Essential Oils for Internal Safety Signals

I have been stimulating my vagus nerve with a Parasympathetic blend for decades and it always makes me feel better!

It is an immediate band-aid for any stress, anxiety, or overwhelm. 

That said, it has not completely eliminated the underlying stress, anxiety, or overwhelm. It has definitely made those emotions more manageable and has reduced the intensity of the emotions, but they were still surfacing on a regular basis.

So I started to wonder what I was missing.  

I knew that vagus nerve stimulation successfully calms the nervous system and helps regulate brain-to-body stress signals.  

I was also aware that the limbic system – particularly the amygdala – was always scanning the environment for external threats which then signals the sympathetic branch of the nervous system to help hormones and neurotransmitters to help you prepare to fight or flee, which many of us experience as anxiety. I formulated Limbic Reset to help regulate the amygdala and address this brain-to-body root cause.

But it was not until I began aggressively focusing on body-to-brain signals – by releasing my fascia with Fascia Release and opening my Heart – that I was able to address the root cause of my stress and finally get off the stress treadmill.

What are Internal Safety Signals?

Your limbic system is constantly assessing threats from both your external AND INTERNAL environment.  

This means that in addition to scanning sensory inputs (visual, auditory, smell) from the external environment, your limbic system is reading signals from the body – primarily from the heart and the fascia – to assess safety cues.

In other words, if your body is storing trauma in the fascia, that impacts the signals that are sent to the brain and keeps your limbic and nervous systems stuck in a hyper-vigilant or maladapted stress response, which is why even though I would stimulate my vagus nerve with Parasympathetic blend and it would calm the stress at that moment, the stress would return the following day. Brain-to-body safety signals cannot work in isolation if the body continues to send incoherent signals to the brain. You have to address BOTH to resolve the underlying root cause that is driving the chronic stress response.

Restoring coherence to the fascia and the heart helps restore internal safety cues to your limbic system and address the underlying root cause of your stress response.

Bidirectional Communication Between the Brain and the Body

Your body and your brain are constantly communicating via bi-directional signals that pass both ways between your body – primarily your heart and your fascia – and your brain. 

Your heart and your brain are in constant communication with the fascia serving as the bridge between the heart and the brain. Research finds that “emotion processing is prompted by an initial modulation from ascending vagal inputs to the brain, followed by sustained bidirectional brain-heart interactions.”  

Information from the heart – including emotions – is sent via afferent nerve pathways in the vagus nerve and may directly affect activity in the amygdala. Afferent neurons – also called sensory neurons – are the nerve fibers responsible for bringing sensory information from the outside world – including vision, hearing, smell, or taste, as well as the sense of touch, pain, and temperature – into the brain. Dr. Rollin McCraty, the Research Director for the Heart Math Institute, shares that perceptions and emotions are not dictated entirely by the brain’s responses to stimuli arising from our external environment, but also include the internal sensations or feedback transmitted to the brain from the body, including signals from the heart and the fascia.

More specifically, your heart generates a powerful electromagnetic field that can inhibit or facilitate the brain’s electrical activity, influencing your brain’s rhythms and cognitive functions. Changes in your internal emotional state are accompanied by predictable changes in the heart rate, blood pressure, respiration, and digestion. 

Fascia, often described as the body’s connective tissue matrix, serves as the bridge between the heart and brain. This complex network of collagen fibers not only supports our physical structure but also acts as an information highway. Imagine it as a fiber optic network within you, transmitting signals between the heart and brain. When fascia is healthy, this communication flows smoothly, facilitating a state of coherence.

Heart Coherence

Your emotions are reflected in your heart rhythm patterns. When you feel stressed, anxious afraid, or angry, your heartbeat reflects that negative energy through a chaotic, erratic, or disordered heart rhythm known as an “incoherent heart rhythm pattern”.

Your heart then sends signals to your brain that influence your mental and emotional experience. 

The neural signals traveling from your heart to your brain follow this incoherent pattern as well. This discordant heart pattern can then throw your mind into chaos, inhibiting higher cognitive functions, and impairing your ability to think clearly, remember, learn, reason, or make effective decisions. 

More specifically, the type of chemicals released into your body depends upon the quality of the emotional signal sent from the heart to the brain. The incoherence of the rhythmic activity of your heart inhibits higher cognitive functions such as attention, perception, memory, and problem-solving.

Conversely, when you’re experiencing positive emotions like love, joy, gratitude, and compassion, your heart reflects a balanced, or harmonious ”coherent” rhythm that looks smooth, ordered, and stable. 

