How To Stimulate Your Vagus Nerve With Natural Remedies

Introduction to the RAD Summit and Jodi Stern Cohen 0:00

Welcome back to the reverse Autoimmune Disease Summit series everybody I'm Doctor Chiesa and this is the fourth iteration of the reverse autoimmune disease or Rad summit. And we're talking about autoimmune detox this time. And I am delighted to bring back my friend and colleague Jodi Stern Cohen, who is the bestselling author, award winning journalist, functional practitioner and founder of Vibrant Blue Oils, where she combined her training in nutritional therapy and aromatherapy to create unique proprietary blends of organic and wild crafted essential oils.

She's helped over 70,000 clients heal from brain related challenges, including anxiety, insomnia, and autoimmunity. She has a new book coming out, her first one. She and I. I think we released our first books kind of together around the same time because we were doing the same. We had the same similar coach, right? Yeah. And so healing with Essential Oils was her first book, and her second book is coming out in March. Actually, this is airing in April and talking to Jodi in February. So when I say next month, it's actually already out.

It's out, it's out. Essential oils to boost the brain and heal the body was released on March 16th, 2021. Congratulations, Jodi. Thank you. Thanks so much. So I usually will start any of these interviews with asking people about their own personal stories that brought them to where they're at in, you know, this, this field, because I find them very compelling. And you know, our our life stories are what inform what we do with our, what Tibetan Buddhism would call your dharma. And so I would really love to have you share that with our listeners.

Yeah. I think with wounded healers, life is like a roller coaster. You know, you hit rock bottom, you claw your way out, then you hit rock bottom again. And so, what first got me into nutrition was actually my son Max. You know, I had a really easy first child. Assumed I was a great mom, had a second 122 months later who was not easy.

Jodi's Personal Health Journey and First Breakthroughs 2:06

And I took every parenting class, read every book, couldn't quite, you know, figure out how to control the impulse, control the focus. We happened to be at a birthday party at the zoo, and Max was being really well behaved. My friend complimented me, and then they passed out like the snack, which happened to be a Ritz cracker. And he Jekyll hide it and took off. And after I like kind of random back in, she said, my brother was on Ritalin his whole life and it turned out he was just allergic to weird foods.

You should take him to a nutritionist. So I thought, I can do that, you know, done everything else. And our big Q with him used to be like, look at my nose. And he couldn't. I took him to the nutritionist who took him of corn, soy and dairy. And the next day he could look at our nose and I thought, this is so ridiculous. Like, I've been banging my head against the wall and it's food. I have to learn more. Went back and got a degree in nutrition, was trying to help other moms, you know, was kind of squirmy, sensory seeking kids.

So I learned a technique called muscle testing, which is great because the kid can be screaming all over the place, climbing your wall, and you can still kind of ascertain what their health priority is and what to start them on. And that came in handy for kind of my second dip, which was my then husband, was severely bipolar. And I was it became obvious he was probably going to die on my watch. So we moved him to a residential treatment facility where I knew he was safe, and it wasn't my job to keep him alive.

At which point my adrenals said, great, we're so exhausted. We're going to just, you know, stop working. Which wasn't convenient because I was suddenly a single mom. The kids were five and seven, and, everything I was trying, I knew I knew the right remedies I should be taking. I was ingesting all the right supplements. Nothing worked. A friend came over with a big box of essential oils and kind of gave me this moment of. You have been so high cortisol for so long. I bet you are chronically inflamed and your gut is toast.

Why don't you try other channels? You know, topical application means it goes through the skin. You know, that works from nicotine patches and hormone creams. Like, give it a try. I thought, why not? You know, I have to do something. Nothing's working. So using my muscle testing, I tried to figure out if there was anything in the box that would help my adrenals. Five oils came out, which surprised me because I normally get, like, one remedy. And then it occurred to me, oh, they're liquid, I can combine them.

So I tested each bottle and made my first blend literally in a shot glass because I didn't know what I was doing, put it on my low back and felt like me for the first time in two weeks. You know, I was able to clean the house, do the laundry, put it away, go to the store, make their favorite meal. Like, I kind of felt like I had myself back and you did all the wrong things. Yeah. Oh, I have a little bit of energy. Let me go spend it. Go into more debt. Right. I just wanted to put that in. But it is so freeing when you feel like yourself again.

