EP 18: WTH ?!? Essential Oils to Balance Organ Systems with Jodi Cohen

Basically what I have found. And it's funny because I notice things and I notice that things work and then I'll reverse engineer, like, oh, that's so interesting. Why does that work every single time? Yeah, so the two things, three things actually that I always do, and it's in my brain reboot kit is I help to activate and detoxify the vagus nerve. I help to activate and detoxify the pineal gland. And I open neck drainage. And those three things seem to be messed up in every single person. And. And the minute you start to get them working again, huge health shifts.

Sweet.

Yeah.

Cool. Hi. Cameron, are you on there?

I am. How you doing, Paul?

All right, you got me with. It's one of your naturopaths in your state.

I know. I just. I just got off the phone with him.

So I'm like, yeah, totally fine.

Totally sorry.

I still love you, Cameron.

Oh, thank God.

Greg.

And Jody. You go by Jody Sternoff. Cohen. The whole thing.

Just. Honestly, just Jody Cohen. It's just that there are like 70 million Jody Cohen's and only two Jody Sternoff. So it just helps people. I grew up with confinement. Yeah.

Okay.

Makes me unique.

Well, I put the link to your main website and I could put like maybe top two of your social media links, like your favorite platforms.

In the notes I can give you guys, I have some really useful like checklists and things that if people like, just so they don't have to take furious notes. If they just want the Cliff Notes, I can give you a link to. We have a parasympathetic checklist that is really helpful for people. Yeah, yeah.

Awesome. Why? Yeah, I can have them. Yeah. We're getting close.

Yeah, we got about a minute to go.

Awesome. Cool.

Yep.

Great. And I'm gonna pull this up over here.

Did you.

Were you up here on the weekend?

I did not, no. I was actually down in Salt Lake City. Park City, my unofficial residence down there.

Okay.

Are you living in Utah also?

Well, no, but I'm contemplating living in two cities at once. Portland, Portland and Park City.

Well, that'll work with your split split personality, right?

Thanks, Cameron.

Yeah, yeah, I'm kidding. I kidding.

There's a really great community down there. Jody and my sister lives there.

Oh, nice.

Yeah.

All right, standby, Here we go.

All right, here we go.

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Welcome to what the Health an independent approach to your health span. Have you noticed how our healthcare system may not have your best interest in mind? Join Dr. Eckel in this fun and sometimes disturbing exploration of the state of healthcare and what it means for you. Now here's your host, Dr. Eckle.

All right, welcome back everybody. Again, this is Dr. Eckel and this is what the health I've got Jodi Cohen on the show today. Thanks for coming on, Jodi.

Oh, thanks for having me.

You are very welcome. She is a best selling author, award winning journalist, functional medicine practitioner and founder of Vibrant Blue Oils where she has combined her training in nutritional therapy and aromatherapy to create unique proprietary blends of wild crafted essential oils. She's helped over 50,000 clients get their heal from brain related injuries, anxiety, trauma, insomnia, autoimmunity. For the last 10 years she's lectured at wellness centers, conferences, corporations on brain health, essential oils, stress and detox. She's got been in numerous publications, New York Times, Wellness Mama, Elephant Journal, and she's got vibrantblue oils.com, which is in the show notes down below. And this is such a great topic in general, right, for the listeners, this is what the health and we're really helping people take back their health, Jodi. And you've got such experience here and such a unique combination of skill sets and expertise. So I'm really excited to dive in on this one.

Thank you. I'm excited too as well.

So we put in the show notes. This is like basically clinical strategies for topically applying essential oils to balance organs systems and basically regain your health and pinpoint regions of the brain. So I mean in general, for folks that haven't, I mean essential oils seem like they've gone through a renaissance, right?

They've become kind of the hot trend. But the way they're being used really just scratches the surface of their potential.

Perfect. Well, let's start there. So what's happening? Like what's the differentiation of what are you seeing kind of popularized versus really what, what's intended for their use?

We know, it's funny. Our neighbor is 90 years old and his grandchildren gave him an iPhone and he uses it to make phone calls. And my kids are always like, tom, guess what, you can take pictures and get directions. You can use the Internet and to him it's just a phone. And it's kind of like you can use lavender on your feet to make them smell good. And there's nothing wrong with that. Or you can use it to detoxify your vagus nerve and reboot your pineal gland and all of these things. What people don't realize is the brain's really hard to get to. It's like Antarctica, right? Because in order to get things into the brain, you need to cross the blood brain barrier. And the blood brain barrier is a pretty tough bodyguard. It only lets super small fat soluble molecules pass. So that really limits the number of remedies that you can get into the brain. Which means that people, we have all these conditions that correlate with the brain, but people don't really address that. They take supplements, they eat vegetables, they do a lot of good things. But they're missing this really key part of the equation. And what they don't realize is your nose, your olfactory channel. Those cells are brain cells. That is the only place where the brain is directly accessible to the environment. And it's really interesting. In fact, it is the most direct sense into the body. Like you have five senses, right? Your sense of smell, your eyesight, taste, touch. But the nose goes directly to the part of your brain that kind of manifests and keeps you safe. It's called the amygdala. It's part of the limbic system. And you know, back in the day, predator odor, like you could smell the wild animal coming, you could smell fire. That's what kept us alive and that's what kept us safe. And so it made sense that being able to have smell go directly to the limbic system was smart. And what's interesting is there's a researcher, a Nobel prize winning researcher from my hometown of Seattle. Her name is Linda Buck. And she was looking at kind of the sensory organs, you know, and looking at olfactory channel. And what exactly happened when you smelled predator fear? And she identified very specific channels in there. And then she thought, gosh, I wonder if there's anything that cancels that out. Guess what cancels out the order of predatory predators? It's rose Rose oil. So we all know, everyone you know, stop and smell the roses. People smell roses. Everyone who's ever kind of been through an anxious situation who has smelled rose oil can tell you it makes you feel better. Here's why. Because it cancels out that fear response. And it's the most direct way to get things into the brain. So just knowing that there's so much potential to use oils to help kind of reduce our stress, put us back in balance. But for whatever reason that people have not really gone down that rabbit hole.

Sure. Oh, that's huge. So on. I mean, I guess on the. Let's talk about that pathway number one. Right. Cranial nerve one, the olfactory nerve bypasses the blood brain barrier, going the olfactory tract up to the brain direct connection. So I can tell my kids now, stop picking your brain. Right. So that is. Yes. Good. I'm gonna use that one tonight at the dinner table. So thank you. I'll say. Well, Jody said, yeah, blame on me. But on that one, I mean, you know, we folks in neurodegeneration in general sometimes have lost their ability to smell. Right. One to two decades prior. So that could be one of those telltale signs like, you know, if dementia or Alzheimer's or any of these neurological conditions run in the family, maybe get your smelling checked. Right.

Well, and even, you know, if you have multi chemical sensitivity is when everything is heightened, all of a sudden it's really hard to smell. Yeah. And what's nice about oils is that they work even if you don't smell them. And they work like for people who have intense chemical sensitivity. We work on detoxification because if you can help the body be less reactive, then the smaller things don't bother you. But you can also put oils on the bottom of your feet where you can't necessarily smell them and they still, you know, the bottom of the foot is a great place to apply oils because there are all those reflex points and also the skin is a little thicker and there are certain oils like clove or cinnamon that are really helpful because they're hot. But because they're hot, like if you put them on your throat, it could make your throat red. It could be slightly painful. So the bottom of your feet, the skin is thicker and so it doesn't tend to react the same way.

Lovely. Okay, so one, before we get into more of the clinical stuff, I want to talk about the industry in general. And you are you make specific proprietary blends. So I'm wondering, you said it's wild crafted. So talk about just in general because it is kind of the flavor of the month right now. Are these essential oils? And so what there's a differentiation, right? I mean there's some high quality oils and low quality oils. So how do people tell Dr.

It's the way they've been marketed. I mean, let's be honest, they're a commodity. It's like saying there's high quality apples and low quality apples. Sure, a lot of them. You know, the biggest issue is some of them are grown with pesticides and they're highly concentrated. So if you're highly concentrating something that's grown with pesticides, you're highly concentrating pesticides. Right. So the biggest issue to me is making sure that they're grown without pesticides, that they're either grown organic, you know, or some oils, like, for example, frankincense, which is a resin, you know, it's kind of grown. It's not like people are spraying pesticides on our forests and getting all of the pine and the fur. So a lot of them, they're not certified organic, but they're grown in nature in an organic way. And I think that it concerns me. I started this company in 2012 and oils have definitely taken off since then. And a lot of the companies use fear based marketing. They say things like, oh, you can only take ours internally or all the other ones are bad and use ours. And I just think that's disempowering to people. So what I tend to say is that they're all good. Don't be too afraid. You know, I do think that a lot of the companies encourage you to use more, so you need to buy more and more quickly. So one example is diffusing. You know, just as you wouldn't pop an Advil every other minute, you wouldn't necessarily want to diffuse 24 hours. That's medicine. So I say do it maybe twice a day for 20 minutes at a time. And you know, the challenge with diffusing, if you have pets in the house, dogs are fine, but cats don't necessarily detoxify the oils as quickly. So if you're diffusing 247 and you have a cat, that's really not so good for your cat. But other than that, I think, you know, I think they're all fine. And I have a lot of people, a lot of patients who have used different oils and I never disparage anyone. I think we're all good. What I try to do differently is I think that when you combine oils and into a blend, there's a different synergy that evolves that allows you to address issues that maybe a single oil, you know, like frankincense is an amazing oil. Yeah. You know, people always talk about frankincense and myrrh. It was a blend. When you combine the two of them together, they do something different than frankincense alone. So I am really trying to, you know, I don't look to reinvent the wheel. I just really try to stay in my lane and do things slightly differently.

Sure.

Awesome. Are you using the energetics like one of the main textbooks, I think was what Peter Holmes and his essential oil textbook or, you know, I think I came up with the conclusion just in a therapeutic grade, you know, if I was going to use them clinically, I wanted to make sure I did have a high quality oil. So there are certain companies that do cut their oils or what makes a different.

