Last weekend I went away with friends who have younger children. They were excited to get away from the constant noise, touching, messiness and busyness.
I remember that stage of parenting when the house was never clean and I never had a moment to myself. I remember my frustration at the time and how I longed for privacy. And now I realize that I should have been careful what I wished for.
Now, the house is mostly quiet save for my barking dogs. My daughter is in her senior year and is so busy that I feel lucky if I get to spend 20 minutes with her each day.
For the first time in decades, possibly in my entire life, I feel lonely.
I have time to myself.
And I no longer know how I want to fill it.
Between Max dying and COVID my world has gotten so much smaller. And so many things that I used to enjoy doing – like enjoying live entertainment and travel – no longer seem as accessible.
And yet, my default is to problem solve, so I’ve been trying to problem solve loneliness in the middle of a pandemic.
Enter Heart™ Blend. . .
When I apply Heart™ over my heart, my throat and the back of my neck, I feel calmer.
The pain and intensity of loneliness dissipates for a moment so I can breathe and take a moment to the assess the landscape and calm my desire for distraction.
Distraction and Loneliness
I suspect I have been experiencing loneliness long before I was actually physically alone. I was just so good at distracting myself that I was often too busy and exhausted to notice.
It wasn’t until I really slowed down, in part by choice, in part by circumstance, that the loneliness became impossible to ignore.
Intellectually, I knew that facing my loneliness was an important step in unraveling my grief. It seemed like a good idea to my logical brain.
But my emotional heart just hurts. It hurts so much I am not sure I have the capacity to process all the hurt. I want to run and run far and fast, not sit it in and yet, I know that the only way out is through and that is where essential oils can be especially handy. In the breathing through. Breathing through the pain. Breathing through the shame that I have let so much fall away from my life without taking the time to replace what was lost (as if I could ever replace a lost child, but still I feel like I could have/should have somehow done more to avoid this rock bottom moment). Sitting in the sorrow so that I can acknowledge it and move through it instead of distracting, delaying and avoiding.
Essential Oils for Loneliness
Essential oils have been known to provide relief from the intensity of pain. Oils can help me calm my overwhelm and anxiety in those moments when I literally feel like I might literally self combust.
They let me pause the busy, and take a manageable sip of pain so I can work through and release it instead of just distracting myself from the pain. Allowing yourself to feel the pain allows you to shift the pain, to make an internal shift.
Loneliness offers an opportunity for transformation
“After a devastating loss, a terrible life interruption a broken heart we find ourselves alone,” as my friend Christina Rasmussen writes in her book Second Firsts. She notes, “Life re-entry can be a lonely experience. Transformation into the person you want to be will require different kinds of losses – the loss of relationships you used to have. The loss of many bridges that connect you to the life you left behind. It’s the loneliness of re-entering life. It is necessary for your transformation to occur.”
Essential Oils for the Heart
Heart™ essential oil blend has allowed me to pause my loneliness and see it not as a limitation, but as a potential for new possibility. Almost like painting with a blank canvas, being more thoughtful and clear about what kind of relationships I want to attract into my life and what I want my next chapter to look like
Heart™ balances the heart that 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.
Heart™ blend contains Neroli which is known to help strengthen and stabilize your emotions, bringing relief to seemingly hopeless situations. This encourages confidence, courage, joy, enabling you to see possibility in even the most challenging of situations.
Neroli may help you open your heart and let go the pain associated with feeling isolated and the wandering thoughts that accompany it. Neroli can be powerful tool in helping to shift your mindset away from self-abuse and towards self-healing.
Apply 2-3 drops of Heart™ over the heart (left side of chest) 2-3 times daily to calm and uplift the heart and the body. I also found benefit from applying the blend over my throat and behind my neck. During times of intense loneliness, use as often as is needed (every 20 -30 minutes).
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