We often think of the Valentine’s holiday as a celebration of romantic love. While loving relationships with others are valuable and important, our relationship with ourselves is perhaps the key to our health and happiness. Essential oils for self-love can help you find your true self.
As I am continually learning on my healing journey, self-love, self-appreciation, self-compassion, and self-recognition allow us to value ourselves, prioritize our health and well-being, and make room for ideal relationships with others.
To that end, I noticed that the more you love yourself and let go of criticism, negative self-beliefs, shame, or any undermining behavior, the easier it is to love others and allow others to truly love you.
The law of attraction notes that you can only be loved to the extent that you can love yourself. For example, if you are highly self-critical, you might attract a critical partner. But if you can fully love and accept yourself, you will draw someone who can reflect those emotions.
Essential Oils for Self Love
Essential oils are great tools to release negative belief patterns that may prevent us from feeling safe, lovable, or worthy of unconditional love. We may have grown up with parents who were withholding, critical, or unable to show affection. Or we might believe on some level that we are somehow unlovable or need to go the extra mile to be loved, so we feel the need to nurture everyone else—our spouses, children, parents, friends—but constantly neglect ourselves.
It’s time to put yourself first on your to-do list!
Essential oils offer a really easy way to relax and make time for yourself. As my Valentine’s gift to you, I’m sharing my 10 favorite essential oils to uplift your moods and emotions, boost confidence, and help you enjoy the best Valentine’s Day ever!
10 Essential Oils for Self Love
Rose™
Known to alleviate symptoms of depression, calm the nervous system, promote feelings of happiness, and boost your mood. It is one of the best essential oils to use in your self-love practice. It has the highest frequency of any essential oil and immediately helps to wash away negative emotions or thought patterns. Rose™ oil is also considered an aphrodisiac and can help stimulate the libido of both men and women. Rose™ can be added to a bath, massaged into the skin, or applied directly over the heart.
Uplift™
Formulated to support optimal energetic alignment, Uplift™ contains several calming and nourishing oils that assist in building courage, confidence, and self-esteem and returning a sense of calm, joy, and peace to our lives. Uplift™ inspires hope in those who have temporarily lost their optimism and helps you to overcome your fear and reclaim your potential. When you have more courage to take on new things and/or change, you can better release old patterns that no longer serve. For example, ylang-ylang oil helps curb the negative thoughts associated with depression. A 2006 study found ylang-ylang to help relieve depression and stress and promote calmness.
Apply Uplift™ to the vagal nerve (behind the earlobe, on the mastoid bone) over the heart, wrists, temples, and forehead to help alleviate depression and promote feelings of strength, courage, and protection. Uplift™ can also align the body’s physical, mental, and emotional energies when massaged into the shoulders or the feet.
Lavender™
One of the most calming and popular oils, Lavender™ can help calm the mind and the body, supporting anxiety and depression. Anxiety is often indicative of an over-active right frontal lobe. Smelling Lavender™ through the left nostril can help activate the left frontal lobe and immediately calm anxiety. In a recent study on those who have post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), lavender oil helped decrease depression and improve mood by 32.7%.
Lavender™ can be applied behind the ears, on the insides of the wrists, or added to a healing bath for the ultimate gift of self-love and nurturing.
Lung Support™
Supports the release of emotional grief to enhance breath and life energy. The lungs serve as a fundamental source of life energy—transporting oxygen from the atmosphere into the capillaries to oxygenate blood—and an essential channel of elimination—releasing carbon dioxide from the bloodstream into the atmosphere. Feelings of grief, bereavement, regret, loss, and remorse can obstruct the ability of the lungs to accept and relinquish, impeding their function of “taking in” and “letting go.” Grief that remains unresolved can become chronic and create disharmony in the body, leading to shortness of breath, fatigue, and feelings of melancholy.
Lung Support™ includes a powerful combination of essential oils, including bergamot, which helps overcome grief and let go of negative experiences. Bergamot oil promotes self-love and self-worth, helping us process and release emotional pain, including the fear of not being good enough, so we can open up to love, self-approval, joy, and self-acceptance. Bergamot can help enhance our energy levels, boosting and uplifting our mood. Further, a 2011 study credited bergamot essential oil with reducing anxiety.
Apply Lung Support™ over the lungs to help release grief and negative emotions, deeply inhale love and joy, enhance relaxation, and elevate your mood.
Heart™
The 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. When body parts aren’t functioning optimally, 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. Still, 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 systems, regenerate the heart’s structure, and help reset the homeostatic mechanism for the entire body. Heart™ is formulated with powerful calming oils, including Jasmine, an oil found to be as calming as the anti-anxiety drug valium, according to a 2010 study. Jasmine also has a mildly sedative and calming effect, allowing it to alleviate anxious thoughts, relieve stress, and ease depression. Jasmine oil stimulates the brain, helps to uplift mood, and promotes feelings of self-confidence and optimism.
Apply Heart™ over the heart (left side of the chest) to balance the heart and support, integrate, and reset all body systems, including mental clarity, physical health, and emotional balance. Heart™ blend also supports feelings of open-heartedness, expansiveness, and receptivity while mitigating loneliness, sadness, and grief.
