jodie-cohen-interview
Lance Wantenaar: [00:00:00] Jodi good morning to you. And thank you for coming on the thinking like a genius podcast. I’m. Actually very pleased to have you on as a guest, because it’s not a topic of interest or an area of interest that I’ve had a chance to investigate yet. So what I’ll do is first of all, get you to introduce yourself and talk about your self and also a bit about how you got started looking at specifically essential oils and the effect that they have on the brain and the vagus nerve.
[00:00:55] And then we’ll start. Diving into some of the research and some of the background of the topic. So tell the listeners a bit about yourself and then we’ll start exploring some of the topics and also about vibrant oils and how you came
[00:01:09] Jodie Cohen: [00:01:09] about starting that. Yeah, absolutely. So I was pretty mainstream boring, you know, MBA from Columbia business school, working at Microsoft, got married, had first kids super easy.
[00:01:24] Had another one, 22 minutes later, not so easy taking every parenting class, trying to figure out why this kid won’t sit still or listen. And one day we were all at the zoo with a bunch of families. And my friend complimented me on how well behaved my son was being. And then another mom passed out goldfish crackers, and he Jekyll had it in front of her.
[00:01:44] And she said, that’s weird. I’ve never seen him do that. My brother was on Ritalin. Life. And it turns out he was allergic to weird foods. So I took him to a nutritionist who told me he was very allergic and sensitive to certain foods. We took them out of his diet and my kid had a different personality overnight.
[00:02:00] And I thought that is crazy. I’ve been banging my head against the wall for two and a half years. And it was food. So I decided I needed to learn more and went back and got a degree in nutritional therapy. And I was trying to help other moms with, with kids. And it’s really hard to test wiggly kids cause they’re squirming.
[00:02:19] So I learned this technique called muscle testing. That really it’s, it’s incredibly efficient. It allows you to really hone in and identify what remedy works well, and it doesn’t really matter how wiggly the kid is. So flashed forward. Three more years. My then husband was bipolar, attempted suicide. I found him moved two men to a residential treatment facility that first night when I realized he was safe and it wasn’t my job to keep him alive.
[00:02:47] I ran out of steam. Your adrenal glands help you with this hormone called cortisol, that boost your energy levels. And it’s a little bit like you can deficit spend until. You just are so out of steam that you have nothing left and that’s what had been happening. I had been so stressed and overwhelmed and trying to, you know, keep the kids clothed and fed and in school and busy and volunteering and working and being a good wife and having social interaction and also kind of keeping my husband’s mood up that yeah.
[00:03:20] When I finally had a moment to collapse, I did, which wasn’t particularly efficient because the kids were five and seven. I was suddenly a single mom. It was expensive to have him in this facility. There was a lot going on, but nothing that I tried to help my adrenals, I knew it was my adrenals. I, you know, was smart enough to know what remedies were supposed to work.
[00:03:41] I was taking all of these remedies, ingesting them, and nothing was helping. Fortunately. For, you know, the world came crashing down. I had helped a friend with a volunteer activity and she, as a thank you gift brought over a huge box of essential oils and said, I really think these are going to help you.
[00:03:59] And I was just so desperate that I muscle tested the box, you know, is there anything in here that will help my adrenals? And everyone gets information differently. The way I receive it, it’s almost like, um, it’s really loud. You know, like if something’s going to work, it’s, it’s a very strong yet. And I kind of got excited, like, Oh my God, maybe something will help.
[00:04:18] And I tested further and got five remedies, which was unusual because usually I got one and I thought, well, what do I do with this? And then it occurred to me. Oh, you can combine them novice essential oil girl that I was, I went in my kitchen, pulled out a shot glass. And tested each bottle. How many drops of this?
[00:04:36] How many drops of that? Combined them topically applied them over my adrenal glands on my low back and within probably five minutes felt like myself again. What I didn’t know at the time was that. My cortisol really messes up your ability to digest and assimilate your nutrients. So all of these remedies that I was ingesting, weren’t actually getting into my system because my digestion was so compromised, but topically applying a remedy, you know, plants.
[00:05:04] That are concentrated. That helped me immediately. And so I got so much done that day. I went to the supermarket, made their favorite meal, clean the house, did laundry, put laundry away, all of these things, you know, even like turned in a project that was overdue for work. Um, and that night I was laying in bed thinking, okay, what did I do?
[00:05:23] Right. Like that works. I need to do more of that. And, you know, I was insomniac at the time cause, uh, cortisol messes with your sleep hormone melatonin, and it throws your whole system out of balance. And I thought, God, I wonder I had been practicing nutrition long enough that I knew where the blind spots work.
[00:05:40] You know, like if someone’s deficient in vitamin B, that’s easy, you supplement with vitamin B. If you’re trying to calm your nervous system or activate your pineal gland to release melatonin, it’s hard to get remedies into the brain. You know, the blood-brain barrier only lets super small fat soluble molecules through, which is one reason that essential fatty acid is so good.
[00:06:02] It’s like the right size and molecular composition to get in. And as I’m laying in bed, it occurred to me like, wait a minute. Well, they’re small, smaller that soluble. Maybe I can make something for the pineal gland. So I went back down, tested the box, you know, made something up, wrote it all down, put it on.
[00:06:21] You know, I knew the pineal gland is in the exact center of the brain, so I didn’t really want to put on my skin. So I kind of put it top of the head over the ears, back of the head. Right. And fell asleep immediately and woke up. Like at that point it was like, I fell asleep maybe for like an hour. And you know, you’d be kind of watching the clock all night, but I woke up and felt like me and I thought, okay, that was another win.
[00:06:41] And I just kept, you know, it’s like, if something’s working, you just keep moving towards it. So within about almost a month, I kind of was back to normal function and all of my friends were super worried and checking in. They were like, wait, what did you do? What’d you do? Right. So I started sharing my little homemade potions with them, and a lot of them were also practicing nutrition and they’re like, okay, this is crazy.
[00:07:06] It’s working on everyone. This is great. And then there was conference and nutritional therapy conference. And at that time it was like $200 to the vendor. And another friend of mine who had a marketing background said, I love what you’re doing. You should. Do something with this, you should turn it into a company.
[00:07:23] And I thought, well, you know, someone must be doing this. So we went online and I was super surprised at two things. I was surprised that no one was really looking at essential oils through the lens of balancing organ systems and regions of the brain. And I was more surprised at how complicated they may have essential oils.
[00:07:40] I really. Was somewhat grateful that my mental capacity was so limited that I didn’t start with research because if I had, I would have felt completely unqualified to do this. So we went to the event, kind of threw something together. We were like either, you know, this is kind of a proof of concept test.
[00:07:58] Either people will totally get it and we’ll go somewhere with this. Or, you know, I’m the only one that thinks this way. We went to the event and we sold out the first day we were the bells of the ball. Everyone was like, Oh my goodness. I’ve wanted to do oils, but it seems so complicated. I love that.
[00:08:15] You’ve organized it by, you know, the different organ systems and regions of the brain. You’re already speaking my language. So that’s how it started. The kids were little, the husband was in the hospital. It was kind of, I have a background in journalism. I really love. To research and connect dots. So basically, you know, when the kids were asleep, I would write my little blog.
[00:08:35] I’d fill orders at night. At a certain point, I heard a friend helped me fill orders and I just kinda kept writing my blogs and people would find me from Dr. Google cause I’m a good writer. And I’m really good at figuring out why things work and explaining it pretty well. By the time my youngest hit middle school and I had more time, I decided, you know, I’ll put some effort into this and I wrote a book and that got more traction.
[00:08:59] I started hiring more people to help me, which obviously helped, you know, you can only grow your business attire people. And now I have a second book coming out. Um, In March of 2021 with random house on basically everything I’ve learned about how and why essential oils can help boost the brand and balance the body.
[00:09:19] Lance Wantenaar: [00:09:19] Okay. That’s a fire hose of information all in one, which was really fascinating. I’d like to find out specifically about the process of muscle testing. Can you tell me how you go through with muscle testing? What do you do? I’ve got an awareness of it, but I don’t know the specific process behind it. So how did you go about
[00:09:38] Jodie Cohen: [00:09:38] muscle tests?
[00:09:39] Yeah, well, I learned there’s a clinician here in Seattle named Dietrich Klinghardt who invented? Well, he kind of put some structure around a protocol that he calls autonomic response testing. And what it’s basically doing is. Asking the body, like on some level, we all know, you know, this intuition, like you crave chocolate.
[00:09:58] When you need magnesium, you crave a hamburger when you need iron. This, the body has an innate intelligence and it really is designed to kind of keep you in balance and heal. It really does try to kind of return to normal. And there is a way that you can kind of. It has a blueprint has a lot of information that it’s happy to share with you.
[00:10:21] And so you can almost like dipping your, your hand in a stream and feeling the stream in which direction the water is flowing. You can tap into the body and ask it questions often. Yes, no questions, but that’s where Dr. Klinghardt really came into play with kind of giving a system of like, What’s the first question you ask what’s the second question you ask the body knows what it needs to get returned to balance.
[00:10:46] So how do you, um, kind of prioritize, like where do you start? And so, um, with, with this particular, you, you basically have to get. The body and balance first and clear out any interference fields that might be, um, complicating the answers. And so there’s a way to balance the body with certain supplements and he actually uses a device it’s kind of a crystal platform that amplifies the energy.
