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Hey friend.  I know essential oils may seem weird.  Truly- we have been there too- in a place where we felt like people just wanted to hang out with us, take us to lunch, just to have us “join their team”, or “get started with them”.  It feels yuck to feel like a cog in someone else’s business.  I’m thankful for those experiences actually, because they help me approach our family business in a whole new way.

If I could, i would go sit with you for coffee and listen to your story.  See where I could help, and offer suggestions, knowing that I will never have all the answers!  Sometimes the answer is just feeling like someone else is saying, “Yes, me too!” and that makes us feel less alone!

In the previous post here, I’m shared with you how oils impacted our life in an amazing way.  I know our story isn’t your story, but if you want to hear us say it in our own words, here it is:

But you probably want to know what essential oils even do, right?  Do they work?  What’s the big deal anyways?!  I get it- I wanted to know the same things.  That’s why we also put together this video where David explains the exact science of how oils work for us.  I promise it’s not boring- I don’t even like science and I love listening to him explain it- it’s so cool!  Both his chemistry/ pharmaceutical research & his natural healthcare background give him a well-rounded perspective on essential oils that are pretty interesting!

Ok, so now you know!  If you are more curious now, feel free to drop me a DM on Instagram and reach out there- I’m always wanting to listen and see how I can help <3

psssst I have a secret to tell you!

Oils don’t fix everything.

Whaaaat???

Did Amber Foresto, a CERTIFIED ESSENTIAL OIL COACH, just say that?

Yes, I sure did!

Now that I have your attention, hear me out.

Oils don’t fix EVERYTHING. This is not to say that oils are not powerful, because they sure are. The FDA won’t let me tell you all of it, but trust a sister that they are

SO
VERY
POWERFUL!

Do a little detective work to learn for yourself. “Essential oils have great potential in the field of biomedicine as they effectively destroy several bacterial, fungal, and viral pathogens.” Sorry Mr. FDA, those are not my words. That’s straight from PUBMED!

I am not here to debate the awesomeness of essential oils; I do that a fair amount already. What I am here to tell you today is that we are stewards, a responsible party of someone or something. As a Christian, I am fully convinced that we are held accountable for what and whom we have been entrusted to care for.

For one, it’s our own bodies! I think in the Christian community we can limit stewardship to regularly attending church, and not seek to love God in every area of our lives like He calls us to…which of course includes taking care of the TEMPLE in which the Holy Spirit dwells, our bodies – the ONLY vessel He gave us to live in! That was my conviction when we started our wellness journey with that little box of powerful essential oils (aka the Young Living starter kit).

Secondly, it’s our family! As a mama, I know that God gave us parents the precious gift of caring for our children. We choose what they eat, what medicines they do or do not take, their circle of influence, and more. The way we raise our kids, the values we instill on them and the example we set for them all greatly impacts their future. If we feed them highly processed, nutrient-depleted foods with all sorts of dyes and sugars then they WILL, eventually, down the road, suffer from the effects of that. Whether it’s physical or even behavioral issues, to a very large extent their future will be able to be traced back to how they were raised, what values they were taught, and of course their own free will to ultimately do what they want.

BUT IF we raise our children with a love for health and healthy things, they will take that excitement and knowledge into their adulthood, and generations will reap the many benefits of that. For our own children, they know that our food should be “organic with no additives”. They know that exercise is important, and essential oils are AH-MAZ-ING. They know that we should try to make healthy choices because it’s what God wants us to do, because He loves us and wants the best for us! It blesses my heart to see them excitedly embrace wellness now, because I know when they’re older they will take that knowledge and run with it. I pray!!

I started this out by saying that essential oils don’t fix everything, because as I’ve discussed, wellness is holistic. BUT they ARE an ESSENTIAL PART of the wellness lifestyle, both in a PREVENTATIVE way as well as REACTIVE. Ditching toxic products in your home is also a HUGE part of living a healthy and vibrant life, just like our food choices.

Ya’ll, baby steps may be needed to transform the way you live, BUT TAKE A STEP! Don’t look at all the things and cower and run the other direction because it seems too much. DO WHAT YOU CAN. Add just one change at a time. For us, we started with changing up our food. Then we got the Young Living starter kit and started pitching toxic products from our home. It has 12 oils that YOU WILL USE for over 100 purposes in your life. That’s a small box with a HUGE impact. Start there.

I choose wellness.

Xoxo Amberyoung living

Why Oils? (It might not be what you think!)

Hi, I’m Eryn, married to David, and we are adoptive parents.  In 2014, a couple years into parenting we still were overwhelmed (as most parents are ? and had a difficult time connecting with one of our children.  Supporting her needs took more patience and skills than I was equipped with and we were getting better.  Things were getting better, yet I still often felt distant from her.

That November 2014, I went to an essential oils class and got some samples of Lavender and Myrrh from a friend.  Later that same night, my daughter got sick for the first time since we brought her home with us.  She was hardly ever even with the sniffles, but she was really down that night.  I didn’t know what to do because I often felt out of my element with her, but this night I also hadn’t ever seen her feel this bad physically.  So I did some research and rubbed the oil samples I got over her spine and put some on me too.  Now, up until this point she wouldn’t really love snuggling or staying in my lap.  She was often wanting her space and wanting to be mobile.  I got to rock my other kids, but she wasn’t really into that kind of bonding time.

