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Physical and Emotional Support for Your Liver

By Jodi Cohen

Your liver plays a critical role in your health, helping you digest, absorb and assimilate nutrients and eliminate harmful substances.

The more you support the physical and emotional health of your liver – and clear up physical and emotional liver stagnation, the faster your body can return to balance and heal.

Essential oils are a powerful tool to help shift stagnation and improve the flow of energy and toxins through the liver and out of your body. More specifically, essential oils have hepatic properties to help stimulate, strengthen, and tone the liver and other detoxification pathways to support healthy detoxification.  Compounds in essential oils help keep plants healthy by moving vital fluids and energy. They perform similar functions in your body, helping to move energy and prevent stagnation.

When your liver becomes stagnant, it impedes detoxification. Topically applying essential oils –  like Liver™ blend for the physical health of your liver and Liver Support™ for the emotional health of your liver –  to specific points on your skin can activate energy flow directly and quickly, stimulating your liver and gallbladder to help physical and emotional toxins flow out of the body.

 

Supporting the Physical Health of your Liver

Your liver is the most important player in your body’s detoxification effort, filtering toxins from the blood and neutralizing the toxins in preparation for elimination.

As long as toxins flow out of the body and do not encounter congested tissue or stagnation in any organ, they can be eliminated. Congestion in your detoxification pathways, such as liver congestion or stagnant bile flow, impede the elimination of toxins. This pushes toxins back into your bloodstream where they are forced out through other detoxification pathways—your skin and your kidneys—leading to blemishes, scabs, and rashes, frequent urination, and lower back pain.

Essential oils can help to remove congestion in your elimination pathways as well as stimulate and tone your liver.  Essential oils that enhance liver function possess what are called hepatic properties. Liver tissue consists of a mass of hepatic cells, tunneled through with bile ducts and blood vessels that perform several metabolic functions. Supporting the vitality of your liver can dramatically enhance your ability to detoxify and heal.

Even better, the topical delivery channel that essential oils offer is an effective alternative to oral delivery, especially because it bypasses the stomach and liver, both of which can chemically alter the therapeutic effects of drugs and essential oils.

 

Liver™ Blend to Support the Physical Health of Your Liver

Liver™ helps support optimal health and vitality of the liver.  Formulated with oils that help stimulate, strengthen, and tone the liver, including:

German Chamomile: which stimulates bile secretions and supports liver detox. Due to its relaxing properties, it will help treat insomnia, nervous tension, and stress related complaints.

Balsam of Peru: Promotes epithelial cell growth, helps lessen mucus secretions and support pain, sores and wounds. Can also stimulate the heart and increases blood pressure. This is a calming oil that helps reduce stress and promotes restful sleep.

Lavender: Lavender’s volatile compounds  protect your liver against oxidative stress from chemicals. Research published in the Journal of Medicinal Food found that lavender essential oil “displayed hepatoprotective and nephroprotective activity against the harmful oxidative stress” caused by a toxin known as malathion. “Essential oil treatment reversed all negative effects of malathion. It also relieved oxidative stress on the kidneys and liver.” The researchers believe these protective properties could be attributed to the antioxidant activity of lavender essential oil.

Ylang Ylang, which helps detoxify your nervous and digestive systems. Calms the mind and soothe the nervous system. It has strong antidepressant properties and it helps to bring the emotions into proper balance. It helps relieve mental fatigue, anxiety, and tension headaches and help balance the equilibrium and function of the heart and lungs, slowing down fast breathing and heart palpitations.

Peppermint, which helps you detoxify through your respiratory and digestive systems. Highly regarded for soothing digestion, nausea heartburn, halitosis and other stomach issues, (including flatulence and abdominal pain). Can help treat liver problems.

Caraway Seed can help reduce the accumulation of fluid or toxins, as well as help reduce lymphatic congestion, support glandular swelling. It can help lower blood glucose, boost and strengthen the immune system and serve as a digestive aid. Research has found that thymoquinone, a constituent of caraway essential oil can increase the production of glutathione, an antioxidant that plays a key role in helping your body eliminate toxins.

