Understanding that your body stores toxic emotions along with physical toxins, such as metals, mold, and pathogens, empowers you to take control of your health. It is common to mobilize emotional toxins when you mobilize physical toxins. By learning to process and release these emotional toxins, you can ensure the smooth progress of your physical detox.
Extensive research on the health-promoting and health-damaging effects of emotions has found that unprocessed negative emotions are strongly linked to disease and ill health. “The health-deleterious impact of negative emotions” like anger, fear, sadness, grief, anxiety, and depression is implicated in a wide range of diseases, from heart disease and cancer to arthritis and diabetes and even the common cold. This knowledge can serve as a powerful motivator to address your emotional well-being.
This likely has to do with the fact that emotions activate your “fight or flight” stress response, and unprocessed emotions are always running in the background, keeping your sympathetic nervous system on high alert even when no physical danger is present.
Emotion is derived from the Latin word exmovere, which means to move out, agitate, or excite. The English word “motion” is also derived from this word. When emotions get stirred up, they trigger movement or readiness for action, which, in turn, activates stress hormones and alters brain activity.
Left unprocessed, these negative emotions influence your thoughts, your behavior, and ultimately your health.
What is an Emotional Detox?
As you embark on the journey of releasing toxins from your tissues, both physical and emotional, you are initiating a transformative process. This process may lead to the release of emotions that were once trapped within you, such as anger, fear, grief, and sadness, from periods of intense trauma.
It’s fascinating to realize that our emotions are not just abstract feelings, but they also produce physical energy. When you release these emotions, you may experience physical detoxification symptoms, like nausea, fatigue, flu-like symptoms, headache, joint and muscle pain, along with emotional symptoms, like sadness or anger. This understanding can empower you to take control of your emotional and physical well-being.
Understanding that these stuck emotions are similar to physical toxins, contributing to stagnation and compromising the function of your cells, tissues, and organs, can be a powerful motivator. It underscores the importance of releasing these emotions as part of the detoxification process, leading to improved health and well-being.
In Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), each emotion is believed to have a unique vibrational frequency that can impact the function of specific organs. For example, anger is thought to resonate with the liver, fear with the kidneys, and grief with the lungs. This perspective provides a holistic understanding of the mind-body connection and can guide detoxification practices.
What Role Do Emotions Play?
Emotions are not just feelings, they are energy that prompts and organizes you for action. This empowering energy resonates at specific vibrational frequencies and serves as a warning system to alert you to potential dangers, putting you in control of your responses.
When a particular emotion is triggered, your whole body goes on a sort of alert to be ready for action related to that emotion. For example, anger can cause you mentally and physiologically to become aggressive. Fear helps you prepare to flee by triggering fear-based thoughts to prime your body for safety.
According to the book, Don’t Let Your Emotions Run Your Life, emotions can also:
- Prompt and organize you for action
- Provide necessary information about what’s going on in a situation (especially social situations)
- Motivate you (anger in particular is very motivating)
- Help you with communication with others
- Help you become adaptive.
Essential oils, with their unique properties, can aid in moving emotions through the body, potentially preventing and reversing disease. This knowledge can provide reassurance and hope for those seeking to improve their emotional health.
They may help you shift to more positive emotions and release emotions that are stored or trapped in your body.
What is Really Happening When You Detoxify Emotions?
Emotional detoxification involves the process of transmuting and releasing emotions that you may not want to feel or are unsure how to process, leading you to suppress them. Transmuting here means to change or transform these emotions into something more manageable and less harmful.
When you don’t transmute or work through your emotions, your body continues experiencing them even when you’re not thinking about them. This deep connection between your body and emotions is a testament to your body’s resilience and its role in protecting you.
Just like physical detoxification, emotional detoxification is a multi-step process that, when understood and followed, can lead to significant emotional healing and well-being.
Phase one: In physical detox, phase one neutralizes toxins so they can be excreted or easily removed from the body. For an emotional detox, you need to counteract the intensity and toxicity of the emotion through nervous system regulation and heart coherence.
Phase two: In physical detoxification, phase two is where the liver attaches another molecule to the “intermediate toxin” to render it less harmful. Similarly, toxic emotions such as anger, fear, or guilt can get wired into your organs and your nervous system. Essential oils can help you release specific unprocessed energy from the emotional toxicity of your organs and tissues.
Essential Oils for Emotional Detox
Essential oils can help you mobilize, process, transmute, and integrate stuck emotional energy and re-create nervous system and heart coherence within your body.
The key to releasing negative emotions is love, compassion, and empathy, both for yourself and for others involved in the situation. If someone hurt or betrayed you, you may stay angry at that person or fear future interactions. These emotions dysregulate your nervous system, throwing you into a sympathetic dominant state and taking you out of heart coherence.
