“My heart is breaking, and at the same time, it’s cracking wide open.”
My daughter leaves for college in three weeks—and it is breaking my heart.
I have dedicated the last 18 years to building my life with her and I cannot image my life without her.
At the same time, I am falling in love and cracking wide open—It’s amazing and terrifying at the same time.
Perhaps because in order to allow myself to experience all the intoxicating feelings of romantic love, I need to allow myself to feel.
And that means actually feeling the intense grief that I have managed to keep so carefully locked away.
It’s a complicated juxtaposition.
In order to let in the positive, new energy, I need to open the space in my heart—which means allowing myself to let my children go—both figuratively and literally.
My daughter is literally moving to the other side of the country as she launches into her next chapter. It’s an expected and predictable loss.
Letting go of my son is more complicated because, on some level, I have completely locked down my heart, putting a quarantine around how intensely I loved him, so I don’t need to experience how intensely I miss him. For the past four years, I have managed to survive and function by literally freezing myself off from the intensity of my love for him—perhaps out of self-preservation.
Shakespeare said, “Life is a comedy to those who think and a tragedy to those who feel.”
I chose to be a thinker—which helped me write my books, grow my company, and raise my daughter. But I never let myself consider the toll my lack of feeling was taking on my heart—I shut out the good along with the bad.
And now that this exceptional soul has shown up in my life with so much kindness, intelligence, humor, and joy that I just want to bathe in all these positive feelings, I so desperately want to open my heart.
But opening my heart to him means re-opening my heart and facing all of my unprocessed grief. I can’t make space for someone new until I process and release the love that I lost.
And it feels like the floodgates are bursting.
Heart Transitions
I am in the midst of a heart transition, a term I might have invented, but one that feels fitting.
I am letting go of old love to make space for new love and it is agonizing because I don’t want to let go. Even though I know Max has been gone for almost four years, there is a part of me that still wants to hold on; to pack away all the memories and feelings in a carefully wrapped package, like the way so many of us store our old wedding dress for decades after the event—untouched and unaltered by the passage of time.
That is how I have carefully packed away my heart—like a delicate piece of pottery, bubble wrapped so tightly that nothing can harm it—to preserve some safety.
But all of that careful wrapping and protective covering has come with a cost that I hadn’t considered. It shields me from hurt, but it also locks out joy. My barricade was so strong that nothing—neither good nor bad—could break through. In my effort to manage my pain, I failed to recognize what I was missing.
So, I find myself in a heart transition point.
Ready to open up to a new relationship.
But terrified to open my heart again after years in protective lockdown.
It was not a dilemma I could think myself out of.
I had to let myself feel my feelings—which can be intense to attempt on your own.
So, I reached for some oils to help.
Essential Oils for Heart Transitions
Desperation is the mother of invention.
There is nothing like the intensity of heartache to motivate you toward a solution. In the intensity of my pain, I started playing and discovered a surprising combination of essential oil blends that felt both safe and supportive as I attempted to open my heart, release my grief, and allow myself to love again.
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 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.
I detail more about how oils can support change and open you up for the next opportunity HERE and HERE.
The combination of blends I have been using to help heal and open my heart include:
Parasympathetic®
Dating can be a fight-or-flight experience, especially in the beginning. The excitement and uncertainty can feel adrenalizing and intoxicating. You may feel your heart pounding out of your chest or butterflies in your stomach—I personally get so nervous that I can barely eat. My fight or flight is so turned on that I have literally no appetite when we dine out together. So, I have significantly upped my usage of the Parasympathetic® oil, applying it as often as every 30 minutes just to calm my nervous system and try to stay in the moment. Parasympathetic® also allows me to recognize and breathe through those intense moments of love and loss—which can ironically occur at the same time. I apply a very small amount behind my right earlobe on the mastoid bone. You can apply on either or both sides—but I have noticed that applying on the right side seems to feel more supportive for my heart transition efforts.
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 blend.
When you experience stress or heartbreak, part of you is resistant, which triggers you to physically contract, constrict, or pull away from physical danger, negative thoughts, 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.
Heart™
Once you have calmed your nervous system with Parasympathetic® and created space and opened channels for energy to flow out of your system, it is now safe to open your heart with the Heart blend. The combination of essential oils in the Heart blend works on physical, mental, and emotional levels to help restore coherence, or the state of balance where it is easier and less intense to gently move through and release trauma, stored hurts, and long-buried emotions. This process is a gentle and subtle unfolding and works best when you intentionally allow your emotions to unpack in their own time. This means that while you can apply Parasympathetic® and Fascia Release™ multiple times a day, you will want to limit the application of the Heart™ blend over the heart to 1-2 times daily for the first week. If you are releasing heavy and intense emotions, the last thing you want to do is mobilize them too quickly.
You can inhale essential oils and gently release intense emotions with your exhale as a powerful strategy to allow you to micro-dose emotional release. Essential oils and the sense of smell allow you to activate and release intense emotions and sensations over brief durations—providing 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 denial.
Just 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. Try to extend the exhale and really allow yourself to release the painful emotion and any associated pain and intensity.
During this emotional release process, you want to be sure to be extra gentle with yourself. Allow yourself downtime to walk in nature, take a nap, or just feel the sunshine on your face. You may also want to consider using a binder, like Cellcore products, in your nightly routine as emotional detoxifications can mobilize and release toxins and ensure that these toxins leave the body and are not reabsorbed.
Featured Oils:
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