Essential oils can help support trauma release and emotional regulation via your sense of smell.
Your sense of smell has direct access to the brain, allowing you to bypass mental resistance and go straight to the subconscious to help unravel trauma, both physically and emotionally.
Somatic therapy—a body-centered approach to trauma that focuses on sensations in the body, including smell—can help you release the physical and emotional effects of past trauma.
Your body registers, holds, and expresses traumatic experiences and emotions on a cellular level. This means traumatic events can impede or even sever your connection to signals from your body. This can leave you feeling disconnected and may make it difficult for you to notice what your body needs and how it feels. This lack of awareness can keep you stuck in fight or flight or other maladaptive stress responses.
Somatic practices can help you reconnect with and explore physical sensations, breaking the survival patterns that may keep you stuck in a state of high alert.
What is Somatic Therapy?
Somatic therapy helps you access and release the unresolved emotional issues and trauma that may become ‘trapped’ in your tissues by helping you focus on and connect with your body.
The word “Somatic” is derived from the Greek word “soma”, which means body. The intentional and focused practice of somatic therapy can help you become aware of and pay attention to sensations in your body, as well as how emotions manifest within the body and the nervous system.
Somatic practices may enhance your ability to sense, interpret, and act upon bodily signals, and help you feel safe. This safety can help calm your nervous system and put your body into coherence, allowing a safe space to process and transmute trauma and challenging emotions that are stuck in your nervous system and body.
While dissociation pulls you out of your body and numbs you to emotional pain, somatic practices enable you to connect with your body so you can access and process the trauma. Somatic practices may help to clear disruptions in nervous system energy and enhance heart coherence.
Somatic healing may help bring awareness to your body’s sensations and responses, which can aid in improving emotional regulation. When you can observe and understand how your nervous system reacts and adapts to different situations, you begin to recognize patterns of stress responses—fight, flight, and freeze—and how these can become maladaptive after trauma. By bringing conscious awareness to these patterns, somatic healing allows you to retrain your nervous system, guiding it towards a balanced and more adaptive response.
In essence, somatic healing supports the nervous system’s natural tendency to regain balance, acting as a catalyst in the healing process.
Signs You Might Benefit from Somatic Therapy
Somatic practices may help support emotional, psychological, or physical issues. You may benefit from somatic therapy if you are experiencing any of the following:
- Chronic Stress
- Anxiety
- Depression
- Unresolved Trauma or Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)
- Chronic Physical Pain or Tension (headaches, muscle tension, or digestive discomfort)
- Low Energy or Fatigue
- Trust and Intimacy Issues
- Overthinking or Ruminating
- Difficulty with Emotional Regulation
- Self-Esteem Challenges
- Disrupted Sleep
- Inability to Concentrate.
Unexplained physical symptoms often signal unresolved emotional pain. Somatic therapy aims to drain those emotions of their power, helping to transform these patterns by addressing how your body has been patterned by stress and supporting its return to regulation, which may both relieve pain and other manifestations of stress.
Emotional Release and Somatic Therapy
Connecting with your emotions is a vital aspect of healing, especially when you have experienced trauma. That said, identifying and understanding your feelings can be challenging. If you are working through trauma, certain emotions might feel difficult to access or may bring discomfort. It is often through subtle somatic cues and changes in our bodily sensations that we can help you recognize the emotions you are experiencing.
By focusing on the sensations underlying your emotions, you can recalibrate your subconscious process of evaluating safety and threat in your environment, known as neuroception. By paying attention to these bodily sensations, you can cultivate a deeper awareness of your emotional state and, in turn, gain a better understanding of your body’s needs.
Somatic work can help you interpret the signals you experience, both internally (interoception) and in response to external stimuli (exteroception), to assess your sense of safety and overall well-being.
Trauma contributes to maladaptive internal and external responses. For example, the emotions of excitement and anxiety can provoke similar physical sensations—a racing heart, quickened breath, a rush of adrenaline. Consequently, you may misinterpret the bodily sensations of excitement as overwhelming anxiety. Developing a somatic understanding of your body can help you distinguish between these emotions, enabling you to respond more accurately to your experiences.
Trauma can also impact your capacity to experience positive emotions. In the aftermath of a traumatic event, you may struggle to reconnect with feelings of joy and happiness. Somatic practices can help foster a deeper awareness of your body and its sensations, allowing you to gradually enhance your capacity to experience and savor positive feelings as they arise.