Large Intestine Support™
The large intestine lets go of those things that don’t serve us. Physically, it lets go of waste after our upper digestive system has taken all the necessary nutrients out of our food. Emotionally, it allows us to let go of patterns of negative thinking and destructive emotions, like self-criticism, self-judgment, or self-loathing, that prevent us from being our best. Compromised large intestine energy presents as having difficulty moving on from difficult situations or holding onto emotions that harm or fail to serve us. This holding on can manifest as an unwillingness to share emotions or be open with others—the phenomenon of “bottling up” emotions for years very often leads to chronic constipation. Large Intestine Support™ contains a proprietary formulation of organic essential oils, including Sandalwood, an excellent emotional balancer and mood lifter!
Apply Large Intestine Support™ over the large intestine, around the ears, or on the bottom of the feet to help motivate yourself to move forward, assist with transitions or changing course in life, calm your inner critic, ease the feelings of loss, heal emotions, and create a sense of security.
Calm™
This soothing blend is ideal for supporting a sense of well-being, alleviating anxiety and feelings of overwhelm, calming tension and worries, reducing stress, and promoting calm and relaxation. It is formulated with orange essential oil, a potent anti-depressant that creates feelings of happiness and helps elevate mood. A study conducted at the Japan-based Mei University found that patients could “markedly reduce the amount of anti-depressants they took” with orange oil.
Apply Calm™ over the heart, on the nape of the neck, the inside of the wrists, and the outside of the ears. You can also massage it on the bottom of your feet before bed to assist in a peaceful night’s rest or use it to calm hyperactive children.
Small Intestine Support™
Poor boundaries can present as putting ourselves last on our “To-Do” List, not valuing our worth, or feeling that we don’t deserve to take the time for self-care. The small intestine plays a critical role in digestion, absorbing and assimilating key nutrients while preventing harmful pathogens and toxins from entering the body. On an emotional level, the small intestine plays a similarly discerning role with emotions, helping to understand experiences and determine healthy and appropriate relationships and boundaries. It is also an area where we can hold deep childhood scars of rejection, abandonment, or abuse, negative thoughts fueled by feelings of lack of self-worth, low self‐esteem, loneliness, neglect, and anxieties about survival and success.
Small Intestine Support™ can support the healthy functioning of the small intestine as it sorts and transforms food, feelings, and ideas into useful ingredients for the body/mind. It also helps correct imbalances where you are overly in tune with other’s feelings at the expense of your own.
Apply Small Intestine Support™ over the small intestine or pulse points to nourish and support a sense of harmony and belonging. This will balance emotional equilibrium and foster clear boundaries that are supportive and nurturing to your physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual health.
Liver Support™
In Chinese medicine, our anger is stored in the liver. Liver Support™ helps you move through and release anger and negative emotions attached to traumatic experiences from the liver cells to promote optimal healing. The oils in this blend assist the body in recognizing, working through, and releasing anger, fear, or frustration, including frequent irritation, impatience, resentment, 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, so they don’t overwhelm you.
Just place the bottle of Liver Support™ about an inch or two below the nose and deeply breathe in the oil to the count of six, then gently exhale just as slowly. Imagine exhaling any anxiety, fear, or emotion you wish to move through as you exhale. Repeat this for 3-7 breaths. It is not uncommon to stop smelling the oil at some point during this process, as that is often indicative of the body shifting. You can also apply Liver Support™ over the liver or around the ankles, as this is often an area where we hold resistance to moving forward in life. Start at the back of the ankle and apply under the ankle bone around to the front and back under the other ankle bone while allowing yourself to release challenging emotions.
Spleen Support™
The spleen, located in the left upper quadrant of the abdomen, acts as a filter for blood as part of the immune system. Old red blood cells are recycled in the spleen, and platelets and white blood cells are stored there. The spleen also helps fight certain bacteria that cause pneumonia and meningitis. According to Chinese medicine, the spleen houses the body’s thoughts and intentions and is responsible for analytical thinking, memory, cognition, intelligence, and ideas. These emotions in their extreme states—over-thinking, worry, excessive mental and intellectual stimulation, or any activity that involves a lot of mental effort—can create disharmony in the spleen. If you “ruminate” and constantly obsess about life experiences, you are not “transforming” them into positive fuel to motivate, take action, and move forward.
Applying Spleen Support™ over the spleen (left side of the body under the breast) can assist in calming worries, easing anxiety, and balancing and stabilizing obsessive thoughts and emotions. It is formulated with Patchouli, an excellent mood-lifting oil that helps decrease sadness and hopelessness and replaces them with positivity and hope. Patchouli is known to trigger the release of serotonin and dopamine in the brain, which can alleviate feelings of depression, anxiety, and stress. Research found that “patchouli can be used to relieve depression, stress, calm nerves, control appetite and to improve sexual interest.”
Featured Oils:
Ready to get started? Click the links below to order today:
- Rose™ available here
- Uplift™ available here
- Lavender™ available here
- Lung Support™ available here
- Heart™ available here
- Large Intestine Support™ available here
- Calm™ available here
- Small Intestine Support™ available here
- Liver Support™ available here
- Spleen Support™ available here