Oh, I see what you're saying. Well, I think it's a combination of things and I do like Peter Holmes and I like the way he. He also kind of combines acupuncture points and very specific acupuncture techniques to do. I see what you're saying. I think that where I get concerned with what other people say is I don't necessarily think there's a wrong answer. I don't necessarily think if you buy the wrong oil, something terrible is going to happen. And so I don't want to encourage people to worry or stress about that, you know, And I also want to empower people to trust themselves. Like, smell it. If it smells good to you, use it. It's like food, you know, when you crave a hamburger, you need iron. When you crave chocolate, you need magnesium. Trust yourself. But so I'm going to empower everyone to, you know, if you're already using oils and it works for you, keep doing that. You're not doing anything wrong. If you've never tried it before, you can certainly buy my product. You can go to your local supermarket and probably find something there as well. But what's interesting and what you're kind of getting at is that there's oils working many levels. They work on the physical level. Right. Like peppermint. Plants that are kind of grown in damp climates kind of help us move dampness. You can smell peppermint and it gives you instant energy. If you have, you know, if you twisted your ankle and it's swollen, you can put peppermint on your ankle and it will feel better. It's got natural and I can't speak right.

Anti inflammatory.

Yeah, yeah. Properties. So boom. There's that physical component. Mentally, like we talked about rose earlier, if you're feeling anxious, if you're feeling depressed and you smell rose, because it kind of turns off that fear response that makes you feel anxious or depressed, you're going to feel better. And then there's kind of the energetic aspect that is harder to explain or what it's really doing. You know, we're all energy. Everything around us, all of the signals in our body are energetic. And so just like you can combine, say the Color red and the color blue and it makes a different color purple. You can take the energetic signature of different plants and combine them to do, you know, a couple things. Like back in school we used to have that thing where you kind of like make your own animal or make your own robot. So. So you could take a cat that maybe has really big teeth and combine it with a bear who is maybe really tall. And you take these qualities of different animals and combine them and have a unique creature. Similarly, you can take a plant like vetiver, which has a really deep root, so it's really grounding and stabilizing and centering. And something like lavender, which is. It's like the all around player, like the kid on the soccer field that could be the forward and score a goal and then be goalie and not let you know. Just it kind of does everything. And so it's just naturally calming. So for a child that might have attention issues, suddenly you're grounding them and you're calming them. And when you combine it, it does something different than those individual aspects.

Nice. And that. Yeah. And I love that. The message of self empowerment and trusting your intuition. And the smell. Right. I mean, that was our olfactory nerve. There's a reason why it's cranial nerve number one. Right. And it is one of those things where you can smell fear or you know, the sniff test on food. Right. Like, is this. Okay, let me smell it. Then taste comes second. But smell is first. Right.

Well, and even in physical attraction, the pheromones, you know, you could kind of think, oh, that guy looks cute. And then suddenly you smell them and you're like, nope, not my cup of tea.

Yeah, that is very important. Your partner should smell well to you. I don't think it'll work out otherwise. Right.

Well, that's why, you know, newborn bab smells so good.

Yeah. Yeah, totally. That's awesome. Yeah. So we need to trust our nose is what you're telling us. That's great. Okay. So on. So and then that root. Right. So let's talk about this pathway in. And you mentioned about it like bypassing the blood brain barrier, anything else around that. So it's like the direct connect right into the brain. Why do you think there's not as much protection going in the olfactory tract? There's.

That's a great question. I mean, I would imagine that because nature doesn't necessarily have, you know, there's mold, which is a problem. Now there are these chemtrails with the nanoparticles. But I Don't know that in nature that, you know, we evolved before modern civilization changed things or had cheap construction. So I don't know that there were natural, obvious predatory things that could get through that channel.

Got it. Yeah. I mean, I think it's a, it's a great rate. You know, I actually studied for my medical boards by taking different plants and smelling while I was studying. And then during that board exam, I'd take like rosemary and lavender and take the different smells with me. So I was, I was thinking like, okay, I'm going to put this in a couple different regions of my brain, right?

Yes. Well, there's a lot of research that if you're studying, you know, my daughter is now 15, so we're looking at the PSAT and all those tests and we've been playing with that. Like smelling peppermint while you study, then smelling peppermint for recall. Yes, there's a lot of research. And the other thing that's so interesting to me, you know, so many of our remedies go through our digestion channel, which is good and especially if your digestion is optimal. But if you're not digesting, absorbing and assimilating your nutrients, there are other channels to get places like the olfactory channel, smelling or the transdermal channel. You know, topical application. We know nicotine patches work, we know hormone creams work when you apply oils, especially to get them into the brain, like even the very back of the neck or behind the ears. That gets into the bloodstream really quickly. And it's a really great way to circumvent, like say that you're having digestive challenges. A lot of my clients come to me and they're very digestively compromised. And so topical application is a really great way for them to get the remedy into their system while they're taking the right supplements and kind of working on improving their digestion.

Love it. All right, well, so that's great. So olfactory. So I want to also talk about another cranial nerve here. Cranial nerve 10 and the vagus nerve.

Yes.

So what? You know, maybe if folks aren't familiar with it, maybe give them a little background on the vagus nerve.

