Smell is the most powerful—and most underutilized—of our five senses.
Your olfactory pathway has direct access into the brain AND the body!
You heard me correctly. Olfactory receptors have been located throughout the body—in organs such as the liver, skin, heart, lungs, kidneys, and intestines—where they act as chemical sensors for non-olfactory functions, including cell recognition, migration, metabolism, and wound healing.
Research demonstrates that your sense of smell can impact various physiological processes, including your ability to heal from and release trauma from the body.
More specifically, you can use your sense of smell to help interpret the mental, physical, and emotional world around you, creating a sense of safety.
Tuning into sensations in the body—including the sensation of smell—can help draw awareness to your body and calm your nervous system, which may allow you to release stored trauma that may be keeping your nervous system stuck in a survival state, making it difficult to relax, feel safe, or heal.
Research on Human Olfactory Receptors: Novel Cellular Functions Outside of the Nose found that “olfactory receptors (ORs) aren’t just for smell in the nose; they act as chemical sensors throughout the body in tissues—like the lungs, gut, skin, brain, liver, heart, intestines and kidneys—regulating cell functions (proliferation, migration, immunity) and playing roles in disease (cancer, skin issues, infections). Research shows they can detect specific chemicals, guide sperm, influence heart function, promote skin healing, revealing a broader chemical sensing role beyond olfaction.”
Your sense of smell plays such a key role in nervous system regulation and brain health that research on Dysregulation of Brain Olfactory and Taste Receptors is warranted. This research found olfactory receptor dysregulation preceded cognitive decline and other neurodegenerative diseases.”
How Trauma Gets Stuck in the Body
Trauma isn’t just a mental story in your head; it’s a physical experience that gets “stuck” in your body as physical tension, fight/flight/freeze energy, or shutdown that needs physical release to truly heal.
When you experience trauma, chronic stress, or heightened emotional triggers, your nervous system reacts instinctively to keep you safe. This is the fight, flight, or freeze response, designed to protect you in moments of danger. Ideally, your body returns to a balanced state when the threat passes. But if the trauma is overwhelming or unresolved, the nervous system can get stuck on high alert, leading to lasting physical and emotional effects.
Common physical symptoms of stored trauma include:
- Emotional numbness or disconnection (feeling detached from yourself or others)
- Muscle tension or chronic pain (especially in the neck, shoulders, and jaw)
- Digestive issues (such as nausea, bloating, or IBS)
- Difficulty sleeping (trouble falling asleep, nightmares, or frequent waking)
- Anxiety or hypervigilance (feeling on edge or easily startled)
What is Somatic Healing?
When healing from trauma, it can be challenging to feel like your body is supporting you. This is where somatic healing comes into play, helping you feel safe and supported.
Your somatic nervous system is a subdivision of your peripheral nervous system that delivers information from four of your senses—smell, sound, taste, and touch—into your brain and allows you to move and control muscles throughout your body.
Somatic practices can help you address the deep physical imprint of trauma and release this stored physiological energy. Somatic practices allow you to reconnect with your body by using physical sensations, such as smell, to send safety signals, helping to regulate an overwhelmed nervous system and process and release stored stress and trauma. Somatic practices may help you listen to your body’s sensations (such as tension and tightness) to discharge trauma energy gently, fostering a stronger connection and an internal sense of calm.
Key Principles of Somatic Healing include:
- Regulating the Nervous System: Trauma overwhelms the nervous system; somatic work helps guide it back to balance by teaching you to discharge excess activation and build capacity for stress.
- Increasing Body Awareness & Regulation: The ability to tune into physical sensations without judgment may help you stay present and calm, even when difficult memories arise and reconnect with parts of the body that may have been numbed or ignored due to trauma.
- Promoting Feelings of Safety: By tuning into the body and finding resources within, you build a profound sense of internal and external safety and resilience, making you less reactive to triggers. Similarly, by gently approaching traumatic feelings in small, manageable doses and moving between moments of discomfort or tension and feelings of safety, you can help release stored stress without overwhelming the nervous system.
