I have been working on expanding my capacity to give and receive love.
After losing my son Max in a car accident, I unconsciously did what many people do and erected a protective energetic wall around my heart, known as a heart wall. This wall served to shield me against further hurt. But it also blocked my ability to receive external love, support, and even self-love.
In response to physical, mental, or emotional trauma (including stress, fear, negative situations, and events), your heart may protect itself by forming a protective shield of energy—to protect yourself from these foreign, uncomfortable, painful, and difficult feelings. This heart wall helps you keep these feelings at arms-length – which may keep you from feeling hurtful, negative emotions as deeply- and in turn, these unprocessed emotions become trapped in this emotional heart wall, which you can later unpack and heal—when you are ready—layer-by-layer.
The energetic heart wall can both protect and shield your heart in response to heartbreak and trauma so you don’t get hurt again and block your internal connection to yourself. In a fight-or-flight situation, it serves as a protective mechanism when we need it.
While a Heart Wall may help keep you safe in times of danger (like a bomb shelter), it can block access to love, support, and self-compassion in times of safety.
Essential oils can help remove the protective shield of energy around your heart layer by layer.
What is a Heart Wall?
A Heart Wall is a barrier against emotional pain. It’s a defense mechanism that protects your heart from injury, deep grief, or the hurt of loss.
The intense feelings that often accompany pain and loss—including anger, sadness, fear, grief, shame, blame, rejection, and abandonment—can be so uncomfortable or difficult to deal with or process that they stay stuck in the body. These trapped emotions contribute to the energetic wall that protects your heart so that you can survive an intensely painful emotional experience.
Heart Walls help dull or numb the sensations of intense emotional pain that may come from death, divorce, accidents, illness, betrayal, trauma, or any other intensely painful experience that may hurt your heart.
You might think of a heart wall as a form of emotional armor—a protective wrap you put around yourself to prevent the things that have hurt you in the past from hurting you again. Emotional armor acts as a barrier between you and your emotions—it protects you from feeling deep hurt. By not feeling and processing these emotions, you trap negative emotional energy from an intense emotional experience in the body, creating chaos in your energy field—especially around the critical energy field of your heart.
READ THIS NEXT: Essential Oils for Emotional Armoring
Emotion Code author Bradley Nelson coined the term heart wall and notes that “trapped emotions are moved and arranged by the subconscious mind to support heart, layer by layer, like the layers of an onion. This is a protective mechanism to keep the heart from being hurt or broken, which may have been a perfectly acceptable defense mechanism at the time.
Nelson further notes that “when your heart is surrounded with layers of negative emotions, it can make it harder to feel positive emotions and easier to feel negative emotions.”
What’s more, if you do not learn to release your heart wall, you may continue to add to it as you experience more trauma or unfavorable situations in life. This maladaptive coping mechanism can become an automatic reflex. Every time your heart experiences pain, you add another layer to your Heart Wall.
Symptoms of a Heart Wall
While protecting you from experiencing negative emotions—which can be stored within the body’s energy field and manifest as physical or emotional discomfort—a Heart Wall may also impact your ability to experience positive emotions and experiences, shutting you off from experiencing the fullness of life and presenting as symptoms like:
- Low energy or exhaustion
- Trouble connecting to others
- Difficulty giving and receiving love
- Feeling disconnected or desensitized to emotions
- Lacking empathy for yourself or others
- Physical neck pain, shoulder tightness, or chest discomfort
- Inability to fully experience positive emotions such as joy, happiness, gratitude, empathy
- Feelings of loneliness, isolation, emptiness or sadness
- Habits of disassociation like keeping busy or other numbing addictions (social media, exercise, alcohol)
- Depression, anxiety, or numbed emotions
- Lowered immunity and weakened vitality
- Unwillingness to forgive, let go, or hold grudges
- Loneliness
- Depression
- Fear of intimacy or complicated relationships
- Co-dependency
- Withdrawing, shutting down or disconnecting
- Inability to trust yourself
Benefits of Releasing Heart-Wall
A heart wall may block heart energy from flowing through the body, making it more difficult for the body to heal itself.
A heart wall also blocks you from fully opening your heart to others. It might make you numb to others and make it more difficult for you to feel emotions and connect to others. It might also interfere with your ability to give and receive love freely and help support your ability to receive love, stay in love, and alleviate depression
By releasing a Heart Wall, you may experience the following:
- Strengthened relationships
- Attracting new and deeper relationships
- Ability to create deeper connections
- Processed or released grief
- More empathy and compassion
- Improved heart-brain coherence (for better physical and mental connection)
- Enhanced creativity, revitalized energy and vitality
- Lessened anxiety, feelings of calm
- Increased confidence and greater emotional freedom
- Being open to more abundance
- Changes to the energy around you and the energy you attract
- Enhanced feelings of compassion, forgiveness, and acceptance
- Ability to move through life with grace, love, and intention
- A shift out of sadness, hopelessness, self-sabotage, and excessive fear and worry
Essential Oils for Releasing Your Heart Wall
Essential oils can be topically applied to help you gently and quickly release emotional armor and tension from your tissues and heart. Oils are valuable tools for processing emotions.