It's so crazy. This is the most important nerve in your body and most people have never heard of it. This is the nerve that turns on all of your function. It turns on digestion, it turns on your ability to detoxify, it turns on your ability to relax and not stress. And it actually sends the signal for your body to anti inflame it's the anti inflammatory pathway. It's the longest nerve in your body. It starts at the back of your neck, winds around on both sides behind the ear, which is kind of where it's most accessible to the surface. It winds through your face, your throat, your heart, your lungs, all of your organs of digestion and detoxification. And what's interesting is it serves as the on off switch between your safety, which is kind of your parasympathetic rest, digest and heal state and your emergency sympathetic fight or flight state. So the example they used back in the day, the tiger was chasing you, you would switch into your sympathetic fight or flight state. You would either run really fast and escape the tiger, fight the tiger, or maybe the tiger was getting close so you'd freeze or play dead so it would leave you alone and walk away. And then once you were safe, your body would almost reset back into that parasympathetic I'm safe now, I can heal now, I can digest. And it's the vagus nerve that's the on off switch. But what's interesting is in our modern life where we don't have tigers, but we have, you know, scary things on the news, we have bad traffic, we have stressful relationships or challenging jobs, whatever we're thinking about, our brain and body don't really know the difference between like, oh God, I hope I don't get fired, I missed that deadline, or that presentation didn't go well, to the tiger is chasing me. So that can put us in this sympathetic state and we're set up to survive. So what happens when we're in that sympathetic state is all of the blood routes away from our organs of detoxification and digestion to our extremities so that we can run really fast. Our pupils get really big, they're dilated so that we can hyper focus and see better. And anything that's extraneous to our ability to survive, be it having a conversation with a loved one, turning on our immune system, anti inflaming, that's kind of put on the back burner because if you die, it doesn't really matter if you can get pregnant, right?

Yeah.

So we're running around in this survival fight or flight state and all the things that we need to function and heal are kind of being turned off. So the question then, the vagus nerve is the on off switch. How do we activate the vagus nerve to help us drop into that healing state? And there are a lot of ways you can do it. Some of them are more Invasive than others. They have a surgical pacemaker like device that you can implant behind your ear. Some of my colleagues, Deitiese Kharazian, for example, talks about gargling or gagging yourself, splashing your face with freezing water. Anything that you do that kind of activates the vagus nerve, like it goes through the lungs. So deep breathing, meditation, yoga, that's all signaling. If you do a coffee enema, that's part of the vagus nerve channel. You know, there are a lot of all roads lead to Rome, but what I found is there's a combination of clove and lime oil that you can just, I'll show you really quickly flip the bottle, you put it behind your ear, right where it's the most stimulatory. We talked about Peter Holmes, who uses a lot of acupuncture points. If you feel right behind your ear, there's that bone there, that is your mastoid bone, that's a popular acupuncture point and also a point where the vagus nerve is most accessible and open to sensory stimulation. When you put an oil there, it does two things. It activates your vagus nerve, so it kind of turns on your parasympathetic response. And the other thing that happens that people are starting to talk about more and more, there's toxicity that can accumulate kind of in your nerves and your lymphatic, in your vascular system. And if you think about that point right behind the ear, it's almost like an intersection of sorts. So there's so many toxins in your mouth, just, you know, from microbes in the mouth, it could be cavitations in the jaw, it could be bacteria in the gums, it could be metal amalgams. And when they're draining, they're draining along your jawline, your trigeminal nerve, and that intersects with your vagus nerve just like a car intersection. And nerves have a really high affinity for toxins, especially metals. So if it's intersecting and there's congestion, those toxins can get into the vagus nerve and, and what happens is it kind of causes it to inflame and impedes its function so it doesn't fire as quickly or as well. So think about this one example. They talk about how root canals are correlated with heart disease. So I'll deconstruct that. You have a root canal in your mouth. The toxins are draining along the trigeminal nerve. They're getting into the vagus nerve. The vagus nerve is what releases the anti inflammatory neurotransmitter acetylcholine that tells your heart rate to slow down. So suddenly because you have this root canal, the toxicity gets into the signaling device and your heart rate's never slowing down. So now you have a heart attack. And there are a lot. That's just one example of how toxins can impact the vagus nerve. And the vagus nerve can then impact downstream signaling.

Wow. Yeah. That's awesome. Yeah. I mean, we live in this sympathetic dominant world. I mean, it could even be as benign as it's taking your computer a long time to boot. Right. I mean, we find that that triggers a stress response in us. And so finding techniques to really balance this out. When we look at inflammation being the root of a lot of chronic illness and being in a fight or flight response all the time. Blasted. I mean, I'll have people take breaks from the media because it's basically negative cells 10 times more than positive news. And so they figured that out. So it's a bunch of negativity coming into our brains. And so we always are looking for, how do we get people into parasympathetic activity? So what do you notice for, like, if somebody's out of balance here, are there some symptoms that they're looking at? Like, you know, like, health wise, how do we know, like, this could be at play here? I mean, you gave the, you know, maybe the swelling of, you know, the lymph glands along those lines. Or do you have a lot of.

It's much simpler than that. It often presents as fatigue, you know, because when there's inflammation, your first symptom is fatigue. It could be pain anywhere. It could be focus. As simple as, you know, you're articulating something and you lose a word in your brain. Or you walk into the pantry because you need something. Then you get there and you're like, wait a minute, why am I here? It could be anything that's not working as well as it used to. You know, for parasympathetic, it could be having a gag reflex or anything digestive, you know, get bloating, you're mildly constipated. It could be, you know, frequent thirst. I actually have a whole checklist that I can give you so people can check it out. But that's one of the things that I've noticed. You know, a lot of people are reporting to me and they're. They're eating like practically nothing. Like maybe they have four foods they can eat and they're doing yoga and trying to meditate all the time, and they're Doing saunas. And they're doing all these things that they think they should be doing and no one told them. It's kind of like, you know, trying to read in the dark. You need to turn on the lights. I often call the vagus nerve the fuse box of the body. Can you imagine, like, trying to turn the. Why isn't light turning on? Well, check the fuse box. If you're in the wrong drive or the wrong gear, you could be doing everything right, and you're still not gaining momentum. And then the minute you activate your vagus nerve and the parasympathetic response, it's like switching from biking uphill in the rain against the wind to cruising downhill in the sunshine. It just makes everything easier.

