“I trust I can keep myself reasonably safe”

That is the belief system I am constantly working toward in my own therapy sessions.  The idea that no matter what storm is raging in the external world, I can keep my internal world calm and safe.

A key to this belief is knowing that I have choices, or options.  That I am not just a victim to my circumstances.  The ability to choose feels empowering and allows your body to shift out of the “fight or flight” Sympathetic state where your only options are to fight, flee or freeze, so you might better assess the landscape, notice more options and make a calmer, more balanced and healthy choice.

I share this personal experience and inner dialogue as I have been noticing the mounting pressures in the outside world to undermine our feelings of safety and minimize our sense of choice.  There is a dialogue I keep observing that may or may not align with your own sense of who you are and how you interact in the world.  This dialog makes many assumptions and assigns significant shame and blame based on those assumptions that may feel inauthentic and out of alignment with your own integrity and sense of self.

There is a heavy burden in choosing to carry those external projections that affects your own healthy experience of yourself.  This is actually how a curse works.  An external group projects an unhealthy vision of who you are upon you and if you choose to accept and internalize that vision, you then become this lesser version of yourself.

I would therefore like to offer a different perspective and empower you with options and choices to allow you to move forward in alignment with your highest integrity.

 

Pain and Suffering Are Opportunities for Growth

Pain serves a valuable purpose.  I have come to believe that intense pain offers a tremendous opportunity for growth.  It attracts your attention to areas of your physical body that need healing.  Similarly, the intensity of emotional pain forces you to work through issues that you can no longer avoid.  Intense pain offers the opportunity to lean in and move through the pain, including your own self-limiting beliefs and poor boundaries.

You can either choose to step into the pain and allow its intensity to help you shift limiting beliefs and strengthen external boundaries, or choose to avoid it and remain stuck in the role of victim.  No one can make this choice for you and no one else can be held responsible for the choice you personally choose to make.  Choosing to step into pain is the hardest thing I have ever done.  It is not fun and it is not easy, but there are many tools I can share that help make it more manageable. 

Victim/Victimizer Program Keeps you Stuck

The victim/victimizer mentality is a mental trap that keeps us stuck in a state of fear and lack.  When you perceive the world from the victim standpoint, you abdicate all sense of power and choice.  I do not mean to in any way diminish you or any situation where you felt unsafe or unable to physically or mentally protect yourself.  There are definitely situations where choices are significantly limited and you might have been made to feel powerless.  If that was ever your experience, I would like to honor you and hold space for that part of you that might still feel unsafe and lacking options.

Now, I would like to invite you to consider that you are able to rewrite your victim story by mentally revisiting a traumatic situation from a place of safety and calm and notice different windows where choices were an option.  This is the benefit of EMDR and other trauma-releasing therapies.  They allow you to re-process traumatic memories and experiences from a parasympathetic state so that you can better observe where you did have choices and opportunities to keep yourself safe so that you might carry that sense safety with you in your present life and future interactions.  I would like to hold the intention that the current shift we are witnessing might alter power dynamics and increase opportunities for safety for everyone on the planet.

A report in the Journal of Biological Chemistry examined the impact of hundreds of fragrances on the brain and found jasmine to be “as good as Valium at calming the nerves with none of the side effects.”

Smelling essential oils like Lavender™, Adrenal® or Parasympathetic® during this process can help keep your body grounded and feeling safe as your mind revisits scary territory.

I would also like to speak to the victimizer label.  If you feel that you have ever treated another human unfairly or unkindly, I would encourage you to step into your personal responsibility and try to make that right.  If, however, you show up every day and do the best you can to treat everyone in your life with kindness and compassion, you do not need to carry the victimizer label as this merely serves to create separation and division that keeps others stuck and trapped.

If you let others blame you and project their own inability to move forward on you, they will never move forward.  This is far from a perfect example, but I will share it as it illustrates my point.  After Max and his two friends died in the car accident, one of the other parents did not know how to process his grief.  So he channeled it all as anger at me in very inappropriate ways.  He didn’t know how to process his intense emotions so he redirected them at someone who he mistakenly believed was an easy target.  I suspect this is one of the dynamics at play in child abuse.  People don’t know how to handle their painful emotions so they either try to numb them with drugs, alcohol, over-work, over-exercise or they project them onto others who they perceive as weak or easy targets, often in an angry and violent form. As an empath, I was able to feel his projected anger and choose not to accept it or carry it for him.   If you ever notice a feeling of intense anxiety or anger that do not feel like they belong to you, you can apply the Parasympathetic® oil and choose to mentally cut cords with anyone or anything that might be projecting that onto you.

When you accept the projection of others, like a victimizer label, you agree to carry these negative emotions for others.  This hurts both parties.  The designated victimizer carries negative emotions that may not belong to them and therefore do not resonate in harmony in the body and cause harm.  It also prevents the victim from processing these emotions in a healthy way and traps them in their field.

