Palo Santo Resin Ritual Oil

Sticks of this wood from Peru have been burned as smudges since at least the Inca, and it sweet, timeless scent remains popular for meditation, cleansing, and ritual. Its lovely aroma comes from the high amount of resin in the wood, and like Frankincense and other resins, it can be collected in a sustainable and renewable way that does not kill the trees.

The resin, in the censer and in our Ritual Oil, is more concentrated than the scent of the wood, still very sweet, but also a bit sharp and with some camphor notes. That camphor is a signature of many cleansing herbs, and we find the resin to be more banishing and protective than the wood. For cleansing, it combines well with our Tulsi Spiritualized Essence.

Palo Santo is a very Mercurial aromatic in its balanced, multi-directional effects. It is uplifting, but also calming; it banishes negativity but also brings in positive influences, and its lifecycle represents rebirth after death and the traveling back and forth between our world and the immaterial planes.

Working with it here, we found the Ritual Oil to have a profoundly calming effect on the mind. Under its influence, racing thoughts and worries just dropped into a void and were gone, leaving behind a quality like the glass-still ocean. Then, from that still place, we found it easy to move into any other time or place across that ocean. It is an herb of scrying and astral travel, but not in the usual sense of projection and movement. It connects to the underlying medium of space and time, letting you drop the moment you are in so that it, and you, can disperse across all moments.

We’ve enjoyed working with it in conjunction with our Sandalwood Initiatic for even greater stillness within, and with our Tesseract Somalixir to enhance the Mercurial traveling energy.

For tips and techniques for working with our Ritual Oils, see this article.