[00:11:11] What you’re basically doing is we all have kind of a tourist like donut field. Energetic field around us. And it’s supposed to be pretty large, like around six feet, but if you’re depleted and kind of less energized, it, it shrinks. And so what you’re doing is you’re introducing remedies into the field and then testing kind of where that balances it out.
[00:11:35] Like if you’ve ever doused for water, you know, you use dowsing rods and kind of move straight and then they open when you kind of. Hit, you know, where the water line is basically doing is measuring your body’s energetic. Field in that same way and you’re trying to expand it. So that’s kind of how it works.
[00:11:52] Does that make
[00:11:53] Lance Wantenaar: [00:11:53] sense? Yeah. Yeah, that works. It’s quite interesting. You were talking about that because there’s another podcast guests that I actually spoke to as in a lady called Beverly Coon, that’s done quite a lot of work on emotional maps and similar type of work because she’s worked with a Russian technology.
[00:12:08] That’s actually found ways of measuring. Do these ways and this reaction. So there’s an interesting bit of correlation between the two. I’d be interested to see what you think of her work. So I’ll, I’ll put you in contact with Anne, maybe have a discussion with her and see how much the information correlates or what you can actually find out.
[00:12:28] There could be. You could say correlating. Between the, the two areas. I think that’ll be an interesting discussion for you.
[00:12:36] Jodie Cohen: [00:12:36] I’m sure. You know, it, it’s one of those things. This is a strange thing to pull in, but Michael Jackson used to say that, you know, when he got a download of a song, he’d write it. So that Prince didn’t get it.
[00:12:46] It’s this idea that there’s certain information that’s accessible to everyone, but we forget to look at it. We get so tuned into our five senses that we forget. We also are very intuitive beings.
[00:12:59] Lance Wantenaar: [00:12:59] Yeah. The other thing I wanted to just explore with you is that fast. Yeah. How much do you think fattier plays a role in that or the fascial system within the body?
[00:13:11] Because there’s a, over-reliance on nerve signaling, which we’ll discuss in a little bit later on with relative to the vagus nerve, but I’d like to hear your inputs about fascia and how much. Muscle testing, actually, either connecting that or uses that signaling mechanism. Cause there’s some research that I was reading up about that fast yet can actually act as a signaling mechanism.
[00:13:34] It’s a lot faster than the nerves because it’s mostly relying on water and that the signaling is obviously a lot faster through water than through physical media. So how much of that have you looked into and how.
[00:13:48] Jodie Cohen: [00:13:48] Yeah, that’s, that’s a hundred percent true. And that actually gets to the fourth phase of water.
[00:13:52] Jerry Pella. Who’s a researcher at the university of Washington. Part of the problem of our health is that our water is signaling as well. Like our water is dead water, like ideally, um, you know, metal pipes. The problem is, you know, the water is flowing through the pipes and the water that’s flowing at the outside of the pipe slows down.
[00:14:11] And so the water in the middle. Is flowing faster. So it kind of splits the water, like living water, water in streams or Brooks or anything that’s moving and flowing is, is really healthy. And that kind of plays into the fascia. Yeah, you’re absolutely right. That’s deeper than I don’t actually think. I think essential oils are really good for certain things.
[00:14:31] And I think that other things are better. Like I think structured water is actually, um, better for the fascia then I think oils are so I haven’t done. A deep dive in my own research, but you’re 100%. Right. Okay.
[00:14:42] Lance Wantenaar: [00:14:42] Okay. That’s an interesting area. I might do some more reading up on that point.
[00:14:46] Life
[00:14:46] Jodie Cohen: [00:14:46] has sight.
[00:14:47] They believe glyphosate interrupts fascia signaling. There’s a woman, a researcher named Stephanie Seneff. Who’s done a lot of good research on that. I would start with her. And then my friend, Dr. Christine, Shoffner also talks a lot about fascia and, and the role it plays just in kind of healthy cellular communication.
[00:15:05] Lance Wantenaar: [00:15:05] Well, that’ll be an interesting area that I’ll look into as well, coming back to the essential oils. So you started testing it based on obviously a gift and you started testing them. Your own need was to. No regulator and basically get to a better balance system. So how did you start looking into the link between the essential oils and the Vegas nerve?
[00:15:31] Jodie Cohen: [00:15:31] You know, I had known about the vagus nerve. I mean, I’m a yoga girl. And I, um, you know, they pretty much talk about the vagus nerve and all of the yoga and the parasympathetic state and how just for the listeners that don’t know the Vegas nerve, I’ll start with the autonomic nervous system, which is basically controlling all of your automatic functions.
