A brief and basic overview of the top Essential Oils for those healing unhealthy habits of any kind. For more on the Oils, my team, or to ask questions, feel free to email me at info@elenabrower.com.
Celebrating my fifth year of sobriety, and sharing what Essential Oils I’ve used during my journey, this quick guide is a way to orient you to the simplest uses for Essential Oils in your own work.
What exactly is addiction?
Most addictions are born of a deep longing to connect from our hearts to our surroundings, and they become reactions to pain, typically related to circumstances or people that are dangerous, challenging, or absent. To divert our attention, numb our sensations and seemingly keep us safe, we choose substances, behaviours and relationships that match the low or stagnant vibrations of our environments in our past or present reality.
Essential Oils help us shift the need for immediate relief into a new and nourishing relationship with ourselves.
How? Every time we experience a traumatic, negative or degrading experience, whether in childhood or adulthood, a cascade of chemistry occurs in the brain that wires certain neurological pathways, records the external physical environment as well as the state of your body (emotions, sensations such as sadness, anger, self-judgment, low self-esteem) in great detail, thereby ensuring that memory pathway is set.
Let’s say it’s so traumatic that you find yourself habitually replaying the event over and over in your mind, somehow hoping for a new outcome. That’s human, normal and natural to do.
In his groundbreaking book, Becoming Supernatural, Dr. Joe Dispenza reminds us of the neuroscience behind this daily phenomenon. Each time we replay a memory in the mind, we send the exact same chemistry through the brain, which lodges impressions throughout the body. The mind has no idea that the event isn’t actually happening IN THAT MOMENT, because the brain cannot distinguish between present and past.
Highlight this: a memory registers in the mind as though it’s happening in the present. Which is why if you’ve adopted any addictive habit to escape an awful memory, or prevent more from happening, you’re only escaping for as long as the drug or the drink works. When it wears off, that memory is still there, that low vibration has made an impression on your subconscious, and it’s waiting for you to replay it and cause the same physiological reaction time and again.
Enter Essential Oils. By introducing new chemistry to the limbic (instinctive) brain, the Oils can transform those pathways of negative memory, bring in new information, and create new, positive pathways. Oils can aid our recovery from low vibrational states that result from addiction to food, dieting, alcohol, drugs, prescription drugs, abusive people, relationships, unhealthy sexual choices and habits, self-harming, overworking, multi-tasking, hiding, lying, electronic diversions, and even social media – by creating an environment of physical balance and emotional peace in the body. Essential Oils create conditions in which those low vibrations cannot thrive.
By creating new habits and rituals of self-care, Essential Oils change your mind, fortify you emotionally, and help you design and sustain your journey in recovery. Such new rituals shift us into new ways of thinking and being with ourselves and with others. By keeping a consistent, simple routine with your favourite Oils, you can shift memories and help your body find its way to freedom.
How precisely do the Oils work?
When you inhale an Essential Oil, the odor molecules travel via your nostrils to the olfactory membranes in your nose lining. The odor molecules stimulate this lining of nerve cells to trigger electrical impulses to the olfactory bulb in the brain, causing a series of reactions within the cell structures, which results in the creation of new habits of feeling, thinking, seeing and being. The olfactory bulb transmits those impulses to the amygdala, where your emotional memories are stored. This is also the control center for automatic functions such as your breathing and your heart rate, so those impulses can instantly shift your state.
The premise of aromatherapy: Essential Oils enable you to access stored, forgotten memories and suppressed emotions, in order to acknowledge, integrate and/or release them.
Which Oils are optimal for recovery?
There are many. I’ll include a few images here to illustrate the magnificence of the plants and how they work in your recovery; feel free to share and ask questions as they arise.
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