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Gregory Eckel has spent the last 20 years developing and refining his unique approach to chronic neurological conditions. In addition to his experience in clinical practice using a combination of Naturopathic and Chinese Medicine, he has a deep personal connection with chronic neurological disease since his wife Sarieah passed of... Read More
Jodi Sternoff Cohen is a bestselling author, award-winning journalist, functional practitioner and founder of Vibrant Blue Oils, where she has combined her training in nutritional therapy and aromatherapy to create unique proprietary blends of organic and wild-crafted essential oils. She has helped over 70,000 clients heal from brain-related challenges, including... Read More
- What are essential oils?
- Frequencies of the oils
- Rhythm of the planet Balancing organs systems
Related Topics
Anxiety Relief, Aromatherapy, Bioenergetics, Breathwork, Emotional Balance, Emotional Health, Energy, Essential Oils, Fascia, Frequency, Grounding, Nervous System Calming, Organ System Balancing, Pineal Gland Activation, Plant-based Healing, Relaxation, Sleep Support, Third Eye OpeningGreg Eckel, ND, LAc
Hi, everybody. Welcome back to the BioEnergetics Summit. I am your host, Dr. Greg Eckel. I have Jodi Sternoff Cohen on with us today. We’re talking the bioenergetics of essential oils. Jodi is the bestselling author, award-winning journalist, functional practitioner and founder of Vibrant Blue Oils where she has combined her training in nutritional therapy and aroma therapy to create unique proprietary blends of organic and wild-crafted essential oils. She has helped over 50,000 clients heal from brain related challenges, including anxiety, insomnia, and autoimmunity. Jodi, welcome aboard.
Jodi Sternoff Cohen
Thank you, Greg. This is gonna be fun.
Greg Eckel, ND, LAc
This is, and bioenergetics of essential oils, and you of all of the people I know are my go to resource on essential oils and the bioenergetics is such a fun discussion to have around the frequencies of oil. So when we bring up just bioenergetics and essential oils, where does your mind go with that discussion?
Jodi Sternoff Cohen
Well, I think that everything… The planet has a rhythm, right? The tide goes in, the tide goes out, it’s day, it’s night, and I think that anything entrained in the earth, like the trees, the plants, the flowers, and for anyone who’s listening who doesn’t know what essential oils are, they are the concentrated essences of plants. So basically you pick Lavender, you put it in a vat of boiling water, the steam rises and oil and water are different weights, right, so oil goes down one side and the water goes down another, and then that oil carries the frequency and the vibration of the plant and we all have different frequencies and different vibrations and you can… Just like if you’re teaching a child to swim, right, what do you do?
You put them in like the arm floaties and the arm floaties lift them up so they can feel like they’re swimming, it just kind of raises them up. So you take a plant like Lavender, which has kind of a universal frequency, so that’s why it’s so versatile. You can use it in so many ways because it just matches you and it tends to have the same frequency as humans. So you can pretty much count on that one unless you don’t like the smell. That’s a good one, and oils are working, they’re working on many levels and I actually think that plants and food work on very many levels, they work on kind of what we’re aware of the physical dimension, where they’re giving you nutrients, or certain chemical constituencies that do certain things like most people may not know that white willow bark is Aspirin.
So basically the drug Aspirin just mimics the chemical constituencies so that works, on the physical level for pain, but we’re not just physical, we’re physical, we’re mental, we’re emotional, we’re many dimensions and what people don’t realize is sometimes it’s the energetic dimension that gets in the way, sometimes when we’re able to shift that, then the physical healing can occur. And if that feels overwhelming and complicated, that’s okay, because you can use plants and not even really understand what you’re doing, you can use flower essences, you can use oils and it’s almost like cleaning your windshield, right? If you just try to use water, maybe it will clean, maybe it won’t and then you add in like some kind of cleaning fluid and suddenly you can see more clearly. Oils are just another tool to kind of peel off whatever layers are getting in the way between you and health.