[00:15:51] On NAMEC automatic, you know, breathing your heart, beating your digestion, your detoxification, your immune system. You don’t have to consciously think immune system turn on. You know, it does it automatically. And your autonomic nervous system has two gears. It has kind of the accelerator, which is if there’s danger, it shifts resources to keep you alive.
[00:16:13] That is called your sympathetic fight or flight nervous system and the resources it shifts. Is, you know, your energy. So your blood flow, your oxygen, your heart beats faster, your breathing intensifies and your blood pumps to your muscles and your arms and your legs so that you can either fight or flight.
[00:16:30] And it pumps away from your organs of digestion and detoxification. And then ideally the danger passes and you switch lanes into the parasympathetic brake. Rest digest and heal lane. It is your vagus nerve cranial nerve number 10. That is the toggle between these two systems. And it’s not that one turns off.
[00:16:53] And one turns on it’s more, that one is prioritized, right? Like if you’re driving in a car and you’re on the gas, you can still brake the brake. Isn’t not working. You’re just focusing on the gas at the time. And so the Vegas nerve. Can help you to shift gears. And it starts with the back of the head kind of goes behind the ears on both sides.
[00:17:13] And then once through every organ of digestion and innervates them, it sends signals between those organs and your brain. It’s kind of the information highway between your gut and your brain, your gut brain access. And what’s fascinating is that activating. Any point, you know, that the vagus nerve touches like the breathing, breathing is a really easy way to kind of, if you make your exhale longer than your inhale, you activate your vagus nerve.
[00:17:39] But people for whatever reason is easy as breathing is, it was very hard to get compliance. Most people in order to heal, you have to be in the right gear, you know, think of it as riding a bike. If you’re in high gear and you hit a Hill in high gear and you don’t downshift, it’s going to be a lot harder.
[00:17:57] To get up that Hill, you might actually have to get off and walk, but if you’re able to shift down into the lowest gear, you can manage it. So your body is trying to calm inflammation. It’s trying to turn on its immune system. It’s trying to do all these things that really need to be in the parasympathetic gear.
[00:18:15] To do, but it stuck in sympathetic. So it never gets turned on. So chronic infections kind of fester under the surface until they become these big problems in order to really heal, you need to make sure that you’re in the parasympathetic state of the nervous system. And guess what? 99% of the people that I saw were in chronic sympathetic.
[00:18:34] And you could tell them, Oh, gag yourself with the tongue Spencer, all a splash of face with freezing water. Oh, do a coffee enema. Guess what? My compliance was like slightly zero. Yeah. But I knew that it was the most accessible right behind the ear load on the mastoid bone, because there’s a researcher out of New York, Dr.
[00:18:54] Kevin Tracy, who realized that. You could stimulate, um, this nerve, he actually did these pacemaker like electrical implants and was stimulating the vagus nerve from there. And I’m like, well, surgery seems a little complicated, but whales are super stimulatory. You know, they’re called hot, right. They make your skin red.
[00:19:14] They feel hot to the touch. And I know that oils, you know, They’re fat soluble. They’re super small. They can topically get through this skin. I wonder if you can use essential oils to stimulate the vagus nerve behind the ear lobe on the master. It goes, so that was kind of in yoga. I think I love about yoga is such a thinker, but my mind just wanders in the weirdest.
[00:19:34] Places. And I was always like, okay, breathing. Like, what else can I do? Cause I’m not the best breather. I’m terrible at meditating. So it was always playing with that. So when I was kind of in creation, mode of oil seemed to like hit all the spots that were hard to hit in the practice. Like I made a whole list, like my wishlist of, Ooh, if I could help make lymphatic flow, you know, if I could help balance the gallbladder, if I could help stimulate the vagus nerve, like I had this whole like, Wouldn’t this be the perfect reality list.
[00:20:04] And I just kept playing the things, you know, and I had the benefit of having a client population that I could test different things on and see really immediately, is this working? Is this not working? So it was a lot of intuition then researching then trial and error. And the combination that seems to work the best is clove in line.
[00:20:22] Because Clovis, stimulatory and line distilled line, because if it’s pressed, then your photo sensitive. If it’s distilled, it doesn’t make, you know, your skin burn in the rat, in the sun. So just behind the ear, love on the mastered bone. And that was a really easy noninvasive way to. Activate the parasympathetic state that people actually complied with.
[00:20:45] And I’m like, when, you know, it’s like get them to eat kale until you’re blue in the face. And if they’re still eating Fritos, like, Oh, well, but if you finally get something, even if you get them to eat like Kado or just anything that’s not processed garbage, you’re like,
[00:20:59] Lance Wantenaar: [00:20:59] when, how quickly have you found that?
