How Could I Not be a Believer? – Volume 6, Number 2
by David Stewart, PhD, DNM, IASP, BCRS, LSH
Originally Posted March – April 2008
1. How Could I Not be a Believer?
by Connie Bennett
(See Editor’s Note on the author at the end of this article)
Sept 14, 2007.
Took out an Independent Distributor account through Young Living Essential Oils. I did it for the sole purpose of building a home-based business marketing Dr. Edward Close’s 10-Step Protocol for cleaning up mold with Thieves Oil Blend presented in his book (Nature’s Mold Rx) and on his DVD (Toxic Mold: A Breakthrough Discovery). I even built a website to get me started: www.CleanUpMold.com. Although YLEO has an extensive line of Essential Oils, Personal Care products, and Nutritional Supplements, I had no interest in becoming involved in any aspect of YLEO beyond their exclusive Thieves line of antimicrobial products that are at the heart of the Close Protocol.
Sept 22, 2007.
Attended a New Distributor workshop in St. Louis, which was paired with a rare presentation of my friend Dave Stewart’s workshop based on his book, “Healing Oils of the Bible.” I learned some valuable things at the New Distributor workshop that day, but I suspect that years from now it’s Dave Stewart I’ll be crediting with changing my life.
If you don’t know Dave, in addition to being a renowned local earthquake expert, David Stewart, PhD, has become one of the foremost authorities on aromatherapy and the chemistry of essential oils. In 1999, when Dave gave up his part time job at Crader Distributing to devote himself full time to building an Aromatherapy education and research institute, I stepped into Dave’s shoes and parlayed it into the full-time job I have right now. I designed Dave’s website, raindroptraining.com in 2000, and have been maintaining it all these years.
In one sense, Dave’s Healing Oils workshop on Sept 22 was pretty much what I expected — Bible stories and contemporary testimonials of how certain oils had been and are currently being used to treat various ailments. What I didn’t expect was that Dave would actually pass around the oils as he shared testimonials and scripture passages about them.
The first Bible story I remember hearing was how the Three Wise Men brought Frankincense and Myrrh to the baby Jesus. If I learned in Sunday School why those particular oils were chosen, I’ve totally forgotten it, and it had never occurred to me to wonder what those oils smelled like. It was an amazing moment–experiencing a dozen oils that for the most part were only abstractions to me. I was so excited by what I’d learned that I wanted to gather up everyone I know and love — particularly everyone who is suffering physically or emotionally — and take them to hear Dave speak and experience these oils for themselves. When I learned he was conducting another of these rare presentations in two weeks, I just had to go to that one, as well.
October 4, 2007.
During the workshop, Dave passed around “Valor,” an oil blend of spruce, rosewood, blue tansy and frankincense. The blend is known among aromatherapists for the remarkable impact it has on energy alignment in the body (and in the spine). Dave related the story of having given a bottle of Valor to a skeptical chiropractor who nonetheless agreed to give it a try. After dropping several drops of oil onto the back of a patient who was on the table for an adjustment, the doctor turned away for a moment. When he returned to the patient, the man’s back had aligned itself.
I can hear you thinking what I thought, “Yeah, right.”
Flash forward 24 hours.
Friday night, October 5. Exhausted, I went to bed early and made the decision to pamper myself by sleeping in the next day, even though I knew I would pay for it with a back ache. (When I sleep too long, my spine “pretzels” — it gets all out of whack and I spend a day or more on a heating pad, going through stretches and contortions trying to make the vertebrae snap back into place.)
Having had this problem for decades, it was no surprise the next morning when I crawled out of bed and couldn’t stand upright. Miserable and in pain, my spine feeling like a jigsaw puzzle, I managed to feed the cats, and as I was returning to bed to get on a heating pad, I remembered the story of The Skeptical Chiropractor.
As it so happened I had an old kit of oils I had purchased for a Raindrop treatment six or seven years earlier when my friends Ed and Jacqui Close became involved in Young Living. Valor is one of the main oils in a raindrop—a form of massage that uses a proscribed set of oils that are applied to the back and feet in a specific sequence.
I personally never cared for raindrop and subsequently had a negative impression of oils because two of the most prominent oils in the sequence are Oregano and Thyme, which leave you smelling like the main course at a Domino’s Pizza. A vegetable-based massage oil is also used as a medium to disperse the oils, and so I mistakenly believed that Essential Oils left the skin feeling “oily,” something I have since learned it totally not true. Essential oils are eagerly absorbed by the skin in seconds, and within minutes, their scent is virtually gone.
Back to Saturday morning…
Oily or not, I couldn’t have cared less at that moment. I located the Valor and on my way back to the bedroom, took off the lid and inhaled deeply. The pain in my back seemed to subside. “Coincidence,” I scoffed, and proceeded to put two drops of Valor into my left palm. I dipped the fingers of my right hand in the oil, then reached around and rubbed the oils up and down the portion of spine I could reach in my lower back.
Instantly — before I could even take my fingers off my spine, things began to shift back into place. I rubbed in two more drops, bent to do a flat-back stretch, and when I came out of the stretch I stood fully erect, not a hint of pain. Every vertebrae of my spine was right where it was supposed to be and I was pain free. All in less than 60 seconds.