Interestingly, research in 2006 evaluated the anti-inflammatory impact of caraway and peppermint essential oils both individually and blended together compared to a placebo in a group of animals suffering from a painful inflammatory gut disorder. Interestingly, neither oral peppermint nor caraway therapy for fourteen days was very effective alone at treating the pain or inflammation, but when combined, they reduced the condition by 50 percent!

Apply Liver™ directly over the liver (right side beneath the breast) 2-3 times daily.  You can also combine Liver™ blend with castor oil – just add 3 drops of Liver™ to 1 tsp of castor oil and rub it over the liver before bed.  Castor oil is notoriously messy, so you can either: (1) cover it with a piece of flannel and plastic wrap and apply heat from a hot water bottle (avoid the electricity of heating pads) for 20-30 minutes,  (2) wear a ratty t-shirt and let your body eat work it’s magic (3) climb into an Epsom salt bath with the castor oil and Liver™ oil and benefit from layering 3 healing strategies at the same time.  Learn more about detoxifying your liver here.

Physically cleaning and supporting your liver frees up bandwidth for your liver to release toxic emotions, like anger.

 

Supporting the Emotional Health of your Liver

Most of your organs are connected to an emotion and your liver is the organ connected to anger. The health of your liver is actually fundamental to how you experience and react to emotions.

Your liver is a filter that processes, neutralizes and eliminates both physical and emotional toxins.  Energetically, your liver is responsible for maintaining harmony and the smooth movement of energy (known as chi) throughout the body, including the smooth transition between feelings and emotions as situations change around us. This liver energy supports your drive, planning, endurance, perseverance, quick, clear intellect, ambition, patience, and organizational abilities.

When your liver energy is balanced, you probably feel kind, benevolent, compassionate and generous.   When your liver is physically or energetically congested or stagnant, you might experience intense feelings of angry outbursts, irritability, resentment, frustration, rage, impatience, jealousy, or even depression. In fact, in traditional Chinese medicine, anger is correlated with poor liver function.

Emotional Toxins

When physical toxins build up or continuously recycle because they are reabsorbed and not eliminated, the liver has less energy and vitality to process and release emotional toxins. At these times you may have a more difficult time controlling or letting go your angry feelings.

Frustration, rage, and anger tend to build up when toxins build up. Your liver shares a common bile duct with your gallbladder.  This bile ducts can get congested and clogged up which diminishes your liver’s ability to remove toxic substances from the body. The buildup of poisons can lead to changes in brain that impact your mood and your need for control.

When you embark on a physical detoxification of the liver, it is common to experience the release of anger and rage as well.  When the liver has more bandwidth, it is able to process and release both toxic chemicals and toxic emotions that may have accumulated in your body. Often the more physical toxins a person releases, the more stored emotion that is also released.

Stagnation sets the stage for both physical and emotional toxins to build up and contribute to anger or rage. Any stagnation, congestion or compromise in the healthy function of your liver allows toxic chemicals to build up and accumulate in your body.   For example, intense feelings that we do not process or release, like intense unexpressed or repressed anger, fear or grief, can also build up in our system.

These “emotional toxins” might present as:

  • Feeling irritable or impatient
  • Inappropriate anger, including angry outbursts
  • Over-reactivity, flying off the handle, or having a difficult time letting things go
  • Feelings of not feeling heard, not feeling loved, not being recognized, or an inability to be honest with yourself and others
  • Experience of resentment, frustration, or bitterness
  • Being judgmental, overly critical, finding fault, or complaining
  • Feeling the need to control situations; being domineering or bossy

Suppressing emotions might work for a short period of time.   But at a certain point, these repressed emotions begin to boil over in a way that we often cannot control them.   A good example is morning sickness.  Your body literally vomits out toxins so they do not get passed to the fetus.  The more you physically detoxify your body before pregnancy, the less likely you are to suffer from morning sickness.

Toxins in the Blood Contributes to Anger

When your body detoxifies, it eliminates toxins by moving them out of your cells, into your blood, through your liver, into your bile, which then carries toxins into the gut for elimination in your stool.  As long as toxins flow in the right direction, they can be eliminated.

If there is a block in detoxification pathways, like a clogged bile duct, the fluids carrying the toxins out of your body are not able to flow out of your liver into your intestines for elimination.  When detoxification pathways are blocked, toxins are forced to flow back into your bloodstream and either need to be eliminated through other detoxification pathways – your skin and your kidneys or linger in the blood.

