Hey y'all! I have the pleasure of bringing Spring Esteppe, LPN and doTERRA Blue Diamond, onto our podcast today! She worked in Emergency Medicine for 10 years, then found resolve to look for answers to support her health and found essential oils and natural healthcare!
Sit back, relax and listen to this insightful podcast about empowering you towards natural health and your lifestyle!
On this podcast we discuss:
- Spring's journey toward working in medicine and healthcare
- Spring's discovery of her ability to help her health goals
- Her journey towards launching her empowerment website
- How essential oils can help you!
Here are the show notes from today's podcast:
Frank:
00:10 I am so unbelievably excited to bring our special guest for today's podcast on today. It is my good friend, Spring Esteppe, and she has been doing doterra with us now for at least five years. The pleasure of meeting her. Matter of fact, that's how we met was through a doterra essential oils, but I have just been so honored to be able to meet her and I really wanted to bring her onto the podcast today because I just have to share with you guys. She is very well known in the wellness world and I wanted to ensure that you guys knew how a licensed practical nurse could actually be, you know, traditionally trained in western medicine and then start adopting various different integrative ideas of different wellness ideas to be able to incorporate them into not only her family, but now she has grown to the capability of being able to help tens of thousands of people.
Spring:
01:15 So a spring. I just, I thank you so much for being on the podcast today. Oh Wow. Great intro. Frank. Thanks so much. I'm really excited to join you. Yeah, well we want to get started with talking all about you and so we have had the opportunity to meet your and your husband, Keith, who you guys are fabulous power couple and you all have just been so instrumental in even myself and Jackie's life when it comes to the whole understanding of wellness and a really good you can do this attitude. What'd you guys don't know about is that spring is like a traditional southern y'all. She is like, she is like, you're going to hear her talk and I just can't get over how just warm and inviting her voice and so I, I'm going to say this now and then we'll say it again at the end of the podcast, but please check her out.
Frank:
02:10 She now has springesteppe.com and that is her educational platform that she has just recently released, actually just bought a couple of months ago. Right. And in order for everyday folks like you would need to be able to get on there and get some knowledge about how to start having a better lifestyle and really just achieve the wellness that you've always desired. So thanks again for joining us. Thanks for having me. All right, so let's get started with talking about like where you came from, right? Um, you know, from what you told me is that you are a licensed practical nurse and you've been a licensed practical nurse for about 17 years now. Why don't you tell me about like, what your experiences were with that, like where did you work and all that sort of stuff. We'll just kind of take things from there. Sure. Well, um,
Spring:
03:00 I, I started my nursing journey. I'm 17 years ago when I actually graduated from nursing school, but even before that I was, uh, I am the daughter of a first generation hippie. My mom was very committed to natural health and wellness and I thought that she was crazy and in my teenage years I hit that rebellious stage where I was convinced that I belong in foster care, um, that my parents were losing their minds because they would never take us to the doctor. My mom was so passionate about natural medicine that I finally said, I'm going to become a nurse because I'm going to prove you wrong, and when I graduated from nursing school in 2001, I was so like, you know that that moment in your life where you kind of have dust your shoulders off and kind of market your parents and say, ha ha, I did it.
Spring:
03:52 That was totally me. And then I started working in health care as a nurse and I really quickly saw that these people that we were seeing, I started out as I worked my first two years in Icu and then I transitioned into the Er and I really quickly saw that the patients we were seeing were not getting better. That we were seeing them on a lot of them on a repeat basis. And the things that we were doing in healthcare was not actually fixing anything. We were just masking the symptoms and these are orienting more sick. And that was so frustrating. As a healthcare provider, you know, we, we practiced do no harm, right? Like we want to see people get better, but the ugliest side too, like I call it sick care because it's really not health care, but the idea is that people are actually not getting better.
Spring:
04:52 Like they are getting more sick as we go and it's not because of health care and it's not because of the doctor's fault. It's not. It's because it's a broken system and we have gotten away from the basic needs of health. And so through my years in working in er medicine, I was so frustrated and a lot of people will look at nurses and doctors and say, oh my gosh, they are so grumpy and they have such bad attitudes in that, you know, all the things. They're just not happy people. And I always said when I become a nurse, I'm not going to be like that, but it was happening to me. I got to where I was just angry and frustrated and felt like my hands were tied, working in medicine because I was not seeing people get healthy. So I definitely know what you mean if I May. So like an echo though are the truth.
