Discover How The Sense Of Smell Can Signal Safety To Your Body, Promoting Healing and Well-Being

In this interview with Jodi Cohen from Vibrant Blue Oils, we delve into the concept of safety and how essential oils can help improve our sense of safety. When our bodies perceive a continuous threat, they redirect resources to escape rather than heal. Jodi and I explore how we can shift to a safer environment using essential oils.

Key Takeaways:

• Importance of Safety: We discuss how the body cannot heal if it feels under constant threat and how essential oils can signal safety to the nervous system.
• Jodi’s Personal Journey: Jodi shares her recent challenges and how she’s used essential oils to find safety and calm amidst turmoil.
• Power of Smell: Smell directly accesses the limbic system, helping regulate emotions and promote a sense of safety.
• Essential Oil Blends: Jodi introduces five essential oil blends, including the parasympathetic blend, which helps stimulate the vagus nerve and create a sense of safety.
• Practical Applications: Discover how to integrate essential oils into daily routines, like morning rituals, to support overall well-being.
• Practitioner Training: Jodi talks about her new course designed for practitioners to learn how to use essential oils in their practice, with modules covering various aspects of health and healing.

*These statements have not been evaluated by the Food & Drug Administration. These products are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.

Read the transcript here:

Dr. Terry Wahls:

Welcome, everyone. This is Dr. Terry Wahls, and I’m here with one of our sponsors, with Vibrant Blue Oils. So this is Jodi Cohen. Now, Jodi and I have known each other for many, many, many years, and I have a lot of respect for her insight and her wisdom with how we can use essential oils to support our healing journey.

And with that, we’re going to have an interesting conversation today about the sense of safety and how we can support improving that sense of safety. Because we cannot heal if the body perceives it’s under continual threat because we’ll redirect all of our resources to escape the threat. So welcome Jodi, and let’s talk about what we can do to shift to that more safe environment.

Jodi Cohen:

It’s really interesting. I was telling you before we started to record, I’ve had quite a doozy of a month, and I’ve really, one of the things that I’ve always tried to do with Vibrant Blue Oils is be that person who walks out of the fire carrying water for those who are still burning and really take those hard lessons like you have and go into curiosity and learn from them. And when you’re in it, when you’re drowning, it’s really easy to see, “Oh, this helps me swim.”

And so one of the things that I’ve really been playing with is safety cues. When your nervous system and your limbic system think that you’re in danger, what calms you down? And there are many things, movement helps, but one of the things that I’ve noticed is that smell helps immediately because smell is one of the five senses.

Smell has the most direct access to the limbic system of the brain because it helps keep you safe. You smell food, you smell water, you smell predator odor, you smell fire, and you can actually use smell combined with breathing techniques, combined with, you can put it on your fingers and use it for tapping. There are many ways that you can help your body regulate your nervous system, regulate, and get into that safe place so that it’s easier to do whatever comes next.

Dr. Terry Wahls:

So Jodi, let’s stop for a moment. When we talked about your essential oils, you mentioned a specific blend. Did I hear that correctly?

Jodi Cohen:

I have actually five blends that I use to regulate safety. The easiest one is the parasympathetic blend, your vagus nerve, cranial nerve number 10, which connects your body to your brain. So it starts at the base of the skull, winds around both sides and is super accessible here. This can be used as kind of a vagus nerve activation strategy, vagus nerve stimulation, which helps you stimulate the ventral vagal, parasympathetic state of the nervous system where you feel safe.

So that’s one cue for stimulating safety. You can also smell it. There’s something, I think one of the reasons so many of us are addicted to coffee is the smell. We smell it and we’re like, “Ah, our morning’s starting. There’s something warm and tastes good.” It is kind of a ritual, and I think that you can use smell in many ways. It can be the warm meal cooking for dinner when your family gets home. It can be any kind of smell that you associate with. I know you use oils in your ritual. It’s just a nice tool to kind of signal the body that it’s safe.

Dr. Terry Wahls:

Part of my typical morning ritual is I have a morning meditation. I do my workout. Today, I did my strength workout, and then I went into my sauna for some red light therapy and heat. And the parasympathetic is certainly a part of that morning ritual.

Jodi Cohen:

Thank you. Yeah. And I’ve been playing with, I don’t know. We were talking before we started filming that sometimes I had a pretty significant betrayal, and I think our impulse is to go into victim and to go into anger and, “Oh, that person did this and poor me.” And I had this epiphany that sometimes when you react to things, it’s really your own stuff. It really, that person is just an opportunity for you to learn more and for you to heal and for you to uncover like, “Wow, I had trauma before I had this trauma, and there’s something here for me to get to unpack and finally release and let go of so that I am not burdened by that trauma anymore.”

And it just brings up more and more opportunities to peel back the onion and to heal. And in that kind of moment of overwhelm, I’ve realized we have so many tools, so many amazing resources, but a little bit like the supplement graveyard, the supplements that you don’t take aren’t going to help you.

The ambulance that can’t get to the accident isn’t going to save a life. We need things that are easy and actionable that we can actually do. And that’s where oils, especially for the limbic system, the limbic system, the olfactory nerve literally is right next to the amygdala. And so unlike your other four senses, your sense of smell goes directly to the amygdala.

You smell something, it goes right to the brain. And certain oils, like Frankincense and Sandalwood are high in this constituent called Sesquiterpene, which are very oxygenating. And so carrying that oxygen to the limbic system is a way to reset and regulate. Also, oils. Basically, the plant that it’s derived from really kind of bestows the property. So oils that come from trees with very deep roots in the ground like cedarwood or sandalwood, those can be very grounding. And when you’re grounded, you feel safe, right?