That sounds and looks so lovely. So. Right. And so that is on. I mean, how often do people have to apply the oils then for that to kick in?

Well, you know, it's interesting. When something works, you start to use it. Right. So for people who are new to this, I tell them, just leave it by your toothbrush. You know, like, we're so trained to brush our teeth twice a day. And they just put it on in the morning and the evening, and they start to notice, oh, gosh, I feel better. You know, or they start carrying it in their person. You know, I live in Seattle. I think Portland is the same. Traffic is abysmal. I have people that are like, the only way I can, like, drive across town and get my kid in rush hour is with this oil. Yeah. And one fun trick that our colleague and friend Titus Choo taught me, he was talking about how anxiety is often the overactivity of the right frontal lobe. And so if you can activate the left frontal lobe by smelling something through the left nostril, that goes directly up there, and it then balances the brain, and you feel less anxious. That is my daughter. My daughter goes to a highly competitive school with a lot of type A anxious people, and that has been a lifesaver for her entire grade.

Wow.

Yeah.

They're all kind of snorting essential oils. Nostril.

Yeah.

That's awesome. Yeah. And that's a great one. You know, especially, it seems like, you know, that seems to be a preponderance of anxiety coming up with in the school system now and, you know, for perhaps good reason with, you know, in current. Current affairs, et cetera.

So I've seen anxiety skyrocket in my lifetime. I really almost feel it's at epidemic proportions.

Yeah, I would agree. And, you know, there's multiple, multiple routes as to why that is. Right?

Correct. Yes.

You know, for a variety of topics there. So. Well, so let's see on one. I'm going to take a quick station break. This is what the health. This is Dr. Greg Eckell and I've got Jody Cohen on the show today. It's vibrant blue oils, correct?

Vibrant blue, yes. Like the color.

Love it. Yeah. I got the memo today.

So I know we're twinning.

If you're just tuning in, go to naturecuresclinic.com, i've got the podcast tab there. And subscribe to this channel. If you're listening, please give us a review on your favorite podcast platform. Also, share us with your friends and family and your network because we're really, I'm wanting to bring top notch speakers on here, experts in their field, sharing really the information you need to stay well in this rather kind of crazy world and the medical system that is broken. That's why I named it what the Health. And you know, looking at it, you know, we were talking before we got on here, Jodi around, you said, oh, I did this one post and I was surprised that it wasn't common knowledge. Right. In the medical field, we kind of get into our discussions with our peers and we have a very similar background, but in general wanting to provide some amazing information for folks. So that aspect on brain health that's near and dear to my wheelhouse and what I talk about, and you were talking about some drainage or you have a specific way of working with people too that you found. We can maybe start there and if it comes up in that conversation, we can layer that in there.

Perfect.

Yeah. What is your approach? You said you had three main areas that you typically will address for folks and you get a lot of movement.

Yeah. I think that there are bottlenecks that people don't realize. Everyone kind of knows, oh, the gallbladder can be a bottleneck. And there are a lot of amazing protocols out there on moving bile and helping to decongest the liver. I think the gut is really well known. I think that the blind spots are. I was talking about the neck channel. I just wrote a blog that was pretty obvious to me. Right. It's the neck that connects the brain and the body and what happens. And some people don't know about this. The brain detoxifies when we're sleeping. In fact, it was only seven years ago in 2012 that they kind of discovered discovered this brain detoxifying mechanism. It's called the glymphatic system because it combines Brain cells that are glial cells and the lymphatic. And what happens, you know, when you're awake, your brain needs to be functioning and active, so it's at full force. When you enter deep sleep, the brain actually shrinks by as much as 60% and allows cerebral spinal fluid to kind of flow through. I mean, think of a car wash. It just mobilizes and moves through the brain and cleans between the cells and everything. And then it needs to drain down the neck so that it can leave the body. It drains from the neck into the blood, through the liver, gallbladder, out the gut, and then into the toilet. But what happens if the neck is congested? What we don't realize is that within the neck, we've got, obviously the spinal column, we've got muscles, we've got veins, we've got lymphatic, and we've got the vagus nerve. The nerves, if any of those are kind of congested, it bumps into other things and impedes the flow. And that's when pressure builds in the brain. And then you get things like headaches or depending on where the pressure is. If it's in the lower part of the brain, then you have dizziness or vertigo. If it's kind of in the top part, it can be headaches. If it's pressuring against the hypothalamus, it can prevent anxiety or OCD or overachieving, or all of these symptoms are really related to congestion in the neck, which then backs up the ability of the fluid to drain down the neck and leave the body. And so one of the main aspects of that is your lymphatics. Lymphatics kind of run alongside the veins, but they don't have their own pump. And that's why things like yoga and dry brushing and all these other things are so incredibly helpful. But what we found is that oils, especially, like we use mint spearmint's really good. Frankincense is good. A combination of oils actually helps to move the lymph. And if you think about what plants do, you know, they basically, the water comes from the ground, and somehow the roots soak them up and kind of spread it throughout the plant. Oils are what help that flow and that movement in the plant. And they can do the same thing in us. They can actually help to expand the vasculature, like formulates his own supplements. And he always adds black pepper, which is a root, which helps to kind of optimize the flow and move things. It's like trying to think Of a culinary example. Like, some people think everything tastes better with butter or salt. You know, it's like certain things just, doesn't it? I think so. I'm a butter girl myself, you know.

