Releasing Emotional Patterns with Essential Oils

My son Max would have turned 18 last week.

While I had always been warned that grief is not linear, I was ill-prepared for the intensity of this particular missed milestone.  

I would have loved to meet the man he might have become.  

I could not help but wonder what he would have looked like, how he would have filled his time, which childhood friends he would still be close to, who he would have loved and where he would have chosen to attend college.  

The last question, the college choice question, feels particularly intense as all of his childhood friends are in the process of making their college decisions and every time I leave the house I seem to run into his old friends or their parents.  Watching his best friends grow up and thrive without him is such a mixed blessing – on one hand, I am so proud of them and so grateful to bear witness to their journey.  On the other hand, I am so sad that Max will never get to experience those milestones.

One day after running into his closest friend and hearing about all the exciting things in his future – college, girlfriend, summer travel plans –  I was overwhelmed with such an intense wave of sadness, that I literally felt paralyzed – I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t move.  The intensity of my sadness and grief was so big that I didn’t know how to experience or release it, so instead I tried to depress it.  I do wonder if this is the origin of the word depression – the inability to process sad feelings so just attempting to numb and avoid feeling.

Fortunately, I was walking my dogs during this particular moment so I was unable to stay paralyzed and depress these feelings for long.  Instead, I started moving with the dogs and the tears started flowing and the breath started heaving – loudly.  I had read that movement helps to move emotions.  

And I did.  I walked and sobbed and at one point started dry heaving, but I made it home and went straight to the essential oil pantry (the cool, dark, place with I keep my oils).  

Intense moments of pain and suffering have always emerged as the biggest opportunity to crash test dummy myself, so I best guessed 

• Parasympathetic™ to calm my nervous system with
• Heart™ to try to pivot my sadness into love and gratitude for the 12 years I did get to enjoy with Max and all the positive memories from those years
• Lung Support™ to release my grief 

Releasing Emotional Patterns with Essential Oils

These blends helped me calm down enough to realize that I needed more powerful tools or strategies to tackle this level of emotional pain.  I remembered an old book on releasing emotional patterns with essential oils – that I ironically stored on a bookshelf in Max’s old room – and set out to learn more.

The first page of the book details how emotions can either be released or stored and that stored emotions can either be:

• Stuffed, as I had been doing which leads to blocked energy and pain or 
• Redirected and channeled into positive experiences, which I had also been trying to do.  

But, let’s be honest, I had mostly been avoiding situations that could cause emotional pain because I already had too much to handle.  What I did not know how to do was redirect and release my negative emotional patterns, which I want to share more about.

My most exciting discovery is different acupressure points which assist in releasing emotional patterns

Essential Oils To Release Or Change Emotional Patterns

I have been writing a great deal about how smell accesses the emotional limbic brain.

In particular, the chemical constituent Sesquiterpenes, found in high levels in essential oils such as Frankincense and Sandalwood, are thought to help to increase the oxygen in the limbic system which in turn “unlocks” the DNA and allows emotional baggage to be released from cellular memory.  Research on intergenerational trauma has found that emotions can be encoded within the DNA of the cells and passed on from generation to generation. 

Emotions themselves are stored in the body in your organs, glands, and systems.  According to the book Releasing Emotional Patterns with Essential Oils, “Feelings are taken in through the chakras, or energy centers along the midline of the body, and then fed into the meridian system, which consists of energy channels that run over and through the body. Since each organ has a vibrational frequency, as do emotions, the emotions will settle in an area with a corresponding frequency. Disease occurs when the body’s vibrational frequency drops below a certain point. Essential oils can raise the body’s frequency, and therapeutic grade (medicinal quality) oils are able to do this because they vibrate at a high frequency and transfer that frequency to the body.”

The book notes that “emotional patterns are fear-based survival responses.”  To be safe as a child, you had to control your emotions.  If you felt unsafe expressing feelings, you may have had to suppress and internalize them or find another outlet. As a child, you may have had limited resources, especially if your role models had poor ways of handling their own negative emotions. As a result, you may have learned the negative expression of an emotion, but not the positive side, let alone how to access it. 

Pain is usually the catalyst that inspires you to seek better ways of handling situations. For me, pain was induced by the trauma and resulting grief of losing my 12-year-old son Max in a car accident in 2018.  For you, pain might be induced through a physical or emotional trauma which then initiates an emotional pattern where:

• Emotional energy gets generated during real or perceived trauma, which enters the body and, if it is 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.  
• The memory of the trauma gets stored in the “emotional center” of the brain, known as the limbic system. 
• Your mind may create a belief and attach it to the emotional memory stored in the limbic brain. 
• This emotional response to trauma gets stored in the cellular memory throughout your body and becomes automatic, until you release it.  If you choose to ignore and suppress the feelings, the problem tends to magnify each time it presents itself.

Often, the emotional pain you are experiencing can feel like more than you are able to deal with, so you may block it off from your conscious awareness.  I often say that when I don’t know what to do, I do nothing.  And by doing nothing, I mean I stuff and ignore the painful feelings – perpetuating the problem instead of healing from it.

This is the how chronic illness can start.  You can only bury your emotions for so long.  Remember that emotions are stored in the body.  Over time unprocessed emotions build pressure, producing pain or disease in the area

Essential oils have been a powerful tool to help shift the emotional intensity without having to relive the unpleasant experience.

Clearing Emotional Patterns with Essential Oils

Essential oils can be powerful tools to help you clear emotional patterns from the body.  This is due, in part, to the fact that most emotions stem from either love or fear.  Essential oils can help regulate the fear response and activate heart coherence and feelings of love and gratitude which help ease the release of intense emotions like anger, sadness and grief.