Frank:
05:51 And certified peers between what know we have this mentality of when we first walk into whatever training we're going to go do whatever medical training do we have, this sense of empowerment light's going to conquer the world. And then when the rubber meets the road, goodness gracious. It's so unfortunate that people are doing exactly what you're saying. It's like, you know, we have, we have a lot of repeat offenders is what we refer to them as you that we have a lot of folks too. We go out there and we release them back out there quoting and then they come back and then come back. So it's like, you know. So it's like, what, what did you find out? What did you learn that you needed to be able to start doing in order to have help with these folks that were just sort of like walking through your door all the time?
Spring:
06:41 Well, you know, after being in er medicine for so many years, we were still at home. I'm a mom, I'm married. My husband and I have been together 21 years and we have two children at the time. My kids were young and I felt like even as a health care provider in my own home, I felt completely powerless when it came to tooth aches or the stomachaches or you know, any colds and Buddhist and my husband, he has a headache or the man called feeling a real thing by the way y'all professional diagnosis or just diagnosing. But you know, I felt powerless as as a wife, a mom, a caregiver in my home and then to come into the workspace and know that the people that I was seeing on a daily basis, they felt the same way I felt and how and I medically trained.
Spring:
07:45 So knowing that in the back of my head, like it led to even more frustration and then fast forward to 2012, I'm a friend of mine offered me some essential oils to try because my husband was dealing with recurrent mouth altars and I was just kinda like rare. I'm a professional stuff does not work. This is crazy. And my husband, he has his degree in biology so he's real smart too. He thinks and we looked at these natural healthcare options as a joke because we had never actually seen anybody use national health care options and see really good results from it, but what we didn't know is that it's more than just, um, what they were using there was, there's more to it than just using the product one time. And so we jumped into the essential oil world and July of 2012 and I just started doing my research and as I researched, um, I was still working in the Er that I was seeing that there was more to just masking the symptoms, a natural health product.
Spring:
08:56 Like what? Like that shift from educating yourself, empowering yourself and knowing that there's more to it than just one magic thing that fixes everything that translated across all platforms for me. So that was when I started talking to my husband more about, Ooh, we're going to dive into the essential oil world. And he thought I was crazy. We lived in the poorest area of Virginia and very, um, the Appalachian mountains, very rural. Everybody, the coal mining and railroad and they're not concerned with their health because they've never been educated and it was one of those things where I thought we have the ability to educate people and help them feel empowered whether health by just offering simple solutions to the everyday thing because I think when, you know, education is power, right? So when we know better, we do better than a lot of people don't take the time to educate when we're in the healthcare bill because we don't have time or all the regulations from administration comes down and we have, you know, five minutes with a patient and you don't have to do anything with that.
Spring:
10:09 So we just got really passionate about it and that's what we do. We educate and get down to the nitty gritty. It was unfortunately uses that exactly like so perfectly in the sense of, um, remember the, when I was working in a clinic however many years was that I always had to give like a monthly when I'm available kind of worksheet. And we had a, we had a schedule to where it was like Rehab and acute appointment. No more than 20 minutes or a follow up or you weren't allowed more than 30 minutes. We sold them, had 60 minute blocks, you know, and I remember the fight with a lot of my folks kinda tooth and nail to say like, I've never seen this person before. I'm not, I'm not gonna pretend like as if like we've been friends since, you know, when and all of a sudden I could just kind of pick up where somebody else left off.
Frank:
11:07 I didn't feel I didn't feel qualified enough to really do that. And even early in my career when I first got started, I was taught by a lot of lies folks to say like, you know, like really, you know when it comes to medicine, you do a lot more teaching than you expect and you really have to sit down with folks. So I remember what you just said like rings extremely true with me is that I was very frustrated that I was only being deemed to have a 20 minute session with somebody when maybe I never met them before. And I kind of wanted to find out their story and talk with them a little bit. And that's it. It's just that much more has happened now with being a, being a PA for the last 10 years. I've seen the trend a lot more of like fast medicine, you know, it's like, it's like a come in, get what you need or what the doctor believes that you need and be good with that and take off.