It's like I finally as as parents, you know, as mothers, as nurturers, like our priority, especially when they're little is really, it, you know, it's like we're always last on our to do list, right? Right. So that's not the you know, that's not the end of your roller coaster. Right. Because life does that right now. Yeah. That was yeah. We do this right. So you built your company I built my company. I started it in 2012. And then, August 27th, 2018. Max, you know, my raise and our tribe, died in a car accident.

And he was. He was 12. His dad was driving. There were other children in the car who also didn't survive. And I knew enough from you about this cause. And I was looking at my 14 year old daughter, and I thought, oh, my God, her her dad's probably going to go to prison. Her brother's gone. You know, my father was sick at that point. I'm like, I, I have to find a way to figure this out and survive so that I can show up for her and give her a fighting chance. And so was highly motivated to figure out how one navigates grief.

And yet, I had no idea what I was going to do. Yeah. No idea. And your journey through that, which is not over until the day you die. Yeah. You know, I mean, honestly, this is the way our big challenges are. They're not done because this is part of what life brings. And when we're talking about the essential oil blends that you created at the very beginning, right, to help with your adrenal fatigue that you're now using to support hundreds of thousands of other people on the planet.

Grief, Resilience, and the Role of Essential Oils 7:18

These are, you know, these have been tried and tested by you and your loved ones. And so that's why I wanted you to start with your story so that people would really understand, you know, this and this way of coming upon solutions for pain. These are the authentic ways. These are the ways that are tried, tested, true. Right. Proven. So along the way, as you've worked with other people and listen to their challenges that life has brought them, there are a lot of those come in different packages, right?

Challenges come in all sorts of different packages, from death and loss to disease to financial crisis to I mean, name it right there, a whole bunch of different packages and all of us have them. And so what are some of the health challenges that you've run across that you've started to organize and to think, you know, systems and things and created solutions for them that that essential oils support because essential oils are not going to be good for the thing that my dad died from last week, which is, hemorrhagic brain bleed, you know, so, like, we talk about sometimes people will get very, passionate about essential oils.

And Jody is a scientist. And so I love that she does this where she's just like, if you've broken your arm, the essential oils will help you with the stress of that. But please go and get that fixed, right? Because I think it's very dangerous with the number of essential oil companies that sometimes people will write to me and say, will this oil solve this problem? And I say, no, that's a red flag problem. You need to go to the emergency room, right? That's not an email me if you're having chest pain.

You need to go have an EKG. Right. So the number of times I know not I wouldn't start with oils for that. You know. Yeah. That's that's nutrition. That's right. And oils are a tool to support you know that that Malu. And so let's talk about those health challenges where you think essential oils are really fantastic and shine. Yeah. And that's really what I wrote the book for is kind of you know I think people we, we have a tendency to overcomplicate ourselves. Right? We go and we get all these tests and like, I'm Hashimoto's and I can decide that makes me really complicated.

But at the root of most problems are kind of five imbalances that once you start to clean that up, a lot of the symptoms disappear. You know, like sleep. If you're not sleeping, of course you're going to crave sugar. Of course you're going to be tired during the day. You know, of course, your focus might be off. Like, let's help you address sleep. And oils are great for that. You know, caffeine is not the thing to do the next day when you haven't had enough sleep. Just ignore your lack of sleep and have a cup of coffee and move on.

Well, I am, I am a Seattle girl so I do love my coffee. That is my one vice I will not get rid of. But no, you have other options. Shockingly, we can actually unravel what's going on. You know? Is it trouble falling asleep? Because maybe your melatonin production isn't as strong as it could be, or your cortisol is too high and that throws off melatonin? Or are you waking up? You know, in the middle of the night with a blood sugar wake up, you know, and we can help your pancreas to get the insulin out.

So the sugar gets back into your cells and out of your blood so you can go to sleep. Or are you waking up at 3 a.m. and your white, you know, your liver needs help. Like there are different reasons that your sleep is disrupted and oils, that is, you know, oils are great for sleep. Oils really work naturally with sleep problems, stress. And this is actually, the solution. That was kind of a surprising solution. But, you know, before before Max died, when people would say, oh, you're you're so stressed.