By becoming aware of and releasing these armoring patterns, you regain the ability to fully experience and process your emotions, leading to improved emotional regulation.
Research demonstrates that somatic (of the body) and visceral (felt in internal organs, like the gut) feedback plays a role in the repression of emotion. A heart wall can disconnect different parts of your body from awareness, cutting you off from your entire range of sensory and emotional experiences.
For example, your heart is the center of all emotional and energetic healing. By opening your heart and allowing energy to flow freely, you support open communication between the body and the brain. It also allows you to receive love and support from others.
The inhalation and topical application of essential oils can help send safety signals to your body and brain, allowing you to transmute and digest the emotions and memories that often facilitate the need for your heart wall.
Topically applied essential oils like Fascia Release™ and Heart™ may help you break down and dissolve layers of your emotional armor, allowing your blood, oxygen, and life force to flow more freely throughout your body.
Shifting your focus by engaging your senses—such as your sense of smell—also helps distract you from an internal state of distress, thereby lessening its intensity and the intensity of your responses to others. This allows you to feel safe and access more possibilities and options.
READ THIS NEXT: How Smell Signals Safety
Heart™
Heart™ balances the heart to enhance compassion and support, integrate and reset all body systems, including supporting feelings of open-heartedness, expansiveness, and receptivity while mitigating loneliness, sadness, and grief.
The heart integrates and balances the physical, emotional, and mental body, providing blood to every cell and organ. It also serves as a complex information processing center, influencing brain function, the nervous system, the hormonal system, and most of the body’s major organs.
Essential oils carry the frequency of healthy heart tissue. They can help gently release a heart full, restore optimal function, and open the heart for the healthy flow of emotional energy.
Heart™ blend contains a proprietary blend of organic and/or wild-crafted essential oils that help you show love to others and yourself. Research has shown that sweet smells, like those found in the Heart™ blend, have been shown to reduce pain by activating the opioid receptors in the brain.
Heart opening can be achieved through physical movement (like heart opening yoga poses and backbends, which allow your thoracic soft tissue to gently stretch, opening your heart space), topical application of essential oils—like Heart™ and Fascia Release™ blend—deep breathing techniques that expand your chest and rib cage, words, or intentional actions.
When the heart is open, you might experience more empathy, compassion, forgiveness, and love. When the heart is blocked, you might feel more anger, grief, hatred, and jealousy.
READ THIS NEXT: Essential Oils for Heart Coherence
Fascia Release™
Essential oils can help balance your heart both physically and emotionally. Fascia is a three-dimensional web of connective tissue supporting very deep tissue layers surrounding the physical heart. Releasing your heart wall allows the fascia and muscles surrounding the heart to help release its grip.
The issues are in the tissues, and before you can begin to unpack your blocked or stuck heart energy, Fascia Release™ helps you open up the space around your physical heart. This opens space to allow you to release blocked or stuck emotional energy from the heart wall.
Your fascia is a web of connective tissue that gives your body structure and permeates, surrounds, and supports muscles, vessels, nerves, organs, and bones. Under normal circumstances, your fascia moves and stretches.
When you experience stress and armor, 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. Energy doesn’t flow, and your body constricts, locking stress and the emotions that caused the stress in your body.
In the process, you constrict and physically guard your heart in preparation for attack. When you do this, you internalize fear or negative emotions without release or recovery. In short, energy doesn’t flow, and your body constricts, locking the stress in your body.
This physical tension in your muscles and connective tissue forms the protective layer or heart wall that will not be released until you know you are safe.
Fascia can harden and become dehydrated also as a result of emotional trauma and the body’s response to extreme stress. This dehydration, tightening, and hardening decreases the space between the fibers, causing fibers to shorten, thicken, and constrict, trapping emotional energy. When you release restricted fascia, emotions can recirculate in the body before they are flushed out. Supporting the release of these constrictions speeds up the elimination of emotional toxins.
Fascia Release™ generates a state of coherence in the cells of your fascia, supporting order and alignment in the body.
Topically applying Fascia Release™ liberally over the front and back of the physical heart—with focused application and both above on 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— may help unravel your heart wall and opens the space to allow energy and emotions to flow down and out of your system
READ THIS NEXT: Open Your Heart With Fascia Release