Spring:
12:04 I talked to a lot of physicians who will recommend their patients to me and say like, well, we've done all we can do, so why don't you just have to spring. She may have some options for you. A lot of these physicians are friends of mine and you know when we're, when they're off the record and we're just having a normal conversation, the frustration is palpable event because they're trained to help heal people and help them feel better. But because of all of the things that get in the way and a short office visit, they get stuck in the monotony of just describe this and send them out the door. And then as these patients come back because they want to feel better, they truly do to these physicians want to help them that they do not have time. And I think that that is what has created this sick care because our we're doing is managing sick patients and for me, I wanted other options and I also knew that as a mom I didn't want my kids to be in their teenage years and their early twenties, you know, an adult my age and have a whole list of health issues that maybe there were answers for that we could have addressed when they were children and we could have just raised them in a healthy lifestyle.
Frank:
13:24 Sure. Yeah. That makes perfect sense. And so umbrella of the lecture that I say this because with that also being, you know, we don't want the tone of this podcast where we're bad about our healthcare. Absolutely. That we live in a society where our abilities as healthcare providers are second to none. I mean, there are people literally right now saving lives. Yes, very, very unbelievably training physicians that are saving lives right now. But what we need to do is look at the same that are choosing us and coin and say, okay, that's definitely happening. People are getting saved, you know, cancers are getting removed and people are absolutely becoming success stories right now. And that's a wonderful thing. Um, but with that also being said, is that like when we look at some of the, some of the data in terms of like some of those surveys that I've seen is that now over 80 percent of Americans have some sort of a long term illness.
Frank:
14:31 And then longterm illness actually equivocates to about $2,000,000,000,000 spent every year in that form of healthcare to manage that condition. And so what we need to help spur along, and people I think in spring, you definitely can attest to this, is that we need to inspire people, the managers of their own healthcare, their lifestyle. That is going to be something that they know, that they are making those positive choices in order to be able to actually have the great foundation, great healthcare. Because we still want to make sure that everybody's still going to see a doctor. You absolutely should have a physician or a PA or a nurse practitioner and persons in your life. Yes, I need to go see them on a regular basis, but there is a lot of things that we can do on our end every single day because they're not the ones that are putting the food in our mouths. They're not the ones that are telling you to go out there and get a nice walk for 15 minutes. Right? Yeah.
Spring:
15:29 I like to tell people that it's not about replacing medicine. Modern medicine. I'm so thankful that we live in 2018 right, where they don't bleed and bleed into that at that you hurt your arm. We're going to have to take it off. Had a fever. Let me just. Let me just do a little bit of an incision on your carotid and drain all your life. You know that. Thank God we don't live in that high, but this is not about replacing. This is about partnering with because the frustration that we feel as a provider is not because we want to replace something. We weren't a partner with the modern practices and say, how can we make this better so that people feel better, they live longer, apply, they feel like you're in the driver's seat of their health, so thank God for modern medicine. Let's make it better.
Spring:
16:20 Let's partner together. And so when you yourself started noticing these changes and stuff like that in your family, what was sort of like the Aha moment? What was like the, I have to, you know, go from all of this wonderful information that I've been trained with to saying like, okay, now I need to go out there and inspire others to take charge of their own healthcare and take charge of their own wellness as well. You know, the, the, the biggest moments for me was the little things. Like when my kids start using in the middle of the night and they're on the top bunk and I hear that puke hit the floor tile, I hope it. I hope it wasn't like those were the worst moments in parenting when you feel like, oh my gosh, like what is it that I can do? Because most parents feel like, oh, like we have no options, and so they're paralyzed, you're paralyzed, and you're like, oh gosh, what?