Greg Eckel, ND, LAc
Lovely, so how would you measure the frequencies? So I have heard that the essential oil or smell of Rose is one of the highest frequencies on the planet.
Jodi Sternoff Cohen
Yeah, yeah.
Greg Eckel, ND, LAc
How do we put that together?
Jodi Sternoff Cohen
Well, there’s a lot of research, so I’ll start with kind of the scientific research. In our nose, we have olfactory receptors, right? Our sense of smell is what keeps us alive because we smell food, we smell water, we smell predator odor. So there was a researcher named Linda Buck who was isolating different predator odor receptors in the nose to kind of try to isolate the fear response. And after she was able to isolate, she took it one step further and said, “What blocks it out?” And it turns out the smell of roses, that whole expression, stop and smell the roses, that kind of overrides and shuts down your fear response. So it’s really powerful that way. And then there was a researcher named Bruce Tanao in actually Eastern Washington who was measuring the frequency of different parts of the body, different oils, Rose does have the highest vibration and vibration can be sound, it can be light, it can be color, it can be smell.
And you might just think of it as like wavelengths, right? Going up and down, and what’s important about that is that high tides lift all boats, like high vibration things lift low vibration things so there’s also emotions in their vibrations, right? So love is the highest vibration. If you’re feeling love, if you’re feeling gratitude, it’s very hard to be grumpy, your brain can’t really multitask, like I’m gonna be grateful and angry at the same time, grateful tends to win, right?
Greg Eckel, ND, LAc
Right.
Jodi Sternoff Cohen
And so what you’re always trying to do is go higher so that you bring things up like this is kind of the phenomenon of a tuning fork, right? Someone can strike a tuning fork on one side of the room and then the other side, it kind of matches, it’s called resonance, meaning that the lower vibrating thing kind of lifts up and matches the frequency of the higher vibrating thing. You can hear this if you’re ever in a crowd and people start to clap, it tends to kind of harmonize together. If you watch birds fly, they fly in resonance, so it’s all around us and we don’t really realize what it’s doing.
This is what crystals do, actually. Crystals, we all have frequencies and rocks, they’re solid, right? They stay stable, they stay steady just like trees. We’re all over the place, it’s not that we’re all ADD but you know we’re fine, we’re driving, “Oh my gosh, the car might accidentally hit us.” Our heart starts to go, and then we recover, we come back whereas that rock or that tree stays steady. So the more you can kind of tap into nature, the more you can kind of balance the highs and the lows and stay more steady yourself.
Greg Eckel, ND, LAc
Love it. That’s a great way to talk about the bioenergetics of the essential oils and of the plants in general and why we’re attracted to nature, et cetera. It is on those frequencies. What are would you say are the top views? Like you said Lavender is pretty universal, is that because we’re all needing that balance or that foundation in our lives? Like we’re so challenged that way? Or is it some other thing at play there?
Jodi Sternoff Cohen
I think, it’s kind of like if something works, people use it, I think Lavender’s not crazy expensive, it’s pretty accessible and it doesn’t seem too weird to people. They know what it is, they like the smell, it just feels easy in that way and yet it’s really powerful, it can help calm your nervous system, it’s known to calm anxiety, it’s great for sleep, it’s great for relaxation, it has so many benefits. It’s kinda like saying salt’s really popular. Well, there’s a lot of uses.
Greg Eckel, ND, LAc
Right, yeah, that’s true. I’m thinking just out of my personal interest and curiosity for certain bioenergetics to really help us on astral traveling or meditation or inter-dimensional travel, along these lines, I figured let’s go there ‘cuz I’ve got you on the line.
Jodi Sternoff Cohen
Yeah, you know it’s really interesting. So the way I use oils, like, okay, look at the painting behind me, right? It’s a bunch of different hues of blue. If you think about it, there are three main primary colors, right? There’s red, yellow, and blue. And from that with white and black, we get the whole universe, the whole rainbow. So just like you can combine colors to change the hue, you can combine different components of the oils. And based on what plant they’re derived from like trees or whatever, things that have really deep roots in the earth, they’re very grounding and stabilizing. Citrus have smaller molecules, they’re light, they’re very uplifting, right? Flowers like Lavender, Rose, Jasmine, Chamomile, they’re like they open your heart and they’re happy, and so you can kind of combine them in different ways and I do that to balance organ systems in regions of the brain.
I believe that each organ system has its own frequency, almost like its own color, its own sound. And by overlaying kind of what healthy frequency should do, it goes into alignment with that. It resonates and it trains with the healthy frequency and then it starts to heal. So to your point about what can we do to kind of open our third eye? I have an oil that I call hypothalamus and that’s great for opening the third eye. I also have a circadian rhythm blend that’s great for the pineal gland. And then the other thing that obviously you are the expert in is breath, right? The more you can get in touch with your breath, the more you can kind of entrain with deep diaphragmatic breathing, the more you relax your body, and the more you relax your body, the more you open your mind, you can also use it to open your heart so that it’s easier for messages to get into you so there are a number of ways to do it. I don’t know if there’s a right way or a wrong way, so you can do it as a heart opening, you can do it as a pineal gland opening, or as a third eye opening or kind of a breathwork practice.
Greg Eckel, ND, LAc
Oh, I love it. I love it, and that actually makes sense to me as a Chinese medicine practitioner too on the organ networks and bringing in more the intuitive art to the blends and the ways of individualizing a program for oneself, right, I’m thinking for our viewers and listeners here of really speaking into that bioenergetic frequency of the different plants so it is a great way to couch it on, well, how are they in nature, what are they doing? And it’s in the herbal traditions, it’s then in the oil, it’s basically herbal tradition expanded into the olfactory nerve. What’s unique on essential oils and the olfactory nerve, you’ve been drawn into this, right? Like you’re a powerful medicine woman there. And so how did you get into that? Or like, what’s unique about that route for us as humans?
Jodi Sternoff Cohen
You know what’s really interesting, like if you talk to practitioners who have been practicing a long time, the challenges that they faced 20 years ago are very different than the challenges they face today and that’s in part due to the introduction of more toxicants that kind of compromise our digestion. Most people today have some form of leaky gut. 30 years ago, that was relatively unheard of, right? So if you think about how do we get remedies into our system, most of us ingest them, we ingest our food, we ingest supplements. Okay, so now let’s lay that over the fact that our digestion is compromised. So it’s kind of like you live in Portland sometimes, I live in Seattle sometimes, driving from Seattle to Portland, used to be able to do it in like two, two and a half hours, now good luck if it takes four, ’cause it’s just congested and complicated so you’re trying to feel better.
You need to basically get it into your system. You could take a pill and it has to travel through your whole digestive system and through your liver and get to your heart to pump into your body, or you can smell and it goes directly into your brain immediately because nose cells are brain cells. The brain is protected by the blood brain barrier, which guess what, only lets super small fat soluble molecules through, guess what oils are. So it’s kind of a matter of efficiency and convenience. It’s the fastest way to get something into your system. This is why cocaine is snorted through the nose. This is why they do some anesthesia through the nose. It’s just an efficient channel.
Greg Eckel, ND, LAc
Yeah.
Jodi Sternoff Cohen
And the right key to unlock the right door.
Greg Eckel, ND, LAc
I love it. And there is something kind of mystical, it is called cranial nerve 1. Like they didn’t name it cranial nerve 12, it’s the first nerve on the system, right?
Jodi Sternoff Cohen
The one, yeah.
Greg Eckel, ND, LAc
Yeah, we’re number one. And that root in, and like you had mentioned, our sense of smell has kept us alive for eons and we-
Jodi Sternoff Cohen
That’s another thing, smell goes directly to the amygdala. All the other five senses are routed elsewhere first. I think we all have a smell memory. I smell blackberries and I remember like my cousin’s cabin, summers in my cousin’s cabin, and it’s so vivid, I can practically taste it and see it, you know other people, smell really can impact memory and it can help us calm the limbic system, which is another system that often is overactive.
Greg Eckel, ND, LAc
Yeah, huge, huge. So it doesn’t go through the hypothalamus to be interpreted or directed, it goes right to the sensory organ, I love that. What are some favorite blends and we’re talking bioenergetics of the fields around the body, let’s say, what traditionally has been used or thought of, and I know in different traditions, there’s different, I’ll call them flavors, but we’ll say odors and different plants that are associated with different healings, clearing, support, nutrition, et cetera.
Jodi Sternoff Cohen
Yeah, when we’re talking about bioenergetics, I’m slightly obsessed with coherence and coherence begins with the heart. The heart sends more messages to the brain than the brain to the heart. The HeartMath Institute is amazing for this, but there are so many heart opening oils and I feel like that’s the one thing, I think most people are aware we should be sleeping, I think most people are aware that digestion is key in stress and detoxification. I don’t hear enough people talking about heart opening and about when you can open the heart, and I think the heart is the easiest key to the field.
I think when you expand your heart, you expand your field, you expand everything you touch and you just elevate yourself. I think it’s the easiest if we’re talking about efficiency and so what are good oils for the heart? All of the flower oils, Rose oil, Jasmine, my Heart Blend has a lot of flower oils and it’s really combined to work on so many levels, not just the physical heart, but the emotional heart, the energetic heart. I feel like Christine or Dr. Schaffner, our friend is like, “That’s my favorite of your blend.” Because I think a lot of supplements are good, a lot of lifestyle products are good, but for whatever reason that itch that’s hard to scratch is the heart. And even if we are in gratitude, sometimes we just can’t help but we’re grateful and then we’re like, “Oh my gosh, I wish my hand wasn’t so messy.” We just can’t help ourselves.
Greg Eckel, ND, LAc
Yeah.
Jodi Sternoff Cohen
And so I feel like if you can bypass the thinking mind by overlaying something on the body, that is a shortcut to accessing the coherence we’re seeking.
Greg Eckel, ND, LAc
I love that, and you know it is a big.. In Chinese medicine, we have no word for mind-body medicine, it’s all heart centered so the emperor or the empress, and what I really appreciate about that system is it is so heart focused and allowing that’s kind of my work on the planet now as well as, how do we get people to access their heart? Well, they’ve gotta have their brains put together and out of fear, out of fight or flight, in our deep, relaxed, coherent state, but then getting ’em to drop into their heart and listen to their heart, ask their heart. So anything that helps support that and aids it, you’re right, it is the limiting rate or limiting step in a lot of healing is broken heartedness, or we see Monday mornings with heart attacks as being a major time for heart attacks to happen in Monday mornings, it’s like, well, why is that? People aren’t paying attention to their heart. And one of the sayings is, “Creating the more beautiful world our hearts know and desire.” So I love that suggestion, thank you on that front.
Jodi Sternoff Cohen
I mean, yes, you’re totally right and the work you do is incredibly valuable and there is a little bit of a hack that you can, like the three legged race, you can kind of get the brain in shape and keep the heart up there because it is like that flotation device, you’re overlaying the frequency of a healthy heart and so people can’t quite help, it’s like if everyone of them is singing, you tend to match volume, right? You tend to match energy level. There’s always that entrainment and matching whenever you are surrounded with people. If you are watching a football game and the crowd around you is going wild, you’re not really gonna just sit grumpy in your seat, you’re probably gonna get up and cheer, you just can’t help it.
Greg Eckel, ND, LAc
Right. Yeah, so in those frequencies and resonance and getting into resonance with those around, so the more of us helping our hearts get into coherence the better.
Jodi Sternoff Cohen
Yeah, exactly.
Greg Eckel, ND, LAc
What are some other maybe not so well known frequencies for people to consider here?
Jodi Sternoff Cohen
Blue Tansy is my absolute favorite. I do think there is something incredibly healing about the color blue, especially for the brain and the heart and so when you take a plant that’s a certain color, it’s almost like layering the healing, it’s a really powerful one, it’s one of my favorite. Angelica root is also very elevating and uplifting, Jasmine, super expensive, but really valuable. I do like the Chamomiles and the Blue Chamomile in particular, I find them to be kind of relaxing and uplifting. Ylang ylang is interesting, it’s better when it’s in a blend, it enhances everything else, on its own, it’s a little hit or miss, people either love it or they don’t. But when you kind of combine it, I think it’s really lovely.
Greg Eckel, ND, LAc
Interesting, so that’s more of like a synergistic, kind of synthesizer together.
Jodi Sternoff Cohen
Yeah but I mean, Rose can be used on its own, Blue Tansy on its own, any of the Chamomiles, it’s kind of like they can do whatever they want. What I’m trying to do is I think there’s a lot of overwhelm and a lot of like, “Oh, I don’t know what I’m gonna do. So I’m gonna do nothing.” What I’m trying to do is say like, “Okay, well, here’s something that we’ve tested. Here’s exactly how other people have benefited from it. If you wanna dip your toe in the water, this is a good place to start ‘cuz you probably won’t drown.”
Greg Eckel, ND, LAc
Yeah, I love it. So on that front, what comes to mind is how does Jodi Cohen experience a new essential oil? Or is there a process that you use personally that you could share with us?
Jodi Sternoff Cohen
Yeah, I can actually talk about it ‘cuz I’ve created a new blend called Fascia because I was realizing they always say like, “Whatever you’re working on is always your biggest issue.” So Cal ShakaRoot, I tend to be in fight or flight a lot, I’m sympathetic, well, I’m way better than I used to be, I’m chipping away the iceberg but I still tend to fall into sympathetic dominance a little too early and it’s grumpy, frustrating for me ‘cuz I do this, I know what I’m doing and I realized I had a blind spot. So it’s the vagus nerve that you’re stimulating, what else can influence the vagus nerve? Your Fascia, the connective tissue that’s all around us because we’re bracing for impact. What happens when you see your dog, you’re walking your dog, there’s like a big dog that feels like having a bark attack, it’s a little scary, you get out of that situation. What does your dog do? They shake, they shake it off, they release the stress.
What do we do? Our teenager’s having a mood swing, we brace for impact. Our husband can’t find our keys, brace for impact. We turn on the news, not good news, brace for impact. We’re constantly turtle backing it and we never relax the Fascia and release it. And so I created a blend for Fascia and it was inspired, our mutual friend, Kelly Kennedy has this lymph FLOWpresso machine and she was talking to me about Fascia, it’s like a full body kind of blood pressure cuff and it just gets you right into parasympathetic. And so it was kind of meditating with help. And I realized, “Oh my God, the Fascia’s right below the surface, oils can really easily access it, like I need a Fascia blend.”
And so many people focus on, we know that oils can dilate vasculature so improve blood flow, they can help with drainage, you can kind of use plants that have deep roots to help with downward movement, lymph drainage drains downward, all of these things and the physical aspect of it came true first and you can do research and there are a million oils that everyone says, “Oh, this is good for Fascia.” And they’re totally right but there’s also that energetic, emotional component and so I was getting a download fright, I call it a download, suddenly I just can kind of feel what plants are supposed to go into it but it’s a lot of kind of uplifting, plants and flowers and so when I combined it, what people are saying with Fascia, it’s kind of a pressure point release, so typically, it’s like heat and time and pressure so you press on a certain point and it releases usually in four minutes. And what they’re saying is that when you put the oil on, it releases in half the time and it stays longer. So you go into a chiropractor, you get an adjustment, you walk outside, you feel amazing. Then suddenly you go home and home is not Zen and you’re out of alignment. This is just a way to kind of keep the momentum going.
Greg Eckel, ND, LAc
Oh, that is really cool.
Jodi Sternoff Cohen
Yeah.
Greg Eckel, ND, LAc
And you’re getting that feedback from hundreds if not thousands of practitioners around the country,
Jodi Sternoff Cohen
Yes.
Greg Eckel, ND, LAc
To help in the healing process and expedition or expedite, so-
Jodi Sternoff Cohen
And it’s interesting, I noticed I’ve been doing yoga for over a decade and all of a sudden my right hip wasn’t so happy and I’m like, “What is up with this? What’s going on?” And so I was in yoga practice trying to sit crosslegged and being really grumpy with my hip and thinking about getting a block. And I was like, “Wait a minute, I’ve got the Fascia blend, I’m gonna just put it on and see what comes up. So I put it on and my son was killed in the car accident and all of a sudden I was so like, the grief was just like a tsunami of grief and I’m like, “Oh my God, I used to carry him on my right hip.”
Greg Eckel, ND, LAc
Wow.
Jodi Sternoff Cohen
That’s why. And once I kind of recognized it and acknowledged and said, “Oh, that makes so much sense.” It kind of passed, it was almost like I was holding this emotion in the hip, in the Fascia and by using the oil to kind of let it go and discharge it, then it wasn’t an issue anymore.
Greg Eckel, ND, LAc
Wow.
Jodi Sternoff Cohen
Yeah.
Greg Eckel, ND, LAc
So the storing of emotions in the body and the cells, having frequencies in essential oils, helping to free up the the energy packet that was stuck and then jogging the body memory of you of where you would carry your son, that’s a beautiful story and a great example for everybody listening, our symptoms really are not to be suppressed, right? They’re to be listened to and asked and followed with a inquisitive curious mind because our bodies are telling the story that we need to listen to. So thank you, Jodi.
Jodi Sternoff Cohen
You’re welcome. You’re welcome, yeah. I mean, the issues really are in the tissues and it’s really fascinating because there’s certain things that I’ve been chipping at that iceberg hard, taking the right supplements, making the right lifestyle changes and it wasn’t really until I started addressing the bioenergetics that I saw big shifts.
Greg Eckel, ND, LAc
Yeah, that aspect of it, I’m curious in kind of the final piece of this interview today, and you said you want to help people get into action. What kind of words of advice can we give at this point for folks to get into action? Where do you suggest they start?
Jodi Sternoff Cohen
I think the world today is overwhelming and we can feel like victims, we can feel very disempowered because there is so much out of our control. So one of the things that I like to share with people, your sense of safety is influenced by your nervous system. When your nervous system is reacting to danger, you can’t really access your own sense of calm. When you can calm it down, then it’s much easier to feel empowered and the on-off switch between safety and danger is your vagus nerve which is most accessible right behind the earlobe. So I have the Parasympathetic blend that I use to kind of put on that point and it turns on calm and when I think about people who’ve survived challenging situations, they’re my role models ‘cuz you wanna know who did this, right?
So Holocaust survivor, Victor Frankl has this great quote, “Between the stimulus and the response, there’s a space, in that space lies our power to choose our response, in our response lies our growth and our freedom.” In other words, the world can seem crazy bananas and you can either lean into that and feel exhausted and anxious and overwhelmed, or you can calm your nervous system and say, “Wow, the world is bananas, but I can still be grateful for my friends, for my family, for my beautiful garden.” Or whatever you love, my cute dogs. Like you really have power over how you choose to respond to the world and I just want to leave people with that.
Greg Eckel, ND, LAc
Awesome. Jodi Cohen, thank you so much for coming on to the BioEnergetics Summit.
Jodi Sternoff Cohen
Thank you.
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