Coherent heart rhythms initiate afferent messaging to the brain, alongside related feedback from your nervous system. The brain recognizes this positive pattern and works to lower the baseline of arousal, allowing your amygdala to shift from negative to positive emotions. This allows your body’s systems to synchronize and work better, enhancing your ability to think clearly, learn, remember, reason, and make healthy, thoughtful decisions.

By opening the Heart and allowing energy to flow freely through it, you support open communication between the body and the brain. Heart opening also allows the fascia and muscles surrounding the heart to help release its grip.

Fascia Coherence

Fascia is a three-dimensional web of connective tissue that supports very deep layers of tissue surrounding the physical heart. Your fascia also acts as a high-speed conductor or communication network, allowing electrical and biochemical signals to travel efficiently between the body and the brain.  

In this capacity, your fascia helps send signals from your body to your mind, allowing you to function as a coherent whole. The alignment of collagen fibers within connective tissues of your fascia closely resembles traditional acupuncture meridians allowing these channels to provide pathways for speedy electromagnetic signal propagation. 

When fascia becomes compromised through injury, physical or emotional stress, or poor posture, adhesions or blockages develop compromising the communication network.  

When you experience stress, part of you is resistant, which triggers you to physically contract,  constrict, or pull away from physical danger, a negative thought, or an emotional aversion. This triggers your fight-or-flight response.

In the process, you constrict and restrict your breath and your energy in preparation for the attack. When you feel you can’t flee or fight your way out of a bad situation, you hold your breath or breathe minimally and freeze, hoping the threat will pass you unscathed. Instead, you internalize the fear without release or recovery.

In short, energy doesn’t flow and your body constricts – which locks the stress in your body. After stress passes, the emotions should be discharged and released, but if it often does not – keeping the stressful experience stuck in your tissues and the constant feedback loop of stress circulating to your brain.

This is especially true around critical communication centers like your heart. To help unpack your blocked or stuck heart energy, you need to open up the space around your physical heart with a fascia blend.

In other words, brings the heart and body into coherence to shift the messages sent to the brain and limbic system to complete and release the trauma loop. When the emotions are not released from the body, the trauma does not release and you stay stuck in a trauma loop.

Your fascia generates the state of coherence in the water molecules of our cells, constantly transmitting essential information to the body and the brain. This fascia coherence helps to support a higher degree of order and alignment with your body.

How Coherence Communicates Safety Signals

Your amygdala coordinates your mental and behavioral response to environmental threats. 

You might think of it as your threat assessment center. It monitors incoming signals from your five senses to scan input from the external environment and messages from the body to scan the internal environment for emotional content and signals and compares them with stored emotional memories (your internal baseline) to determine the level of perceived threat.

Past experience builds within us a set of familiar patterns that are established and maintained in the neural networks. Inputs to the brain from both the external and internal environments contribute to the maintenance of these patterns or baselines.  

Your amygdala is looking for a match or mismatch with these pre-existing baselines. If external or internal input is sufficiently different from the familiar reference pattern, this “mismatch” or departure from the familiar underlies an amygdala “hijack” of your neural pathways activating your autonomic nervous system and triggering an emotional response (that can present as overwhelm, anxiety or panic attacks, to keep you on alert to potential or imminent danger) before the higher brain centers – like your prefrontal cortex which helps to regulate your emotional response – can receive the sensory information.

In other words, familiarity feels safe.  When an input is unfamiliar – even if it is ultimately a positive new opportunity – it can automatically trigger great vigilance in your amygdala If the rhythm patterns generated by the heart are disordered and incoherent, especially in early life, the amygdala learns to expect disharmony as the familiar baseline and thus we feel “at home” with incoherence.

Rollin McCraty of HeartMath explains that if you regularly and consistently spike your arousal, through extreme mental states of fear, stress, or anxiety, then hormonal responses ensure that may over-sensitize your system, prompting you to react even more quickly to emotional or environmental stimuli. This further impedes the rational cognitive functions of your prefrontal cortex, making thoughts of how to reduce stress or anxiety more difficult, and leaving you open to more stress or anxiety-inducing stimuli. This perpetuates the vicious circle of stress

This is one reason that you cannot think your way out of trauma into a new baseline. Your ‘thinking’ higher cortex has limited access to the emotion-processing centers of the limbic brain, making it difficult to counter a stress response with thoughts alone. The sensory input from the body travels more quickly than the thoughts coming from your prefrontal cortex pushing your body into a stress response before your brain can override it. The key is to send safety signals from the body.

