Five Essential Oils for Detox: Clear Your Detox Pathways

Essential Oils for Detox: When your body detoxifies, it eliminates toxins by moving them out of your cells, into your blood, through your liver, into your bile, which then carries toxins into the gut for elimination in your stool. As long as toxins flow in the right direction, they can be eliminated.

You might think of this as streams flowing into rivers, flowing into the ocean. As long as the path is open and not blocked by logs or rocks, everything flows smoothly. When there is a block in this flow, the water backs up and can overflow, flooding the surrounding area and causing damage.

Similar bottlenecks can occur in your detoxification pathway when your liver is congested, or bile flow becomes stagnant. Like a river unable to flow past the bottleneck, the fluids carrying the toxins out of your body are not able to flow out.

When that pathway is blocked, the toxins are forced to flow back into your bloodstream and need to be detoxed.

When toxins are eliminated through the skin, they present as blemishes, scabs, rashes, or feel dry and itchy. Brown spots on your skin, known as liver spots, are aptly named. When your liver is unable to process toxins, the toxins are released through the skin, your largest organ.

Another exit pathway for toxins that cannot be processed through the liver is your kidneys, located on your low back. When your kidneys overwork, you experience symptoms like low back pain, the need to urinate more frequently, puffiness around your eyes, or swollen feet and ankles.

If your skin and kidneys are not able to pick up the slack for your liver, your body will store toxins in fat to try to protect against them, landing in critical organs like your brain. Liver congestion is associated with weight gain, fatigue, and brain fog. The body will do anything it can, including store fat, to move toxins out of your bloodstream.

Essential Oils for Detox

Essential oils help keep plants healthy by moving vital fluids and energy. They perform similar functions in your body, helping to move energy and prevent stagnation. When your liver becomes stagnant, from physical toxins, stress, or anxiety, it impedes detoxification. Essential oils are a powerful tool to help shift stagnation and improve the flow of energy and toxins through the liver and the gall bladder.

Essential oils can help shift your body into alignment, so toxins do not backlog back into your bloodstream but flow out of your body. More specifically, topically applying essential oils to specific points on your skin can activate energy flow directly and quickly, stimulating your liver and gallbladder to help toxins flow out of the body instead of back into the bloodstream.

The super small size of essential oil molecules allows them to be easily assimilated into the organs, to help promote the directional flow of bile and toxins.

Essential oils can play a vital role as a part of a broader multi-therapeutic approach to healing. Their portable and accessible nature makes them an easy tool to incorporate into daily life, and bring awareness and mindfulness to the process of healing. Therapeutically, an appropriate oil can also provide profound results to support the body’s natural detox pathways.

Let’s explore some of the ways essential oils can get your detox pathways flowing correctly, as well as a few other tools to ensure the toxins (both physical and emotional) make their way out of your body for good!

6 Tools to Support Detox

Essential Oils and other supporting actors can be used to rapidly stimulate this directional communication between your brain, liver, gall bladder, and gut for proper elimination. Keeping your detox flowing in the right direction can help you avoid typical ‘detox’ and ‘die-off’ symptoms.

1. Liver™ Essential Oil Blend

It helps to balance and energize your liver so it can perform its numerous functions with optimal vitality. The liver eliminates toxins and their metabolites into the bile, and out of the body via the stool.

If your liver is overwhelmed, it cannot keep up with the toxic load; toxins do not move into the bile and leave the body. Instead, they get flushed back into your bloodstream, contributing to systemic toxicity and inflammation.

Formulated with oils that help stimulate, strengthen, and tone the liver, including German Chamomile, which stimulates bile secretions and supports liver detox.

Apply Liver™ directly over the liver (right side beneath the breast) 2-3 times daily. You can also combine Liver™ blend with castor oil – add three drops of Liver™ to 1 tsp of castor oil and rub it over the liver before bed. Castor oil is notoriously messy. You can:

(1) Cover it with a piece of flannel and plastic wrap and apply heat from a hot water bottle (avoid the electricity of heating pads) for 20-30 minutes. (2) Wear a ratty t-shirt and let your body eat work it’s magic

(3) Climb into an Epsom salt bath with the castor oil and Liver™ oil and benefit from layering three healing strategies at the same time.

2. Gall Bladder™ Essential Oil Blend

The gallbladder is responsible for storing, releasing, and concentrating bile, which helps carry toxins and old hormones out of the body. When our bile becomes too viscous, it doesn’t flow as well, and toxins don’t move out of the system and often get reabsorbed.

Supporting healthy bile flow helps support digestive function and balance your gut flora, as bile acids are antimicrobial. If bile is not properly flowing, toxins w.

Essential oils can turn on bile flow, so it is not blocked. To support the optimal flow and directionality of bile and allow toxins to flow out of the body, apply 2-3 drops of Gall Bladder™ underneath the ribs at the gall bladder (right side, underneath the ribs. If you lean forward, it is easier to apply under the ribs).

