Grief is not linear.
Every year on the anniversary of my son Max’s death I am reminded that no matter how much time passes, the grief does not go away.
It changes. The intensity ebbs and flows. And honestly the experience evolves. It does not disappear, but it shifts.
The anniversary of Max’s death is this Thursday, August 27.
Eight years have passed. He was 12 at the time and would be 20 today.
As I prepare to mourn his day of passing, I am obviously sad, but in a different way.
In the past, I actively suppressed my grief throughout the year by disassociating or staying so busy that I did not have time to feel. I do think that this served me until it did not. The intensity of grief can be more than your nervous system can bare and when you are already juggling too much, it can be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.
Now that I have the time, space, capacity and our new Unstuck blend to help support my deeper processing of grief, I am able to notice the deeper patterns of grief and how your body physically and emotionally detoxifies this grief.
Your Liver and Emotional Toxins
Your liver is all about flow – blood flow, energy flow and the flow of emotions.
Your liver is a filter that processes, neutralizes and eliminates both physical and emotional toxins. Energetically, your liver is responsible for maintaining harmony and the smooth movement of energy (known as chi) throughout the body, including the smooth transition between feelings and emotions as situations change around us. This liver energy supports your drive, planning, endurance, perseverance, quick, clear intellect, ambition, patience, and organizational abilities.
It also helps process and release toxic thought patterns and emotional toxins, like:
- Rage, hostility or belligerence
- Feeling irritable or impatient
- Inappropriate anger, including aggressive behavior or angry outbursts
- Over-reactivity, flying off the handle, or having a difficult time letting things go
- Feelings of not feeling heard, not feeling loved, not being recognized, or an inability to be honest with yourself and others
- Experience of resentment, frustration, or bitterness from disrespected boundaries, unmet needs, and things left unsaid
- Being judgmental, overly critical, finding fault, or complaining
- Feeling the need to control situations; being domineering or bossy
- Feelings of grief, sorrow or depression
Your liver holds all of the intense feelings and emotions that you are unwilling – or unable – to feel, speak, release or process. It is an organ that is designed to filter, cleanse, detoxify, and purify the emotional residue. When you are unable to process and transmute these intense emotions, they get stuck and stored as unprocessed emotional toxins in your liver, compromising its ability to flow.
Grief is an especially intense and overwhelming emotion to process, so when you have the capacity to process your grief or other stuck emotions, it becomes the job of the liver to then filter and release them.
As you may know, your liver performs over 500 functions in your body – physically processing, filtering, storing, regulating and protecting your body — producing hormones, storing nutrients, detoxifying chemicals, regulating energy and emotionally creating harmony and mental clarity. Your liver works tirelessly to process these intense and overwhelming emotions that you may never have allowed yourself to acknowledge or feel, boundaries you may not have upheld or abuse that you may not even have realized you were choosing to tolerate.
As your liver regulates emotions, it becomes more sensitive to the effects of stress. Your liver is involved in regulating your emotional and physiological reaction to external stressors that trigger your sympathetic nervous system and prepare you to fight or flee. Anger is the emotion that often accompanies the fight response – and repressed anger is believed to present in the liver – often as a natural response to any impediment to the liver’s state of flow.
According to Traditional Chinese Medicine, each emotion is linked to an organ system and intense emotional stress or unexpressed feelings of grief are thought to disrupt the smooth flow of energy in the liver. Unprocessed grief is believed to block the flow of liver energy, contributing to stagnation and a pattern of stuck energy. Blocked or congested flow in the liver can contribute to excessive susceptibility to mild triggers, and feelings associated with “stuckness.” It’s marked by tension, irritability, and grumpiness, or melancholy and depression.
How Stuck Grief Impact the Liver
Your liver is designed to filter, clean and restore your physical and emotional health. Each unspoken heartbreak – including grief – is stored in the tissues and the cells of your liver.
When you swallowed, suppressed or numbed your anger, your sadness, your fear or don’t process and release your grief, your liver becomes toxic. It carries the weight of all the emotions you have absorbed, including the moods of others, the pain of your environment, the trauma you internalized.
This unprocessed grief in the liver prevents it from filtering like it once did.
You feel stuck because your body can no longer store what you’ve been refusing to face.
When emotions are suppressed, your liver-area muscles contract, pulling on and locking the diaphragm which then impedes your breathing and reduces oxygen intake. It can become a vicious cycle with grief triggering anger and the feeling of being “stuck” and this blocked or stagnant liver energy pathway further compromising emotional processing.
But when you are able to process your feelings and release your grief, your energy begins to flow. When you express what you feel, you will no longer store it. The liver doesn’t have to hold it all. You transmute and release your pain. When you begin to metabolize “stuck” emotions creates space within the body and within the liver for flow to resume.
Essential Oils for Grief and the Liver
Essential oils can be powerful tools to help allow you to work through your emotions and release unprocessed grief. Your sense of smell links directly to the emotional control center of your brain known as amygdala, where emotions and emotional memories are stored.
Your sense of smell is the only one of your five senses that is directly links to this unconscious area of your brain, known as your limbic lobe, making the sense of smell and the tool of essential oils the most direct path to healing emotions like grief, sorrow and anger.