I like both of them.

Yeah, as do I. Yeah. But the point being that you can use essential oils. You can, even if you can't afford it. Castor oil. Castor oil totally moves lymph. I was just at something with Terry Wahls. She was telling me that she puts castor oil all over her face and her neck every day. You can put castor oil, it's really kind of goopy and messy, like on the bottom of your feet before bed and then just put socks on. If you're going to do an Epsom salt bath, you can put castor oil over your liver and let the heat of the bath kind of amplify things. It's just. It's amazing for flow. And the more you can open up flow in your neck and in your lymph, the more likely you're not just mobilizing toxins, but allowing them to drain. Like, I use the example of you would never yell fire in the crowded movie theater without opening the emergency exit doors, because otherwise you're just going to have pandemonium. Think about, you're doing something to detoxify your brain and the toxins can't leave. The exit route is blocked. So now all the toxins are just going haywire and relocating sometimes to places that are more damaging.

Do you have some specific oils blends or oil components that are awesome for doing that? You mentioned the frankincense.

Yeah, well, kind of. Speaking about what we were talking about earlier, I really formulate. There's no easy way to explain it, but it's this idea of resonance. You know, like you hit a tuning fork on one side of the room and then someone matches it on the other side. Or music, you know, you can kind of match the notes and play in harmony. There's. There's a resonance that occurs in nature. It's that thing if I'm a runner. So. And I'm like, I'm not very fast. I'm a nine minute mile. And there were times when I'd run with people that were eight minute miles and you would naturally keep pace with them. And then after like two or three miles, you'd be like, yeah, yeah. But, you know, if you're ever at a performance and you notice people start to clap in resonance with each other, or birds fly in resonance. So it's this idea that you can combine oils to match the energetics of the healthy organ system or region of the brain. So that's what my blends are, is they're very specific combinations that help to open vasculature. But you know, you can also. Frankincense is a good all around player. Castor oil is amazing. You can use these things with the intention of kind of opening the flow. Black pepper hot oil works better when you combine it with some other oils. But you know, I want to empower people to experiment at home and play with it. You know, it's kind of like you can make your own bread or you can just go to the store and buy bread. Yeah, busy mom. I just buy the bread. If you want it done for you, I've got that.

Cool. So on that front, I guess it brings up a question like if somebody's just getting into this, is there a specific starter kit or there are certain. If you don't have access to it in your store where you're smelling them or how does somebody start out with this?

Yeah, I mean there are a couple of the parasympathetic oil, which is clove and lime. I think that's a must for everybody. I really. It's almost like priming the walls before you paint them. It just sets you up for enormous success. Also lymph flow, because most of us, even if we're like healthy athletes, we tend to neglect that. And then, and I have two kits that kind of one. The third component can either be adrenal for energy if you're stressed or tired. And if you're sleeping. Okay, that's in my thrive kit. Those three. If your, if sleep is a challenge, if you're exhausted but you can't fall asleep, we have one called circadian rhythm. And what that does is it naturally triggers the pineal gland to release the sleep hormone melatonin after kind of the vagus nerve being turned off or stuck in sympathetic overdrive. I think that the lack of restful sleep is another, the next big kind of epidemic pandemic. I think that contributes to anxiety because if you're not sleeping, you're of course going to be more anxious, more hungry for easy energy like carbohydrates and more anxious. And it's really interesting. There's a lot of research that melatonin, in addition to kind of inspiring sleep, can be very detoxifying for the brain. And, and it's really powerful. So that's, you know, if someone comes to me, that's the first question I ask. Are you sleeping? And if they're not sleeping, that's the first place I start.

Yeah, that's awesome. I mean you look at if you want to torture a human, you mess with their sleep. You know, it really is, I mean, you know, everything starts to shut down because there's no regeneration. The brain doesn't detox. You know, there's such agitation on the nervous system. That's where the anxiety comes from. Everything starts to break down. So that is so important. It is a baseline. I see that a lot with fibromyalgia patients as well. If you get first, I'll start with their sleep and to get everything else kind of corrected for them. And I love the idea of using oils. Let me give you a test case scenario. Right. We see a lot of really difficult recalcitrant conditions here. And so individual had their gallbladder out and has never been well since. You know, every test in the book, imaging, et cetera, still major abdominal pain and just writhing tightness. So all the sympathetic is just ramped up. Not sleeping, just, you know, really nauseous, can't get stuff down. Just really like over a six week period. Just not, you know, really not sure what's going on. And chronic writhing pain. Are there things to just like I think about your parasympathetic component and the castor oil, you know, what do you do with people that are just so far ramped, far gone, basically of like, geez, what do we do?

Yeah, well, as you know, the gallbladder, parasympathetic helps the gallbladder. And when someone has their gallbladder removed, I'm assuming you have them on bile salts because that helps to emulsify. And then I also would support the other organs of detoxification. One thing that's really interesting is there is a directionality of detoxification, right? So it goes from the lymph into the blood into the liver, then ideally to the gallbladder and then the intestines and leaves the body. So bottlenecks can occur in any of those spots. And one of the things that we find, Chris Shade with Quicksilver talks about this a lot, the directionality. So if the liver is congested or the gallbladder is congested, the toxins don't actually keep moving in the right direction. They backlog into the blood and then they get pushed out the skin and you have skin eruptions or they get pushed to the kidneys and you have low back pain because the kidneys are doing too much. So one of the things that I Would definitely. Based on what you're saying, it sounds like that directionality might be compromised. And the liver is going to need a little bit more love, you know, with things like milk thistle or dandelion or burdock root. We've got an essential oil for liver that I would put over it. I've also been playing with in the Peter Holm range of things. I've been putting oils on acupuncture points, deliver. There's a really powerful point between the two toes kind of on the top.