Essential oils such as clove, contained in the Parasympathetic™ blend also stimulates bile flow and is antimicrobial and anti-inflammatory.

3. Parasympathetic™ Essential Oil Blend

There are two states of the nervous system: The Fight or Flight Sympathetic State and the Rest and Digest Parasympathetic State. For the body to detoxify and heal, it needs to be in the rest and digest, parasympathetic state. You literally cannot detoxify when you are under stress.

When your nervous system is in the “fight-or-flight” mode, you cannot detoxify successfully. Parasympathetic activates “rest-and-digest” nervous system balance, and open up your detoxification pathways. Apply the Parasympathetic™ blend to the vagus nerve (behind the earlobe on the mastoid bone).

Stimulating the parasympathetic response also helps to boost the optimal digestive cascade, including your ability to eliminate toxins. When the flow of bile is stagnant or slow, your gut shifts towards a state of dysbiosis, where unfriendly flora dominates, and constipation is common. The toxins from pathogenic bacteria then block detoxification pathways in the liver as well.

Parasympathetic™ blend helps to promote optimal digestion, absorption, and assimilation and elimination. What’s more, healthy gut bacteria can help to break down toxins. Supporting the parasympathetic state and optimal gut function can boost your resilience to toxins and keep the directionality of your detox flowing.

Parasympathetic™ blend also helps you support your liver’s ability to transform toxic molecules into less toxic ones and help your body eliminate them. Research shows that the limonene found in citrus essential oils, like Lime in the Parasympathetic™ blend, can stimulate the production of glutathione, a key component of healthy detoxification.

Finally, Parasympathetic™ helps to calm inflammation by releasing the anti-inflammatory neurotransmitter Acetylcholine. Chronic inflammation impedes detoxification. Stimulating your vagus nerve with Parasympathetic™  can help reduce inflammation and support optimal detoxification.

4. Detoxify Emotions

The detoxification process occurs on a physical, spiritual, and emotional level and can help uncover and express feelings, especially hidden frustrations, anger, resentments, or fear.

Negative emotions can get stuck in your liver, causing the liver to become sluggish as negative emotions like anger, fear, and frustration and block the free flow of toxins.

These emotions must be allowed to be processed and released to avoid causing additional stress that would undermine the detoxification process. Essential oils make excellent tools to help gentle release and detoxify emotions. For example, our crucial organ of detoxification, the liver, holds onto traumatic experiences and negative emotions, like anger, impatience, resentment, and frustration creating emotional blocks that cause the liver to become sluggish. Processing and releasing these negative emotions are an essential step in opening the drainage pathways.

When emotions build up in the body, it can lead to various ailments, including:

• Dysregulated body rhythms (like irregular sleep and energy cycles)
• Impaired digestion or leaky gut (which both compromises our intake of nutrients and minerals and disrupts our internal microbiome making it more susceptible to pathogens)
• Toxic overload (from both internal pathogens and environmental factors, such as heavy metals)
• Impaired detoxification of both the body and the brain (allowing toxins to recirculate)
• Stressful Trigger (like an adverse reaction to a medication or vaccine, death in the family, divorce, or other trauma that suddenly triggers symptoms of ill emotional or physical health)

Dealing with emotional release can be done in various ways, and should ideally combine a wide range of modalities. There is no clear path to healing emotional trauma, but finding something that resonates with you and your experiences is ideal. These modalities could include:

• Journalling
• Seeing a therapist
• Opening up to a friend
• Meditation
• Mantras
• Cultivating a practice of forgiveness
• Tai Chi
• Qi Gong
• Essential oils

To help you move through and release anger and negative emotions from the cells of the liver with essential oils, apply 2 -3 drops of Liver Support™ over the liver, the heart, or around the earlobes. You can also gently inhale Liver Support™ for 3 – 7 breaths, breathing out any negative emotions on the exhale.

5. Binders

When we detoxify, we need to make sure that the toxins are not only mobilized but leave the body. When toxins leave your body, they travel through your liver, then the small intestine in the bile. If the toxins are not bound to anything, most of them can get reabsorbed in the gut.

Binders are substances that ‘bind’ to toxins to help move them out of the body. They work by attracting or trapping toxins and transports them out of the body. A proper binder helps trap pesticides, herbicides, and plastics when nonorganic foods are eaten and help eliminate bio-toxins (candida, molds, etc.) in the intestines, preventing resorption. A binder can even absorb pathogens (virus, bacteria, parasites, mycoplasma) and their metabolic wastes. All binders, however, are not created equal.

Many people know foods like cilantro and chlorella to be detoxing agents, thanks to their binding abilities. Although they all do bind, they do not execute the job properly from start to finish. These foods act more like street sweepers than anything else, redistributing toxins throughout the body. When a binder is weak, it will pick up the toxin and end up dropping it somewhere else in the body. This redistribution can aggravate symptoms and make you sicker.