And I used to think that meant changing my life. And, you know, you have four kids. I, I had to I had a business. I was Uber volunteer. I didn't really see a way to kind of change my external circumstance. And that made me feel more anxious and overwhelmed. And what I realized kind of through this is that, you don't need to change your external circumstance. You can change your internal response. And it's that kind of shifting gears into, the safety parasympathetic branch of your nervous system that allows you to, you know, look at an example I use is, you know, sometimes we're stuck in traffic and someone cuts us off and we're fine with it with whatever.

You know, maybe they're in a hurry. Who cares? The next day, the exact same thing happens and four letter words are tumbling out of your mouth. And the only variable in that situation is you and how resilient you are in the moment, you know? Or we're running out the door and our kid needs something. You know, sometimes we're like, oh, I'm going to be late and you like it. You try to kind of fight it and it just makes it worse. Often ending in tears from your child. Or you say, all right, I guess I'm going to be late.

And you lean in, what is it you need? And all of a sudden it's like nothing. They just want to tell you something. They had a quick question. It's all good. So the key to kind of managing, I think your internal resilience is helping to shift out of, the nervous. Your autonomic nervous system controls, your automatic functions, your breathing, your heart rate, your digestion, your detoxification. When it thinks it's in danger, it kind of prioritizes survival. So it releases certain chemicals and things like that to keep you alive.

And it down regulates everything. That's not critical to immediate survival.

Stress, Sleep, and the Vagus Nerve 13:00

And so when you're in that danger state, which is the sympathetic branch of your nervous system, everything feels like, you know, a fire alarm, and you're constantly on edge and overwhelmed and anxious. When you're in the parasympathetic state, everything feels easy. You feel safe. It's far more relaxing. The kind of on off switch between these two states is your vagus nerve the longest nerve in your body that most people have never heard of? Cranial nerve number ten starts in the back of the head.

Splits is most accessible here behind the ear lobe. And then kind of a nerve. It's the throat, the lungs, the heart, all of the organs of digestion. This is when you when you feel better at the end of a yoga class, Shavasana. It's because through deep breathing and the poses you have activated the vagus nerve. You have stimulated parasympathetic response. The Shavasana feeling is parasympathetic. It is most accessible behind this ear lobe. And there was a lot of research. There were like electrical implants, pacemaker like devices that were implanted here.

And the FDA has approved them for migraines, depression, epilepsy. What I realized with oils and reflex points is that you can use a stimulatory blend of oils, you know, oils. When you combine them. They do different things. In order to use them like an acupuncture needle. They need to get into the skin quickly. The clove gets in in like 20 minutes because its molecules are a little bit thicker. Lime gets in really quickly. When you combine those two oils, you can use them to stimulate this point.

It's like the electrical stimulus without surgery. It basically helps you shift into parasympathetic and you're like, oh, I like it. Just kind of it's like, okay, I can handle this. Like you just show up as your best self. So you are going through five five. Yeah. I mean have you finished the five and then we'll come. Okay. The other three are drainage, basically making sure the garbage leaves your body. And then energy, which includes both circulation and kind of the, hypothalamus pituitary axis and then, immune support and, immune modulation and inflammatory control.

So we've spent a great deal of time on stress and sleep because, obviously research shows us that your immune system is impacted. So when's the last one that you just talked about inflammation and immunity or impacted? If you're sending a lot of cortisol out into your system chronically, you're not you're not meant to feel like you have a lion on your tail in perpetuity. The zebra will either die or it will get to safety. And there's not this sort of like forever racing. It just isn't possible. And yet humans tend to try to do the forever race, right?

We have all kinds of things like energy drinks. And I was joking about coffee, but, you know, things that stimulate us to try and keep us running right. But the thing that you mentioned that I want to come back to, that I find really important in when I'm teaching for the Institute for Functional Medicine, I'm teaching other doctors about adrenals. I always stand on stage and I say this, do not tell your patients to reduce their stress. And what what I say next is. That is stupid. You know? And because if you keep saying that, reduce your stress.

And here you have somebody that's in your office in front of you who has a special needs child or is caregiving an elderly right parent or has a job that they love, but it's very stressful, or they're working on their marriage, or they just went through a death of some kind, you know, like they're not reducing their stress. That's, that's that's really ridiculous to say. And then what you're doing is you're putting the onus on the person in your office saying that you're responsible for the amount of stress that's in your life, which is accurate.

But, you know, we have a pandemic globally right now. There's global stress. Right. And so this thing that you just said is so important, and I really wanted to come back to it because this is part of the autoimmune detoxification that I'm referring to when I talk about detoxifying your physical body, your energy body, your emotional body, your mental body and your spiritual body is changing the relationship you have with your stress, right? The relationship you have. So Jodi and I both own our own companies, and every single day I wake up and I could be stressed about being the owner of my own company.

The buck stops here quite literally. Or I can say, my gosh, I am so grateful that I get to do this work in the world and it doesn't change the fact that I'm responsible for everything that happens in my company. It changes my my relationship to it. From gratitude and appreciation, you know, which is going to be health promoting. Or I can go into, you know, and be stressful about every little minor thing that happens as things change in the world. So that that I think is really important. And oils can help bridge that moment for you, but they can't do it for you.

Yeah. It's like biking with the wind at your back going downhill as opposed to uphill into the wind, in the rain. It just it it's it makes it easier. You still need to pedal, right. But it's just a more pleasant experience. I really love that. And your, you know, the, the words you use are showing up as your best self and so what you're doing is you're calming things enough that now you can do your own awareness work, which can only be done by you. And I think this is an important distinction because in our culture, I don't know how you were raised, Jody, but you know, the the idea that we're all snowflakes and we can all be anything we want and we can all, you know, yeah, yeah, there's a there's a piece in there that's missing of oh, the world does bring you challenges that sometimes you're going to feel like they're out of your purview to be able to manage, and you're going to have to go find a mentor and learn a new skill, and you're going to have to integrate that skill.

This is Joseph Campbell's hero's journey, and I did not learn that in elementary school. No, I had a lot of perfectionist programing. And that was the other thing is just accepting that mistakes happen. You know, it was not on my bucket list to have my child at 12 years old. Yeah. And so you have to kind of look at the world and say, I guess I will never be able to show up perfect or pretend to be perfect again. So how do I show up broken and just say, like, mistakes happen and life still goes on.

And one way of doing that is accessing your beautiful vagus nerve here with oils that will help you do the showing up process. Yeah. And so that's I mean I just think that doing that like what can I expect from oils and then what do I need to expect from myself as next step is what I was pointing to. So how is the vagus nerve involved in detoxification processes. Yeah, it's really interesting. So when you're in survival mode, your, priority is either fighting or fleeing, right? So all of the blood is routed towards the arms and the limbs and away from the liver, the gallbladder, the gut, the intestines, that whole detoxification pathway, you know, and this is true for digestion, too, when you're kind of eating, you know, when you're throwing sandwiches to your kids in the back of the minivan on the way to soccer practice, that's stressful.

You know, your blood is not being routed to your organs of digestion. So no matter, you know, if you made the most nutritious kale concoction, they're not actually assimilating it. Right? I just had a visual. I got a ticket on the Mackinac Bridge in Michigan one time, throwing my kids food in the backseat on a cross-country road trip, and a cop pulled me over, and I never did it again. I was very, very grateful for that police officer. Well, you know, you know, back back before Covid, soccer practice was always like, at the most inconvenient time.

And, you know, Seattle traffic it, you know, had to leave it like for to get there by five. Right. Right. So when we're talking about vagus nerve and detoxification, you know, one of the five that we were that you were talking about as far as root causes is drainage and the lymphatic system is in here, too. And so if your lymphatic system isn't draining and your liver's not detoxifying and your kidneys can't get rid of ammonia properly and your skin isn't sweating very much, releasing, you know, detoxification because your adrenals are tired and your adrenals are in charge of that.

Then then what?

Detoxification, Drainage, and Autoimmunity 22:00

Yeah. Then your you know, it's like so fast your poor liver is processing these livers. They're not actually leaving the body. So they get reabsorbed and it has to do more work and it gets exhausted. So that's that's what's really interesting. The more you can shepherd the toxins out of the body, you know, because toxins that stay in the body get kind of recirculated or they, you know, get stored in fat, or they're triggering the immune system, which is causing more inflammation. I actually think this is one of the biggest underlying root causes, especially of autoimmunity.

Definitely. With my thyroid issue is kind of the unresolved toxins. So the more we can support every step of the way, you know, helping the cells be in the parasympathetic state, so they release the toxins, helping the lymph actually drain, you know, down to the blood. And oils are great for that, making sure that the liver has more vitality and energy, making sure that the bile ducts that goes from the liver to the gallbladder isn't congested, making sure the bile flows freely, making sure that, you know, the gut, there's motility and things are moving and actually leaving the body like that's really if if people get nothing else out of this talk, you know, switching on the parasympathetic state and helping to shepherd the toxins out of the body, that's what oils are amazing for.