Spring:
17:22 Who can I go to you? But then when you get to whoever, they most of the time say there's nothing I can do. I'm so sorry that came in here. Go home and rest. And so the key moments, turning your moment with my kids and even with my hubby where I was like, oh, we can do things and and have these tools at home that we can manage symptoms and support our bodies need. We started seeing really quickly a rate. It's been six months and we've not had a sick visit. Oh wait, it's been a year or two years, three years, four years, and now we're on six years and we've had no sick visits and our family at all. It doesn't mean we don't get sick. It just means that we have tools that support our body's needs and that is empowering and we're also a part of this tribe of these like crunchy for whatever that means.
Spring:
18:18 People who are doing the same thing and we're seeing this little bit of this revolution that's kind of like taking over where people are like, hey, we know that we can do things, but it's not just about the specific tools that we use. It's more about health education with our. With our families where I say, Hey, we reduced the amount of sugar that we eat. We focus on gut health when we focus on movement and we focus on healthy sleep patterns and all of that empowers us so that it was gradual when all those things started to happen, but worth it. Once we realized that we were like, strap up because we are going with this because it's changed our lives. Right.
Frank:
19:03 You said that so perfectly. You're talking like if you guys are listening to right now, like you're listening to two people whose lives have been changed in the sense of feeling like we actually have something that we can do about it. We don't have to feel like as if like, oh do we need to wait for this to get so bad? And then when do I flip that switch and say, okay, now let's go start the car and get ourselves over to the hospital. We have that ability to like, it's almost like, it's almost like a hate to say it, but I mean like, it almost like it's the same kind of pattern that you would follow if you are falling into some sort of an addictive thing like you know, but, but I don't know if anybody would ever be upset with themselves because I know that we're not to be addicted to good health.
Frank:
19:53 The good news is is that just like you said, you cannot view this overnight. This is not something that you can just wake up and say alright, I'm going to do all these 97 different things and all of a sudden by next week I'm going to be healthy. I mean like it took some time to get ourselves into a situation where we felt like we made it out of that helping and it's going to take some time to kind of get us back on. Our bodies are not made in such a way that we can have that sort of change. Everything is gradual and so we want to help you eat that elephant. One time. One of the big focuses that I tell people is
Spring:
20:30 happen overnight, but if you look at your life and you're like, you know, I really wish that I felt better. I wish I slept better. I wish I wasn't grumpy all the time. I'm like, it's not about like you wake up the next morning and you'd go out and you buy all food and you do all the things, tries you all in one day. Because if you do that, you will fail miserably and feel even worse because you'll feel like a failure. The reality is any of us who are successful with a healthy lifestyle has put little things into practice slowly over time and it takes years, you know, and that is where the success comes because then it becomes a habit, right?
Frank:
21:14 The metaphor of like a professional athletes, professional athletes didn't become a hall of famer overnight. Like obviously they, they started playing high school football and they listened to some really great coaches and they had some, yeah, they had the natural ability, but a lot of it was nurtured, you know, it's like nature involved in it, but a lot of nurturing as well. And then that's how that person became a really great football star. So you know, you can't, I can't lay down and say like, okay, I want to start working out and then like stack on a bunch of weights and like bench press 300 pounds tomorrow. Oh yeah. We got to build ourselves up to that. You know, we can't, we can't just, we can't just automatically assume I can start a diet and it's okay. I can follow all of these. Maybe more stringent rules of this diet tomorrow. You know, because unfortunately a lot of those diets fail because people seek to pick and do that. So yeah, you said it perfectly
Spring:
22:10 as diets like that a lot when I'm talking to people because everybody knows somebody who jumps on the next fad diet, right? They do it for the sake of light healthy living, that they've not done any other minor adjustments in their life. So whatever the Diet may be, whether it's, you know, um, Keto or Paleo or veganism or whatever, like carbon ariens per se, like if they've not made minor adjustments in their life, most people when they jump on a fad diet, they're not going to be successful because it's overwhelming and they've not made the minor tweaks. So this is more about gradual progression, support, a lot of communication and education.
