We have all experienced it: the busy days full of summer sun are over, the children are finally going back to school and we breathe a sigh of relief: the summer holidays are over! Ahh. Even if we don’t have children, our summer plans may diminish as we get closer to fall, and we feel it’s time to slow down and tune into the energy of letting go as the leaves begin to turn orange.
But now – while we experience a sense of relief from juggling ‘all the things’ – we also find ourselves feeling utterly exhausted and emotionally drained. It’s been a lot – we’ve been so busy in life that at times the summer felt overwhelming and we had very little space and time to process anything. We’ve kept our emotions on the back burner – preferring all the summer distractions like TV, or gin and tonics, partying hard, or working hard – and numbing what’s really here.
Perhaps there is a simmering pain or sadness that we have postponed feeling and pushed it aside as a lower priority. Or perhaps we have suppressed some of our true desires for space and time for ourselves, or perhaps we have simply ignored our emotions and are feeling tense, tense and burned out.
If that’s you, and you haven’t created any space this summer to simply “feel” your feelings, with everything going on – or maybe you’ve just been juggling all the things and finally realizing that you’re paying the price – the chances are you’re feeling emotionally drained right now.
So today I thought it would be a good time to discuss essential oils that we can use for emotional exhaustion and that can help us combat the fatigue that comes from suppressing our emotions this summer.
What does ‘suppressing our emotions’ mean – and how does this lead to emotional exhaustion?
Suppressed emotions basically mean that we have tried to ignore and push away our feelings. It usually happens when we are busy in our lives and we feel a sense of shame because we are unable to perform our daily tasks. That’s why we ignore our feelings instead of feeling them so we don’t feel like failures.
Ignoring our feelings in this way is actually exhausting. It takes so much energy to ‘manage’ our feelings, rather than being with them – and they build up inside, leaving us feeling stressed and overwhelmed.
It often happens that we feel overwhelmed by this after busy periods. We may have lacked boundaries when it came to dealing with our feelings, and we didn’t allow ourselves to process everything that was coming our way.
So if we notice any sense of overwhelm, it’s usually a good sign that we’ve been ignoring a part of ourselves that wants to be seen, heard, and felt. Our emotions don’t disappear when we suppress them; they just sit there in the shadows waiting for us to come back to them, and we enter a state of resistance that is exhausting. This is basically what we describe as feeling ’emotionally drained’ – any time we feel overwhelmed by our emotions but have resisted them and swept them under the rug, it’s a good sign that it’s time to completely eyes to see what is there.
How do we do that? Well, essential oils can help – and I’m sharing a process below to help you get started on your journey.
Make space and time to be busy
First, if we are really serious about healing our emotional exhaustion, I encourage you to choose to do so with all your heart. Unless you are aware of the true cost of how this will affect you, you are unlikely to choose the next few steps.
So, the first thing you should do is think about the costs and benefits of suppressing your emotions, and then – if the choice is worth it – grab your calendar and consciously set aside an hour and a half to fully deal with it. to travel. There are no essential oils for this part – it’s a deeper choice to finally cultivate space to heal emotional exhaustion!
Connect with your body
If you’ve created your time, now we can sink in!
First, before we get into this part of the healing work, I invite you to work with some essential oils that can connect you to your body. Our body is the holder of all information about our emotions. We feel our emotions in our bodies – our bodies, through their sensations, will literally guide us to how we really feel.
But especially in the summer, we spend so much time disconnected from our bodies, rushing and striving for the “next thing.” So the invitation now is to reconnect with your body.
Body Reconnection Massage Blend: Mix 3 drops of Patchouli, 2 drops of Cedarwood and 1 drop of Mandarin in 15 ml of Grape Seed Oil to create a massage oil.
Take this massage mixture and apply it for some time – gently, tenderly and slowly – to each part of your body, in the direction of your heart. As you do this, say, “I am connecting with my
Once you’ve done that, lie down and get comfortable and become aware of the sensations in your body – listen to it and see what it wants to show you. Label your sensations with descriptive words (e.g., hot, cold, tense, tight, soft, heavy, light).
Please note: do I feel tense? What does this show me? Am I cold? What does this show me?
Ask yourself: what emotions have I suppressed and pushed away, instead of feeling?
The more you give yourself permission to hear what’s inside, the more will be shown to you.
Spend 30 minutes on this part of the process before moving on to the next stage.
Write down what you noticed about your emotions
Once you’ve completed your body connection exercise, it’s time to keep track of what you noticed.
First, let’s create a diffusion mixture that can boost this part of the process of being honest about our emotions. The following essential oils can help us face our feelings:
Emotional Diary Diffusion Blend: Mix 3 drops of Rose, 2 drops of Sweet Orange and 1 drop of Ylang Ylang in water in a candle burner or electric diffuser and diffuse in the room for 30 minutes while journaling.
I invite you to grab your pen and some paper and record everything you noticed during the body connection exercise.
How ‘alien’ did the tuning process feel? Did I resist?
What body sensations did I notice? Did they show me anything about my emotions?
Were there emotions that came up to be felt? What were they? Sadness, anger, sadness, jealousy, rage or even indifference? Make a note of them so they can all be there.
Once you’ve done this, spend some time freewriting about anything else you want to capture. Simply allow yourself to put pen to paper without any expectations and write down whatever comes to mind. This can help you see something that might not have been captured otherwise.
Stop after 30 minutes and move on to the next stage of our process.
Move your body to process
When we’ve allowed ourselves to feel our emotions, it’s time to let them move through our bodies to help us process them. We often call emotions “e-movement” – or “energy in motion” – meaning that all our feelings are actually energy wanting to be moved through the body to process them.
Movement can help us begin that journey of processing. And that can look like literally moving our bodies intuitively in whatever way prompts us to do so.
I recommend applying another diffusion mixture here:
Motion Processing Diffusion Mixture: mix 3 drops of frankincense, 2 drops of geranium and 1 drop of lemongrass in water in a candle burner or electric diffuser and diffuse it in the room for 30 minutes while moving your body.
First choose whether you want some music in the background. You may want to furnish your space with blankets to kneel on, or a yoga mat if you have one.
When you’re ready, get down on your hands and knees to start. Close your eyes.
Simply tune in to everything you saw in your journal and choose one emotion that moves through your body. Concentrate here and tune into the sensations of it in your body.
Start moving slowly, gently, and in your own time, just intuitively. Again, this may feel very strange at first, but it is a very powerful exercise in anchoring yourself in a sense of self-confidence and emotional connection.
Maybe rock your body to some music while you tune into where you’re tense and stretch and breathe into those areas.
You may start to move vigorously and shake back and forth – let your body guide you.
Do this for 15 minutes and then land in some room, come back and lie on your back in silence for another 5 minutes.
This process is very powerful, so notice how you feel before and after – and repeat this as often as necessary. I recommend doing a shorter version of it daily so you can see a real reconnection with your body and emotions. You can spend 5 minutes in each phase and create a 15-minute ritual every day if you wish.
The point is: our body and our emotions are our guidance system and will tell us where we need to slow down and tune in so we don’t feel so emotionally drained in the future!
Lots of exercise and mixing fun.
Nicole Barton
Advisor Aromatherapist
Disclaimer and safety advice