“Okay,” I thought. “That was a healing moment. Can’t deny it. But that doesn’t mean the oils do any of the other things ‘oilers’ claim they can do.” I mean, I’ve heard testimonials about oils being successfully used for everything from cancer to MS to MRSA. If those stories were true, why on earth aren’t doctors prescribing essential oils instead of drugs?
Now, there’s a loaded question, and I have subsequently learned the answer to it (I’ll tell you later, if you’re interested enough to keep reading.) But on that particular weekend in October, I was most interested in the story Dave had told about the degenerative arthritis he suffered from eight or nine years ago—in his knees, just like mine, for which I have been taking cortisone injections a couple of times a year, plus 1000MG of Relafen every day, not to mention 800 MG of Advil with the occasional Nuprin chaser to stave off the horrible arthritic ache that made afternoons sitting at my desk so miserable.
Dave says that when he wants to know what oil or oils he should use for a particular ailment, he often asks for God’s guidance before he goes to bed at night, and he usually gets his answer the next morning when he’s in that twilight of consciousness just as you’re coming out of sleep but aren’t quite awake. When he prayed for an answer about what to do about his arthritis, the inspiration he got was “Cypress” and “Wintergreen.”
I didn’t have either of those oils, but I did have a blend called Aroma Seiz, which had cypress in it. And of course, I had my Valor, which I had already decided was a miracle cure for any ailment. I decided to see if oils could help alleviate some of the pain of arthritis.
October 7.
I stopped taking Relafen, Advil, and Aleve for the arthritis in my knees. The first night, I applied two drops of Valor to my right knee and even though I was rubbing lightly, just touching my kneecap made me yelp in pain. The left knee got the same treatment, and for the heck of it, I also used two drops of Valor and AromaSeiz on the inflamed tendons in my right elbow (I have been getting cortisone shots for that, too.) The cessation of the daily ache of arthritis was almost immediate. It took three or four days for the inflammation under my right kneecap to go away entirely.
In his workshop, Dave points out that there were two different types of healing mentioned in the Bible. One type was immediate like most of the healings attributed to Jesus, but the other, which was frequently used by the apostles, was “therapeuo” which means healing over time (in the same way modern doctors used prescription drugs, the apostles often prescribed oils that were applied over periods of days, weeks, or months to affect the cures that they were credited for in the Scriptures).
For his own arthritis, Dave said he had used cypress and wintergreen for two months before he was completely healed, at which point he stopped using the oils and was pain free for about six years. Taking his advice to heart, I ordered a bottle of Wintergreen, and began using it in rotation with Aroma Seiz and Valor.
After about three weeks of this, I was working at my desk in my home office one afternoon and realized that my knees were killing me for the first time in weeks. “Okay. Here’s another test.” I got up, went to my stash of oils, applied drops of AS to each knee and the pain disappeared. Instantly.
After all that, how could I not be a believer? How could I not want to share this with the people I care about? Admittedly, I am not totally pain free yet, because regrettably, I have a lot of different sources of pain. The diabetic neuropathy in my feet is quite painful. I also have plantar faciitis in my right foot, but it is healing with the use of Aroma Seiz and Birch oil (some of which I still have from my old raindrop kit). My lower back pain has grown progressively worse in the last 12 months, but a pair of miraculous Z-coil shoes have almost entirely eliminated that pain. As long as I’m wearing the shoes, I can stand or walk for hours, whereas before the Z-coils my lower back was screaming five minutes after I got on my feet. (Z-coils are not a Young Living product. Google them if you want to know more, and you can absolutely believe everything you read in the testimonials on their website!)
As for the neuropathy, my Essential Oils Desk Reference tells me that peppermint will eventually restore feeling, but the process is slow and painful because before you can get back to normal, you have to go through the pain of “reawakening” those deadened nerves. I’ve tested this warning a couple of times and know it to be true—when I put peppermint on my feet at bedtime, I experience more pain and have a harder time falling asleep. I’m going to get brave and tough it out soon, though, because the everyday pain of neuropathy is not something I would wish on my worst enemy.
I’ve also started taking several of YLEO’s amazing nutritional supplements — their whole food vitamins and the amazing NingxiaRed antioxidant super juice—both of which are giving me more energy and making me feel better than I have in years.
The long and the short of it is: I’m a believer. Oils work. Now that I’ve started reading and educating myself on the difference between oils and drugs, I’m coming to understand that there is a reason why oils work. And there is a reason why their efficacy is a well-kept secret.
Remember how I said I had always believed that if there was an all-natural cure for a disease, injury, or ailment, doctors would be prescribing it and its use would be universal. Want to know why that’s a myth? Because things that are naturally occurring cannot be patented. If something can’t be patented, what reason does the pharmaceutical industry have to perform expensive trials and prolonged testing to prove scientifically whether an all natural substance like an essential oil really works?
But if there is no funding for extensive tests and trials, there is no “proof” that something is effective. There are only testimonials from people who use the products, and the health care industry has done a remarkable job of making anyone who believes in any form of holistic or alternative medicine look like delusional crackpots.