Frank:
22:53 Honestly, great expectations and realizations. You've got to be realistic and practical about it. You can't, you can't just assume I can be that person tomorrow. Got To, it's a slow process because you didn't feel that stuff happens. Tell of like, why I don't like social media sometimes is that social media depicts, I call it like the espn highlights film of somebody, you know, you either see the real bad loans, the real low lows or the really high highs and most of the time more people like to post those really high highs. Oh yeah. You know, they really liked the post. I'm like, oh look, I went out and bought a new car, or oh look, we're going to go on another vacation. And it's like, yeah, you don't see the amount of debt that they're carrying or the amount of frustration that they might have or not for that. Especially in this day and age, you know, mental health concerns a lot of folks. And we think that we think that, you know, just because we're playing nice on social media doesn't mean I don't have a lot of demons that were trying to deal with our mental health problems.
Spring:
23:59 Yes.
Frank:
24:00 Yeah. So then that's another aspect, guys, that I want you to be aware of is that everywhere, you know, spring and I have been mainly talking more so about physical health, but physical health is just as important as mental health and we really want people to be aware of, you know, that there's hope for you and that there's an opportunity in essential oils actually are a great start for a lot of people when it comes to their mental health. If you want to explain spring, if you want to elaborate more on emotions and the types of research that are coming out now, uh, you know, with, with, with essential oils. And, and just kind of describe that to us, if you wouldn't mind doing that.
Spring:
24:36 Well, I think it's really interesting that we sometimes in the health care world we neglect like mind, body and spirit. You know, we said this on the body and we leave out this huge element of the mind and our emotions. And I know and anything you could probably agree with this, but when you deal with people and you see a lot of people in the healthcare world, um, a lot of their physical as a direct result of their mental animals. And so when you're dealing with retirement issues, chronic health conditions, it doesn't matter how many medications you surround the body, like if there's an underlying emotional problem, it will manifest itself as a physical problem and you can address the physical. But in truth, you get to the root of the emotional needs. The physical will never heal. And there is so much new science coming out about that.
Spring:
25:37 Um, and, and then by first data, if the physical is always sick, it causes an emotional overwhelm, you know, like. So we have to work with both the mental and the emotional or the emotional and the physical with people. And there's all this research now about how essential oils cross the blood brain barrier. They, they work in the brain at the chemical level to address serotonin and dopamine levels. And all of these things affect overall mental wellbeing and how we feel. And then on the other side of that, there's other things about how we don't fix the gut, you know, the gut is more than just our stomach and how we feel, right? Like 80 percent of our serotonin is from our gut, from our Gi track is where it's produced and it hits the brain, right. So like we need to address all of this, the whole person as a whole. And so when we, when we talked about using essential oils, these are such a powerful tool to be able to address not just how you feel in that moment, but to create a longterm healing effect by using different sense for triggering memories and working through trauma and supporting brain chemical levels and all of this stuff. So
Frank:
27:03 no, I think that's great. I think that the way that you put it in terms of like talking about how really what we're doing with essential oils guys I've hit bottom line, is that we are trying to create this understanding of our own self, but allowing the body to do what it does allow the body to actually do what it was designed to do. I mean, we had been given a, an amazing blessing and our bodies are capable of some tremendous things. I know of people who have become, you know, amputees have some sort due to it being maybe a war related injury or something like that and you'll literally see people get brand new prosthesis and be able to go running again because they're not going to let it hold them back that they've lost an entire limb. You know, like that would be an absolutely devastating thing.
Spring:
27:59 But with the power of the body they can overcome. Maybe something that's significant is that and be able to still live a very full life. So, you know, that's one of the things that catapulted myself and probably you as well, spring is that we have just this fondness. And to be honest with you, I'm mean just drink. All of the human body is so well designed that if we give it the right tools that you can absolutely take care of itself. Oh God. We won't find ourselves in the funk of different situations because usually it's either too much or too little. You know, our bodies are designed for moderation and too much or too little of something, whether it be good or bad is not always gonna. Give you the results that you're hoping for.
