The best essential oils for headaches

Ever had one of those dull, throbbing headaches that won’t budge?

The kind that zaps your patience and even takes the joy out of patting your cat (shock horror!)?

Recently my body was fighting off the flu and I had one of those cracking headaches for 2 days.

Moaning, being grumpy and lying around didn’t help much.

Japanese Yoga macrobiotic remedies + essential oils took the edge off a bit, but the bugger still hung around.

And then I remembered something I learnt in my yoga training: pain is just stagnant energy.

So I dragged my whinging, resistant body-mind onto the yoga mat.

I won’t sugar coat it: it wasn’t easy to push through and the headache had a few moments where it seemed to get worse.

But after an hour of Japanese Yoga, voila – goodbye headache!

It was a great reminder that movement shifts energy.

Especially the movement of Japanese Yoga because it works intentionally to unblock any clogged up energy in our body.

We can think of energy and illness like this:

Imagine your body as a garden hose.

When it’s all in balance there are no kinks and the ‘water’ (ie energy) flows through smoothly.

When we’re out of balance or if there’s pain/illness/inflammation, our hose has a kink in it.

Whenever there’s a kink, one side of the hose has too much energy (known as ‘jitsu’ in shiatsu and Japanese Yoga) and one side of the hose has too little energy (known as ‘kyo’).

And we see this expressed as symptoms in our body (hello headache!).

Moving your body helps to smooth out the kink and get your energy flowing again.

The moral of the story: unless you literally can’t get out of bed, it’s always worth coming to Japanese Yoga -or doing some other light exercise.

If you’re curious, the essential oils I used that helped me were:

FOR MY HEADACHE:

– Lavender + Frankincense: inhaled, rubbed on back of neck and into temples*

– A bath with a few drops of Marjoram and Basil + salts

*Look up the Modern Essentials Book for more tips on head tension – we’re all unique and respond differently to essential oils. I’ve got a friend who uses Peppermint whenever she has a migraine. And another girlfriend who swears by PastTense for hers.

FOR STOPPING THE FLU:

-Rollerbottle ‘Immune bomb’: 20 drops each of oregano, on guard, lemon, tea tree, frankincense in a rollerbottle with diluting oil (Fractionated Coconut Oil)- applied under the feet approx every 4 hours

-Gel Cap ‘Immune bomb’: 2 drops each of oregano, on guard, lemon, tea tree, frankincense in an empty gel cap Ingested with food approx every 4 hours

– Rose oil rubbed on the chest, throat and ears – Rose oil is the #1 superpower oil! It comes diluted as ‘Rose Touch’.

The Macrobiotic Recipe I used was:

‘Ume-sho-ban’ tea: Kukicha Tea + grated ginger (1 teaspoon) + pureed umeboshi plum (quarter teaspoon)*

*all available at good health food stores in the tea and Japanese/Macrobiotic section).

There was one other superpower helped stop my flu that I’ll talk about another time!