In 2012, I was exposed to essential oils for the 2nd time in my adult life. My first time was the 1990s, and I was an emotional wreck. I remember leaning heavily on the essential oils I could find usually at a pharmacy or similar: geranium, ylang ylang and cedarwood. I had no idea what it was doing to me, but I could not get enough of it. I didn’t even know if it was good. I just knew it felt peaceful when I burned them in the home.
I would sit in on a little dish, and burn a tea light candle under it. It felt inept, given all I was going through at the time. I had just been engaged to a man and seen his real character come out in certain situations and I did not like what I saw. I was to be married to someone who was not all he was showing the world to be and I was beside myself as to how to deal with it. I noticed that when I burned the candle, the atmosphere in the home changed completely and as I had a hugely stressful HR job, I wanted a place where I could pretend I lived in a palace. I lived in a very modest, old 1950s beach shack on a main road in Southport, Queensland.
I was incredibly stressed with work, and financial issues. I used the oils, back then, to help me cope with my emotions, ironically though as I knew very little about essential oils themselves, I just knew that when I smelled them, they smelled good. The little bottles would sit on a shelf I had and eventually were not used and were tossed aside. I didn’t like how I was cooking them in the little dish, it felt that I was somehow punishing the oils. It felt wrong. And I stopped using them.
It was not until 2012 when I came into the idea of oils again. This time I was on my first tour to Egypt. I remember watching this magnificent young Egyptian woman come out and loftily sing the praises and the properties of peppermint, and sandalwood, and ylang ylang, and frankincense! Wow! I laughed and said out loud to the rest of the tour participants “when I grow up, I want to be like her!” … in fact I was redundant and at a cross roads in my life. I had no idea what I wanted to do. I had 5 or 6 offers to come and work at different companies, and nothing inspired me. I remember there, in Aswan, towards the Sudanese border, feeling totally at home with my soul, and learning about essential oils in my 40s was total soul food for me!
It wasn’t until almost a year had passed, and I had the opportunity to re experience a very similar setting, only this time it was in my home. I remember when my dear friend came to show us how the oils worked and were easily incorporated into a daily routine they had the potential to totally transform your life. I was open to something along those lines and purchased my very first kit of doTERRA essential oils. I wasn’t sure exactly what I had purchased, or even if I liked these oils. But when I learned what the oils were doing on the other side of the bottle, I was so totally transformed. I started to realise that each oil had its own unique properties and that these were unlike any other oils I had tried before.
