About Us

Mission

Terroma is essential oil company focused on emotional wellness. Terroma blends and wellness products harness the power of nature to help you care for your emotional health so you can enjoy life more fully. 

Sourced and created with Intention

Our unique formulas emerge from working with artisanal distillers and producers with sustainable, ethical practices. Crafting any given blend is a product of extensive knowledge and research, pure passion and an open heart. Our essential oil blends are made of 100% pure, high-quality, non GMO essential oils. All single oils used in our blends are third party tested. GC-MS test reports that provide information on the chemical constituents of each oil, can be provided upon request.

Packaging 

Simply put, sustainable packaging matters. Our packaging has minimized the use of plastic so when you receive your Terroma order, you can be sure that everything is selected with sustainability in mind. We have one planet, and we choose to treat it with kindness and compassion.

 

Story

Terroma is a family owned business. The husband and wife team of Manol and Diyana, both born in the land of Rosa Damascena (aka as Bulgaria) have long been acquainted with the rich history of essential oil extraction in their homeland. Not only is Bulgarian Rosa Damscena best quality, but so is Lavender, Melissa, Zdravetz and many other essential oils.

Diyana had a first-hand healing experience with essential oils during her post-partum journey, which was to say the least, emotionally difficult. After two pregnancies back to back (14 months apart, to be precise) and losing a close friend to breast cancer in the meantime, the post-partum recovery with two babies was a struggle. Depression, sadness, self-doubt, anxiety and irritability actively took turns.

At that time essential oil concoctions and cocktails of various plants became Diyana’s little addiction.

“I’m not sure which device was used more, the breast pump or the essential oil diffuser. What I have not realized at the time is that emotions keep piling up at a cellular level in specific organs within our body. They must be cleared at this level in order to be released. Essential oils helped tremendously and slowly motherhood started to feel good."

Essential oils access stuck emotions at their deepest level, by accessing the limbic portion of the brain, which is where emotions reside. Aromatherapy is by no means a miracle cure for grave emotional issues, but countless studies suggest that they do help relieve particular emotional issues and emotional states.

Careful and proper use of essential oils can go a long way in balancing our emotional health.

This has become the focus for Terroma – emotional well being by using the immense abundance of natural resources.

  

Diyana at the Rose Valley in Bulgaria during Rose Picking in the spring

 

Diyana with her kids, Zina and Nick, and husband Manol

How do essential oils work on our emotions?

These synergies of natural chemical constituents interact with both our internal organs and our brain. Entering the body by two means, they can absorb through the skin and travel speedily up the nose to the brain to an ancient part of called the limbic system. Containing brain parts like the amygdala, hypothalamus and pituitary, the limbic system registers and responds to stress as well as being responsible for how quickly we learn, how good our memory is, and how vigorous our appetite and desire is too. This helps explain why certain smells have almost predictable reactions. The fragrance of bread baking will make most people feel hungry, for example, because the memory is closely linked with appetite, both of which are controlled in the hypothalamus. Memories and associations will often accompany fragrances because they function as “ligands” triggering reactions in various parts of our body and brain. Our entire physiology depends on ligands operating receptors to switch processes on and off in the cells of our body. Stress, for instance sends the hormone, cortisol, into the circulatory system to tell it to be on alert. Cortisol is the ligand which binds to the adrenergic receptor, which then draws energy away from less urgent physiological processes and focuses everything on making sure you are safe from any perceived dangers. Your heart rate speeds and you breathe faster enabling you to convert glucose to energy much more quickly, to power your legs to sprint away from whatever your amygdala perceives may be threatening you, and it will keep doing this until something in the body finds a way to switch it off.
Studies show that when you inhale lavender for example, your breathing and heart rate slow. This is relaxation, and when this happens, the body switches off cortisol release.
Different fragrances trigger different emotions in people and help us to safely revisit old memories that may also have triggers attached. Aromatherapy is such a powerful healing modality and using essential oils for emotional balance had the added benefit of being sensuous, balanced and fun.

 

Who is the aromatherapy expert behind Terroma's Blends?

Terroma blends have been created by world renowned professional, essential oil researcher and clinical aromatherapist Elizabeth Ashley.

The UK Director of National Association of Holistic Aromatherapy and overseas speaker for the International Federation of Aromatherapists, Ashley, also known as The Secret Healer, is the author of 20 books about aromatherapy including 12 Amazon category number one best sellers, as well as being a regular contributor to five professional trade journals.

