This past weekend was emotionally intense for me – My son Max would have turned 20 on March 8.
One of the hardest aspects of grief, for me, has been these missed milestones. These dates that I had looked forward to celebrating with him.
Where his absence prompts me to wonder who he might have become had he lived to be 20.
What would he have looked like at 20? What interests and passions would he have pursued?
It’s a strange experience – to find yourself mourning not just the 12 year old boy that you lost but the potential future that you will never know.
In these moments of intense grief and sadness, I have taken to crash test dummying myself – trying to notice how intense the pain feels, then playing with different essential oil remedies to see what – if anything – actually helps.
The good news?
Essential oils have worked better than anything else when these waves of grief hit hard – so hard I can barely breathe.
I think of essential oil blends as an “emotional carwash”, meaning that they seem to help me wash away intense and difficult emotions – like fear, anger, sadness and grief – without any conscious effort on my part.
The even better news?
Science seems to back this up.
Smell as Frequency
My friend and colleague, Dr. Catherine Clinton, recently shared a new quantum biology theory on the resonance of smell. In her book, Optimize, she explains how our sense of smell is not limited to the olfactory receptors of our nose, but can actually impact our entire body.
“Our sense of smell is quantum biological. It relies on the energies of vibrational resonance. A new model of smell suggests that, along with quantum mechanics, photons of light trigger our sense of smell,” according to Catherine.
The traditional model of smell relies on the odor molecule fitting into its olfactory receptor within the nose to create a sense of smell. Research on smell has found odorants can have different shapes but smell the same or have similar molecular structure but smell differently, ruling out the traditional model of smell.
This is where quantum biology comes in. It explains that the atoms within an odorant vibrate when docking in an olfactory receptor, giving energy that the brain interprets as odor.
In other words, smell impacts the body beyond just the physical interface with the olfactory receptor and the nasal passage way. On a physical level, your nose is the fast pass to your brain and allows the molecules that you inhale – like essential oils – to directly access the emotional center of your brain, known as your limbic system.
But there is more to the story….
During my personal 7 ½ year journey with grief, I have noticed that smelling essential oils – more than any other remedy or protocol – immediately shifts not just my mental state but my physical body.
When I inhale Lung Support™ or Limbic Reset™, my entire body relaxes, and my grief symptoms mitigate.
I have known for years that this works. I just have not known WHY this works.
Until now…
My Personal Experience with Smell as Frequency
Early in my grief journey, I had heard that certain frequencies – including sound, light, color and smell – worked on the subconscious level, meaning they could bypass the conscious thinking mind, which tends to keep us stuck in our own story and repeat the trauma loop.
Colleagues who specialize in frequency healing – including Rollin McCraty of Heart Math – have shared that “you can’t think your way out of trauma”. I personally know this to be true.
But I do believe you can smell your way out of trauma. At least that has been my experience, I suspect because smell bypasses the thinking mind, which can keep you stuck in your victim story.
When you bypass the conscious mind – as I do with essential oils and smell – you simply release your victim story without any conscious thought or effort.
How Science Backs this Up
I was so excited about Catherine’s book that I invited her on my podcast to further unpack her research. We are working to edit and release that episode soon, but I literally am so excited about the dots she connected that I couldn’t wait to share the highlights of our conversation.
We used to think of different smells like puzzle pieces. They had their shape. They would go into the nose, and certain smells would fit with certain olfactory receptors like a puzzle piece. And then a signal would be sent to the brain, and we would smell them.
We now know that that is NOT TRUE – that there are so many different smells and a limited number of receptors. So there’s this new quantum biology theory of smell where it’s a resonance between that smell and that receptor, then electrons can pass, and smell information can pass.
And in that system, there’s melanin. Your sense of smell and olfactory cells are intertwined with intercellular melanin, a biomolecule transducer that allows energy information to flow in the body.
In other words, smell is not just a chemical mechanical process, but an electrical one that sends energy and information via frequency, via resonance, via flow of protons and electrons.
And that’s what we’re talking about with these smells with our olfactory system. We can smell something, and there are smell receptors in the gut (Research), in the muscles, in the prostate, and in the lungs. I mean, all of these areas don’t have that physical connection to smell like we would think of in the old paradigm of how does smell work.
According to research on “Olfactory Receptors in Non-Chemosensory Organs” notes that “overwhelming evidence has shown that odorant or olfactory receptors – the specialized chemical receptors designed to recognize and respond to volatile molecules by activating down-stream pathways to modulate specific behaviors – are both localized in sensory organs such as the olfactory epithelium in the nasal cavity and present in non-olfactory regions of the nervous system.”
How does this support smell as a tool for Grief and Trauma?
Glad you asked…
I suspect that these intense emotions like grief, shock, sadness, fear and anger push the body into overwhelm and shut down, where the flow of energy stops. And these emotions – which are energy in motion – don’t move but stay stuck in our field and intensify.
If smell – as the research is now demonstrating – is a tool to move this stagnant emotional energy, then smell can be used to not only shift your emotional – but your physical state.
And it requires very little mental or physical effort. All you have to do is inhale.
It is literally like an emotional carwash – a term I have coined and will continue to explore.
If you are interested in the exact protocol I use when grief kicks in, you can find it here.
And you can learn more about essential oils for frequency here.
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