As soon as I rubbed the Lavender and Myhrr on her though, she crawled into my lap and slept, snuggled, settled in with me and stayed with me through the night so I could keep an eye on her.   It was really miraculous for our relationship!  I wept because I had been longing to hold her for so long.

I knew at that point that it didn’t matter if these little EO bottles did anything else, I was getting them just for my relationship with my daughter!  Spoiler- they helped with other things too ?  It was such a TURNING POINT for our family.

At that point I was all in!

I researched the heck out of everything I could and then I asked my super smart husband a billion questions.  He even read textbooks on essential oils (he’s a chemist and a chiropractor) and told me all about that.  This cascaded into a thousand different things that helped my family in ways I didn’t even know were possible.

We used oils more….our family healed emotionally.

We started using more green-cleaning items in our home…things got better for our kids behavior.

We started a business with Young Living because we loved sharing….we now are a stay at home family and get to make up for time we lost before we adopted.

We keep finding new things (still 4 years later!) that we love about Young Living.  If you want to start this journey and see what it will mean for your family- it might be different or similar to my story- now is the time, friend!

BDIY (BARELY DO IT YOURSELF): BUG BE GONE SPRAY

So i have a confession to make: i really do not like DIY’s. I would rather “throw money at the problem” and call it one and done. So let me just say- any DIY that I recommend probably just barely qualifies as a DIY, but whatever. Having bug spray that doesn’t seep chemicals and crap into my babies skin and my families skin pushed me over the edge to muster up the 5 minutes that this DIY takes! This toxin-free bug spray that you can safely use even on your littles is worth gathering up the two supplies off Amazon prime. And sidenote: if doing a 2 minute DIY makes you cringe, Young Living sells amazing Bug Repellant wipes ? I just prefer a spray and find this recipe to be super easy and it smells amazing too! The other tip is there are room spray recipes, sleepy sheet recipes, and hand sanitizer recipes you can repurpose with the same leftover 3 oz spray bottles and witch hazel! so its budget friendly. Anyway, I regress.

hiking the jungles of hawaii bite-free!

I first tried this bug spray recipe out when my oldest, Zeke, was 3 months old and we traveled to Hawaii for a summer vacation. I was so worried about him getting bit in the jungles of Hawaii because if he is anything like his mama, our blood is sweet and we just attract those mosquitos!

This recipe did the trick, and we have used this ever since for family vacations, camping trips, and outdoor summer fun! I used the bug spray on cute baby his legs (everything else was covered) and sprayed my husband and myself head to toe. NONE of us got bit a single time in spite of seeing mosquitos throughout the entire hike! WINNING! As always: I only use and trust Young Living therapeutic grade oils because of the quality and the way they process and distill! you can read more about that by going to www.seedtoseal.com if you’re a researcher; but if you’re like me, you just go off of what you experience works from companies you trust!

Keep this handy in your travel bag or hiking backpack and you can thank me later ?

BUG OFF BUG SPRAY:

Supplies:

3 oz spray bottle (i get mine off amazon!)

witchhazel

Young Living Oils:

20 drops young living citronella oil

10 drops peppermint oil

5 drops purification oil

5 drops lemon oil

5 drops cedarwood oil

All you do is shake all ingredients into the 30z. spray bottle! then get onto that adventure of yours!!!

Don’t let those bugs steal your joy this summer or keep you from getting your adventure on! happy summer everyone!!!

xx katy

Getting back to the roots

I have never been anti- conventional medicine. I was raised by a nurse and lived with the catch phrase “better living through pharmaceuticals!” and still to this day I believe there is a very important place for modern day medicine (shout out to Dr. Yang who took out my husbands appendix last week- no oil can do that!!;)…but I also feel strongly there is a place for the natural stuff too. This is my story.

when I turned 20 I found myself on birth control pills, steroid creams, and antibiotics strictly to treat acne on my face. The pill was making me gain weight, I felt moody, I knew my hormones were out of wack and despite my best efforts i got to a point where i was sick and tiredof feeling sick and tired.

so i did was any 20 year old college student would do: i flushed all of it. threw away the creams, fired my dermatologist and decided to get to the root. Turns out, your gut has a whole lot to do with your health, turns out that your skin is an organ and anything you put on it finds its way into every system of your body. It started a journey for me that I am so grateful I said yes to: a journey of getting back to the roots.

Young Living became a source of empowerment, a tool to teach my brain how to listen to the needs of my body, it got me in tune with my emotions and it healed my gut. When I say “young living” what i mean is “plant juice.” the lifeblood of plants that God created to help us stay healthy and strong.

