To celebrate our 50th birthday year, my friend Naomi and I treated ourselves to a resort in Arizona where we indulged in athletic, emotional and mental challenges.
A recurring theme on our trip was the idea of needing to let go in order to move forward. The point was physically driven home on the challenge courses where you needed to physically let go of one rope in order to grab onto the next and progress through the course. We often get stuck and unable to move forward when we hang on to emotions like anger, fear, shame, guilt or grief.
Essential Oils for Letting Go
Essential oils for letting go can help you release all the emotions that keep you stuck and unable to move forward. This is because your sense of smell links directly to the limbic lobe of your brain which stores and releases emotional trauma. Smelling essential oils can help you mobilize and release the negative emotions like anger, fear, shame, guilt or grief so that you can move forward and heal. Read More about Releasing Emotions with Essential Oils HERE.
I know from personal experience how challenging it can be to release these negative emotions in the midst of massive loss. But I also recognize that even the most painful situation can be a catalyst positive growth and healing if you allow yourself to learn and grow from the situation.
Essential oils for letting go can be a powerful tool to help facilitate that growth and help you let go of emotions that no longer serve you.
1. Anger
Excessive anger activates your stress hormones and can take a toll on both your health and your relationships. In fact, research reveals that a 5-minute episode of anger can impair your immune system for more than six hours.
Intense anger can also prevent you from experiencing valuable learning that allows you to move forward and heal. For example, when you project anger at others, it allows you to abdicate responsibility for all the difficult things that may happen to you. This keeps you stuck in the role of victim, which allows you to repress or deflect your emotional pain.
By making everything everyone else’s fault, you are actually choosing to remain powerless to change, grow or learn from challenging situations. Similarly, trying to control the problem only keeps you more attached to it. If you can let go of your attachment to what went wrong or what should have happened, you can create the possibility of growth—and pave the path for more positive results.
When you choose to blame others in situations where you also played a role in the outcome, you often miss a powerful opportunity to grow and expand. When you let go of anger, you can acknowledge your shortcomings, accept responsibility for your choices and open up to the possibility of making different choices that can result in different outcomes.
What’s more, your anger doesn’t do anything to fix the situation. It just holds the negative energy in your field. Liver Support™ allows you to release anger, blame and shame that are often stored on very deep cellular level. Just place the bottle under your nose and breathe deeply, fully inhaling the oil for 3 – 7 breaths, then slowly exhaling while intentionally releasing the anger. It helps you breathe into and work through the emotion. You will know that the essential oil for blame is working when you stop smelling it. You can also topically apply 2- 3 drops of Liver Support™ over your liver (right side of the body under the breast) to help work through and release your anger and boost resilience. 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, all while allowing yourself to release your anger. Read More about Releasing Anger with Essential Oils HERE.
2. Fear
More than any other emotion, it is fear that keeps you stuck. Fear of the unknown is often more paralyzing than the certainty of remaining in an unhappy situation.
The common phrase “better the devil you know than the devil you don’t” illustrates this point that most people would rather continue to deal with a difficult person or situation they know as opposed to changing the situation and risk dealing with a new person or situation that could be worse. This fear can keep you stuck and unable to move forward.
This fear activates your stress response with anxious or fearful thoughts triggering the release of stress hormones, like cortisol and adrenaline. Fear of physical threats is a survival mechanism meant to protect you. It throws your body into the flight or fight sympathetic response necessary to survive.
Emotional or thought driven fear are often based on anxiety, worry and resulting thought patterns about all the things that could go wrong in an imaginary future. Unfortunately, your body, and its stress response, cannot tell the difference between physical fear and emotional fear. You release the same flood of hormones in both cases. For those of you who suffer from anxiety, worry or fear, this often means that your bodies are stuck in a constant stress response.
Emotions, like fear, are processed through the amygdala which is part of the limbic system, the primitive animal part of the brain. Read More about Essential Oils for Fear HERE.
Fortunately, the body has a relaxation response which is the counterbalance to the fight or flight stress response, shutting off sympathetic nervous system and switching it over to the nervous system is relaxed state known as the parasympathetic nervous system.
In this naturally relaxed state, you can release your fear, allowing your body to return to balance. This point was driven home on the challenge courses, when the ability to breathe and relax allowed my friends and I to move out of paralysis (also called the freeze response) and complete our physical challenge.
To help trigger the body’s natural parasympathetic response, you can apply Vibrant Blue Oils Parasympathetic® blend on the vagal nerve (behind ear lobe on mastoid bone). When your body is relaxed in the parasympathetic state, your fear response often subsides.