Yeah.

It also helps with the gallbladder channel. So putting oil on the bottom of the feet. You can also have castor oil on the bottom of the feet, but especially before bed, because liver time is in the middle of the night. And so just helping to continue the flow, the movement. Acupuncture might help as well. But what that sounds like to me is that there's stagnation and there's a block. And so anything you can do to get that flowing and moving, be it activating the parasympathetic response, be it supporting the other organs of detoxification, including the kidneys, the lymph, the liver, be it kind of using essential oils or acupuncture or. Or essential oils on acupuncture points to get things moving.

Love that. Yeah.

You know, and then definitely binders. You know, one of the big bottlenecks is the gallbladder. Bile from the gallbladder dumps the toxins in the small intestines. And if you have any kind of digestive compromise, those toxins can get reabsorbed and reassimilated. This is one thing that happens a lot with women who've had several children. They have all this estrogen that they're reassimulating, and then they get estrogen dominant and have some hormonal issues. So things like binders, you just take a couple charcoal chlorella, psyllium before bed, and that really binds to the toxins and carries it out. So that's what I would do in that test case.

Nice. Thank you.

Yeah.

That was all hypothetical, by the way.

Oh, okay. I'm sure.

Well, no, I mean, that's what we see a lot of folks with that scenario. Right. Never better since. Or kind of into this undiagnosable state of their suffering. And, you know, Western docs aren't coming up with any diagnosis. Right.

Well, or sickness behavior. Like this Tufts researcher found. He calls it vagus nerve hypothesis, and it's basically vagus nerve toxicity. But what he's finding is that some kind of virus gets into the vagus nerve. Because the vagus nerve is almost like the broadcast system. So it's just in that one isolated nerve. It might not even be showing up in lab results, but it's telling the whole body that you're sick. And what is sickness response? What happens? We feel tired so we can stop and heal. We feel in pain, like everything feels amplified. And some people get stuck in that mode and that's when they have like chronic multi chemical sensitivity fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome. That's really kind of being stuck in the gear of sickness behavior. And activating and detoxifying the vagus nerve is a really good way to help people shift out of that state.

Awesome. What about. So, I mean you've got, I mean the vagus nerve seems to be a crucial link here, right. In this switching from sympathetic to parasympathetic.

I almost feel like it's more foundational than food because it's not just what you eat, it's how you eat. And if you're, you know, I'll use myself as an example. Your kids are totally over scheduled. You're picking them up from one activity, driving them to the next. Maybe dinner is throwing them a sandwich in the back of the minivan as you're driving in horrific traffic. That is no way to assimilate your nutrients. You really need to be in that. You know, there was a reason that we used to sit down to family dinners and say a prayer and really kind of ground ourselves and center ourselves and smell the food and drop into that rest and digest state before we tried to eat. Because if you're eating and you're in the sympathetic drive, you're really not going to be assimilating in nutrients.

Yeah, right. You're, you're running from the saber tooth cat and you're, you've got the blood shunted from your gut to the muscles into your brain so you can fight or flight. Right?

Yeah.

So there's no time to digest.

Right. And I mean, if I could go back and tell my former self, who is like, you know, spending a fortune on nutrient dense whole foods and then spending hours cooking them and trying to get my kids to eat them in a mad rush like how foolish of me, I would have been better off buying cheaper food and just assimilating it.

Sure, yeah. Slowing down to eat. Right. All right, well let's see. Where to from here? So you've got, you kind of, you told me you've got maybe a book coming up.

I do have a Book coming up. So I self published my first book, which is really about how to use essential oils on the body. Oh, great, that's on Amazon. And then I got a book deal with Random House to talk about essential oils on the brain.

Awesome. Oh, wow. Essential oils on the brain. Love it.

Yes.

So that component. So where did you uncover. Is that in the living laboratory of clinic or through the research? Where. Where are you coming up with your.

It's a combination of things. It's things that, that I've always kind of. I mean, I started out as a practitioner and you would notice blind spots, like, oh, gosh, you know, there are a million supplements for magnesium. But what do I do to activate the vagus nerve besides telling them to gag themselves and splash their face with, you know, freezing water? Which bizarrely, I can't imagine why, but a lot of people didn't want to do that. So I just started.

Really.

I know, it's super shocking. You know, are you common people have a lot of anxiety and so they're so overwhelmed, so they can't even exercise on what you've been telling them. I kind of realized it was almost like you had to pre pave the pathway, so helping people get in that grounded parasympathetic state. And I was a yoga practitioner for years, and so I used to do it by breathing, but I was always slightly obsessed with the vagus nerve. You know, like I would use my tongue as a paintbrush and try and do it that way. And then I started playing with oils and realized, okay, this is the best I've seen. So it started with me as a practitioner filling in gaps. And then friends like you and our mindshare community and learning more, like, oh, look, everyone wants to move lymph. And you know, I would hear something and I would test it and then when it would work really well, I'd reverse engineer and do research and be like, oh, of course that works. That makes so much sense. So it was a lot of working with people seeing what the blind spots were. And you know, obviously people will tell me like, oh, can you use essential oils for baldness? I mean, there is kind of a circulatory component to that, so you can improve circulation, but otherwise, no. If you break your arm, go to the er. If you're having a heart attack, go to the er. Oils are really amazing for preventative uses and for helping return the body to balance so that it can really function optimally. But if you're kind of having an acute situation, I would use the hospital not oils.