Taking complex scientific data and making it accessible to everyone, her unique perspective on essential oils has made her one of the best loved and well-respected authorities in the industry.

When Terroma began the process of sourcing a consultant aromatherapist, Elizabeth became an obvious choice the moment she spoke about her oils, she called them “her friends”.

Here is what Liz has to say about her love of the essential oils and the process she went through to create Terroma glorious blends.

“The first time I spoke with Manol (one of Terroma's founders), he’d just left the hospital after watching his son being born. He was so proud and happy, I immediately liked him and somehow suspected we would enjoy a wonderfully happy business partnership, because it seemed to me he might come to associate me with the warm feelings he had about the birth of his son thanks to exuberant neurochemicals still coursing through his veins from the excitement of being with his beautiful wife Diyana in the delivery suite.

Hormones and neurotransmitters despatch emotional signals throughout our body. Emotional surges leave chemical echoes in our tissues, waiting to be served up again by all manner of triggers.

Odd to imagine, until you consider how music catapults you through space and time. Fragrances do the same. Perceive a familiar scent and it propels you into a flashback. Fragrance, the mind and the body share powerful and emotional connections.

Olfaction, being able to smell, is an ancient and arcane process, residing in one of the most primitive and highly evolved parts of the brain. Oddly, this system, known as the limbic system, also instructs many of the main driving emotions of our body too, so smell is intimately connected to fear, desire, motivation, hunger and fear too…as well as every other complex emotion you can think of.

Of course, as twenty first century beings, we think we are clever understanding this, but Man has used fragrance to tap into their emotions and spirituality for thousands of years, through perfumes, incenses and floral tributes for example.

It’s nothing new, and they did it without the reassurances of science.

Likewise, bees and butterflies don’t seek to comprehend why they are attracted to one fragrance or another, they simply follow the communication signals the plants give off and trust the plants will provide the sustenance they need. And, for the most part, they’re right.

In my research into essential oils, I look at the earliest recorded associations and literature about plants, right back to the ancient Greeks and Romans, and sometimes even earlier than that, and the thing I find fascinating is that the experiments clinicians are doing in laboratories today only confirm the ways people have been using plants for thousands of years.

It’s remarkable how intuition and instinct have been choosing plants for medicine since time immemorial, and now science trusts the efficacy of the oils so much, they use them as a means to understand physiological processes in our bodies. In other words, they know the essential oils heal, the experiments are merely to understand why.

But what’s so sad for me, is just when our medicine is becoming mainstream, the true beauty of the magic is becoming hidden away by a Western desire to always be so reductive. Aromatherapy, in its glorious exultant beauty is being buried under “if this hurts, use that”…and that’s true…but only for a little while, because while essential oils make a fantastic first aid kit, their true healing that aromatherapy can bring…the sort where people get properly better…comes from addressing the silent emotional burdens people carry. For pain is a complex demon who roars when something’s not right. And while that problem may be physical, dietary, nutritional…for the most part, often it is unresolved feelings that are fueling the daemon’s rage.

It is the biological reaction between the aromas and our emotions that releases our bodies from disease. Fragrances affect receptors in our brain and body to alter chemistry that keeps us locked in stagnant psychological states.

Ultimately, addressing stress releases us from being in worse physical pain than we need to be from repeated skin flare ups, headaches and myriad other health problems as well as relationship and social difficulties. No matter how many recipes you follow on Pinterest for medicinal complaints, disorders will always return unless you listen to your pleading body to address your emotions.

In 2018, this fervent belief lead me to design and co-host the Beyond the Essential Oil Recipe last year, where 60 of the best aromatherapists joined me to share best practice about how they addressed emotional issues too. 

These blends you see today are mixtures of the oils I use on my patients, where I have noticed patterns of success emerging. The eagle eye of you may notice some of the finer oils like rose, jasmine and neroli which apart from being generous additions from Terroma because of their high costs, are also some of the plants with the most clinical evidence into their psychological effects.

Terroma gave me completely free rein to choose the best to get the most effective results and have then gone on to select stunning quality oils which make the harmonies sing.

When concocting the formulae, I wanted the elixirs to have feminine, nurturing, passive and receptive qualities, so I employed ancient Greek mathematical ratios to harness that energy in the mix. The alchemy of the exquisite oils, the subtle therapeutic qualities and the intricate mathematical blending has created something extraordinary. Smooth, thick and luxurious, the blends feel like angels gently stroking your head.
I am extremely grateful to Terroma for the opportunity to see the result of my thirty years of study into mind body medicine made manifest."