- Discharge and Completion: The body often holds onto trauma when it doesn’t get to complete its natural stress response. Practices like shaking, crying, or deep breathing help the body release tension and restore balance.
How Smell Can Support Somatic Healing?
Trauma can be stored in the body as implicit memories. These are not consciously recalled like regular memories but can be triggered by physical sensations or smells.
Smell supports somatic healing by directly linking to both the brain’s limbic system, which controls emotions and memory, and regions of the body, including the skin, the gut, and the heart, that help with somatic emotional release.
Familiar smells like Lavender can provide a safe sensory anchor, especially if you are processing intense emotional memories or experiences. Smell can help bridge the gap between stimulus and response, offering a gentle way to manage overwhelming feelings and enhance emotional regulation.
All but one of your senses travel through your somatic nervous system to reach your brain (sight is the exception because your retina and optic nerve connect directly to your brain). The other senses on your head—sound, smell, taste, and touch—all use your somatic nervous system to reach your brain. This direct access allows you to use your sense of smell to support somatic healing.
Smell and specific scents can be used as anchors to help you feel safe and grounded and to stabilize you when you are dysregulated.
Smells can also be carefully titrated, meaning exposure to a particular scent can be controlled to allow for the slow, gradual exploration of traumatic experiences in manageable fragments, to avoid re-traumatization. Smell will enable you to perceive sensations in your body, which helps you move towards completing protective responses that were previously unable to be carried out.
Scent can also support the parasympathetic nervous system and, with it, the gentle pendulation between states of tension and relaxation in the body, which may help you develop a greater capacity to self-regulate your emotional and physiological responses. This builds vagal tone—or the ability of the nervous system to move back and forth between alertness and action, and calm and rest without getting stuck at either extreme.
Essential Oils to Support Somatic Healing
Essential oils can support somatic healing by gently engaging the sense of smell to help regulate the nervous system, increase body awareness, and support emotional processing.
Bringing attention to your sense of smell can be a subtle yet effective way to help you feel more grounded and safe in the present moment. More specifically, topically inhaled essential oils work with the brain’s emotion and memory centers to promote a sense of grounding, safety, and a deeper mind-body connection. Research on “Smell, Odor, and Somatic Work: Sense-Making and Sensory Management” found that smells convey meaning and can support somatic structural perception.
Additional research on “Observing Somatic Experience and Olfactory Memory” explores the potential therapeutic implications of incorporating olfactory stimuli into trauma therapy sessions.” Olfactory memory plays a critical role in trauma, as smells can trigger traumatic memories. Similarly, olfactory stimuli—like essential oils—are closely linked to emotional processing.
It is worth noting that the anatomy of your olfactory system involves activation of the same brain structures that support emotion processing (limbic system and medial temporal lobe circuits) and declarative memory, as noted in research on “Aromatherapy through the lens of trauma-informed care”. “When essential oils are inhaled, they impact the limbic system and, subsequently, the nervous system. Using a trauma-informed approach, aromatherapy is paired with polyvagal theory and somatic experiencing.”
Smell can be used to connect with physical sensations, emotions, and memories for grounding, stress relief, and self-awareness, leveraging how scents powerfully influence our nervous system and help support emotional regulation.
Specific scents can be used for emotional anchoring, helping to create a physical anchor for emotional regulation.
Fascia Release™
Stress and trauma are often stored in the body—especially in the fascia, the connective tissue that surrounds every cell in your body. Your emotions—or energy in motion—travel through your fascia for release. When your fascia is tight and constricted, emotions do not flow freely or get released; instead, they become trapped in your tissue. This can leave you feeling tense, disconnected, or overwhelmed.
Fascia Release™ supports you in shifting from mental overwhelm to present-moment awareness by helping you reconnect with your “felt sense”—the subtle sensations in your body.