Essential oils inhaled through the nasal passageways enable immediate access to the regions of the brain that house these intense emotions like anger and rage so we can integrate and release them. The word “emotion” can translate as “energy-in-motion.” Emotion is the experience of energy moving though our bodies. This emotional energy actually works at a higher speed than thought and essential oils can help us clear the energetic residue of blame so it doesn’t remain in our thought patterns, negatively impacting your energy field or your health.
Unstuck™
Unstuck™ helps you process and release stuck energy, including the energy of grief that felt too intense or overwhelming to process..
If you do not release but continue to hold unprocessed emotional responses they can become habitual patterns of tension that may keep you stuck. Even after the emotion has passed, your body may remain locked in these braced postures, restricting the flow of energy that supports health and healing.
Unstuck™ encourages gentle unraveling of karmic and generational patterns, including patterns that may have helped you survive loss, stress, trauma, grief, rejection, fear, or uncertainty. Over time, what once protected you can begin to limit you, keeping you locked in emotional loops, nervous system responses, self-sabotaging behaviors, and physical tension long after the original threat has passed.
Unstuck™ was formulated to support the gentle release of trauma, karma, subconscious imprints, and old emotional patterns that may be keeping you stuck. This expertly crafted blend of Blue Tansy, Roman Chamomile, Ylang Ylang Extra, Pressed Lime, Mandarin, Lavender, and Rose works through the olfactory pathway to help activate the limbic system, the part of the brain involved in emotion, memory, and subconscious patterning.
As we release holding patterns within us, we become increasingly more open to new opportunities and increased health.
Designed for inhalation or topical application. Topically apply 1–2 drops to the top of the head, base of the neck, over throat, over heart, navel, bottom of the feet or behind the ears. Use 2 to 3 times daily, especially during emotional processing, meditation, journaling, or somatic practice.
You can also topically apply to the follow acupressure points
- Large Intestine 4 (LI4 – Union Valley): Located in the webbed space between your thumb and index finger. Pressing this point helps release physical tension, clear mental blockages, and assists with letting go — of waste, tension, and emotional holding. This point acts as a gateway for movement and release, helping shift energy outward when things feel stuck. Gently squeeze this point as you focus on releasing stagnation and tension, letting it fall to the earth.
- Liver 3 (LV3 – Great Surge): Found on the top of the foot, in the dip between the bones of the big toe and the second toe. This is a primary point in traditional Chinese medicine for smoothing the flow of energy and relieving frustration or stuck emotions.
You can also add an affirmation like:
“My energy moves freely through my body.”
“I forgive the past and step forward with hope.”
“I am safe to feel and release my emotions.
Liver Support™
Anger that we don’t process and release can get stored in your liver, according to Chinese medicine. I believe anger can be the most intense and the most damaging of all the repressed emotions, because of its intensity. The more we try to suppress it, the more it rears its ugly head in ways that can undermine our health, our growth and our personal relationships.
Energetically, your liver is responsible for maintaining harmony and the smooth movement of energy (known as chi) throughout the body, including the smooth transition between feelings and emotions as situations change around us. This liver energy supports your drive, planning, endurance, perseverance, quick, clear intellect, ambition, patience, and organizational abilities.
When your liver energy is balanced, you probably feel kind, benevolent, compassionate and generous. When your liver is physically or energetically congested or stagnant, you might experience intense feelings of angry outbursts, irritability, resentment, frustration, rage, impatience, jealousy, or even depression.
You might also feel the need to control both yourself and others which might present an attachment to strong opinions, or being power-hungry or over-ambitious. Basically, you seek power so that nobody has power over you. Control dynamics also play out as blame, shame and guilt.
Your liver energy works in conjunction with your gallbladder energy. If gallbladder energy is stuck, it can back up into the liver causing energetic congestion which manifests as rage, anger or frustration.
Liver Support™ helps support the release of anger, including frequent irritation, impatience, resentment or frustration, being critical of yourself or others, control issues, an inability to express your feelings, feelings of not feeling heard, not feeling loved, not being recognized or appreciated.
Formulated to help move through and release anger and negative emotions attached to traumatic experiences from the cells of the liver to promote optimal healing. The oils in this blend assist the body to recognize, work through and release the anger, fear, or frustration caused by traumatic experiences so they don’t overwhelm you.
It allows you to gently let go of negative emotions, including repressed anger, which can create stuck energy and impede an organ’s ability to heal.
Just place the bottle under your nose and breathe deeply, fully inhaling the oil for 3 – 7 breaths. It helps you breathe into and work through the emotion. You can also apply it around the ankles as this is often an area where we hold resistance to moving forward in life and block the ability to receive joy and pleasure. Start at the back of the ankle and apply under the ankle bone around to the front and back under the other ankle bone, all while allowing yourself to release challenging emotions. For more tips on detoxify emotions, read this article.
If using topically, we recommend 2- 3 drops over the liver (right side of the body under the breast). You can also apply on the following acupressure points:
Liver 5: Located on the inner side of the lower leg, positioned exactly 5 anatomical inches straight up from the highest point of the inner ankle bone (medial malleolus), placing it on the lower inner leg just behind the shinbone (tibia)
Liver 14: Located the sixth space between your ribs, directly in line with your nipple, about four finger-widths out from the center of your chest.