And those two things alone will make a very big impact in your health, in your out on your condition. I do genetic testing on 100% of my patients. I mean, most of them come to me because of autoimmunity or they have undiagnosed autoimmunity. And what I found in all of them, and I do genetics on other people that come and find me too, that don't have autoimmune disease. And I noticed this isn't true for them, is that there's a mismatch between phase one and phase two. Detoxification genetically. Yep.

And so when phase one is really efficient and phase two is very, very sluggish, then after the enzyme pathway chews up your fat soluble toxin, it's trying to make it into water soluble so your body can hose it out through all the water pathways that we just talked about. Then it recycles over and over again. I think this is one of the major causes of fatty liver disease. There is so much nonalcoholic fatty liver disease in our country, and it goes under the radar all the time because unless those liver enzymes are bumped, no one's catching it.

But fatty liver is a spectrum. And so when people are having trouble, like if they get put on bioidentical hormones in my practice and they start gaining weight immediately, guess what? I know their liver has that mismatch. They probably have fatty liver. And then we need to actually be shepherding toxins out of the system and getting that detoxification system more optimized before it has to deal with yet another thing livers. Yeah. Hormones. They do not like hormones. And so it's always a big red flag for me.

Like oh you just gained 5 pounds in a week. Good to know this is what we're going to do next. You know that's not a bad thing. It just means that your body's giving us information that you are not getting rid of things the way that you are supposed to. We need to optimize that better. So I think that this is a really important subject that we're talking about, because when those toxins are being recycled and stored and you know, your body's struggling to get rid of them when we're using oils, we're actually, I think about the lymphatic system.

It drains at night. And I always think about it as little dump trucks that are coming through garbage trucks. And your cells have put little garbage sacks on the outside of the cell membrane for pickup at night. And now here come your little lymphatic cells, garbage trucks picking up the Irish sacks and pulling them out. Well, if you've ever seen pictures of if there's a garbage strike, have you ever seen San Francisco? And when they did that. I live right York in the summer. Oh, yeah. I'm the smell will be with me forever.

But yes, yes, yes. Or going to a third world country like Cairo, Egypt or Delhi, India, you know, and no one's picking up the trash and removing it. It's there's vermin, right. And in our case, the vermin is going to happen. And the microbiota and our digestive tract and, you know, all this starts to impact the immune system and the inflammatory response. And this is, you know, if we can think about the essential oils being the the little helpers that let the garbage truck start doing their job.

I love the word shepherding. It's perfect. Right? It's just like, okay, here we are. We're going to help. We're going to make sure this is happening. We're not going to let this pile up happen. Right. Then the essential oils can really become powerful. They're not they're not the only solution, but they're the ones that are making your system do its jobs efficiently. Is that really what you want? You don't want dependency. You want your body to do its own job. Yeah, yeah. And that's I mean, that's the beauty of plants.

All plants, plants that you eat, you know, plants that you interact with in nature, plants that you know, are concentrated into oils that you put on the body. They really help us return to balance. And that's really what we want is to get back into remission and to balance so that we, you know, obviously we're not going to go out and have a gluten party. But, you know, for the most part, we don't need to work as hard to make our system work in a healthy way. Right now, I'm going to ask you a question that, I just realized some people that are listening and viewing this might have.

We have a great deal of chemical sensitivity these days. A lot of canaries in the coal miner autoimmune patients and plants, have anti nutrients in them so that predators won't eat them. Right. And called histamines or oxalates or you know, tyramine is the ages like all of these things are produced inside the plant life. And now we have a lot of people that are having mast cell activation problems or having histamine issues. And so what do you there's a way that you can actually test things to make sure that you're going to tolerate it.

Do you want to teach people how to do that. The oils. Yeah. I mean, the way, the way I do it with oils is very slowly and very gently. If you if you're averse to smell, I don't even recommend smelling it. I have actually a whole foot chart in the book, but I just said to put the smallest amount on the bottom of the foot and see, because a lot of times if you're having mass cell activation that can relate to the vagus nerve, there's this whole, philosophy. Speaking of drainage, you know, so many of the pathogens that enter our system are living in the mouth, you know, either from, metal amalgams that are off gassing, cavitation root canals or just pathogens in and they gums and they drain along the jaw, along the trigeminal nerve, and then they intersect with the vagus nerve.