[00:21:02] People would start seeing a response or starting it a reaction to it because that’s a big challenge, especially when you taking some of the more, you could say personal or manual interventions was breathing. Breathing takes a bit of time to develop the skill and to go through the process and actually calm your brain down because it’s, you have to get your body to relax in it’s.
[00:21:24] Trying to change your physiology to a point where it actually starts calming down the brain patterns in your change, your thought processes, because you switching from the fight or flight response into more of a relaxed creation or creative thinking process. And also you start using different parts of the brain.
[00:21:40] And that can be sometimes quite counterparty cause of brain’s running it a hundred miles an hour. Your body is obviously trying to work on that fight or flight response, right? And by manually trying to intervene, although it can work, it does take a bit of time. So I’m very curious to, to see or to understand why something as simple as a essential oil can almost switch you in immediately into a different thinking process.
[00:22:10] I have
[00:22:10] Jodie Cohen: [00:22:10] understand the role that smell plays in terms of safety, out of all your five senses only smell goes directly to the amygdala, which is kind of the emergency response, right? Center in the brain. Everything else is routed to the thymus first cause smell plays a critical role in our survival. Not only can we smell food and water to keep us alive, but we can smell fire and predator odor.
[00:22:31] In fact, there are specific odor receptors that are kind of designed to smell predator odor, and there’s a researcher, Linda Buck, a Nobel Laureate out of Seattle who did a lot of research on it. Specific odor receptors that identify predator odor. And what’s fascinating is she took it one step further and looked at what would cancel that out.
[00:22:50] And it turns out it’s roses smelling the roses. So anything that you smell, even if you’re topically applying it, you’re also smelling it right. And that sends a signal to the amygdala immediately. The make Dilla kind of works in tandem with your frontal cortex. Basically the Abdullah is, you know, if you know those couples where one’s neurotic and one’s kind of the voice of reason, the amygdala is reacting to everything you’re walking in the woods.
[00:23:14] You think you see a snake, you start having an anxiety attack and then your frontal cortex says, you know what? That’s a stick. You’re good. You’re fine. Smell really has kind of the fastest access route to the brain and also stimulating the nerve right here. You know, if you think about the breath that has to go from the lungs, carry up to the brain when you do it right on your ear lobe, you’re super close to the brain.
[00:23:37] So that signal gets there faster. So it’s just, it’s a hack. It’s a faster way to get. Things into the system.
[00:23:44] Lance Wantenaar: [00:23:44] Okay. That’s I hadn’t realized that smell has such a strong, you could say effect, and it’s such a strong link. I know, obviously your audio visual, you could say responses through the face, depending on which one, they, the link into the vagus nerve, because the vagus nerve is also a social net.
[00:24:00] And that’s why social interaction is so key to people. And obviously during the pandemic, this is causing a lot of problems. Cause that social interaction is. Removed and a lot of aspects, which obviously causes a lot of anxiety in people. And, you know, again, that triggers all of the actions and reactions that go with that, which is, I think this will make a really interesting use case, for example, to actually test it and actually.
[00:24:24] Get people to look at it from a different perspective and also realize how crucial social interaction is, but also the importance of taking care of themselves. So I think that we’re sitting with a really, you could say very interesting time for your book to come out and actually.
[00:24:44] Jodie Cohen: [00:24:44] Well, you know, it’s funny.
[00:24:44] I actually am doing a parasympathetic summit. That’s going to be live November 9th to the 15th, but available on replay and Dr. Stephen who wrote the polyphagous theory books gonna be on it on it. And her work is brilliant. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Actually, if you go to the site now, person, the FedEx summit.com, just giving your email address, you have access to his talk.
[00:25:04] But he talks about that. He talks about how, you know, smiling at people, making eye contact, that coms, the parasympathetic nervous system. And when we have the mask on you can’t smile, but people also ease avert because there’s this whole, the social distancing. He’s like, don’t call it social distancing, call it physical distancing.
[00:25:24] That’s what it is. But we’ve been kind of. Trained groomed, whatever you want to call it, to feel like, you know, we, we have not engaged with people. You know, there’s something, somehow if you look at someone you’re going to make, you’re going to kill the grandmother, but you know, it just how, um, that is really affecting us and how we almost have to very intentionally manually override that.
[00:25:45] Right. By making sure that we activate our parasympathetic nervous system, you know, in other ways, another great way to do that is gratitude because when you’re in gratitude, it’s very hard to be in fear. You know, so even, you know, just being grateful that you’re able to listen to this or breathe or move, you know, it just kind of activates that safety response in our system
[00:26:07] Lance Wantenaar: [00:26:07] that was actually such a strong trigger or change that, although thinking about it.
