I have been deep diving into my trauma, with the intention of finding tools to neutralize and transmute the trauma, along with the intensely painful emotions that often accompany the trauma, without having to re-traumatize myself.
Of all the modalities and tools I have accessed in my quest to transmute my trauma and the intense emotions that accompany it, essential oils have, hands down, been both the easiest and the most effective.
It is no surprise that essential oils have been found to “modulate emotion and cognition,” according to research on “Effects of Odor on Emotion”. Essential oils can literally “suppress stress levels” and “influence psychological and physiological states” as inhalation allows essential oils to travel directly to the part of the brain that manages and processes trauma—your limbic system, according to research on Smell and Stress Response in the Brain.
Transmuting Stuck Emotions
Emotions are not just feelings, they are energy that prompts and organizes you for action. The word emotion includes motion, signifying that emotions are meant for us to experience and move through.
This emotional energy resonates at a specific vibrational frequency that serves as a warning system to alert you to potential dangers, putting you in control of your responses. For example, anger can cause you to become aggressive mentally and physiologically. Fear can help you prepare to flee by triggering fear-based thoughts to prime your body for safety.
If the energy of this emotion cannot move or prompt you to act, it can become trapped in the body. More specifically, if you experienced an event that emotionally overwhelmed you and you were unable to process the experience, accept your emotions, or express and release them through your body and mind, they stay stuck in your organs, muscles, and tissues.
Your brain cannot differentiate between physical and emotional stress, including stuck emotions like shame, fear, or anger that you have not processed or released. These stuck emotions play in the background, keeping you stuck in a constant “fight or flight” stress response, draining your energy, contributing to fatigue, emotional imbalance, and even disease.
Stuck emotions often run in the background, keeping your sympathetic nervous system on high alert even when no physical danger is present.
Moreover, trapped energy distorts the energy flow in your body, contributing to stagnation in the lymph, the blood, and the fascia.
The Power of Smell to Release Stuck Emotional Energy
Smell can address and release trapped emotions and trauma stored in the body. You can’t think your way out of emotions, but you can smell your way out.
Your sense of smell can be a powerful tool for processing stuck emotional energy. Research shows that “olfactory stimulation can directly activate amygdala neurons to help shift emotions.” Your sense of smell is directly linked to the amygdala—a part of the limbic system in the brain that helps process and release stored emotional energy and enhance both our emotional and physiological state.
Like all of your senses, your sense of smell helps you become more aware of your body and the physical sensations you might experience from inhaling specific blends of essential oils.
Essential oils can also send safety signals to help calm your subconscious survival response.
Smell is unique among the five senses as it bypasses your thalamus and projects directly to the regions of your brain associated with emotion and memory. This direct pathway allows smells to trigger subconscious emotional responses before they reach the brain’s conscious awareness. Smell often provokes emotional or memory reactions before you can consciously identify or label it.
The chemical constituents in essential oils known as sesquiterpenes—found in the essential oils of frankincense and sandalwood in the Limbic Reset blend—can penetrate the blood-brain barrier. These molecules have a significant oxygenating effect on the brain’s limbic system. The combination of oxygenation on the brain and the stimulation from aromatic molecules appears to assist the amygdala in facilitating the release of emotional blockages.
Essential oils help to balance and raise your frequencies, including the frequency of various body organs and tissues, which may help balance and release the emotions trapped within those organs.
Oils are also easy to titrate, meaning you can introduce smell in small, manageable amounts that help you avoid feeling overwhelmed or retraumatized by the intensity of the emotions or physical sensations.
Finally, topical application of essential oils may help enhance emotional regulation by increasing awareness of bodily sensations to release tension, enhance relaxation, and facilitate emotional healing. This enables you to foster a deeper connection with your body and relieve tension by being aware of bodily sensations. Touch can help access and process emotions held in the body and help release physical tension and stress stored in the muscles and tissues without reliving traumatic experiences.
Releasing Stuck Emotional Energy from Organs
Since each organ has a vibrational frequency, as do emotions, the emotions will settle in an area with a corresponding frequency.
Emotional energy gets generated during real or perceived trauma, which enters the body and, if not released, gets stored in an organ or gland with the same vibrational energy. For example, anger is stored in the liver, fear is stored in the kidneys, and grief is stored in the lungs. Anything that bothers you can carry an emotional charge. Once generated, energy can neither be created nor destroyed. Instead, it shifts and transmutes and is neutralized.
Emotions stored in the glands and organs can be accessed through the topical application of essential oils on acupuncture points, and the limbic system accessed through smell and the inhalation of essential oils.
Essential oils can raise the body’s frequency because they vibrate at a high frequency and transfer that frequency to the body.
“Essential oils hold vibrational frequencies that can shift patterns. Using them on the acupuncture alarm points sends the frequency directly to the specific organ, and smelling the oil releases the pattern from the brain’s limbic system, thus providing direct access to the body’s cellular memory,” according to Releasing Emotional Patterns with Essential Oils.
