It’s been a rough week.
I broke off my engagement.
Even though I am the one who ended it and I am clear on why it needed to end, I am heartbroken.
I deeply loved my partner and am profoundly grateful for the four years we shared together.
But over the course of those four years, I’ve changed a lot. I’ve done a lot of work on releasing my trauma patterns. And suddenly, I’m no longer able to take responsibility for some of the things that he is projecting onto me. In other words, as I shifted out of my people-pleasing pattern, certain aspects of our relationship stopped working.
I love learning new things, and I am committed to constantly improving myself. I still wish my partner had been willing and able to embrace the same attitude. But at a certain point you have to realize that you cannot set yourself on fire to keep someone else warm and you cannot change anyone that does not want to change.
I know this is the right choice.
And I am still deeply sad.
There are many things about him that I will always love and that I will sincerely miss.
I haven’t felt this heartbroken in decades.
So I decided to lean into my sadness and heartbreak to see what oils might help lighten the intensity.
Essential Oils for Heartbreak
Sadness and heartbreak are natural responses to the loss of something or someone to which you have formed a bond or an attachment – like the loss of this relationship.
Essential oils can help you process and shift feelings of heartbreak, along with the feelings of sadness, loss, grief, overwhelm and disempowerment often associated with grief.
This has to do, in part, with your sense of smell.
You have a direct link between your sense of smell and the areas of the brain responsible for moderating your emotions and behaviors. When you inhale essential oils, airborne substances stimulate receptor cells in the roof of the nasal cavities. The olfactory receptors carry signals to the olfactory bulb in the brain. The information is then sent to the areas of your brain responsible for memory, behavior, and emotion.
Your limbic system is the emotional center of your brain that controls your hormones and influences your emotions and your mood. The limbic system plays a role in controlling several unconscious physiological functions that influence your emotions, like breathing, heart rate, and blood pressure.
On a physical level, only two synapses separate your amygdala from your olfactory nerve. No other sensory system has this kind of direct and intense contact with the neural substrates of your brain’s emotional control center. Your other four senses, including sound, sight, taste, and touch must travel to other regions of the brain first, before reaching your limbic system.
This makes essential oils an incredibly powerful tool for calming the intensity of some of the emotions that correlate with heartbreak such as sadness, fear and anger.
By triggering specific memories or emotions, the aroma from an essential oil may help release heartache, improve your mood and promote relaxation. In fact, research suggests that essential oils may help in the treatment of depression, which is one of several emotions that people tend to experience when dealing with heartbreak.
Oils allow you to gently release these intense emotions, much like you would slowly and carefully unscrew the top of a carbonated beverage to gently release excess carbonation and avoid an explosion.
My Favorite Essential Oils for Heartbreak
Particular parts of a plant and how they can help in the grieving or transitioning period.
Some of my favorite blends below can be used to help gently release and support heartbreak and sadness.
Heart™ blend was formulated to balance the heart to support, integrate and reset all the systems of the body, including mental clarity, physical health and emotional balance. The heart is our body’s reset button. By applying Vibrant Blue Oils Heart blend over the heart, it helps return the heart to balance, and strengthen our ability to process difficult emotions like heartbreak, sadness and grief.
More specifically, essential oils can be used to remove emotional toxins, along with physical toxins, to help support your emotional release. The high frequency of the essential oils may help to open the subconscious doors and unlock the barriers that stop us from releasing our traumas. The oils oxygenate the cells and bring its blockages to the surface, ready to be released.
Since smell travels directly to the emotional control center in the limbic system, inhaling essential oils releases trapped emotional patterns, including patterns of heartache. Essential oils – with their unique molecular structure – can directly stimulate the limbic lobe and the amygdala where emotional trauma is stored, processed and released.
Each essential oil possesses multiple properties that can support emotional processing and release. The oils in the Heart™ blend in particular may help to balance your heart energy to promote feelings of safety that allow your subconscious mind to release negative stored memories and emotions and replace them with positive beliefs.
Heart™ balances the heart to enhance compassion and support, integrate and reset all the systems of the body, including supporting feelings of open-heartedness, expansiveness, receptivity while mitigating loneliness, sadness and grief.
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.
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™ blend contains a proprietary blend of organic and/or wild crafted essential oils that helps you show love to others and yourself. Research has shown that sweet smells, like those found in the Heart™ blend, have been shown to reduce pain by activating the opioid receptors in the brain.
To release the trapped emotions or correct energetic imbalance, you can use the Emotion Code to identify trapped emotions, then Heart™ blend over the heart to clear the trapped emotions from your body.
READ THIS NEXT: Heart Centering with Essential Oils
Heartbreak may be triggered by traumatic or stressful events, like the death of a loved one, an accident or near miss accident, exposure to a traumatic event (like a natural disaster) , a frightening medical diagnosis or an unexpected financial or romantic loss.
These stressful events trigger a stress response in your body, throwing you into the fight-or-flight state of the nervous system. Your body responds to any threat to survival, including unexpected or alarming news, by dropping into the “emergency” sympathetic state of the nervous system to cope with the change in circumstances and physiologically prepare you to fight or flee. Your heart rate, blood pressure and respiratory rate increase and your blood flow is routed away from your organs of digestion toward muscles in the arms and legs in preparation for flight.
Whenever you feel unsafe, either physically or emotionally, your nervous system kicks into this high gear or sympathetic State, activating the survival brain either sending you into “fight or flight” or “freeze” shut down avoidance strategies. To help your body safely process heartbreak, you can shift your nervous system into the safety Parasympathetic branch of the nervous system where your heart and respiratory rate can return to normal.