[00:26:13] Yes. Obviously you triggering different hormones and you changing your physical reaction because obviously it’s a different reaction politically, too. To the whole process. I hadn’t realized that it had such an immediate reaction in such a strong,
[00:26:31] Jodie Cohen: [00:26:31] well, you know, what people don’t realize is we talk a lot about the tiger chasing us and everyone’s aware of the physical stressors, but no one really thinks about is that anticipatory stress thought driven stress.
[00:26:40] Yeah. Triggers the same release of chemicals in the body because the body really can’t differentiate. You know, if you, um, had been in a fire before and suddenly you see smoke, you know, all of your internal alarms are going to be going off. Oh my goodness. Fire. And you start panicking and that could save your life.
[00:27:01] Or it could just release way too much cortisol and kind of kill your function. So you just need to be aware of what’s going on in you once you kind of know, and this is actually my modus operandi. I noticed with clients that when I would just say like, Oh, take these and didn’t really explain why. Right.
[00:27:19] Compliance was zero. When I would explain it, especially the kids, you know, cause kids, um, they’re sweet and they really do want, you know, like this is going to make you so much Esther, on the baseball field and you’re going to be able to hit the ball better. Cause you’re going to be able to see it coming.
[00:27:32] Like once they understood like, Oh, this is going to benefit me in this way. They start really adhering to it. And so. My hope is that anyone who’s listening starts to realize, Oh gosh, you know, when I’m kind of in stress and fear that down-regulates all these important functions in my body that I really want to work at their best level when I’m able to.
[00:27:55] Think about something, you know, be grateful for something my dad used to say, you always need someone to love something to do and something to look forward to. You know, it can be that simple, just thinking about it, even if it’s your dog that you love. I love my dog. He’s fantastic. You know, it just kind of brings you into a different space.
[00:28:11] Yeah.
[00:28:12] Lance Wantenaar: [00:28:12] And it’s, it’s very interesting to realize that there are so many different ways that you can actually go about improving how you actually think and manage and maintain yourself. And it’s, I think a lot of people tend to rely on a silver bullet and they think this one thing is going to be the one and only thing.
[00:28:30] And. Over a period of time. You’ve got to realize there are many ways that you can actually do it, but once you start combining them all into, you could say habit of process of saying, okay, let’s say for example, awareness and mindfulness, mindfulness is only part of the story because you’ve got to pay attention to the body of the sensor’s awareness.
[00:28:50] You’ve got to realize when you’re stressed or when you’re not stressed, you’ve got to pick up those signals. To be able to detect, okay, something’s not right. I’ve got to change this, or I’ve got to deal with it in this way. And it’s, it’s a tool to then say, okay, I can modulate it by just do some breathing or in your case, having some essential oils, applying in essential oil.
[00:29:16] Yeah. And it’s, it’s knowing the little things that you can do in a day-to-day basis to actually. Make sure that you’re dealing with things in a correct way because the big challenge, I think that a lot of people are dealing with, especially now is that a lot of people are dealing in a stress mode of thinking.
[00:29:32] So they, the, the thinking processes change, your decision-making changes, the psychology that’s involved too with it is completely different because you don’t using different parts of your brain. Your assessment is completely different than when you’re in a more of a relaxed state. And that’s going to be completely effective when you’re making any decisions, whether it’s something work-related or personal, because your reaction is completely separate or different to how you would be when you not be relaxing.
[00:30:02] Jodie Cohen: [00:30:02] I can speak to that. The easiest way to explain that is if you’ve ever been driving in a car and someone cuts you off and you’re kind of in a good mood and you’re like, whatever, maybe they’re in a hurry. And then another day the exact same thing happens. And four letter words are flying out of your mouth.
[00:30:15] The only variable is you. And what’s interesting is when your nervous system is in the sympathetic drive, you know, and you’re trying to be safe, your pupils dilate, which means the black part gets really big to let in more light. And that really kind of narrows your options. You really are able to just focus on like, I’m going to, you know, hit him here or run there because if you had too many options available, it would be paralyzing.
[00:30:37] So your higher creative skills, your problem solving capability, all get shut down when you’re in that. Fear place. So the more you can, you know, especially I’ve noticed, there are certain, like I had to deal with attorneys at one point and they do this interesting thing where they put you in fear and then they give you two options and you have to make a choice right then and there.
[00:30:57] And it happened to be my, my dad was in hospice and I was like, you know, yeah, I have this conversation right now hung up like goodbye to my dad and was like, I’m really too riled up to even drive it. This is my house. So I walked around the neighborhood. I grew up in, which I knew very well and really intentionally calmed my nervous system down and was, um, you know, applying my oil, focusing on my breathing, observing nature.