Emotions stored in the glands and organs can be accessed through the the topical application of essential oils on acupuncture points, and the limbic system accessed through smell and the inhalation of essential oils. 

“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 limbic system of the brain, thus providing direct access to the body’s cellular memory,” according to Releasing Emotional Patterns with Essential Oils.

The book further notes that “Clearing deep-seated emotional patterns requires releasing held emotional patterns and replacing them with more positive responses.”  I outlined a protocol that combines essential oils, affirmations, and tapping with fingers on specific Chinese acupuncture meridians associated with key organs (Available Here). This combination helps release and repair emotional blocks, diminishing the pattern of the negative emotions and thoughts and replacing them with more positive options. This helps to balance the nervous system and enhance and open our energetic field for optimal healing and vibrant health.

Step 1: Shift Out of Fear with Parasympathetic™ 

Your Parasympathetic branch of the nervous system allows you to feel safe and less reactive to intense or toxic emotions, while the Sympathetic nervous system keeps your body, mind and heart in lockdown where it is more difficult to process and release emotions. Activating your parasympathetic nervous system may help to neutralize the emotional charge that keeps the intense emotions stuck in your body. 

Topically applying the Parasympathetic™ blend behind your earlobe on your mastoid bone helps to shift you out of emotional reactivity, allowing you to transmute and detoxify intense emotions with less difficulty and intensity.

Step 2: Heal your Heart with Heart™ 

Part of releasing negative emotions involves transmuting the negative perspective to the positive.  This is accomplished through your heart and raising the vibration of body 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 more easily  release these feelings.  Stagnant anger, grief, sadness, judgement, low self-worth cannot exist in combination with coherent heart rhythm patterns. 

When you are in a state of 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, simply apply 2-3 drops over the front of the heart (left side of chest).

Fascia Release™ also helps open up the space around your physical heart with fascia blend.  Releasing fascia constriction in the back of the body – specifically between the shoulder blades at the back on 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.

Step 3: Release the Specific Emotion

I formulated the Vibrant Blue Oils Emotion Balance line to help release specific emotions from your body’s cellular memory.  Deep seated emotions and their resulting thought patterns can drive a chronic stress response that interferes with your ability to heal.  Remember a body in stress cannot heal. In order to really heal, you need to address the problem at its root and help release outdated emotions and thought patterns driving the stress

The word emotion includes the word motion, signifying that emotions are meant for us to experience and move through.   When we lack the tools or the support to move through these emotions or thought patterns, they can get trapped in the body as concentrated and condensed fields of energy, often in the corresponding organ area, disrupting the body’s innate intelligence and energy flow.

That said, releasing those emotions and thought patterns can often help heal the associated organ. With this intention in mind, we are pleased to introduce the following emotion balance blends to help balance associated organs:

The following blends and affirmations can be used in this process:

These blends are designed support the gentle release of emotions. Oils are uniquely beneficial in helping to release emotions as the sense of smell links directly to the limbic lobe of the brain which stores and releases emotional trauma. Smell has a direct route to the limbic system and often can mobilize long forgotten memories and emotions.   Just as when we detoxify our livers, it is not enough simply mobilize the toxins. We need to ensure that they leave our field and replenish the depleted organs with nourishing food and energy.

Here’s how:

1. Identify and FEEL the EMOTION.  This brings it into conscious awareness.

2. Inhale deeply, smelling the essential oil while focusing on the positive side of the emotion or the positive expression of the emotion.

3. Topically apply the oil to the Emotional Accupressure points, above the eyes on the forehead.  You can also lay your hand over your forehead.

4. Focus on or say a positive affirmation that helps to shift the energy from the negative to positive. This allows you to move from an undesirable emotional state to a positive state.  

Remember all emotions come from either fear or love.  Positive affirmations – or phrases you say to your subconscious mind to support positive change –  allow you to reframe your experience and connect with the other side of the emotion from a mindset of choice and personal empowerment, not that of a victim. (more here).  When the negative emotion has lost its hold, it is easier for you to shift.  Continue breathing the oil until you feel the energy shift, 

The following affirmations can be used in combination with the following oils to help clear, release and reprogram emotional patterns in your body and replace them with the desired response.  

• Bladder Support™ – “I comfortably and easily release the old and welcome the new into my life.  I am safe.”
• Calm™ – “I love and support myself and I trust that everything is going to be O.K. I am safe.”
• Kidney Support™ – “I dissolve my fear with ease.  I am safe.”
• Large Intestine™ -“I easily release that which I no longer need.  The past is over.  I am free.”
• Liver Support™ – “I am ready to release all hurt, resentment and angry feelings.”
• Lung Support™ -I release my grief with ease and take in the fullness of life.
• Small Intestine™ –  I digest life with ease and trust myself and my judgement. I easily assimilate and absorb all that I need and release the past with joy.
• Spleen Support™ – I release worry and embrace balance. I love and approve of myself and trust the process of life to be there for me. I am safe. All is well.
• Thyroid Support™ – I express myself freely and creatively. I speak up for myself with ease 
• Uplift™ – I love and approve of myself. It is safe for me to reclaim my power to change.”

The most important element is your intention. Feel the feelings and focus on the affirmation to release the negative emotion and invite in the positive emotion you wish to program into your cells. For example, you might replace fear with safety, love or confidence. If you cannot think of anything specific, simply say “I deeply and completely love and accept myself.”

Doing the clearing procedure at night before you go to bed allows your subconscious to process the emotional patterns during your dream state.

Featured Oils:

References: