Happy Thanksgiving week! As we enter the time of year when we focus on gratitude, I wanted to share some of my favorite essential oil blends to help you give yourself and your loved ones the gift of gratitude by helping to enhance feelings of love, gratitude, and abundance.
Grateful individuals tend to notice and appreciate the positive in the world, count their blessings, and see their lives and experiences as “gifts” for which to be thankful.
When you focus on all the positives in your life, it helps amplify those benefits—not only physically but mentally and emotionally as well.
Health Benefits of Gratitude
Research finds that focusing on gratitude practice may help you boost your mood by enhancing your ability to feel more positive emotions, improve physical health, and enhance cognitive functions, including memory.
Gratitude improves physical health. Research finds that gratitude is linked to traits indicative of better physical health including conscientiousness, emotional stability, and optimism.
What’s more, grateful individuals experience a wide variety of social and psychological health benefits. For example, grateful individuals tend to report greater vitality and agency, along with better sleep and less anxiety. A 2012 study published in Personality and Individual Differences found that grateful people experience fewer aches and pains and report feeling healthier than other people.
Gratitude also improves psychological health, by helping you emotionally detoxify negative emotions like anger, fear, and sadness. This seems to work, in part, because gratitude enhances empathy toward other people and reduces aggression.
Gratitude increases mental strength by activating the parasympathetic branch of your nervous system. The HeartMath Institute found that when you feel gratitude or appreciation, your heart rhythms become more synchronized and coherent, which increases the mental clarity, resilience, and well-being needed for discernment and better choices.
HeartMath researchers found that “gratitude causes a synchronized activation in multiple brain regions and lights up parts of the brain’s reward pathways. Gratitude can boost endorphins that produce a natural euphoric rush; it can boost oxytocin—the love or bonding hormone—where you feel more warm-hearted connections with others; it can boost the neurotransmitter serotonin that makes you feel happy and calm; and it activates the brain stem to produce dopamine, which helps you feel pleasure. Gratitude has also been shown to boost immune system functions, as well as lower stress and lower blood pressure.”
By way of contrast, focusing on negative emotions or complaining was found to literally shrink your hippocampus, the part of your brain that supports memory and problem-solving abilities, according to a study by Stanford University.
Essential Oils to Support Gratitude
Essential oils may help you enhance feelings of love, gratitude, and abundance. Your sense of smell links directly to the limbic lobe of your brain which stores and releases emotional memories and trauma. Smelling essential oils can help you mobilize and release negative emotions so you can sincerely feel gratitude or appreciation for family, friends, nature, or the convenient things in life.
Plants and the oils derived from plants help not only with physical ailments but also with emotional processing. They help support movement and gently release stagnation, including emotional stagnation so that you can begin to release stuck energy and old patterns and open up to new potential.
Essential oils can calm the intensity of the emotional flow, allowing you to chunk the release so that it feels more manageable. In this way, essential oils help you control the duration of the pain—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 gently release excess carbonation and avoid an explosion.
Combining essential oils with positive thoughts or feelings of gratitude can help expedite your healing.
My favorite essential oil blends to open the heart and support gratitude are:
Heart™
Heart™ helps amplify feelings of love and gratitude, increasing the amount of love in your life. In every moment, you have the opportunity to see the glass as half empty or half full. How you envision each moment helps paint a picture of your actual experience, so why not choose to be happy, to think of and move toward things that bring us joy? Essential oils are a wonderful tool for cementing in that positive frequency. Apply 2-3 drops of Heart™ directly over the heart (left side of the chest). During times of intense stress and fatigue, use as often as needed (every 20 -30 minutes). During times of normal stress, use 2-3 times daily to calm and uplift the heart and the body.
Fascia Release™
Opening your heart requires you to also open the tissues around your physical heart that can hold on to blocked or stuck heart energy. Opening up the space around your physical heart with fascia blend helps to amplify and enhance your capacity for gratitude.
You see, 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.
Topically applying Fascia Release™ over the physical heart—with focused application both above 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.
Featured Oils:
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