By paying attention to sensations, you can help recognize and recalibrate the ongoing dialogue within your body, fostering a sense of connection with it. Over time, this mindful awareness can help alleviate trauma symptoms, as it aids in regulating the nervous system and promoting a more harmonious mind-body relationship.
Somatic Therapy and Smell
Somatic therapy and smell are interconnected through how you perceive sensory information, including smells, and make sense of the world through your senses.
Of the five senses, smell is the most powerful and underutilized, especially in practices of embodiment and safety.
Smell is more than just perception—it’s chemistry. When you inhale, you aren’t just identifying scents, you are physically breaking down molecules that interact with the brain, creating reactions that influence your emotions, mood, and memories.
Your sense of smell can be used to calm your danger response. Nobel prize-winning researcher Linda Buck found that rose essential oil can counteract your brain’s response to predator odor and fear. Her research found that inhaling rose essential oil in the presence of other fear stimuli can suppress your brain’s stress responses and hormonal signals.
The energetic imprint of different plants also supports somatic practice. Essential oils carry not only the scent but also the life force and energetic signature of the plant. As you may know, every living thing is made of energy, and it has its unique signature vibration. Negative emotions are believed to be a result of a disruption in the body’s energy system.
Your body responds to the energetic field of the plants. The inhalation pathway directly connects to the brain, meaning that smell alone can shift your entire vibration, altering your emotional state in an instant. Inhaling the vibrational essence of plants affects the energetic field of the body and brain, which then provides the energy to transmute trauma and difficult emotions. When you change the field, you stimulate the body to return to alignment. This alters the way hormones are released and the way tissues and organs function.
Plants tend to offer an energy that remains relatively constant. This means that even though you can have lots of different experiences with a plant you love, the underlying feel will be similar and safe. The consistent nature of our relationship with plants can support a sense of security and safety that supports healthy co-regulation
The inhalation pathway allows for gentle and controlled titration of smell. You can introduce small, manageable amounts of fragrance to support healthy levels of stimulation without triggering overwhelm or re-traumatization due to the intensity of emotions or physical sensations. For example, if you are working through a complex emotion or memory, you can use a comforting smell in small, manageable doses to return to a state of safety and calm.
Research on “Smell, Odor, and Somatic Work: Sense-Making and Sensory Management” highlights how odor conveys meaning and olfaction supports compelling reflexive forms of somatic work by which people manage smell (as an act) and odor (as a sign).
Essential Oils and Somatic Therapy
Essential oils can amplify somatic practices. The strong connection between your sense of smell and your limbic system makes essential oils an ideal tool for both experiencing sensations and reconnecting to a feeling of safety as you work through these sensations. These actions help you reconnect with and ground in your body, which may help you bring your attention to the present moment and connect you with your physical sensations.
According to research on Aromatherapy through the lens of trauma-informed care, “essential oils are not just about their aromas but about the experience they facilitate – an experience of greater embodiment, awareness, and connection with oneself.”
Incorporating aromatherapy into your somatic practices may help create a strong association between the scent and your state of awareness. Over time, the smell itself can help you quickly access that mindful state. Many clients report that simply smelling a blend, such as Parasympathetic, triggers the same relaxing response as topical application.
These olfactory cues can create a more tangible link to different sensations or emotional experiences, supporting your sense of safety and awareness. To further support this awareness, try to notice how you feel before you smell the oil, observe what comes up for you as you anticipate smelling it, and then note the changes that occur when you smell the oil. Practice listening to what your body is saying. This not only helps you to become more attuned to your sensory experiences but also fosters a deeper understanding of how your body reacts to different stimuli. It’s a way of practicing the art of listening to the body, recognizing its signals, and responding mindfully and compassionately.
Parasympathetic®
Your autonomic nervous system is responsible for receiving information, processing it, and triggering the necessary responses, including coordinating and regulating the functions of all other bodily systems. Unfortunately, when the nervous system undergoes trauma, its delicate balance can be disrupted, triggering survival responses, such as a state of heightened sympathetic “fight” or “flight” response or a dorsal vagal “freeze” response, to help navigate threats.
While these nervous system states can support survival, they can often lead to a disconnection from your body and the sensations arising within you, in effect cutting you off from the very source of information you need to heal.