Essential oils are powerful tools for embracing positive emotions like joy, love, and peace, and sorting through more challenging emotions such as anger, fear, and sadness. Sadly, positive thinking alone cannot override your fight-or-flight nervous system.
But did you know that your sense of smell, when used to inhale essential oils, has a direct pathway to the emotional center of your brain, the limbic system? This system controls your hormones and influences your emotions and mood, giving you a powerful tool for emotional regulation.
On a physical level, only two synapses separate your amygdala from your olfactory nerve. No other sensory system has this 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 different brain regions before reaching your limbic system.
This direct physiological access can rewire your physiology and detoxify emotions.
The inhalation and topical application of essential oils work with your natural physiology to support an emotional detox, a process of releasing and purging negative emotions from your system, promoting emotional balance and well-being!
READ THIS NEXT: Essential Oils for Emotional Health
Essential Oils for Phase One of Emotional Detox
Empower yourself using the following essential oil blends, which can be powerful tools in supporting nervous system regulation and heart coherence. They can help you neutralize intensity and toxicity and transmute emotion for easier detoxification, giving you a sense of control over your emotional well-being.
Parasympathetic®
Your Parasympathetic branch of the nervous system allows you to feel safe and less reactive to intense or toxic emotions.
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.
Remember, activating your parasympathetic nervous system can help neutralize the emotional charge that keeps toxic emotions in your body. Acknowledging your feelings from a mindful state allows you to observe your experience from a more detached, less emotional place, making it easier to process, transmute, and release. And remember, you might physically feel the discharge or release. For example, some clients report shivering or shaking off emotions during this process, validating the physical aspect of emotional release.
READ THIS NEXT: Parasympathetic Pause
Heart™
Your heart integrates and balances your physical, emotional, and mental body.
Your emotions are reflected in your heart rhythm patterns. When you are in a state of fear or anger, your heartbeat reflects that negative energy through a chaotic rhythm known as an “incoherent heart rhythm pattern.”
Your heart plays a crucial role in emotional detoxification. It sends signals to your brain that influence the release of hormones, impacting your mental and emotional experience. Incoherent heart rhythms inhibit higher cognitive functions, hindering emotional detoxification. This is where Heart™ blend comes in.
Conversely, when you’re experiencing positive emotions like love, joy, gratitude, and compassion, you create a state of heart coherence or “coherent heart rhythm patterns” that look smooth, ordered, and stable. Coherent heart patterns help your body’s systems synchronize and work better, enhancing your ability to think clearly, learn, remember, reason, and make healthy, thoughtful decisions—and detoxify emotions.
Heart™ blend is a catalyst for positive change, helping you activate heart coherence by energetically aligning your heart into coherence. This helps you focus on positive, peaceful, loving, and harmonious thoughts and emotions, uplifting your spirit and fostering a sense of hope.
Your heart is home to 40,000 sensory neurons, through which it communicates with the brain and the body, producing and releasing hormones into the bloodstream.
Heart™ blend was specifically designed to harmonize the chemical and electrical signals in your heart, supporting an optimal state of heart coherence. To use it, simply apply 2-3 drops over the front of your heart (left side of the chest) as part of your daily routine.
During intense sadness, use the Heart™ blend as often as needed (every 20 -30 minutes). Use it 2-3 times daily to support heart coherence and emotional detox during everyday stress. This consistent support will make you feel cared for and less alone in your emotional journey.
READ THIS NEXT: Essential Oils for Heart Coherence
Fascia Release™
The issues are in the tissues, and before you can begin to unpack your blocked or stuck heart energy, you need to open up the space around your physical heart with Fascia Release™ blend.
By releasing fascia constriction in the back of the body—specifically between the shoulder blades at the back of the heart—you can experience a physical release of fascial constrictions and adhesions around the heart. This can pave the way for a healthy flow of emotional energy, offering a sense of relief and optimism.
When you experience stress or heartbreak, part of you is resistant, which triggers you to physically contract, constrict, or pull away from physical danger, a negative thought, or an emotional aversion. In the process, you constrict and physically guard your heart in preparation for an attack. When you do this, you internalize the fear without release or recovery. In short, energy doesn’t flow, and your body constricts—which locks the stress in your body.
Fascia Release™ is a powerful tool that can help ‘unwind’ your fascia, emotionally signaling your body that you’re ‘safe.’ It physically removes restrictions and tension in your muscles and connective tissue, creating a protective layer or ‘armoring’ that will not be released physically or emotionally until you are certain of your safety.
Topically applying Fascia Release™ over the physical heart—with focused application and both above on the clavicle bones in sweeping outward motions and in a gentle vertical caress from your throat and the sides of your neck down over and below the heart—opens the space to allow energy and emotions to flow down and out of your system. You can also apply over the back of your heart. This allows the fascia and muscles surrounding the heart to help release toxic emotions like anger and sadness.