I believe the current upheaval on this planet is giving us all an opportunity to release unnecessary victim and victimizer labels and process these emotions in a healthy way.  I would encourage you not to feel the need to carry any label that does not apply.

Carrying inauthentic labels has a diminishing effect which can spur resentment and other unhelpful emotions along with negative health consequences.  That said, it is not your job to carry the burden of anyone else’s pain or solve anyone else’s problems for them without their active participation.  That does not help them and it does not help you.

Instead, you can hold space, validate, send love, compassion and empathy from a place of grounded, kind and loving support.

 

The Benefit of Heart Centered Focus

Your heart connects you to feelings of love, balance, and connection to others. When you process things through your heart (as opposed to your head) you are better able to be kind and compassionate and avoid conflict.  Your heart also helps to support feelings of self-acceptance, self-love, compassion, openness, and unconditional love of others.

Looking at the world through your heart center allows the kindest, most genuine response and helps you avoid the desire to engage in any kind of conflict or argument. Heart centered focus allows you to bear witness and hold space for others and validate their experience without judgement, allowing you to be kind and supportive witness and validate the experience of others without the need to carry their pain for them or diminishing own your voice.

We now have the opportunity to instead envision the world we want to shift into.  A world where there is no scarcity of resources, and therefore no need to fight over resources.  It starts with our intentions and our ability to hold the space for that positive outcome in your heart.  Strengthening your heart with essential oils can help enhance your ability to step into your heart space.

It is far easier to reframe the current narrative away from shame, scarcity and fear toward hope, kindness and optimism from a heart-centered place of kindness, integrity and truth.  There is an opportunity to stop dividing and conquering and allow a global healing if we can all hold space for each other

My intention for this blog is to empower you with the tools to navigate this time through your heart from a place of compassion and respect so you might continue to shine your bright light in the world and use that light to help us all stop tearing each other down and start collaborating to rebuild a more loving, kind, inclusive and supportive future for everyone!

 

Essential Oils for the Heart

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.

When any part of the body isn’t functioning at an optimal level, the heart has to work harder.  For example, when the body is in a state of stress, it needs more oxygen which increases the heart rate.  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.

Blue Tansy:

Helps lift physical and mental stagnation, relieving congestion along with anger, anxiety, depression and nervousness agitation to help open your heart and move out energy that no longer serves you.  On a physical level, it helps calm inflammation and neutralize histamine to calm allergic reactions. It helps enhance the properties of the other oils in the blend and will help you relax your mind and body.

Jasmine:

Helps improve mood, overcome stress and balance hormones. Research suggests that jasmine oil positively influences the nervous system and balances the heart, lifting depression and anxiety and calming emotional stress. Jasmine can help support the heart, by regulating heart rate, blood pressure and breathing. Jasmine oil also known as a natural aphrodisiac for its libido-boosting and mood elevating qualities, capable of increasing physical signs of arousal — such as breathing rate, body temperature, blood oxygen saturation, and systolic and diastolic blood pressure.

Neroli:

One of the top oils for supporting you through depression and anxiety disorders. Neroli helps calm nervous tension, stress related conditions, and emotional problems. It lifts the mood and helps relieve nervous tension.

Roman Chamomile:

A natural anti-histamine, Roman Chamomile can help promote the health of your physical heart.  Roman chamomile contains high levels of flavonoids, or plant secondary metabolites, that have been shown to significantly reduce mortality from coronary heart disease when taken internally.

The flavonoids present in Roman chamomile essential oil are believed to lower blood pressure and have a relaxing effect on the heart. On an emotional level, Roman chamomile essential oil has been used as a mild sedative to calm nerves and reduce anxiety by promoting relaxation.

A 2013 study published in Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine found that an  essential oil blend including lavender, Roman chamomile and neroli reduced anxiety levels and improved the sleep quality of patients in an intensive care unit compared to conventional nursing intervention.

Spruce:

Derived from the leaves of the spruce tree, Spruce essential oil was used by Native Americans in meditation sessions for its calming effects.  Spruce essential oil can also help clear emotional clutter from your heart and your energetic field. It may help stimulate your nervous system and boost your mental and physical energy level. Spruce oil is high in monoterpenes, which are known to help you feel mentally grounding, stimulate your heart, and help release anxiety and stress.

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. During times of intense stress and fatigue, use as often as is needed (every 20 -30 minutes).

Featured Oils:

Ready to get started? Click the link below to order today:

• Adrenal® available here
• Heart™ available here
• Lavender™ available here
• Parasympathetic® available here

Resources:

• https://draxe.com/health/coronary-heart-disease/
• https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8105262/
• https://www.hindawi.com/journals/ecam/2013/381381/
• https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/7881819/Smell-of-jasmine-as-calming-as-valium.html