[00:31:20] And at a certain point I realized, okay, I’m calm. And I revisited the problem. And I realized that’s really crazy. Like this is not a black and white issue. There’s so many different options that I can pursue. And I actually need more information on this and all of a sudden, my whole access to my creative problem, solving skills.
[00:31:37] Opened up. And I realized like, this is really not a problem. Like they were positioning it one way, but that’s not really what’s going on. And I actually wound up choosing that to work with this attorney and kind of the way everything unfolded was, was far better than the forecast this person had. But I think that if you’re forced to make a decision with your back against the wall, you sometimes don’t make the best decisions, you know?
[00:32:02] Like it, it, the more you can access your parasympathetic nervous system, that feeling of safety, your creative problem solving skills, the more options that become available to you and the easier it is to navigate, because you have so many more choices. Yeah.
[00:32:18] Lance Wantenaar: [00:32:18] And the example that you gave is really very strong because it’s easy to use hindsight when you’re looking at a decision, I would have thought I should have made the decision in this way.
[00:32:30] I should have thought of this. Or I think what people fail to realize is that because you’ve got this physiological stressor, it changes how your brain functions, it changes completely how you assess things. And unless you really very well disciplined and you’ve trained yourself to access high cortical functions.
[00:32:52] It’s very difficult to override a physiological and almost. Primal response when something like that happens. And as you’ve mentioned before, just the fact that you can have a conversation can actually trigger you to react in a more emergency primal way. It doesn’t even have to be. A real situation. And that’s what is really interesting and important that people need to realize is that the switch can happen almost immediately.
[00:33:20] It can happen like that. You can have one moment you happy and find the next moment you could be reacting emotionally really, really differently to the way you were thinking previously. And unfortunately, the brain is also. Prime more towards the negative aspects for survival purposes because. The primary goal is preservation of the host.
[00:33:45] And it’ll default to, I will preserve you because that’s my core function. My core role is to make sure that you survive. And if I have to use the primal part of the cortical functions and the processing, I will defer to that because I know that that’s going to keep you safer for longer. That is a really difficult juggling game to, to have between the two.
[00:34:08] Jodie Cohen: [00:34:08] Yes, absolutely. But you know, I really do want to land on the fact that you have a choice. You have options, you know, um, Viktor Frankl who survived the Holocaust said between the stimulus and the response, there is a space. And I believe that that space is your ability to press the pause button, to notice like, Oh my God, I feel so anxious.
[00:34:28] I feel like my heart is going to explode out of my chest. I need to pause. I need to not respond to this email, to this conversation, to this argument, I need to go outside and move. I need to apply essential oils. I need to focus on breathing. I just need to kind of pause and, and take, you know, the 20,000 foot view and reassess the situation because you’ll always come back with more options.
[00:34:56] Lance Wantenaar: [00:34:56] I think you’ve highlighted a really interesting, a couple of points over there is knowing that you have an option or a choice. A lot of people go from seeing to acting to doing. And sometimes you have to just say, okay, do I need to respond now? I think that’s probably one of the key things is once you realize it doesn’t have to be an immediate response, very, very seldom with modern technology and everything else that we’re doing at this stage, the level of safety are so high.
[00:35:31] There’s very little reason for somebody to immediately have to respond or react to the information. Yes. Most of the time, you’ve got a certain amount of buffer in your reaction and your response that you can actually use. And nobody’s going to demand an immediate response. It’s just that because of technology, it’s allowed people to respond almost instantaneously without proper sorts and consideration, which means that you tend to.
[00:35:57] React instead of act, which is a different way of thinking. And unless you’ve actually disciplined yourself to actually go through almost your own little internal process to say, okay, look, let’s, let’s just pause. It’s really difficult to overwrite. And I think a lot of technology is probably exacerbating the situation quite significantly.
[00:36:20] And it feeds also into certain amount of internal paranoia that people think they have to respond to immediately. If they have to look. More capable by reacting immediately. And I think that’s a, that’s a incorrect perception that people tend to.
[00:36:36] Jodie Cohen: [00:36:36] Absolutely. No, I think you’re totally right. This was fun.
[00:36:39] We got to talk about a lot of parasympathetic activation strategies. The one last thing I’d love to leave your listeners with is just one other kind of fun strategy. So if you’re prone to panic attacks and anxiety, as I am that, you know, we have two hemispheres of our brain and they do different things.
[00:36:58] And when you’re having a panic attack, that is the. Right frontal part of your brain, your frontal lobe by your forehead, that’s overactive. So the easiest way to calm that is to activate the left frontal part of your lobe brain, so that it’s kind of imbalanced. And the easiest way to do that is to smell anything through your left nostril.