In the 1950s and 60s, when I was growing up, doctors knew everything. They could cure anything! That’s what the healthcare industry trained us to believe. Doctors want us to believe that only drugs “cure” — but if you listen to the list of potential side-effects that go hand-in-hand with the potential benefits of the drugs we hear about these days in television commercials, it’s easy to see that drugs don’t cure, they just trade one set of problems for another set of problems, and it’s up to the doctor and the patient to decide whether the treatment is worse than the disease.
On the other hand, oils that are pure, therapeutic grade* work because they are 100% natural, and because they are natural, our bodies know instinctively how to make use of them. Drugs are artificial, and our bodies have to figure out what to do with them.
Fortunately, there is some scientific testing of essential oils being conducted on a limited but widening basis around the world. Unfortunately, research conducted in England, France, and Egypt, to name a few, doesn’t make the headlines in the U.S.
If you want to know more, I’ll be happy to bore you with all the details you could possibly handle and then some. If you’re a baby boomer like me who has started to creak and groan (or been creaking and groaning for years) and want to know more about feeling better and making the last decades of your life healthier and more productive, give me a call. (And if you have mold or mold-related health issues, I can totally help you solve your problem and save big bucks in the process!)
Ten years ago in a workshop called “Essential Oils: The Missing Link,” Young Living’s founder, D. Gary Young, said, “God put everything we need right here on earth for us. He didn’t intend for us to suffer.”
Whether you believe in God or not, whether you accept that he created plants and gave them medicinal properties for the benefit of man, here’s a fact I hope you can embrace: Pure, therapeutic grade 100% natural essential oils* cannot possibly do anyone any harm. So, if there exists even the slightest possibility that simply smelling an oil or rubbing a drop of it on someone’s skin could alleviate pain, heal wounds, or improve the quality of life even a little, why in the name of God would anyone refuse to even try it?
Connie Bennett
December 2008
YLEO Independent Distributor #882250
* There is only one company in the U. S. that makes pure, therapeutic Grade Essential oils — Young Living Essential Oils. Because of a lack of regulation in this area, there are other manufacturers who distribute low quality and/or synthetic essential oils and they should never be used topically or aromatically.
** In order to keep me from getting into trouble with the FDA, I have to add this disclaimer: The statements made herein have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. The products mentioned are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.
EDITOR’S NOTE:
Connie is a successful author of contemporary and historical romance novels. She has published 20 of them over the years with well known publishers such as Harlequin, Berkley Diamond, and Zebra. You can visit Amazon.com or Google”Connie” or “Constance Bennett” and find her publications. I (David Stewart) met Connie about 15 years ago at a writer’s workshop. Later I took classes from Connie in the craft of novel writing.
From 1996 – 1999 I was employed part-time as a writer for Crader Distributing company, which is the regional supplier of STIHL Chain saws and other Stihl equipment throughout a seven-state area in the Midwest, including Missouri. They are headquartered in Marble Hill, Missouri, across the creek from the farm where I live. (I used to wear rubber boots and walk to work, wading the creek, every day.) My job was to produce a monthly newsletter for Stihl distributors throughout the Midwest. In doing so, I traveled from Oklahoma to illinois and from Nebraska to the Mexican border of Texas gathering information on Stihl dealers and their experiences as material for my articles. It was a stress-free, fun job. At the same time, I also owned a publishing company that was mainly being run by wife, Lee, and my son, Anthony.
In 1999 I decided leave the Stihl company (Craders) in order to go full time into building my YLEO distributorship, developing the CARE Program, and researching oils to write books. I asked Connie if she would be interested in taking my place as a writer with the Crader company. When I suggested her for my replacement, she was immediately offered the job and, in addition to fulfilling their needs for a writer, they also got an expert on websites and the Internet, which I am not. With Connie’s superb writing/editing skills and thorough knowledge of the Internet, what had been a part-time position with Stihl for me turned into a full-time position for Connie. She remains there to this day.
Connie also has a website design company called Silver Moon Designs (www.AffordableWebPages.com). Connie is the designer and maintainer of the CARE Website. As our webmaster and a witness to our success over the years in several aspects of the oil business, Connie decided to build her own oil business and enrolled with Young Living last September. She was intending only to promote the Thieves mold-combating program developed by Dr. Close, since she had been able to solve a serious mold problem in her own home with the Thieves protocol. As a close friend of Ed and Jacqui Close for many years, she asked them to be her YLEO sponsors. She is now the diligent leader of a steadily growing YLEO business. The rest is history in the making, as Connie has expressed above. Remember her article when you see her walk across the stage at future Young Living conventions.
BOOKS AND DVDS:
Dr. Close’s book and DVD (mentioned above) on how to use Thieves Oil and Thieves Products to effectively and economically rid your home or business of mold, and keep it mold free, are available on the Internet at the CARE Website, http://www.RaindropTraining.com. Dr. Stewart’s book and DVD, both entitled “Healing Oils of the Bible,” include instructions by which you can give a Bible Oils program in your community. They are also available on the CARE Website.
