We often think of the Valentine holiday as a celebration of romantic love. While loving relationships with other people are valuable and important, our relationship with ourselves is perhaps the real key to our health and happiness. There are essential oils for self love that can help you find your true self.
As I am continually learning on my own 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 both 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 are able to fully love and accept yourself, you will draw to you a person who can reflect those emotions back to you.
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 that we need to go the extra mile in order 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 Valentines gift to you, I’m sharing my 10 favorite essential oils 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 supports optimal energetic alignment. Uplift™ contains several calming and nourishing oils that assist in building courage, confidence, 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 are better able to release old patterns that are no longer serving. 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 earlobe, on mastoid bone) over heart, wrists, temples and forehead to help alleviate depression and promote feelings of strength, courage, and protection. Uplift™ can also align the physical, mental and emotional energies of the body 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 suffering from 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 so they can oxygenate blood – as well as an important channel of elimination – releasing carbon dioxide from the bloodstream into the atmosphere. Feelings of grief, bereavement, regret, loss, remorse can obstruct 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 that 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 the 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 and 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, hormonal system and most of the body’s major organs. 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 helping to 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 actually stimulates the brain, helping to uplift the mood, and promoting feelings of self-confidence and optimism.
Apply Heart™ over the heart (left side of chest) to balance the heart and support, integrate and reset all the systems of the body, including mental clarity, physical health and emotional balance. Heart™ blend also supports feelings of open-heartedness, expansiveness, 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 the food we eat. 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 a hard time 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 which is 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 motivates yourself to move forward, assist with transitions or changing course in life, calm our inner critic, ease the feelings of loss, heal emotions, and create a feeling of security.
Calm™: This soothing blend is ideal for supporting a sense of well-being, alleviating anxiety, feelings of overwhelm, calming tension and worries, reducing stress and promoting calm and relaxation. Formulated with orange essential oil which is 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 were able to, “markedly reduce the amount of anti-depressants they took” with orange oil.
Apply Calm™ over the heart, on nape of the neck, the inside of wrists and outside of ears. You can also massage on the bottom of feet before bed to assist in a peaceful night’s rest or use to calm hyperactive children.
Small Intestine Support™: Poor boundaries can present as putting ourselves last on our “To Do” List, not valuing our own worth, or feeling that we somehow don’t deserve to take the time for self-care. The small intestine plays a critical role in the digestion process, 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, balancing the emotional equilibrium and fostering 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 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, 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 gentle exhale just as slowly. As you exhale, imagine exhaling any anxiety, fear or emotion that you wish to move through. 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, all 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 kinds of 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 obsess constantly about life experiences, you literally are not “transforming” them into positive fuel to motivate taking action and moving forward in life.
Applying Spleen Support™ over the spleen (left side of the body under breast) can assist in calming worries, easing anxiety and balancing and stabilizing obsessive thoughts and emotions. Formulated with Patchouli, an amazing mood-lifting oil that helps to decrease feelings of sadness and hopelessness and replace them with feelings of positivity and hope. In fact, 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.”
Resources
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