[00:37:18] You know, normally right. Brain controls left body, but your nostrils you’ll factory nerve cranial nerve number one goes directly to left. Nostril goes to left forehead. So just plugging the right nostril, smelling something through the left nostril will activate the left frontal lobe balance, the right frontal lobe.
[00:37:36] And I. Speak from personal experience. If you’re in the middle of an anxiety attack, it will pull you out and you will feel better immediately.
[00:37:43] Lance Wantenaar: [00:37:43] Interesting. How does that, I’m just going on a limo B here, but the alternate nostril breathing that you get in yoga, pranayama.
[00:37:50] Jodie Cohen: [00:37:50] Yeah. It’s activating both hemispheres.
[00:37:54] So it’s kind of integrating them. That’s exactly what it’s doing. And then
[00:37:57] Lance Wantenaar: [00:37:57] obviously adding the additional oil and the sense of smell actually just helps elevate it and make it a lot, lot more effective in actually doing that. Exactly. Oh, wow. I didn’t, I didn’t realize that there was that strong, a. You could say effect by, you know, by triggering it, just going into the, the whole factory process and there the alternate nasal breathing, how much have you worked with or dealt with any kind of nasal breathing practices to improve thinking?
[00:38:31] And just in general, overall, you could say cognitive processing.
[00:38:36] Jodie Cohen: [00:38:36] That’s that’s not, I stay in my lane. That’s not my lane. No.
[00:38:40] Lance Wantenaar: [00:38:40] Okay. I was just a bit intrigued because you were talking about the, I
[00:38:45] Jodie Cohen: [00:38:45] like the yoga. I mean, I, you know, I experiment on myself. I know what I feel in yoga, but that’s not something I’ve gone
[00:38:51] Lance Wantenaar: [00:38:51] into getting into your essential oils.
[00:38:54] How did you go into a start looking at specifically which oils to use and how they were effective? What was your
[00:39:04] Jodie Cohen: [00:39:04] process? I apologize. I have a hard stop at 11, but my process is it starts with intuition. Basically every organ, we all have blueprints, right? There’s a blueprint of the whole body. There’s a blueprint of healthy organ tissue.
[00:39:16] You know, like everyone’s healthy. Liver looks the same and human blueprints and plant. Blueprints are similar humans and plants. So bio familiar. And so you can combine the essence of different plants, just like you might combine colors, right. You know, like red and blue give you purple if you add white that’s lavender.
[00:39:34] So I think we’re all able to do this, but I’ve just been practicing that you tap into the frequency of the Oregon and kind of. Recognize what healthy organ tissue looks like and then use the different oils to combine them. And then it’s like an overlay. Like if you think about when you’re teaching a child, this one, you give them like the little floaty wranglings right.
[00:39:54] So they get the feeling of, this is what it feels like when my body’s in the water and I’m not drowning, you know, we’re riding a bike, you put them on training wheels. So it helps with the balance or you kind of move them forward and help them balance. And yeah. Teaching kids to ride a bike is a weird thing.
[00:40:08] Cause it’s not like it takes a certain amount of time. Like some kids pick it up in five seconds. Some kids take five months. It’s really when your body figures out, this is what it feels like to move forward and balance. This is what my body feels like in balance. And then you can do it. So by topically overlaying the frequency of balance at a certain point, your liver, your gallbladder, your pancreas, they snap into like, Oh, this is balanced.
[00:40:33] It’s almost like you’re supporting them. You’re you’re. Spotting the, you know, energy of vitality. Jodi,
[00:40:39] Lance Wantenaar: [00:40:39] thank you very much. I think I could probably sit and talk with you very much longer to dive into all of the different areas. I think we’ve covered a lot of really interesting areas, which I had no idea what would ever come to light.
[00:40:53] It’s been a fascinating discussion and I really appreciate it. Do you want to tell people. About your site and how they can get hold of you and where they can find out more about your books, because you’ve already got one book that’s published. That’s on Amazon, but just tell people about your site and how they can get hold of you.
[00:41:11] Jodie Cohen: [00:41:11] Yes, it’s, it’s vibrant blue, like the color oils.com. Okay. If this sparks any questions, you can send us an email at info at vibrant blue oils. We try to get back to everyone within 48 hours. And then the book is called essential oils to boost the brain and heal the body it’s available on Amazon. If you’re interested in more.
[00:41:33] Parasympathetic activation strategies. I have kind of my secret chapter that they didn’t let me include. Cause it was really about other ways to activate your parasympathetic nervous system and that’s boost the brain book.com and you can grab that secret chapter for free.
[00:41:49] Lance Wantenaar: [00:41:49] Thank you very much, Jody, and have a lovely day and hope to speak with you soon.
[00:41:55] Jodie Cohen: [00:41:55] Thank you so much. This was great.