with rose, geranium, lavender, spicy essential oils, vanilla and almond, professionals evade ordinary consciousness, going to the brain's more reliable pathfinders. Still taking talent as given, alloying it with desire and determination, professionals inquire, "What do you wish to accomplish with your gift?"

Especially working with people struggling to bounce back from failure, naturopaths and their traditional colleagues have found how essential lavender and other aromatherapy oils prompt people to discover not how they have "fallen flat" but how they have "fallen into."