In other words, the only way to change a maladapted stress response pattern is to change the input from the body to the brain via the heart and the fascia coherence. Your heart and your fascia are uniquely positioned as a powerful entry point into the communication network that connects the body, mind, and emotions.

Changing the input from your heart and your body sends coherent signals to the amygdala which may help support feelings of safety and comfort that alleviate the stress response.

Essential Oils Support Coherence

Nature is coherent which is why inhaling or topical applying essential oils that are derived from the concentrated essences of plants helps shift you into coherence both physically and emotionally. 

Coherence is defined as a state of harmony within the mind, emotions, and body which is naturally found in nature. A coherent heart rhythm follows a stable, balanced pattern similar to the patterns found in nature. Topically applying essential oils derived from coherent plants can shift your body into a state of coherence just as harmonious language or gratitude practices promote emotional well-being. I believe this is one reason that flowers or plants are gifted as an expression of love or kindness. They lift your mood, boost your sense of safety and joy, and enhance your natural coherent state.

What’s more, your sense of smell is correlated with your sense of safety. Your olfactory nerve has direct access to the amygdala. In fact, on a physical level, only two synapses separate your amygdala from your olfactory nerve. No other sensory system has this kind of direct and intense contact with the neural substrates of your brain’s emotional control center.

Smell is the only sense that does not travel to the thalamus (the relay center for all sensory signals) before accessing the forebrain. Your other four senses – including sound, sight, taste, and touch – send signals through the thalamus first, which then sends the signals to your amygdala before forwarding them to your prefrontal cortex.

This may explain why your brain responds to smell-based stimuli – like essential oils – within seconds. In fact, research estimates your sense of smell to be 10,000 times more acute than your other senses. Once registered, scent stimuli travel more quickly to the brain than do either sight or sound.

The following essential oils have been profoundly helpful in changing the input from the body to the brain. Your heart and your fascia are uniquely positioned as a powerful entry point into the communication network that connects the body, mind, and emotions. Essential oils that support the heart and the fascia are therefore ideal to send safety signals to the brain and break the trauma loop.

Heart™ 

Your heart integrates and balances the physical, emotional, and mental body, providing blood to every cell and every 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. While all organs in the body send signals to your brain, your heart has significantly more afferent inputs than other organs and is the primary source of consistent dynamic rhythms to the brain.

For example, heart coherence signals brain coherence, which activates your prefrontal cortex helps override emotional circuitry, and supports healthy emotional regulation. When your heart beats in a coherent rhythm, it communicates with the other organs and systems in your body and may help to shift them into the same coherent rhythm.

Essential oils topically applied over the heart may help bring the heart into coherence. Heart™ blend balances the heart to enhance compassion and support, integrate and reset all the systems of the body, including supporting feelings of open-heartedness, expansiveness, and receptivity while mitigating loneliness, sadness, and grief.

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, but 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 system, regenerate the structure of the heart, and help reset the homeostatic mechanism for the entire body.

Heart™ blend contains a proprietary blend of organic and/or wild-crafted essential oils that help you show love to others and yourself. Research has shown that sweet smells, like those found in the Heart™ blend, have been shown to reduce pain by activating the opioid receptors in the brain.

Fascia Release™

Neural inputs that signal the brain may originate from tissues and organs that are affiliated with your fascia.

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 like essential oils.

Topical supplements play an important role in supporting fascia health and recovery from inflammation. For example, essential oils easily penetrate layers of restricted fascia, creating warmth to break up congestion, increasing circulation, lymphatic drainage, and mobilizing adhered tissue.

Essential oils soften the myofascial tissue, allowing the deep and constrained tissue to stretch and move as it is designed to function. They also have an analgesic effect, relaxing the muscles and reducing pain.

Essential oils can be used to revitalize and de-stress the fascia and muscles, working quickly to break down inflamed, fibrous tissue, and removing toxins from the painful area.

The essential oils in the Fascia Release™ blend are uniquely formulated to unravel deeply held tensions, constrictions, and energetic blockages in your tissues to reduce pain, improve blood and lymphatic circulation, and release fear, repressed emotions, and tension held in the body (organs, muscles, tendons, bones, and joints) or the mind. Topically applying Fascia Release™ over the physical heart or any area of physical tightness or pain opens the space to allow energy and emotions to flow down and out of your system. Releasing fascia constriction in the back of the body – specifically between the shoulder blades at the back of the heart – helps to physically release fascial constrictions and adhesions around the heart that may help open the heart for the healthy flow of emotional energy.

Featured Oils:

References: