Essential Oils To Calm Your Nervous System & MCAS

Jodi Cohen

Yeah, thanks for having me. This is gonna be fun.

Tom Moorcroft, DO

I’m super excited and I really love to start and just I would love for you to tell us your backstory. How did you get to this place where you’re doing this amazing service to people and utilizing essential oils to do that?

Jodi Cohen

You know, it’s really funny ’cause I have a daughter going off to college, who’s obsessed with what do I major in? I majored in journalism and poli sci. And out of college, I worked actually in the U.S. Senate for Ted Kennedy. I was on the Health and Human Resources Committee and this was in 1991 before we could control F and search everything on the internet. So my big job was going through stacks and stacks of research to get talking points for the Senator and also for the testimony for the witnesses. So I got incredibly adept at reading research and getting to the point and finding the critical information. And then, I went on and I was a journalist for a little bit and got really good at writing really quickly. And so, I got married, had kids, living life. The second kid harder than the first, turned out he was really sensitive to certain foods. 

Once I figured that out, I dug deep ’cause nothing motivates us like helping our children, and wound up getting a degree in nutritional therapy. And then here in Seattle, I was trying to help other moms with squirming kids, and so I decided to learn muscle testing ’cause that made it much easier to identify the root cause and the best remedy, and that wound up being super handy when the shoes started to drop my own life. My husband, at the time, basically became so depressed that we needed to move him into a residential treatment facility. Once I knew he was alive and it wasn’t my job to keep him alive, it was like my adrenals could finally take a break and they really hit hard. I could barely function. My kids were five and seven and I would basically wake up with them, make them breakfast, pack their lunch, take them to school, come home, crawl back into bed, and set the alarm for pickup, which was not sustainable. None of the other remedies I was using seemed to help. 

So a friend had gifted me a box of essential oils, and when she came to drop them off, she said, “You know, you have been so high stress for so long, which means so high cortisol which means chronic inflammation. I bet nothing you’re ingesting is working because your gut is just so inflamed that it’s not getting through.” Oils, they’re really nice ’cause you can smell them. They get right into the brain. You can topically apply them and they get into your system. It’s kind of a back door to , and I was so, you know desperation is the mother of necessity, kind of I’m like, “All right, I’ll try anything.” Muscle tested the box. Will this help my adrenals? Strong yes. I couldn’t narrow it down. I kept getting the same five remedies, which stumped me for a moment until I realized, “Oh wait a minute, they’re liquid. I can combine them.” You know, essential oils… I’m thinking of it like a mixed drink. You know as I grab my shot glass, I’m testing, “Okay, three drops of this one, seven of this,” put it together, and I knew enough about the adrenals and that they were located on the low back. I put the remedy on the low back and I had this moment of feeling like myself like, “Oh wait, I could go running. I could do all the laundry and put it away. I could clean the house.” You know, all the things that mothers have to do on a daily basis. But when you’re overwhelmed, even climbing up the stairs could feel like too much. So I had this kind of superhero day, and I thought, “Well, that was quite a win.” It’s not uncommon when you’re exhausted during the day that all of a sudden at night, when you’re supposed to sleep, you’re insomniac, and that was my pattern at the moment. 

So somewhere around 10:47, it occurred to me, “Wait a minute, I know there’s kinda remedy that you can put right above your ears that helps with sleep. I wonder if I can make up an oil blend?” So I did and it worked so well that I don’t even remember falling asleep. My son woke me up in the morning and I just kept making things up until I felt better. And then all of my nutritional therapy friends were like, “Oh, we wanna try it.” …on their clients. And so then, there was a nutritional therapy conference and it was only like $200 to be a vendor. So one of my friends was like, “Let’s just do this. Let’s like test it.” And I’m like, “Well, someone must be doing this. It’s so obvious.” It was that point where I went online and realized no one was kind of making essential oil blends to balance organ systems and regions of the brain. 

The way they were positioning oils, they made it sound incredibly complicated like I was almost grateful that my cognitive function was so diminished that I didn’t start with online research because I would’ve felt unqualified and never tried. So we went to this event and all these people were like, “Oh, we love this. We’ve wanted to use oils, but they kind of seemed confusing and we weren’t quite sure how to use it. We like that you’ve prepackaged these blends and you tell us exactly how to use it. We can work with that.” And so, that basically how I started the company.

Tom Moorcroft, DO

Wow. So I think it’s so interesting, it’s like you’re using this opportunity of diminished cognitive function to actually this is the superpower to create this.

Jodi Cohen

Well, I think when you kinda get out of your head and allow your intuition to flow that it’s really amazing because I didn’t quite realize… In writing my most recent book, “Essential Oils to Boost the Brain and Heal the Body”, people think of they know that there are really three ways to use oils, right? You can smell them. I actually think the smelling from the bottle is super effective.

Tom Moorcroft, DO

So good.

Jodi Cohen

You don’t need a fancy machine. You can use one if you love it. You can drink it which a lot of people do, which I think is the only way you can really harm yourself because you know everything in moderation and these are concentrated essence of plants. When you’re drinking them, you could kind of over serve yourself. And then, there’s topical application that people diminish ’cause they think of it as being kind of a local remedy. Like you hurt your wrist, you put something topical in your wrist but that’s not gonna be system wide ’cause it has to get into the bloodstream, then travel to the heart, then get pumped to the body. What they don’t realize is that you can use acupuncture points, anywhere in the body, and that is a systemic balancing mechanism. So you can use a very, very, very small amount of oil on a very specific point and kind of have a whole body experience. That’s what I’m really trying to help people understand. Especially for mast cells that are involved in calming mast cell activation so that they… ‘Cause I think when you don’t feel great, everything can feel like a lot and things can feel very hard. And so, I really wanna give people very affordable, very easy ways that they can feel better.

Tom Moorcroft, DO

I love it, you know. ‘Cause it’s like… As you were talking about that, I’m like the nervous system is like, it wants the love but it also doesn’t want to get hit over the head. And so, when you take in sort of the acupuncture points and the low dose but appropriate stimulation in combination, I think that’s like really brilliant. So for a histamine intolerance in particular, are there particular oils or approaches to putting them on? It sounds like topical. I mean I’m is a lot less outta control than orally, but yeah. Like what might you be using for histamine intolerance and how to apply it?

Jodi Cohen

I mean, one of the things that I think is going on… So for people who aren’t familiar with the vagus nerve, your autonomic nervous system controls your automatic functions: your breathing, your heart rate, your immune response, your inflammatory response. It has two gears, right? Kind of there is danger, we need to allocate resources towards survival. This is known as your sympathetic fight or flight branch. And then the it is safe, we can allow healing, restoration, all of the positive things that we need when we’re not feeling great. That is the parasympathetic branch. So here’s the problem. Danger is not just the lion chasing us down the street. It can be we turn on the news and fear that we’re going to hurt ourselves or hurt somebody else. We look at our bank account and fear for the future. We have some kind of confrontation either in real life or on social media. All of that makes us feel unsafe. So we are constantly thinking survival is at stake and that is when resources are allocated towards survival. 

Blood’s routed away from digestion and detoxification so that we can fight back in flee. The other thing that’s going on cognitively is that we are kind of stuck in our reptilian survival brain. We don’t want to be able to contemplate the universe when danger is present because we could get killed. We’re too busy, like looking at the sky and thinking. So we’re really only able to access the back part of our brain and not kind of our problem solving brain. So this is why one of the symptoms of being stuck in sympathetic is that your pupils, the black part of your eyes, get really big to take in more light so you can fight back or flee. So if you’re trying to have a conversation with anyone significant in your life and you notice their pupils are really big, that is not the time. You’re gonna, you know… 

In parenting they used to say, “Connect before you correct.” Let your kid calm down so they can hear you. Let your other human calm down so they can hear you and the way to do that… The gear shift between like, “Danger is present, we cannot repair,” and “I am safe, life is good,” is your vagus nerve. It’s the longest nerve in the body. It is literally the information super highway between the brain and the body, and the body back up to the brain. Quick physiology lesson, it starts back of the head, splits.. It’s most accessible if you feel right behind your earlobe, there’s a divot between earlobe and the bone, that’s their mastoid bone. That is where your vagus nerve is the most accessible to the surface of the body. From there, it winds through your throat, your heart, your lungs, every organ of digestion and detoxification. One of my mentors, Carrazi, who’s been talking about vagus nerve activation to turn on the parasympathetic nervous system for decades. He’s the first person I’ve heard talking about this and his strategies are like, “Gag yourself with a tongue depressor. Gargle till you cry. You would suffer coughing .” You think it’ll work, but no one is like, yeah-

Tom Moorcroft, DO

Who’s gonna do it right?

Jodi Cohen

I know compliance was terrible because it sounds uncomfortable and undesirable. And so when I started playing with oils, there’s so much research about how oils can be used to activate the parasympathetic nervous system. I just kept trying to find the easiest way to get there. And so, I did a deep dive on vagus nerve stimulation research and what that means is vagus nerve stimulation turns on parasympathetic, which is where all-

Tom Moorcroft, DO

Exactly.

Jodi Cohen

And the inflammation calms down. So how do you do that? This New York neuroscientist named Kevin Tracy was surgically implanting a pacemaker-like device, like on that point behind the earlobe, and using it to stimulate the vagus nerve and turn on parasympathetic. The FDA approved this technique for epilepsy, migraines, and depression. When I realized, “Oh my gosh, you just need something stimulatory that can stimulate that point.” This is what acupuncture needles do. I started looking at there are all these oils that we consider to be stimulatory, meaning they’re hot like pepper, oregano, thyme, rosemary, cinnamon, clove. So I started testing using those oils and clove has actually the most amazing research for its anti-inflammatory capacity. But basically, I combined clove because it has medium molecules and lime because it has small molecules with fractionated coconut oil, also gets through the skin really quickly and you can. It’s so simple. You can flip the bottle and go like this, and it’s literally like you’re shifting your bike. Vagus nerve stimulated, you activate parasympathetic. 

The vagus nerve is actually kind of the anti-inflammatory nerve. It triggers the release of acetylcholine, which is the anti-inflammatory neurotransmitter. What’s going on often in the histamine response is your body thinks it’s in danger and it’s producing more and more mast cells to kind of protect you and mount the defense. It’s a little bit like the cell danger response, someone yelled danger. It’s a red alert alarm and the body’s just reacting, but it never kind of completes the cycle and says, “Oh okay, it’s alright to turn off.” Like histamine serves many functions. It’s a powerful neurotransmitter and signal in the body. It’s really like the Goldilocks principle, right? You know, too little isn’t great, too much isn’t great. You want it to be just right. But what tends to happen is we just keep overproducing and overproducing, so how do we let the body know we’re good. You know, you can calm down. We don’t need anymore. You signal the vagus nerve to activate parasympathetic and that helps to return the body balance.

Tom Moorcroft, DO

It’s so key what you’re saying Jodi, because like one is I don’t want to have a surgically implanted vagus nerve stimulator. I find that a lot of people get vagus even external ones, you can kind of overdo it. I love the topical administration at that easy access point because you can do… It just really allows the body to do it more naturally. I think what people, a lot of times we talk about like polyvagal theory, people will talk about the ventral vagus to the heart and then the dorsal vagus or the vagus to the gut as if the gut one is reptilian and bad and the other one is better. You use the term balance, right? So that we’re not in this mast cells being on guard all the time and just con chronically coming out. I love the idea because here is where the vagus is all still one thing, from an anatomic perspective. So you’re allowing the vagus to do its job in all branches rather than trying to pick and choose parts of it to micromanage. So I’m loving what you’re saying about that.

Jodi Cohen

Exactly. I mean that’s really the goal. Like I think when we can get the body in balance, it can heal itself it’s. It’s just sometimes they’re bigger obstacles to move, to help it return to balance.

Tom Moorcroft, DO

Yeah, it’s so funny because it’s just like… It’s just like when I talk to people who think the way I think, and it’s just like the body wants to functional optimally and the sympathetic and parasympathetic, like you said there is a balance that you need. There are times in our lives where we have to be more aware. But if we overstimulate the vagus in one direction or the other, or overstimulate or understimulate it, we can’t have that natural response. So that’s really nice. Are there… So when we talk about the vagus and we’re trying to calm all this down, I mean clove and lime kind of like are big ones, are there other ones that people might wanna look at?

Jodi Cohen

I mean, people play a bunch, those were just the two… It’s kind… Chemistry right? Because you wanna make sure that it’s stimulatory enough and it gets in. Clove has this constituent eugenol that honestly out of every essential oil constituent like lavender, has a lot of research and frankincense has a lot of research. Eugenol is the best. It’s antibacterial, antifungal, antiparasitic, anti-inflammatory. It’s just really kind of a rockstar constituent, but I’ve had people use peppermint if they like that ’cause that can be stimulatory. Rosemary, it’s a little bit… They all work. It’s just kind of a matter of preference like how much stuff do you put on your food? It’s a matter of pace.

Tom Moorcroft, DO

What about like the clove and like histamine intolerance and stuff? I mean, you know… You knew that’s gonna come up so…

Jodi Cohen

I know. So it’s funny cause I see that all the time, like being really careful with clove. Don’t use clove because it can basically trigger kind of a response. And so I was curious, I looked that up and I found there was an article in… What was it? Histamine doctor article on the seven high histamine foods to avoid and it said that certain high histamine spices including cloves should be avoided. And so, the article actually talked about the anti-inflammatory benefits of clove. It noted cloves contain powerful compound called eugenol which I just talked about, an antioxidant that may improve fatty liver and abnormal blood lipids. It also extol the modest quantities of flavonoids. But, it was concerned that the clove herb was related to compounds called benzoates that trigger histamine release and uric acid. And so I was like, “Huh, that’s interesting. I wonder how much of the benzoates are actually in clove.” 

So I went and looked at the chemical composition of clove on PubMed and it contains less than 0.01% of the benzoates compared to like almost 90% of eugenol. So its like, well that’s interesting. I mean it’s valid that the herb could have this, but sometimes what’s in the oil is different than what’s in the herb. And then I went and looked at the other compound that they were concerned about, the uric acid, and I couldn’t find that in the oil. So I’m not discounting. Obviously, whenever someone says to me like I’m super sensitive to grapefruit, can I have grapefruit oil? I always err on the side of caution like I would never wanna harm people, and yet so many of the practitioners that I work with that are actively trying to stimulate the vagus nerve to kind of balance mast cell activation have great success with the parasympathetic oil. So I guess what I’m saying is, keep avoiding clove as an herb and a food but I’m not sure that the oil is concerning.

Tom Moorcroft, DO

It’s interesting too ’cause as you’re saying that I find myself thinking, “Well a lot of the times, like the reason we have mast cell activation syndrome or even just histamine intolerance has to do with there’s an underlying trigger that hasn’t been addressed, be it lime, mold, parasites, whatever.” And so, many of these people, you can add whatever those words in there that is their diagnosis or as we know many of folks that listening are gonna have many of those things going on for them, but a lot of those folks can’t get better because they’re stuck. They need to release their limbic system, balance it out, get their vagus working better. So a lot of times I find that like, I’m like a rule breaker right? So I’ll be there like you, it’s just like, “Hey, like what’s more important? Getting the vagus nerve relaxer that I can actually move forward and heal, or not stimulating this thing that the downstream product of the underlying pathophysiology?” I mean I’ve certainly not seen clove blow my folks up. I’m sure like you said though.

Jodi Cohen

Actually they’re not ingesting it. They’re using topically. And so, it’s basically working to stimulate the nerve, but not necessarily getting into the bloodstream or into the digestive channel.

Tom Moorcroft, DO

Yeah, it’s really good. Even smelling like, I’m just think if I even just think about clove and lime combined, I’m like it’s such an interesting aroma. And so, there are these other ways to address things and I think that’s brilliant. So are there other things like, so if we move from the vagus… ‘Cause I mean it’s so funny, it’s like we were… It seemed like we were gonna talk about that later, but it’s like the primary. This is like the most important thing, right? I mean we’re also stuck in whatever our state is because we’re so chronically cortisol driven and sympathetic. It’s not like that’s not good, it’s just not good for a long period of time. Somebody runs in front of my car, I wanna swerve and then I wanna go back to chill.

Jodi Cohen

Exactly and sometimes we’re all drivers, sometimes you’re accelerating, sometimes you’re slowing down. You just need to be able to kind of respond and be resilient, and be regulated. If you’re stuck in one gear that limits your flexibility.

Tom Moorcroft, DO

So then, are there particular forms… So if we’re working on the vagus, we’re really unlocking ourselves out of that stuck in fight or flight, are there other things in particular like oils that are specifically helpful for supporting mast cell stabilization or histamine tolerance that you’ve come across or approaches that you would use?

Jodi Cohen

Yeah, I love… My favorite oil for histamine modulation is Blue Tansy. It’s super expensive from Morocco. And so, what I try to do is I remake the blend. So it’s kind of like instead of having you spend hundreds of dollars to buy a bunch of different oils and then combine them yourself, I do it for you so it’s more affordable. So we have a Histamine Balance blend that’s mostly Blue Tansy. You can just put it behind your ears, on the base of your neck. You can put a little Q-tip swab and kind of circle in the nostrils that really helps with the release. Because so much of the things you were talking about, the mold, everything kind of gets stuck in the nasal passageways and especially mold ’cause it lays dormant and it’s right near the brain and so it contributes to all these symptoms. So what we’re really trying to do is help allow the good things in and get the bad things out. The reason that can be compromised is the nasal passageways, which the Histamine Balance is great for, but also the lymph and the blood flow, the circulation. 

And so, oils are fabulous for vasodilating. Think of a freeway, maybe it has four lanes, maybe all but one is under construction. There’s gonna be a bottleneck right? Going through that part, it’s gonna be slow going and take a lot of time. And then, all of a sudden the construction ends and four lanes are open and everyone gets to go on the road. So, when you think about what’s happening in the brain, the brain basically cleans house when you sleep. It’s called the glymphatic system and it’s almost like the brain shrinks like a the car wash. And then, all the garbage drains down the neck. This is a big bottleneck because you have a lot going on in there. You’ve got your structure. You’ve got your nerves, including the vagus nerve. You’ve got your blood vessels. You’ve got your lymphs. You’ve got your muscle. Just like if you are in the middle seat in the airplane next to two linebackers, I’ve done that before Your arms aren’t going anywhere. So imagine all of this going on in the neck and your nerve is infected. 

So it’s pressing into the lymph that’s congested and it’s just a big traffic jam. So the more you can kind of dilate and there’s actually a researcher, Marco Ruggiero, who was doing sonogram pictures of the neck of chronically ill people and what he found was exactly that. The vagus nerve was kind of infected. The lymph was inflamed and pushing into other things. And so, he started topically applying remedies that had oils in kind of a downward motion. So that that opened up the lymph and it was able to drain down and kind of… The garbage could leave the brain. The traffic jam alleviated. And then also, there are oils that help to vasodilate like black pepper and cypress are great oils for that. A really good point if people wanna film with me. The clavicle points right there, if you just take two fingers and kind of gently massage. If it feels tendered, don’t worry. 

That’s just a point that you’re gonna wanna kind of work on ’cause that can be a bottleneck. If you wanna layer in, we have a circulation blend or cypress, even castor oil, just things to kind of help break up the stagnation. So that as you’re healing mast cell activation, we’re going to activate your vagus nerve to help you turn on parasympathetic so you get out of danger and into safety. We’re going to open up the vasculature of the lymph so that all the garbage can leave and not recirculate and cause the immune system to cause more inflammation. We’re gonna make sure that your vasculature is dilated so that all the blood flow and the oxygen rich blood and nutrients can get into the brain and other parts of the body. We’re basically just gonna set you up for success. You have a big test. You’re well rested. You’re well fed. You’re prepared. You got all your pencils. We just wanna make sure that you’re in the best shape possible to heal.

Tom Moorcroft, DO

Yeah and what’s really interesting is like I… As an osteopathic physician, my background’s a lot in the structure and function of the body and so love the vagus, addicted to the cranial nerves and like all the physiology up there. The glymphatic system, one of the things I think you pointed out that’s really important for us to highlight is, there’s estimates that 20 to 30% of all the drainage out of the brain comes through the nasal lymphatics. So what’s really cool is in order to get the brain to drain, like you said Jodi, you need to sleep more. So let’s get our vagus and get parasympathetic so we can sleep. Let’s do some sleep blends and the really get our sleep dialed in like you were talking about, and keep ourselves lower cortisol, more parasympathetic. And then, with like Blue Tansy and the rest of the blend like we’re opening up the nose. This is like where PANS and PANDAS is triggered from. 

This is where mold toxins cause an issue. And so, I want the nose, not only to just allow… I want it to be open so it drains because it’s all low pressure. And then like you said, in the neck and the rest of the body, it’s low pressure systems on the veins and the lymphatics. So when you’re doing the combination approach you’re talking about, it really resonates. I see this working with my patients. So I just want to really highlight that the glymphatics, that taking the dirty water out of the brain, getting that congestion out, ’cause everybody seems to come to us for brain. It happens around the cranial nerves and it happens best when you’re resting and sleeping. So you need to be parasympathetic, sleeping, and you have to have the lymphatics open just like you said. So I just wanted to highlight that because having been… My whole career has been with chronic illness recovery and this is one of the sticking points ’cause it’s really hard to do unless you’re utilizing the principles you’re talking about. So for the nose, can we just… 

I just wanna refresh what you said about using sort of the histamine blend and the different ways to apply it because I think this is one of the critical pieces that I know all my patients want to hear over and over. I want everyone listening to be able to really be clear on this because it’s one of the most important things in optimizing brain function and recovering from histamine intolerance.

Jodi Cohen

I have a lot of people who don’t love nasal sprays. You can literally use the Q-tips and kind of stick it up your nose for 20 minutes. What it does is it just helps drainage. Don’t be surprised if you even like kind of gently circulating inside the nasal passage away if you start to kind of drain. But this is good, you’re getting the garbage out. You’re helping to relieve the congestion and start things moving and flowing.

Tom Moorcroft, DO

I love it. Do you find that you get the sit, like let’s say somebody doesn’t wanna put stuff up their nose, is sort of diffusing it yourself or just hanging out with the bottle? I have some folks who just kind of like do this all day long, I mean is that as effective?

Jodi Cohen

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. You have to meet people where they’re at. If they have any aversion to that, smelling is great. Smelling is better than not smelling if you can graduate to like gently circulating in the nostril, even better. It’s kinda like yoga right? Go ahead. If you’re gonna do some crazy inversion, have fun. It’s kind of like meet people where they’re at, but anything is better than nothing.

Tom Moorcroft, DO

Cool. So if I were to do the progression, you’re saying like topically, I could just put a little of the blend right on a Q-tip? No problem?

Jodi Cohen

Yeah, exactly. Sometimes I tell people like put a little bit on a cotton ball, put it in your pillow while you sleep. I actually love the Histamine Balance. I’m very sensitive to mold in hotel rooms and it seems like every hotel room has it. So I just bring it with me when I travel and I… For me, it’s just enough to put it behind my ears in the back of my neck. For kids, I put it on the bottom of the feet. That seems to be the easiest place to put it on kids and they really never complain about foot rubs from mom.

Tom Moorcroft, DO

Nice. So were you also saying we can transition also to even a nasal spray of that if we wanted to?

Jodi Cohen

I would be a little careful with that. That that can be a little strong. I would maybe just use the Q-tip.

Tom Moorcroft, DO

Okay, cool.

Jodi Cohen

But you know, some people do… If you’re going to work with a practitioner and that’s what they recommend, you can do that.

Tom Moorcroft, DO

For sure.

Jodi Cohen

You want to make sure you’re taking binders if you do that, because then you’re really gonna open things up and the garbages might come out more aggressively than you anticipate.

Tom Moorcroft, DO

So true. I think what I really love on what you’re just touching about is that like we can overdo it.