BIND by Systemic Formulas is a powerful binder made from activated charcoal, humic and fulvic acid, as well as critical botanicals to ensure that the toxins stay bound until they are eliminated from the body. BIND can absorb up to 300 times its weight in toxins, including heavy metals (thanks to its negative ion charge).

Each capsule contains cascara sagrada to bring water into the intestines, apple, and flax, which provide beneficial fiber and probiotics to support a leaky gut. Daily use of BIND reduces the body’s toxic load by up to 60%. Pair that with your newly flowing detox pathways, and you’re setting your body up for smooth flowing detox.

Binders can contribute to constipation, so combining Parasympathetic™ blend with binders can help keep you regular.

6. Fasting

Fasting is a powerful way to help the body rid itself of weak cells and debris, as well as boost new healthy stem cells. Going without food induces a process called autophagy, that acts as a furnace for damaged cells. By challenging your cells, fasting enables the body to “clean house” and leave only the healthier cells behind.

Doing so also helps eliminate the weaker part of your immune system, giving your body a more robust defense line against infections, bacteria, parasites, and any other invaders. This boost ensures that when you use tools like essential oils and binders, there is the least amount of resistance from the body.

There are various ways to incorporate fasting into your life, and choosing the right one depends on your current state of health. Intermittent fasting can be used by most people, whereby you eat in a restricted feeding window daily. Starting at 12 hours and then narrowing your feeding window to 6 hours, you enable the body to focus on healing during the other 12+ hours of the day. From there, 24-hour fasts, as well as multiple-day water fasts, can be incorporated for maximum benefit.

Essential oils can be applied throughout a fast to encourage detoxification directionality. BIND can also be taken during the fasting period to minimize symptoms of detox and ensure that your toxins are indeed leaving the body.

My Favorite Oils

Essential oils are more popular than ever. You can find them at health food stores… drug stores… multi-level marketing companies… Amazon… everywhere!  The problem is, it’s hard to know which brand to trust. 

For instance, are you REALLY buying pure essential oils—or are you buying some bottle of “who knows what” diluted or mixed with something else? It’s all incredibly confusing.  With all the new brands and products—and everyone making big claims of purity and efficacy… you’re probably confused. 

That’s why I’m such a big fan of Vibrant Blue’s essential oils, skin care oils, and other products—which are made from simple and pure botanical ingredients—and all designed to unlock nature’s ability to improve your well-being. 

The company sources its ingredients carefully and sustainably from the best sources around the world. And then they test every shipment of essential oil they receive to verify its purity and quality. No corners are cut, no impurities are tolerated. 

Plus, they give back to the local/regional communities where they get their raw materials, helping create sustainable income for those who make their oils possible. 

If you want the many benefits of essential oils, we highly recommend Vibrant Blue oils—and you can save 10% on their entire line here. 

References

Arnold, Dacm L. Ac Michel. Ancient Healing For Modern People: Food, Herbs & Essential Oils to Detox, Cleanse & Rejuvenate —the Body, Mind & Soul. LULU COM, 2018.

Chaiyasut, Chaiyavat, and Bhagavathi Sundaram Sivamaruthi. “Influence of Probiotic Supplementation on Brain Function: Involvement of Gut Microbiome, Inflammation, and Stress Pathway.” Gut Microbiota – Brain Axis, December 2018. https://doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.79511.

Guarner, Francisco, and Juan-R Malagelada. “Gut Flora in Health and Disease.” The Lancet 361, no. 9356 (2003): 512–19. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0140-6736(03)12489-0.

Lam, Luke K. T., and Bo Ling Zheng. “Effects of Essential Oils on Glutathione S-Transferase Activity in Mice.” Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry 39, no. 4 (1991): 660–62. https://doi.org/10.1021/jf00004a006.

Longo, Valter D., and Satchidananda Panda. “Fasting, Circadian Rhythms, and Time-Restricted Feeding in Healthy Lifespan.” Cell Metabolism 23, no. 6 (2016): 1048–59. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cmet.2016.06.001.

Processes of the Kidneys. UC Berkeley. Accessed November 5, 2019. https://mcb.berkeley.edu/courses/mcb135e/kidneyprocess.html.

Riddington, David W. “Intestinal Permeability, Gastric Intramucosal PH, and Systemic Endotoxemia in Patients Undergoing Cardiopulmonary Bypass.” JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association 275, no. 13 (March 1996): 1007. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.1996.03530370045029.

Takagi, M., H. Satofuka, S. Amano, H. Mizuno, Y. Eguchi, K. Hirata, K. Miyamoto, K. Fukui, and T. Imanaka. “Cellular Toxicity of Cadmium Ions and Their Detoxification by Heavy Metal-Specific Plant Peptides, Phytochelatins, Expressed in Mammalian Cells.” Journal of Biochemistry 131, no. 2 (January 2002): 233–39. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordjournals.jbchem.a003093.