My upline (or person who signed me up as a Wellness Advocate) is Barbara Sherman. She sells doTerra products retail from her wonderful little health  food store, The Healthnut,  in Callao, VA. If you are looking for GMO free food in the Northern Neck of Virginia, this is the place to go. She refuses to sell anything that is not GMO free.

I loved her store and had been coming in since the day before the store actually opened. When I was introduced to doTerra oils,  she had only just been introduced to doTerra for a few weeks herself. The lady who signed her up is Kari Garrell and it was Kari who was teaching a class about how to use essential oils for gardening at the back of Barbara’s store.

I had found out about the class because I had been at another whole foods store down in Mechanicsville and purchased the Modern Essentials Guide. The lady there asked if I knew Barbara and I told her I did and she she mentioned something about a class which I sort of ignored. But then Barbara called me and invited me herself. It was on a Saturday, so I told her I would come.

The information provided by Kari was spot on with what I already knew about essential oils but magnified 100 times. Once I smelled the oils, I knew they were pure. None of them made me sneeze. All of them were very, very concentrated. While the majority of Kari’s presentation was on gardening, there were hints dropped about other things the oils could do for me and my family members.

I already knew lavender could be helpful to the skin. My husband, being a blacksmith, had often had his burns treated with lavender oil from another company. But smelling the lavender oil from doTerra and feeling on my own skin; I knew this was the lavender oil I wanted to have on hand for those small emergencies.

I’ll admit, however, the retail prices sort of scared me. When Kari advised we could sign up as members and get a 25% discount, this appealed to me. I also confessing to knowing that Barbara was only able to keep a few of the oils in stock at that time and I did not want to have to wait for her to stock what I wanted.

So, I took the plunge and became what we called at that time, an Independent Product Consultant. Later, our titles were changed to Wellness Advocate to better reflect the work we are really doing which is to promote healthy lifestyles.

That was July of 2013. I became a very loyal customer and collected oils like they were matchbox cars. I wanted them all! I attended a few classes all of them lead by Kari, but it wasn’t until November that I hosted my first class. In retrospect, I sure wish I had understood the business better earlier in my enrollment. But I know now I needed to come to believe deeply in what the oils could do for me first. To do that, I needed time to use them.

I’ll tell you all about my first class in my next post.