READ THIS NEXT: Open Your Heart with Fascia Release
Essential Oils for Phase Two of Emotional Detox
Empower yourself with these essential oil blends that can be used to calm the intensity of emotionally toxic energies—including anger, fear, sadness, and grief. By micro-dosing emotional release and detoxification from your internal organs, you take control of your emotional well-being.
In Chinese medicine, different emotions ‘gravitate’ to and are related to other organs. For example, anger and frustration relate to the liver. When you start to physically detoxify your liver, it will often begin to self-clear emotionally. If you cannot process the intensity of the emotions, it can impede your physical detoxification.
Essential oils and the sense of smell allow you to activate and release intense emotions and sensations over brief durations. They provide a small amount of stimulus to engage your body in releasing the pain without flooding and shutting down your system or keeping you stuck in a state of emotional denial or suppression.
Once your nervous system is calmed, you can begin to release specific emotions in small, manageable doses. Think of it like using an eye dropper, not a fire hose. Releasing intense feelings can be a painful process, so it’s important to be compassionate and patient with yourself. Remember, the only way out is through, but there’s no need to rush.
On a positive note, essential oils help you control the duration of challenging emotions, releasing just a small amount of the intensity at a time, much like you would slowly and carefully unscrew the top of a carbonated beverage to release excess carbonation and avoid an explosion gently.
I recommend a specific technique for using essential oils to release intense emotions. Inhale the essential oil deeply, holding it under your nose for 3–7 breaths. As you exhale, visualize the release of the painful emotion and any associated pain and intensity. This process helps you breathe into and work through the emotion.
Liver Support™ for Anger
Anger can take many forms—rage, blame, frustration, hostility, or irritation.
According to Chinese medicine, it’s crucial to process and release anger, as it can get stored in your liver. Any stagnation, congestion, or compromise in the healthy function of your liver allows toxic chemicals to build up and accumulate in your body. Frustration, rage, and anger build up when toxins build up.
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.
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 while allowing yourself to release challenging emotions.
READ THIS NEXT: Essential Oils for Anger Management
Kidney Support™ for Fear
Fear, as the emotional response to an immediate threat, is a normal and vital part of survival. It’s an unpleasant feeling that arises from perceived danger or threat. This response, while uncomfortable, is a crucial alert system that allows you to assess your ability to deal with potentially threatening situations. It often triggers a fight or flight response, preparing you to deal with environmental threats effectively.
Anticipated threats or thoughts about potential dangers can also trigger fear. When over-activated, it can feel like anxiety, nervousness, compulsiveness. These responses are normal and part of the human experience, and it’s okay to feel them.
The goal isn’t to “overcome your fear” or turn it off. It’s to feel it, embrace it, and most importantly, learn from it. Fear can be a powerful teacher, providing insights into our deepest concerns and helping us grow.
In addition to the Parasympathetic® blend, which helps to calm the fight or flight response, Kidney Support™, when applied over your kidneys (one inch up and out from the belly button), back of the neck, or around the outside of earlobes, can help dispel fear, and assist you in feeling safe.
Fear is often associated with your kidneys, two bean-shaped organs that sit on top of your adrenal glands and regulate the balance and flow of fluids in your body by selectively filtering out or retaining various minerals and electrolytes. In Chinese medicine, fear is associated with the water element, as water is symbolic of your unconscious, or that which you do not understand and therefore might fear. These feelings of fear and paranoia can be held in your kidneys, impairing function. Topically applying Kidney Support™ over your kidneys 2-3 times daily may help calm your fear response.
READ THIS NEXT: Overcoming Fear with Essential Oils
Lung Support™ for Sadness and Grief
Sadness is an emotional state characterized by disappointment, grief, hopelessness, disinterest, and a dampened mood. It’s important to remember that sadness is a natural part of the human experience, allowing you to become aware of and release anything that no longer belongs to you or hurts you. You are not alone in this process.
According to Chinese medicine, feelings of grief and loss are stored in your lungs, and they can obstruct the ability of your lungs to accept and relinquish, impeding their function of “taking in” and “letting go” of oxygen and feelings. Grief that remains unresolved can become chronic and create disharmony in the lungs, weakening the lung’s function of circulating oxygen around the body. Lung Support™ can help release these feelings of loss and support your ability to transport oxygen from the atmosphere into the capillaries so they can oxygenate blood—and eliminate carbon dioxide from the bloodstream into the atmosphere. It’s crucial to actively work on releasing these emotions. Apply 2-3 drops over the lungs, allowing yourself to deeply exhale any grief as you apply the blend.
READ THIS NEXT: Essential Oils for Grief
Featured Oils:
- Parasympathetic® available here
- Heart™ available here
- Fascia Release™ available here
- Liver Support™ available here
- Kidney Support™ available here
- Lung Support™ available here