Parasympathetic® blend, which contains a combination of clove and lime, can help stimulate your vagus nerve to activate your parasympathetic nervous system and gently release heartbreak.
Citrus Oils, like Lime, are useful when you need to inject an uplifting and refreshing approach to life and help heal a dark and heavy feeling. Lime is known to help you ‘let go’ and release anxious feelings and heartbreak.
The clove oil in the blend also supports your ability to change your circumstances and let go of victim mentality and patterns of self-betrayal by restoring a sense of self and instilling boundaries and the strength to stand up for your needs. For intensely stressful situations, we recommend applying it at the base of the skull and over the heart.
Dabbing a drop of Parasympathetic® blend behind my earlobe ALWAYS lifts me up. I think of it as my personal reset button.
When you are able to calm down and drop into the parasympathetic state, you can better process and release heartbreak.
The more you activate your parasympathetic nervous system, the more your body can process through the shock. A drop of Parasympathetic® oil placed on the vagus nerve (behind the earlobe on the mastoid bone) can help you calm your nervous system and drop into a more grounded, parasympathetic place.
Fascia Release™
Heartbreak often lives in your tissues, specifically in your fascia, the tissue that surrounds every cell in your body, including your heart. Your emotions—or energy in motion—travel through your fascia to be released. When your fascia is tight and constricted, emotions do not flow freely and are not released; instead, they become trapped in your tissue, especially the tissue of the heart, locking in sadness and heartbreak.
You must release the fascia to release the trapped energy and negative emotions that are stored in the tissue.
Fascia Release™ helps you tune into your body and the messages it has for you. When you learn to be present and signal safety from the body and the cells, your body feels safe to discharge energy and emotions, helping to rebalance the nervous system and release feelings of sadness and heartbreak.
Essential oils offer a safe and simple way to release tension that may be keeping you stuck and negative emotions from the tissue, creating an easy flow for healthy fascia. Releasing my fascia with Fascia Release™ essential oil has been extremely helpful.
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, such as essential oils. Fascia Release™ blend is uniquely formulated to unravel deeply held tensions, constrictions, and energetic blockages in your tissues, reducing pain, improving blood and lymphatic circulation, and releasing fear, repressed emotions, and tension held in the body (organs, muscles, tendons, bones, and joints) or the mind.
By applying Fascia Release™ — especially in the back of the body, specifically between the shoulder blades at the back of the heart — helps to soften and physically release the tight, protective patterns of fascial constrictions and adhesions around the heart that may help open the heart for the healthy flow of emotional energy. This simple ritual invites more space, both physically and emotionally, so you can begin to feel safe without becoming overwhelmed.
The essential oils in Fascia Release™ work on multiple levels: softening inflamed tissue, improving blood and lymphatic circulation, and signaling to your body that it’s okay to release. In this state of gentle unwinding, you may find old grief, sadness or heartbreak rising to the surface—and just as gently, beginning to let go.
READ THIS NEXT: How to Detoxify Emotions
When we experience loss, rejection, or heartbreak, the brain often registers it as a threat—and keeps us on high alert. Limbic Reset™ helps quiet this overactive alarm system. By engaging the olfactory nerve through inhalation, the oils bypass the conscious mind and go straight to the limbic brain—the emotional center responsible for memory, mood, and perception of safety.
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.
Formulated with emotionally balancing oils like Frankincense, Sandalwood, and Helichrysum, Limbic Reset™ supports the release of emotional trauma stored in cellular memory. Citrus oils like Melissa and Grapefruit help uplift heavy emotions and support resilience, so you don’t continue to carry what isn’t yours.
A few deep inhales of Limbic Reset™—especially during moments of deep sadness and heartbreak—can help restore a sense of calm and grounded presence. Over time, consistent use helps retrain the brain’s response to emotional triggers, opening space for new emotional patterns to form.
Apply to the temples and base of the skull, or inhale during emotional waves to reset the volume of heartbreak.
Lung Support™ was designed to help overcome grief and let go of negative experiences, including heartbreak.
Feelings of grief, bereavement, regret, loss and remorse are often associated with the lungs. The lungs are sponge-like organs located near the backbone on either side of the heart. They function 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.
Grief 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 lungs, weakening the lung’s function of circulating oxygen around the body. When lung function is impaired, it leads to shortness of breath, fatigue and feelings of melancholy, like that experienced with grief. Sadly, many chronic respiratory diseases and conditions develop after a major loss or bereavement.
Lung contains flower oils, like Rose, which can be powerful when you need to get out of a dark place. Rose oil is also known to bring a feeling of love, create a sense of well-being and release past hurts, like grief. Its benefits were documented in studies that found breathing and blood pressure relaxed after Rose oil was applied to the skin.
Lung Support™ blend works best when topically applied over the heart, lungs or around the ears. It can also be deeply inhaled and allowing yourself to gently release intense emotions with your exhale as a powerful strategy to allow you to micro-dose emotional release.
READ THIS NEXT: Essential Oils for Grief
Featured Oils:
Ready to get started? Click the links below to order today:
- Heart™ available here
- Lung Support™ available here
- Parasympathetic® available here
- Fascia Release™ available here
- Limbic Reset™ available here
- Rose available here
References:
- https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19370942/
- https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/articles/200711/the-hidden-force-fragrance