Spring:
28:45 Our body gives us signals all the time. Anytime that you have anything that is off in your body, it is a sign that your body's giving you as either a deficiency or a toxicity of something. And you know, our bodies were designed to be self hearing machines, right? Like God created us to be human chain. And I think this example like, have you ever held these examples so many times? It's like, okay, I felt like 1 million, 200 times probably if you break your arm or your leg and you'd go to the Er, we don't give you a pill in the Er for your leg or your arm to heal because it doesn't work that way. We put a cast on whatever the broken part is and then your body doesn't want. Your body heals itself because it has the appropriate tool to stabilize the broken area and then your body goes to work and it corrects itself because something is off and if we look at our health that way we look at how we support our health that way.
Frank:
29:48 Then everything we do will be managing toxicity or deficiencies. Right? So if you're somebody who says, oh, I, I have struggled with, had discomfort of some sort for my entire life. Well, what is it? What's the underlying thing that you need to address that's going to fix that? Because it may be a structural part of your body on the line, that issue. It may be an underlying gut health issue. It may be an emotional issue that there are things that you can do to check all those boxes to see how you can best support your body. Right?
Frank:
30:24 Can I just say, I wouldn't even be able to add to that. I mean, that's just so perfectly said that it's just a lot of truth in everything you just said is that, you know, we just systematically can work through things and most of these things where we can be empowered to do them on our own. We can. Absolutely. I mean, unless you just said about breaking your arm or your leg. Okay. We did it. Well, you know, like that's, that's, that's the problem. Okay. And so we need to go get additional management for that, but really could we break bones every single day? Right. Like do we have to head discomfort like most days of the week? Are we sleeping poorly most days of the week? You know, like there's, there's, there's tons of medications out there to, to manage those issues as well. But you know, there's sort of like just putting a bandaid on a, on a leak, on a big dam that's getting ready to erupt. We need to replace the stone with the choices that we're making in that dam in order to be able to actually successfully look at it and say, Gosh, I can't believe that I was able to do that. I was able to overcome the issues that I've always had with getting nice healthy sleep disorder. And
Spring:
31:51 I struggled with that. Like I've still struggled with it at times, but since we've been on this natural health journey, I can identify the things that caused me to have flares. I can identify the things that I need to do differently in my diet and my exercise and movement that caused me to be able to support my body's needs at that time. Because, you know, when, when I worked in the Er, I will be treating patients and, and I would say, you know, what is your life threatening medical emergency that brings you to the Er? And I would have people say things like, well honey, I've got fibromyalgia and I'm sitting there triaging and diagnosis and I, and I was looking at these patients and I would think, what are they doing differently that I or what are they doing that I can differently?
Spring:
32:40 And you know, now I'm 41 and I've had fibromyalgia for a long time and I know if I don't get proper sleep then I'm gonna be very uncomfortable. If I'm not managing my stress, I'm going to be very uncomfortable. If I eat a ton of sugar and I'm really high in Carbs, then I'm going to be super uncomfortable and not able to move very well. And so that just caused me to feel like, oh, he went bad. So then I weigh around more if that makes me feel worse. So if I stay on top of it and I'm supporting my body was good supplements and good rest and good food, man. It's like a humbling or you know, I'm feeling great, but still, I don't even know what you talked about. I mean, I don't know.
Frank:
33:32 I mean, Fibromyalgia has a diagnosis of exclusion. Yes, yes, we have some real criteria if you will. You know what I mean? Like we understood more than what we did 15, 20 years ago. Regardless, it ends up being like, well we have to like say all these things that it's not in order to be able to say that this is what it is, but the thing is is that I would offer that there is a multitude of different situations out there that we need to address the whole person to be more effective. Fantastic. So for the sake of time, I mean my goodness gracious girl, we could probably talk for hours, but for the sake of our listeners, we're coming up on that time and so I just wanted to sort of circle back and finish where we started and you first of all like you guys are amazing.
Frank:
34:38 We are so grateful to be able to know you guys and thank you so much for sharing your heart with us today. We just want to know that if know you're going to fall in love with Spring, so go check her out again. [inaudible] dot com and you will be able to put is where it's all about the approach to modern living cell, but once again, spring. Thank you so much. It's just been so wonderful to have you on today's podcast and I just cannot wait for you guys to be able to listen to this and be able to join us again on our. Take care everybody. Bye. Bye.