When bile carrying toxins flows in the wrong direction into the blood, even in small amounts, it creates irritation, anger and frustration. So that is what when we refer to a bilious nature, a person who has overflowing bile.

Similarly, when liver or bile ducts are clogged, nutrients are not passed to the cells in the body in sufficient quantities, depriving your cells of nourishment.  When there is not enough glucose or oxygen or other nutrients made available to these cells, the cells become frustrated angry. This can further suppress and diminish some of the healthy function of the body.

Liver Support™ Blend to Support the Emotional Health of Your Liver

Anger that we don’t process and release can get stored in your liver, according to Chinese medicine.  I believe anger can be the most intense and the most damaging of all the repressed emotions, because of its intensity.  The more we try to suppress it, the more it rears its ugly head in ways that can undermine our health, our growth and our personal relationships. Liver Support™ helps support the release of anger, including frequent irritation, impatience, resentment or frustration, being critical of yourself or others, control issues, an inability to express your feelings, feelings of not feeling heard, not feeling loved, not being recognized or appreciated.

Formulated to help move through and release anger and negative emotions attached to traumatic experiences from the cells of the liver to promote optimal healing.  The oils in this blend assist the body to recognize, work through and release the anger, fear, or frustration caused by traumatic experiences so they don’t overwhelm you.

It allows you to gently let go of negative emotions, including those attached to PTSD, which can create stuck energy and impede an organ’s ability to heal.  It can also help children and adults deal with the trauma of abuse and let go of negative emotions, frustration, and fear so you can function effectively in the world.

Vibrant Blue Oils Emotion Balance Liver Support™ blend contains a proprietary formulation of organic and/or wild crafted essential oils of

Blue Tansy: Helps enhance the properties of the other oils in the blend and will help you relax your mind and body. Due to its relaxing nature, it will also help you treat insomnia, when blended with the other oils in the synergy.

Cypress: Helps balance and calm the nervous system, supporting nervous tension, stress, and lack of sleep. It can also help support concentration.

Elemi: Calms nervous exhaustion and stress, supports anxiety, nervous tension and stress-related conditions. Can help fortify the mind, control of nightmares and diminish the fear of the future.

German Chamomile: Due to its relaxing properties, it will help treat insomnia, nervous tension, and stress related complaints.

Helichrysum italicum: Helps to heal and regenerate nerves and connective tissue. It is a great pain reliever, infection fighter and liver regenerator.

Lavender: Lifts mood and helps balance mood swings, normalizes emotions, brings deep relaxation. May help support irritability, moodiness, shock, fears, insecurity, restlessness, depression, nerves and stress.

Rose Geranium: Supports depression, creates a sense of security and comfort and can calm acute fear, extreme moodiness, abuse, hurt, and emotional crisis. It also supports extreme grief and can help increase self-esteem and balance mood swings.

Sandalwood: Helps overcome low self-confidence, grief, and fear, calm aggressive and egocentric behavior, control OCD and help with insomnia.

Ylang Ylang: Soothes the nervous system, calms the mind, relieves mental fatigue, anxiety, depression, and insomnia. It has strong antidepressant properties and it helps to bring the emotions into proper balance.

White Grapefruit: Stimulates the liver, gallbladder and helps the lymphatic system function properly. On emotional and spiritual levels, grapefruit is said to address a person’s self-acceptance and release self-abuse patterns.

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.  You can also apply it around the ankles as this is often an area where we hold resistance to moving forward in life and block the ability to receive joy and pleasure.  Start at the back of the ankle and apply under the ankle bone around to the front and back under the other ankle bone, all while allowing yourself to release challenging emotions. For more tips on detoxify emotions, read this article.

If using topically, we recommend 2- 3 drops over the liver (right side of the body under the breast).  You can also apply with a castor oil pack over the liver or place a drop or two on the palms, rub hands together, cover your nose and inhale.  Always test on a nickel sized portion of skin first. Make sure your skin can handle the oil/blend before using.  Dilute to start or if any redness occurs.

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About The Author

Jodi Cohen

Jodi Sternoff Cohen is the founder of Vibrant Blue Oils. An author, speaker, nutritional therapist, and a leading international authority on essential oils, Jodi has helped over 50,000 individuals support their health with essential oils.