I think this is one of the reasons that nature is so powerful. You just feel so connected and safe, and it’s so beautiful and you can kind of calm down and regulate. Being by the water for me is magical just because it really calms my nervous system. And I feel like oil have a little bit of that, a little bit like farm to table.

The lavender is picked, it’s immediately distilled. You kind of capture that essence of health. And when you’re in the dark times of winter when you might not want to go outside in the snow or the pouring rain or the freezing cold, you can use oils to kind of bring nature into your body and help your body feel safe and regulated in health.

Dr. Terry Wahls:

Okay. Now the other thing that I’m excited to talk about is we’ve been having a conversation that I know many of my practitioners would like to learn more about how to use essential oils to support their patients. And I believe you’ve done some work there.

Jodi Cohen:

Yeah, I finally, I’ve been doing this for 12 years now, and for 12 years people have asked me to teach a course. And there’s a part of me that’s introverted and there’s a part of me that’s [inaudible 00:07:18] and I didn’t really want to do it until I knew I could do it really well. And I’ve now realized that oils are a really powerful adjunct to everything they’re doing in clinical practice.

I mean, obviously if they’re not following your diet, that’s going to cause systemic inflammation and make it harder. But if they’re doing everything right and there are just some hard to reach spots like that safety gauge, it’s really hard to feel safe. It’s really hard to let your body know and your limbic system and your nervous system regulate and know you can calm down. Your cells don’t need to be in that active danger response. It’s safe to heal, safe to detoxify.

It’s safe to anti inflame. So I feel like oils are really powerful for sending that safety signal. And then I also feel that because of certain reflex points that can help different organ systems and also just topical application, I feel like the neck is a big bottleneck in healing. Right?

We know that when we’re sleeping, our glymphatic system basically gives the brain a bit of a carwash and cleans the brain, and then it’s supposed to drain down the neck and into the vascular and lymphatic system and leave the body. But if there’s congestion in the neck, either from congested lymphatic nodes, or all of us have this kind of tech neck from basically punching over-

Dr. Terry Wahls:

[inaudible 00:08:45]

Jodi Cohen:

… our device. Yeah. Yeah. It can just constrict that flow and suddenly it’s a bottleneck, right? It’s like a traffic jam and all the traffic is backed up so the toxins aren’t leaving. And just by nature of oils and how they’re able to pass through the skin and where the drainage points on the lymphatic system is located, I really want to teach people how… I want to empower practitioners to empower their clients to do a lot of self-healing rituals to open the-

Dr. Terry Wahls:

So how do practitioners access this practitioner training?

Jodi Cohen:

We’ll give you a link and they can go and register. We’re opening registration very soon. Very excited about that. And it will be 10 modules where we’ll really go through kind of how to use oils as an adjunct. But the thing that’s most powerful, I, as an introvert, I’m actually making myself available. I’m going to do I think five live calls people can come on. I will stay on until every question is answered. I will go over case studies.

I will really get into the weeds of how you can use oils to help your clients with sleep, with mast cell activation and histamine intolerance, with limbic system retraining, with vagus nerve function and regulation, with digestion, with blood sugar, with all of the challenging things that we know what supplements to take, and we know what food we should be eating, and we know what lifestyle choices we should be making. And maybe there’s something more that’s really easy when we’re having that moment or that anxiety attack or that depression, and we just don’t want to get out of bed. We really don’t want to go to the gym or get in the sauna, but we can smell something.

Dr. Terry Wahls:

Okay. And what kind of practitioners can take your course? Is it just physicians only or?

Jodi Cohen:

No, it’s really open to anyone. And there are a lot of clients who have overcome chronic illnesses like autoimmunity or Lyme or mold, and they are just so educated that they just want to learn more. It’s really open. Originally, this company was founded for practitioners, and there were so many consumers that found me, and I basically decided I will never turn away somebody that I might help.

Dr. Terry Wahls:

Okay. Well, this has been excellent, inspiring, and the practitioner course sounds like this is something that people can participate in from anywhere in the world.

Jodi Cohen:

Exactly.

Dr. Terry Wahls:

So these are online modules and then the live training is still online as well.

Jodi Cohen:

Exactly. And we’ll give them advance opportunities to mail in questions if they can’t attend live. Obviously everything will be recorded and available after the fact. And I’m just incredibly excited to help more people, help the people that help the people. And so any questions, I’m excited to explore things. My background is actually research and journalism, so looking into things, sharing more resources just so more people can have an easier path.

Dr. Terry Wahls:

Okay. This is excellent. And where do people find… You have a Instagram and a webpage. Let’s hear that as well.

Jodi Cohen:

Vibrant Blue Oils is our website and also our Instagram, our Facebook. We have a Facebook discussion community. And if you have any questions, just send us an email at [email protected]. We try to get back to people within 24 to 48 hours.

Dr. Terry Wahls:

Excellent. Okay. Now for everyone who’s listening, I’d like you to down below tell us what is the one thing that you learned that you are willing to implement and begin today. And of course, I want you to come follow me on my Instagram handle, Dr. Terry Wahls, and so you can see what I’m doing and the food I’m eating, and the various ways that I support my healing journey and those of all of you who are following us. Thank you so much. And thank you, Jodi. This has been wonderful.

Jodi Cohen:

There’s one thing I just wanted to add that I’ve been integrating, tapping, I’ve been putting oils on my fingers and tapping with it, and that’s kind of another layering approach, combining the frequency of the oil and kind of the rhythm of the tapping that has been really beneficial in regulating the nervous system.

Dr. Terry Wahls:

Excellent.

Jodi Cohen:

Yeah.

Dr. Terry Wahls:

Thank you.

Jodi Cohen:

Thank you.