And if your lymph is congested in the neck, then they can sit too long and get up taken into the nerve and call cut. Because kind of a minor underlying infection that, what is his name? Tufts researcher Michael van Eichler calls vagus nerve infection hypothesis. And that can kind of trigger the cell danger response. And so your cell always is kind of inflaming, causing pain causing chemical sensitivity is causing fatigue. So there's a correlation with, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome and multi chemical sensitivity.

So one thing that really helps is to kind of help people shift into the parasympathetic state, understandably. You know, this point behind your ear is kind of in smelling range. So if someone has a sensitivity that I tell them, there's a very specific vagus nerve point, super detailed in the book, and I go through it in videos so that no one can get it wrong. But that's a good point. And then also to kind of calm the histamine reaction. Blue tansy essential oil is a really great one for kind of modulating the histamine response.

Again, for some reason, most people do not react to that. Smell it. We have it in a blend called histamine balance. But for any sensitivity I would say just start by testing the smallest drop on the bottom of the foot. You know, and see how you go, and then build from there. And and with that population to your point, we often encounter once they, their body starts kind of shifting into parasympathetic, they are so ready to dump toxins. It's like, you know, at the end of a long hike when you've been carrying a 30 pound backpack, you cannot wait to take it off your back.

You know, the body's like, yay! But if you're draining, just congested, it doesn't go well. So for that population, I really advise doing everything you can to kind of open up your lymph.

Chemical Sensitivity, Anxiety, and Practical Oil Strategies 31:00

You do so much great information about rebounding, dry brushing, castor oil. You know, they're essential oils you can use for lymph. So you know, just I say go slowly. And if any symptom kind of occurs like pause and really make sure the drainage is open is a really, really important advice. What you just gave in. And the other piece around that is, if you're like this all the time, you know, and hyper vigilant mode mentally, if I've noticed with muscle activation, there's a lot of hyper vigilance right in the mind.

And so if things do get to a point where they're not going so well, as Jodie said, where, you know, the lymphatic system is backed up and it wants to just go and you get, a swamp of your symptoms. Again, the most important thing that I tell my patients with basal activation is not to react to that. Like, oh, no, this isn't working. Nothing's going to work. I'm never going to get better. I'm going to die. You know, like those survival things come up again, right? And now this and this match. And so again, using, you know, some parasympathetic oil blend from Jody with fiber and oils, which is a beautiful blend to just like help again bridge that space of in this moment my body is challenged.

I'm not dying. I mean, you know and just like reiterating that every breath, every moment I am here, I'm alive. My body's giving me some some data. I'm going too fast. Let me slow down my breathwork. Let me slow down my mental work. Let me slow everything down and just be with the body and support it. And so, you know, it's like soaking your body, right? I'm right here with you. It's when that anxiety ramps up again that things go to the races. Right. I actually there's a great trick, that I share in the book for anxiety because I, it's so funny how you don't realize kind of your foibles until they really until your coping mechanisms get taken away.

So, I I'm a lifelong anxiety girl, and in many ways it served me well because it made me very Type-A and very, very, you know, achievement oriented. But then when Max died in Covid, it's like, you know, I can't go exercise. I can't go see my friends. I, you know, all of the things. I can't go to a movie to distract myself. So our colleague Titus Chugh, who studies functional neurology, which is a branch of chiropractic that's really looking at the different hemispheres and regions of the brain and how to balance them.

He taught me that an anxiety attack is the right frontal lobe. So the right forehead that's overactive. So the way you calm that is you stimulate the left frontal lobe to balance the two hemispheres, your nose, your factor channel goes directly to the left forehead. So literally just taking the right thumb, plugging the right nostril, smelling anything, any oil in your house. If you have a citrus fruit, peel that and smell the peel because that's where the oils live. 3 to 7 breaths. You're activating your left frontal lobe, balancing the two brain hemispheres and the anxiety goes away.