We've got you frozen there a little bit.

Oh, sorry.

So we got going in for the ER for essential staying alive, but using the oils as nutritive and.

Yeah, yeah, I think that oils are. They're preventative. They're great for returning the body to balance, for detoxifying, for managing stress, for supplemental supporting optimal brain health and function. But if you're having an acute emergency situation, I wouldn't use oil.

It's not going to heal my broken arm.

It can help improve circulation and lymph flow so that once you've gone to the ER and gotten it set and put in a cast, it can heal better. Once you get your cast taken off, it can help with that, but no, it's not going to set your arm for you.

Yeah. Oh, one question. So are you personally, when you talked about the resonance of oils, are you tailoring, like doing consults with people and tailoring blends right to them, or is it more like, let's say you got a surgery and you want to help with healing and circulation that. Well, these are the ones that, you know, this is a good blend for you.

What I did is I kind of identified the underlying organ systems and regions of the brain and noticed that the frequency was consistent across the board for everyone. And so I created oils that work for everyone. And I found that to be more efficient than trying to tailor it. Because even if you, if you are trying to tailor, like throughout the course of our conversation, your resonance has changed.

Yeah.

So where you are at that one moment in time is going to shift and especially as you start to heal and get better. So it felt more efficient to just create oils that were the resonance of healthy organ tissue and regions of the brain.

Sure. So, out of. For. In curiosity, so do you have. You've got a blend for helping heal after wounds or surgeries?

Why? I kind of. It's like, I don't know if you remember when we were kids, they had granimals, like kids that were colorblind. You could kind of mix and match things. So, for example, for blood sugar, the organs of blood sugar are your pancreas, your adrenals and your liver. So I have a blood sugar support kit that supports those organs. I have a stress support kit that supports your hypothalamus, which is kind of the region of the brain that tells your pituitary to then tell your adrenal glands to release the stress hormone cortisol. So that kit really focuses on the regions of the brain aligned with stress. I have a detox support kit that combines a gallbladder, liver and the parasympathetic. So what I'm really doing is trying to identify what is your biggest priority and what are the underlying organ systems or regions of the brain that are out of balance, that if I can return them to balance, then your detoxification effort will flow more freely. So that's, that's how I work.

Awesome. Yeah, that's great.

Thank you.

Yeah, that's a, yeah, really great. Elegant and time tested. Right? You've done this with, you know, over 50,000 people.

Yeah, I've been, I've been doing this for eight years.

Yeah, that's awesome. And you know, with your nutritional background as well, and the more functional component, it's not just like a one hit wonder. You're addressing all of the facets that need to get addressed.

So that's really also, I think people are so overwhelmed because they have all these different symptoms and they go to all these different doctors and it doesn't make sense to them. And they have decided that they're very complicated. And some have given up hope and decided like, oh, no one can help me. But, but when you start to listen to it, you identify clusters of symptoms and really distinct underlying themes. It's often, and I'm sure this is your experience as well, it's either, okay, your vagus nerve is a little bit offline, so we can reboot that. Your sleep doesn't seem to be working. Your drainage is compromised. People will come to me and I'll ask, okay, do you have metals in your mouth? Do you have some kind of mold exposure? Like, it's pretty obvious to me if it's one of those three things. And just by addressing one of those three things, it really helps to move them out of stagnation into a place where they're starting to heal more.

Got it. So just to piggyback on that, talking about, we talked about sleep as being one of those first systems that you want to get under control. So are there specific recommendations you have around sleep? Essential oils for sleep?

Yeah, and there are different. What I think people don't realize is that sleep is not, you know, just tranquilizing sleep. It doesn't work for a reason. It's either that you have trouble falling asleep or you have trouble staying asleep. And they're very different when you're trouble falling asleep. That is because the sleep hormone melatonin works in tandem with the stress hormone cortisol. They almost have a, you know, kind of opposite relationship. And that makes sense. What's supposed to happen is that melatonin is supposed to be high. At night, cortisol is supposed to be low, so you fall asleep. And then in the morning, cortisol levels are supposed to be high. Melatonin is supposed to be low so you can wake up. But what happens? Because our stress response, if we're worried about something, our body thinks, you know, the tiger's chasing us, so it releases cortisol. Because if you're about to die, you don't want to fall asleep. So you're lying in bed, you're worried about your job, your kids, your relationship, you know, your president, you name it, and you can't fall asleep. That's because cortisol is high. Melatonin is low. So what's interesting is a lot of people take melatonin capsules and they're like, oh, it doesn't work. Well, remember that blood brain barrier? It's hard for pills to get through the brain. If you take liposomal melatonin, like Quicksilver has a good one that can get into the brain.

We got you frozen again there, Jody. So we left off at if you're frozen.

Am I frozen now?

Where is the oil if you are frozen? I'm not sure.

Oil for falling asleep.

So thanks, everybody, for.

Oh, no. Okay.