Jodi Cohen

Well, it’s not so much that you overdo it. But just think of like, if you yell fire in the movie theater without opening the exit doors, everyone’s gonna be up and- and bump into people right? So if you’ve been kind of really stressed for a really long time and have a lot of delayed maintenance with detoxifying and all of a sudden sudden you’re parasympathetic, your cells are like, “Great, it’s safe to dump the garbage.” If your liver or gallbladder a little fatigued, or maybe you are constipated, you just really wanna make sure that you’re supporting your lymph. You’re supporting the liver, the gallbladder, the gut, and that you’re taking some kind of binder which kind of grabs the toxins and takes them out of the body.

Tom Moorcroft, DO

Yeah. One of the things I’m thinking of is, are there particular oil approaches you might suggest for someone who may go through a big herxheimer, maybe they overdid it or their practitioner, which is I find two things. One that practitioners overzealous the patients. The reason I ask about the nasal spray part is I know that people listening who work with me are more than happy to just go, “Oh, a little bit’s good. A Q-tip is good. I’m gonna just fill the syringe or the nasal puffer and start going.” I agree with you don’t do that work with your provider.

Jodi Cohen

I used to run marathons right? There’s a very rigorous marathon training schedule like do two miles, then six miles, then 12 miles. I foolishly in my twenties was like, I’m just gonna run 18 that was Walking downstairs for the next week was not my friend, but you know like slow and steady wins the race. You do not need to rush it. There’s no extra credit for getting there faster.

Tom Moorcroft, DO

Cool. If I did happen to overdo it a little bit when I’m working with some of the stuff, are there particular one or two oils or a blend that you might just recommend because it does happen sometimes.

Jodi Cohen

Absolutely Lymph. Lymph is always your best friend and then any kind of binder that you recommend for your clients. You know in Epsom salt baths, you can add a little bit of lavender to an Epsom salt bath which does a lot. It really calms the nervous system. It regulates. It allows you to detoxify through the skin.

Tom Moorcroft, DO

Cool.

Jodi Cohen

Yeah.

Tom Moorcroft, DO

So we’ve got oils that are helping us with our sleep, balancing our parasympathetics, open up our vasculature, draining our nose, are there any other things that you kind of like, we should make sure we share with everyone that we haven’t talked about?

Jodi Cohen

I think those are good. The only thing that I think I would say is I feel like the world right now feels disempowering. We might turn on the news and feel like, “Oh my goodness, there’s so much I can’t control.” I will say that the vagus nerve is correlated with kind of your emotional and cognitive perception of the world. Holocaust survivor, Victor Frankel, has this great quote. He talks about between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space, lies our power to choose our response and in our response lies our growth in our freedom. So I do notice that when I’m able to activate my vagus nerve, it helps me find that space where I’m not bombarded by external stressors and I’m able to say like, “Oh, wait a minute. I’m actually okay.” I am choosing like… I can’t control anything around me, but I can control my response and in this moment I’m safe and I’m okay. That has been very helpful I think, given all of the uncertainty on the planet right now.

Tom Moorcroft, DO

Jodi, that is amazing and I think that’s like the number one message, is that the vagus nerve and our sense of safety and our choice and our ability to have that response, that space to choose our response is so critical in what’s going on in the world, what’s going on with our chronic illnesses. So I wanna say, thank you so much for sharing your wisdom with everybody. I mean this is amazing. I just, having known you for a while, like Jodi’s work is so incredible. I really highly recommend, everybody check her stuff out. I have lots of patients who are using your products and it’s so beneficial. I love the idea of done for you. I mean some people are gonna want individual things and we’ve covered that, but the done for you part is just so nice. I really appreciate that. How can folks learn more about you and your products, and what’s going on in your world?

Jodi Cohen

I think we’ve got some free gifts to share with your community. And then, head over to vibrantblueoils.com. If you have any questions, just email us at info@vibrantblueoils. Thank you.

Tom Moorcroft, DO

That sounds so great. So thank you Jodi Cohen, vibrantblueoils.com, for joining us and having this amazing conversation and thank you everyone for joining us for this episode, and we’ll see you next time.