Oils have helped me heal my gut (which took care of that pesky acne btw!) They have helped me through emotional trauma, anxiety, family crisis, financial crisis, and more. Oils have given me confidence as a new mom, and oils has become a tool to give me the ability to care for my family in a way that I am proud of. I am proud to be a gatekeeper of my home- choosing products and solutions that benefit my family and whoever steps foot into my home. And one of my favorite things: oils connect me to amazing people like YOU!

When I started gaining experiences and testimonies, I couldn’t keep it to myself. So here I am- 7 years later, 2 years into building my business- and I have over 600 families that have said “yes” to wellness alongside me. We are just getting started!

I want to invite you to come along on the journey with us. To be a part of a community that is a safe place to let your “freak flag fly” and us be like “yes mama. i know the feeling. have you tried Peace and Calming!?” (a common conversation amongst us toddler moms, ha!)

Whatever season you find yourself in, you can rest assured oils aren’t going anywhere. They are stable. They have been around since Bible times. for thousands of years they have helped us heal and get back to our roots…to feel connected and whole.

So whether its: hormones, stress, emotions, kids, nontoxic living, belief and mindset work, traveling, fertility, bedroom oils for the married folks….theres an oil for that ? lets get back to the roots together shall we?!

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Sed tempus urna et pharetra pharetra massa massa. Volutpat commodo sed egestas egestas fringilla phasellus faucibus scelerisque eleifend. Ornare suspendisse sed nisi lacus sed. Malesuada fames ac turpis egestas maecenas. Dolor magna eget est lorem ipsum dolor sit amet consectetur. Bibendum at varius vel pharetra vel turpis. At volutpat diam ut venenatis tellus. Pharetra et ultrices neque ornare aenean euismod elementum nisi. Sagittis orci a scelerisque purus semper. Morbi leo urna molestie at elementum eu facilisis sed. Tempus urna et pharetra pharetra. Urna nunc id cursus metus aliquam eleifend. Tincidunt ornare massa eget egestas purus viverra accumsan. Cursus sit amet dictum sit amet justo donec. Odio pellentesque diam volutpat commodo sed egestas egestas fringilla. Nunc aliquet bibendum enim facilisis gravida neque convallis a. Egestas pretium aenean pharetra magna ac placerat vestibulum lectus. Duis convallis convallis tellus id interdum velit laoreet id. A cras semper auctor neque vitae tempus quam pellentesque.

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Testimonies :)

One of my favorite things to do is share testimonies so I will try to make this  a running list of some of my favorite ones!

 

The oils that saved me during my super high risk pregnancy!

  • Peppermint — I had morning sickness ALL day!! I work with homeless and foster youth that sometimes do not have a place to shower or wash clothing so you could imagine the smells I am exposed to. This made it even worse! Well I found that one drop of peppermint on my nose was all it took to take that nausea feeling out!
  • Lavender and Frankincense- Put my Anxiety at ease. I knew my pregnancy would be high risk, but I was not about to consider termination. A few months in the stress of it all became overwhelming, anxiety had taken over and I could not function! I could not even sleep. That is when my dad brought oils to my house! These two were a GAME changer!!
  • Oils for Varicose Veins – If you put cypress, lavender, lemon and lemon grass in a roller it is like magic!! I have tested this on MANY people!
  • CBD: Seriously, I can not say enough about our CBD oil! Everyone has a testimony about it. I love that it has 0% THC so that means you will never test positive on a drug test.
  • Ningxia Red- THIS stuff is LIFE!! It has all the nutrients and antioxidants you need to in a day in ONE shot! When I take it I have more energy, make more breast milk so my baby girl can exclusively breast feed and my blood disorder like doesn’t exists. Also, one of my aunts had major stomach issues and when she got out of the hospital she tried it for a few days and had no symptoms.. then stopped taking it for a few days and the issues came back then drank it for a few days and again she was good! Now she is just a believer and drinks it all the time!

 

The beginning of our oil journey

 

As a young girl, I knew too well about cancer and grief. My sister had a 99.9% chance of living but the side effects of the chemo and radiation, the very thing that was supposed to kill the cancer, actually killed her. Not even 6 months had passed by before Cancer took my Tata Alfredo as well. It was a BRUTAL season for myself and family. The journey of learning how to live life with a new unwanted normal was long and painful, but I was finally happy again. In fact I was so happy and so proud. I had just come back from Studying abroad in Spain.

I knew something was not right when my dad did not come to the air port to pick me up. He literally called me every single night while I was in Spain to wish me a good night, I could not imagine what could keep him from being at the airport to see me. To make a long story short, it was Cancer. He had been diagnosed and had surgery my last week abroad. As you could imagine I was traumatized, I allowed my mind to go to the worst places like, “who would walk me down the aisle when I got married.” Lucky for us, he beat cancer! We were thrilled! But that did not last long, as it returned shortly after. Life went on repeat and after chemo treatment again he had won the battle! But then again it came back.

This time we all felt defeated, especially my dad. My parents decided to fight a different way, a clean and natural way! He changed his diet, drank alkaline water and used essential oils! In 6 months his cancer was GONE!! No pain or side effects, just a miraculous healing! We have been celebrating his life for the past 10 years and YES, HE DID WALK ME DOWN THE AISLE!!