I’m going to guess that your spiritual journey is just as confusing as mine is most of the time. And by spiritual journey, I mostly mean life journey. What lessons are we here to learn in this lifetime and how, exactly are we going to learn them?
And let’s be honest, if it’s something I REALLY need to learn, I’m probably going to resist it. Because I like to make things harder on myself than they need to be I guess.
So when I was first introduced to Young Living essential oils, that was the easy part. I GOT IT immediately. When you inhale those molecules of truly pure, therapeutic oils and feel them go to work in your body right away, you want to learn and experience more. But selling the oils? No thank you.
I don’t think I even had a negative opinion about network marketing companies, I just really wasn’t interested in doing the business – and since that’s not a requirement to purchase the oils, I was perfectly happy using these amazing oils and not getting more involved.
And then someone asked me how they could get oils for themselves. And then another person did in the same week.
In my world, that’s not nothing, that’s a nudge from the universe. So I helped them get some oils and I got a $75 check in the mail. Hmm, that was easy. So I decided to learn a bit more.
Over the past six months or so, I’ve helped more people get oils into their lives, started teaching classes and building a team, but I still haven’t really been sure what the big picture is. Why have I been led in this direction? I mean, other than the obvious that these oils change people’s lives and I want to help people experience that for themselves.
But then two, unrelated things happened in the same week last week (this seems to be a pattern for me, no??) and all of a sudden I GOT IT again. All of the moving pieces are suddenly making sense to me.
First of all, I attended the Young Living convention. I wasn’t really sure what to expect but I certainly didn’t think it would be a spiritual experience. I was wrong. It rocked my world (and I even had a huge physical purge after it was over – a definite sign that it was time to release some things I no longer needed).
During a guided meditation in one of the general sessions (because yeah…this company is like THAT), I had a sudden full-body physical understanding of how my path has brought me here. And yet, I couldn’t yet describe it in words. I just knew that it all made sense.
One of the notes I wrote down – I don’t even know who said it now – was that there are plenty of sales and marketing people in the world right now.
What the world needs now is more healers.
Working with these oils is a healing journey. You can’t be on this path without experiencing profound physical, emotional and spiritual healing. Our team did a group meditation with one of the new oil blends released during convention called Journey On. The second the drop fell into my palm, I literally felt it break open a pocket of emotion somewhere in my body and the tears started streaming down my face. I felt an energetic shift in my body and knew that I had received a healing. When the meditation was complete, I looked around the circle and saw tears in everyone else’s eyes too.
We’d all had a profound experience from a drop of oil.
Sadly, not all oils are capable of this kind of work with us. If they have not been grown, distilled and handled with the utmost respect for their gifts, there will be no magic in the bottle that you buy at the grocery store. Just a nice smelling ghost of the plant it used to be.
As the convention wrapped up (and I was suddenly battling a high fever), I was looking for an audio book to listen to on the way home and I remembered a book that has been recommended to me over and over again in the past year: Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer.
I read a ton of books so I’m not sure why I kept passing this one up. So I downloaded it to listen to on our 12-hour drive home. The first chapter totally captivated me. In the second chapter, I had an epiphany.
It almost feels silly to say that I had an epiphany about network marketing while listening to such a beautiful piece of nature writing. I’m sure it wasn’t the author’s intent, but if you’ve been reading my writing for any amount of time, you know that my guides often teach me through the lessons of nature so I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised.
The second chapter of the book is called: The Council of Pecans.
In it, she explains how trees like butternuts, black walnuts, hickories and pecans are all closely related members of the same family. Nut trees don’t make a crop every year, but rather produce at unpredictable intervals. This is called mast fruiting and results in creating new forests as each tree will make lots and lots of nuts – so many that it overwhelms potential seed predators (like squirrels!).
What’s interesting is that biologists still don’t understand how this boom and bust cycle works. You might think that each individual tree decides when it has accumulated enough calories to produce a huge crop in one particular year, depending on their habitat, but that’s not the case. If one tree produces a nut surplus, they all do – not just in one grove, but every grove across the county and all across the state.
The trees do not act as individuals, but as a collective. And in that collective is the power of unity – what happens to one happens to them all. All flourishing is mutual.
She goes on to say that native elders said that the trees talked to each other. They’d stand in their own council and craft a plan. And although scientists long ago dismissed that idea, there is now compelling evidence that the trees are talking to one another – through pheromones on the wind warning each other of impending danger.
But we also know that trees in a forest are connected by underground mycorrhizae fungal strands in their roots. These networks help to balance carbohydrates from tree to tree. In this way, the trees are able to act as one because the fungi have connected them. Through this unity, they survive and flourish.
So what does this have to do with essential oils?
When I heard this story about the nut trees, the point of why I have decided (or rather, was pushed…thanks guides!) into network marketing suddenly made sense. We are each a tree, acting as individuals, running our own businesses. But it’s impossible to flourish without each other.
There is no competition with each other in network marketing (only the goals we set for ourselves). The possibilities are exactly the same for all of us – if one person moves up to the next rank, it doesn’t mean you can’t. There’s room for us all at every level and in fact, it’s impossible to do without our teams (the fungi in this scenario? LOL).
No single person can grow their business without everyone else growing their businesses as well. You literally cannot just strong-arm your way to success, you have to act as one. And when you do that, everyone benefits.
I don’t know about you, but I’ve spent a lot of years in a standard corporate employment structure. Many times I debated how long I needed to wait for the person above me to quit or get promoted so that I could maybe have an opportunity to move to the next level. Or hoped that when next year’s review came around, the company would reward my hard work with more than just a cost of living increase. And more than once, I’ve missed out on a bonus because the company didn’t make as much money as they’d hoped that year, regardless of how hard I worked for them.
For nearly 20 years I have traded my hours for dollars and now, I have the opportunity to grow a forest instead.
And in this business, I can live by the precepts of what the author calls the Honorable Harvest. To take only what is given, to use it well, to be grateful for the gift, and to reciprocate the gift. Knowledge and generosity has been shared by others on my team to help me get started in this business so now it is time for me to plant seeds for the next forest. And we will nurture and protect each other as we grow.
I love the idea of cooperation and mutual flourishing and that our efforts as a group will mean everyone is rewarded as a result of their efforts. If you feel this way too, there’s plenty more room to grow in this forest. Send me a note and let’s talk about how we can do it together.