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. 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.”
Fascia Release™ essential oil blend is uniquely formulated to release the trapped energy and emotional and physical tension stored in the fascia. Fascia Release helps you feel bodily sensations so you can feel safe occupying your body.
Fascia lies just below the skin, so topically applying essential oils to the skin provides easy, 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 may help unravel deeply held tensions, constrictions, and energetic blockages in your tissues, enhancing body awareness and grounding, 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 actively engage my safety response. The video and graphics in this post show how to tap in more detail.
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. When this happens, it’s hard to feel calm, safe, or fully present in your body.
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.
Parasympathetic® blend can be a simple but powerful tool to help shift your system back into balance. When topically applied to the vagus nerve (behind the earlobe on the mastoid bone), it helps activate the parasympathetic branch of your nervous system. In this state, healing, digestion, and emotional regulation naturally occur.
By supporting this “rest, digest, and heal” state, the Parasympathetic® blend can help reset the nervous system and prevent it from continually feeling unsettled when distressing memories are triggered. It’s one of the most effective and accessible ways to help your body return to a place of safety, ease, and resilience.
Essential oils are natural, non-invasive, and easy to use! 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.
Limbic Reset™
Your limbic system helps regulate your emotions and respond to physical, mental, and emotional threats, working in conjunction with your parasympathetic nervous system.
In fact, your limbic system is often referred to as the “emotional nervous system” as it helps you interpret sensory information and determine whether external stimuli are threatening or benign. If a threat is perceived, your limbic system will then prompt your nervous system to activate the “fight or flight” sympathetic nervous system response. This threat response can become maladaptive and overly reactive, leading to poor emotional regulation and heightened emotional reactivity.
The strong connection between your sense of smell and your limbic system makes essential oils an ideal tool to reset the volume of threat perception, help calm the over-firing of your limbic system, and reconnect you to a feeling of safety as you process trauma.
Scent has direct access to the emotional center of your brain, which controls your hormones and influences your emotions and mood, known as the limbic system. On a physical level, your olfactory bulb is physically located near your limbic system, with only two synapses separating your amygdala from your olfactory nerve. No other sensory system has this direct and intense contact with the neural substrates of your brain’s emotional control center. Your other four senses, including sound, sight, taste, and touch, must travel to different regions of the brain first, before reaching your limbic system.
This makes essential oils a potent tool for calming the intensity of the emotions, allowing you to chunk the release so that it feels more manageable. In essence, restoring proper function to the limbic system can help TURN OFF the alarm in your limbic system—in effect rebalancing inhibition and activation—and TURN ON your body’s self-healing mechanisms by regulating your “fight or flight” response, and rewiring your response to emotional triggers.
Inhaling essential oils is the fastest and most efficient way to reset the volume of threat perception and help calm the over-firing of your limbic system. This is because smell can access the limbic system of the brain to lower limbic system activation, which then enables your body to enter the parasympathetic “rest, digest, and repair” state.
Limbic Reset™ contains a proprietary blend of essential oils designed to calm threat arousal and send safety cues, helping reset your limbic system and support healthy emotional regulation. Limbic Reset™ was specifically formulated with essential oils such as Frankincense and Sandalwood, which contain the chemical constituent Sesquiterpenes, thought to increase oxygen in the limbic system, thereby “unlocking” DNA and allowing emotional baggage to be released from cellular memory. The citrus oils in Limbic Reset™ help lift your mood and clear your energy so that you do not take on or carry negative emotions or a pessimistic mindset toward others. For example, Melissa is known as an antidepressant that possesses uplifting and emotionally balancing compounds.
Limbic Reset™ also contains Helichrysum oils, which are touted for their benefits to brain function and are known to cross the blood-brain barrier, carrying oxygen to the limbic system to help rewire neural circuits and calm an overactive stress response.
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