Somatic therapy focuses on subtle shifts and gradual adjustments to increase your nervous system’s capacity to experience a fuller range of sensations, thereby reducing the impact of trauma on your body and how you are showing up in life. This approach aligns with the natural rhythms of your nervous system, allowing it to comfortably adapt to and integrate new experiences, rather than being overwhelmed or rushed.
Essential oils are natural, non-invasive, and easy-to-use tools that can activate your parasympathetic nervous system in combination with somatic therapies. Oils possess both olfactory (smell) and transdermal (topical application) properties, making them easy to inhale and apply to the skin to stimulate the vagus nerve and activate the parasympathetic nervous system. Topically applying the Parasympathetic® blend behind the vagus nerve on the mastoid bone can help ground your energy, activate your parasympathetic nervous system, and help calm the emotional reactivity triggered by trauma. It helps soothe the physical sensations of fight, flight, or freeze that you feel.
Fascia Release™
Trauma resides in your tissues, specifically in your fascia, the tissue that surrounds every cell in your body. Your emotions—or energy in motion—travel through your fascia to be released. When your fascia is tight and constricted, emotions do not flow freely and are not released; instead, they become trapped in your tissue.
You must release the fascia to release the trapped energy and negative emotions that are stored in the tissue. Fascia release practices are an invaluable “bottom-up” piece of nervous system regulation, where you tune into your body and the messages it has for you. When you learn to be present and signal safety from the level of the body and the cells, your body feels safe to discharge energy and emotions, helping to rebalance the nervous system and move beyond trauma.
Essential oils offer a safe and simple way to release tension that may be keeping you stuck and negative emotions from the tissue, creating an easy flow for healthy fascia. Releasing my fascia with Fascia Release™ essential oil has been extremely helpful.
Fascia lies just below the skin, so topically applying essential oils onto the skin allows for easy and immediate access to the fascia. The skin is your largest organ and is relatively permeable to fat-soluble substances, such as essential oils. Fascia Release™ blend is uniquely formulated to unravel deeply held tensions, constrictions, and energetic blockages in your tissues, reducing pain, improving blood and lymphatic circulation, and releasing fear, repressed emotions, and tension held in the body (organs, muscles, tendons, bones, and joints) or the mind.
Application Tip: I have been applying Fascia Release™ to my fingertips and tapping on key reflex points to engage my safety response actively. The video and graphics in this post show how to tap in more detail.
Heart™
Compassion helps activate your parasympathetic nervous system and support the somatic sensations that accompany an emotional state of relaxation.
Heart™ blend helps balance the heart to enhance compassion and support, integrating and resetting all the body’s systems, allowing you to send love and forgiving energy toward yourself. Take time to notice the somatic sensations that arise during your self-compassion practice.
The heart integrates and balances the physical, emotional, and mental aspects of the body, providing blood to every cell and organ. It also serves as a complex information processing center, influencing brain function, the nervous system, the hormonal system, and most of the body’s major organs.
When any part of the body isn’t functioning at an optimal level, the heart has to work harder. For example, when the body is in a state of stress, it needs more oxygen which increases the heart rate. The heart is our body’s reset button. Still, a state of constant stress can fatigue the heart and compromise our ability to reset, leading to inflammation, infections, toxicity, and heart disease. By returning the heart to balance, we support the cardiovascular and circulatory systems, regenerate the heart’s structure, and help reset the homeostatic mechanism for the entire body.
Heart™ blend contains a proprietary blend of organic and/or wildcrafted essential oils that helps you show love to others and yourself. Research has shown that sweet smells, such as those found in Heart™ blend, can reduce pain by activating opioid receptors in the brain.
You can train your somatic awareness, using smell as a tool to help you connect with your body and emotions. Deepening your sensation awareness is like turning up the volume on our body’s communication system. Once you begin to understand more about what your body is requesting, we can more easily attune to what we need to do to heal.
Step 1: Inhale & Observe
Hold the scent close to your nose and take a slow, intentional breath in. As you inhale, observe:
- What memories surface?
- What emotion do you feel immediately?
- Do you feel resistance, comfort, nostalgia, or something unexpected?
Step 2: Engage the Body
As you continue breathing in the scent, scan your body:
- Where do you feel sensation?
- Does your body tense up or relax?
- Does it spark an urge to move, write, or create?
Step 3: Express & Reflect
After a few minutes, write down or verbally express what came up. Did this scent unlock something? Did it bring you closer to a creative breakthrough?
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