Other oils to help modulate the body’s stress response to fear include the Hypothalamus™ blend. Under conditions of chronic stress, the hypothalamus is repeatedly triggering the adrenal glands to release stress responses. Applying the Hypothalamus™ oil over the third eye helps to return the hypothalamus to balance. Similarly, Adrenal® oil either smelled or applied over the adrenals (back of the body one fist up from the bottom rib) can help return the adrenals to balance.
Finally, 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. Kidney Support™, when applied over your kidneys (one inch up and out from belly button), back of neck, or around the outside of earlobes, can help dispel fear, and assist you in feeling safe.
3. Grief
Grief can negatively affect your physical health. For example, grief can weaken your immune system, leading to illness or infection. In one study, those who had lost a loved one had weaker immune systems compared with those who had not suffered a loss.
Emotionally and physically, your lungs and your large intestine help you release and “let go” of whatever you don’t need. This includes both intense emotions and metabolic waste.
Your 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.
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 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. Sadly, many chronic respiratory diseases and conditions develop after a major loss or bereavement.
In order to grow, we often need to move on from old behavior and thought patterns as well as individuals, places and possessions. There is often a deep sense of loss and grief associated with the process of letting go. Lung Support™ helps you release grief when topically applied over the lungs. You can also inhale the oil the oil through the nose, letting the oxygen flow deeply into the lungs, then exhale or apply directly over the lungs.
Similarly, your large intestine lets go of those things that don’t serve you. Physically, it lets go of waste after your upper digestive system has taken all the necessary nutrients out of the food you eat. Emotionally, it allows you to let go of patterns of negative thinking, destructive emotions, and spiritual blockages 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 you. 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™ eases the feelings of loss, heals emotions, creates a feeling of security, and is grounding. It motivates us to move forward, assists with transitions or changing course in life, eases the feelings of loss, heals emotions, creates a feeling of security, and is grounding. Apply Large Intestine Support™ over the large intestine, around the ears or on the bottom of the feet to help you let go of past hurts.
4. Guilt
Guilt turns blame inward, a concept known as self-blame, where you attribute any negative outcome to a personal short-coming or deficiency. Guilt also has to do with control. You may like to believe that things should go your way and when they do not, you feel guilty about it.
The energies of guilt can create stagnation in the body, which may cause problems in the physical organs of the body, physically affect the back of your body, including your heart and pain in the back of the head and neck (where your skull joins to the spine) where guilt and self-recrimination hides. A pain in the neck often means you believe you have made mistakes and haven’t forgiven yourself.
Guilt can also weaken your immune system. A study compared those who had high guilt levels with those who had lower guilt levels related to pleasurable activities. They found higher levels of illness-fighting immunoglobulin A levels in those who took pleasure in activities with less guilt.
Heart™ applied over your physical heart (left side of chest) or on the back of the neck helps amplify feelings of self-love and gratitude, helping to balance and heal feelings of guilt.
5. Shame
Shame results you receive negative messages from others, leading you to believe that you are bad, defective, or unworthy and somehow helpless to change that deficit. Feelings of helplessness and powerlessness often accompany shame, producing high levels of stress-related hormones, like cortisol, that wreak havoc in the body. Others may feel justified in showering you with mental, physical, emotional or verbal abuse, in effect shaming you for something you are doing or not doing. If you choose to accept that as your truth, you allow yourself to suffer unnecessarily.
Poor boundaries are correlated with shame, especially when you believe you lack the power, skill, knowledge, or capability to manage the expectations of others and continually seek validation through serving their needs and wants. Not surprisingly, your body holds shame in your digestive system, primarily the small intestine which is also associated with boundaries. Small Intestine Support™ may help you support positive boundaries and confidence to assist in bringing a sense of peace to our lives. When you are struggling with negative emotions, like shame, it can be uplifting and help release and clear any residual negative emotions. I find it best to apply in a clockwise direction around the belly button or massaged into your ears for emotion related issues. You can start on the bottom of the ear at the earlobes and gentle massage upward along the exterior of the ear, hitting many of the major reflexology points. This article and chart show specific points on the ears for specific issues. Bladder Support™ is another excellent blend for releasing shame, especially any shame related to sexual assault.
Resources:
Ready to get started? Click the links below to order today:
- Adrenal® available here
- Bladder Support™ available here
- Heart™ available here
- Hypothalamus™ available here
- Kidney Support™ available here
- Large Intestine Support™ available here
- Liver Support™ available here
- Lung Support™ available here
- Parasympathetic® available here
- Small Intestine Support™ available here