And I am like a walking testimonial to that. I used to have panic attacks in supermarket lines. I'd have to like abandon cart and that, hasn't happened. And just as stress is additive in cumulative kind of activating the prefrontal cortex and balancing out anxiety, my anxiety has has really diminished significantly since I've started doing this. Beautiful. That's beautiful. Yeah. I just got the, you know, 10,000 years ago and probably longer in, in our Vedic medicine, you know, there's alternate nostril breathing.

And they taught this very thing. But adding in an oil at the same time. Right. That's really that would just kick it up a few notches. You and I have kind of talked about the more you can layer in the different senses, the more it really amplifies the effect. Like I always joke, it's like if someone said like, I want to lose weight, do you think I should exercise? You diet like try both, you know. Right. And add an essential oil to it, right. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. Okay. So when we're talking about detoxification again, what are some of the oils that you, you know, we can talk about brain detoxification, the nervous system, vagus nerve.

We can tell it when it detoxification. Let's talk about liver. Let's let's kind of break those down. And what are some of the oils that you would recommend for detoxification. Yeah. And I get into all of them in the book. What's interesting is that black pepper and cypress kind of help to vaso dilate. So you know, you want the good things to get in and the bad things to get out. You know, if it's a narrow little passageway or, you know, on our Seattle freeways, if one of the four lanes is open because there's construction, things are really going to go slow and get congested and stuck and the brilliant thing about oils is they just break up congestion wherever they're applied.

So those those are good ones. Black cumin. You know, the gallbladder is kind of, my constant Achilles heel. So I am a gallbladder professional practically. And I personally test, you know, I, I probably could have lost my gallbladder multiple times, but every time I can tell I'm having an attack, I play with something different. Black cumin oil is the best. Castor oil is really great for anti inflaming. So if you think about the points of congestion it's the lymph. So mint oils are good. That Ava is good.

You know it's interesting the really grounded plants that have like the deep roots in the Earth, we kind of talked about how the lymph is a bit of it flows in one direction. It's a one way street. So the more you can help with that directionality by pulling things down and out, the more you kind of get things to move. The liver you can really enhance the liver helixes is a good one. White great food, combining it with castor oil at night before bed. If you want to use an absence of bath to heat it up, even better.

You know that's great. The gallbladder is really important. And then I always tell everyone to take binders, you know, so that when the gallbladder dumps the toxins in the gut, they don't get reabsorbed. Some things like grabbing them like a magnet and pulling them out of the body. And then you need to make sure you're taking those away from any prescription medications and supplements, just that it doesn't grab that carried out of the body. Yeah, yeah. So what else have we not talked about that you would like for people to know?

I'd like them to know that the brain, one of the reasons that brain inflammation is so rampant is that it's really hard to get any remedy into the brain, that the blood brain barrier is an awesome security guard. And just like the gut, it has really tight, you know,

Brain Support, Delivery Methods, and Closing Remarks 38:00

semi-permeable junctions that only allows super small, fat soluble remedies like essential oils, you know, or essential fatty acid to cross. So helixes, frankincense, they're all really good for kind of helping to get into the brain and just helping to calm inflammation from the inside out and really reset the body. Beautiful. It's another thing I read, you know, talked about nausea, oil treatments all those years ago. They just knew this, right? That you can snort something up your nose, but it's actually good for you.

Not just bad things like we do. Well, I mean, that's why they do cocaine up the nose or anesthesia through the nose. It's the fastest way to get something into the bloodstream, because the nasal passageways are thinner. And so it gets into the capillary system really quickly. Same with, sublingual under the tongue or the side of the mouth. Yeah. And so some of these oils will cross that curve a foreign plate that actually stays between the sinuses in the brain and in those that really great nervous system activation through it.

So exactly, exactly. We can do it with things that calm not just things that stimulate. All right, all right. So, Jodie, I, this celebrate your new book, and I'm so very excited that, you know, we have another resource for essential oils and green health and detoxification. And, I appreciate you spending the time teaching us just a fraction of your wisdom. Oh, thank you know, and it's fun. It's fun to deep dive on things. And I love how you kind of brought up drainage. That to me feels like, the, you know, the parasympathetic state and drainage feel like really the, the two kind of critical aspects of healing that most people are not focusing on.

Yeah. All right, everybody, we have Jody's, contact information here and, really access all of the amazing wisdom that she is. She's an avid researcher, as she's told me, goes down rabbit holes for you and brings information back. And so this book is yet another example of that. So until next time, you will.