Introducing the Emotional Detox Kit
The key to mobilizing and releasing emotional toxins is signaling safety to the body. The Emotional Detox Kit comprises five powerful blends that, when combined, can help you address the root cause of your stress response and reset your nervous system.
Parasympathetic®: Your vagus nerve—the bi-directional information highway between brain and body that helps regulate your autonomic nervous system—plays a vital role in communicating changes in fascia to your brain. Stressful, traumatic, or life-threatening events may shift you into the fight-or-flight or freeze response.
Parasympathetic® calms the nervous system and may help you harmonize connections between fascia and your vagus nerve, which enables you to be present to the moment. This sense of embodiment and safety can support emotional detoxification. Apply Parasympathetic® over the vagus nerve (behind the earlobe on the mastoid bone) to activate the vagus nerve.
Lymph™: Your neck is the critical intersection where your brain connects with your body. Oxygen, nutrients, and stimuli are carried between the brain and the body through the nerves, lymph, fascia, and blood vessels that travel through your neck channel. For example, your vagus nerve and lymphatic system run alongside the veins in the neck, and congested lymphatic vessels in the neck can impede the healthy function of the vagus nerve.
Healthy lymphatic drainage—especially around the neck, where 1/3 of all lymph nodes live—can help support healthy vagus nerve tone. Unfortunately, the lymphatic system doesn’t have a pump, but essential oils, like those in Lymph™, can enhance lymphatic flow and drainage. Generously apply Lymph™ over the clavicles, around the sides of the neck, and under the armpits to help alleviate congestion and provide space for healthy emotional detoxification.
Heart™: Part of releasing negative emotions involves transmuting the negative perspective to the positive. This is accomplished through your heart and raising the body’s vibration into the heart emotions of joy, love, and compassion. When you increase your heart coherence, lower energies, like suppressed emotions, no longer resonate, allowing the body to release these feelings more easily. Stagnant anger, grief, sadness, judgment, and low self-worth cannot exist in combination with coherent heart rhythm patterns.
When you are in fear or anger, your heartbeat reflects that negative energy through a chaotic heart rhythm known as an “incoherent heart rhythm pattern.” Your heart then sends signals to your brain that influence the release of hormones that impact your mental and emotional experience. Incoherent heart rhythms inhibit higher cognitive functions such as attention, perception, memory, and problem-solving that help support emotional detoxification.
Heart™ blend helps you activate heart coherence by energetically aligning your heart into coherence to help you focus on positive, peaceful, loving, and harmonious thoughts and emotions. To use, apply 2-3 drops over the front of the heart (left side of chest).
Fascia Release™: Essential oils are a powerful tool to help “unwind” your fascia to move your mind and body out of a “frozen” traumatized state, gently releasing restrictions so that your body does not have to protect itself. Essential oils can help emotionally signal your body that you’re “safe” and physically remove restrictions, rehydrate the fascia, restore elasticity, and widen the space between the fibers to improve circulation and help blood and oxygen flow smoothly around the body again.
Fascia Release™ also helps open up the space around your physical body. 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.
The essential oils in Fascia Release™ are uniquely formulated to simultaneously work on physical and psychological levels, working quickly to break down inflamed, fibrous tissue, removing toxins while unraveling 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.
Limbic Reset™: 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 to help reset your limbic system and support healthy emotional regulation. Limbic Reset™ was specifically formulated with essential oils such as Frankincense and Sandalwood that contain the chemical constituent Sesquiterpenes, which are thought to help increase the oxygen in the limbic system, which in turn “unlocks” the DNA and allows 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 for 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 brain function and known to cross the blood-brain barrier and carry oxygen to the limbic system to help rewire neural circuits in your limbic system and calm an overactive stress response.
How to Apply Essential Oils to Release Trapped Emotions
Essential oils are uniquely suited to help you process and release these stuck emotions through inhalation and topical application channels. Emotions stored in the glands and organs can be accessed through the topical application of essential oils on acupuncture points, and the limbic system accessed through smell and the inhalation of essential oils.
Inhalation: Your sense of smell has direct access to the emotional center of your brain, known as your limbic system, where emotions can be processed and released (i.e., detoxified).
Smell is critical to survival. It alerts you to dangers (like predators and fire), helps track food and water, and even aids in locating certain plants for medicine. Research estimates your sense of smell to be ten thousand times more acute than your other senses.
Smell travels more quickly to the brain than your other four senses—sound, sight, taste, and touch—and has direct access to the emotional control center of the brain, known as the amygdala in your limbic system. Other senses first travel to different brain regions before reaching the limbic system. This makes inhaling essential oils one of the most potent tools for detoxifying emotions.
Topical application: Oils can penetrate deeply into your body through your skin, immediately impacting tissue close to the skin’s surface, like your lymph and fascia. As you may know, 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 essential role in supporting lymph and fascia health and the release of trapped emotions. For example, essential oils easily penetrate restricted fascia and congested lymph layers, creating warmth to break up congestion, increasing circulation, lymphatic drainage, and mobilizing adhered tissue. Essential oils may also soften the myofascial tissue, allowing the deep and constrained tissue to stretch and release trapped emotions and energy.
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