Meet the Heart Behind the Hands

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I didn’t find holistic medicine because life unfolded neatly or because my body was resilient and cooperative. In fact, my story is quite the opposite. I found natural medicine because I became very, very good at pushing through. 

For most of my life, I was strong, athletic, driven, and capable. I learned early how to override discomfort, how to minimize pain, how to keep going even when something inside me was whispering that things weren’t right. Over time, those whispers turned into symptoms, and the symptoms became constant companions. Still, I kept going. Still, I was told I was fine.

Years passed like that...more than I care to count.

Eventually, after years of suffering and being dismissed, a chronic Lyme disease diagnosis finally arrived - not as a solution, but as a naming of the truth, a validation that I was in fact, not crazy. This was not all just in my head, as I had been told by doctors for so many years.

Even then, I kept functioning on the surface. Working. Showing up. Smiling. No one really knew how sick I had become. Not clients. Not even friends. Only my parents, who watched me slowly disappear on the couch, my body failing in ways I had become frighteningly skilled at hiding. That’s the part that still breaks my heart a little - how ill and alone I truly was without anyone realizing it, and how practiced I had become at surviving quietly.

There was a point, after immense grief and loss cracked me open completely, when my body simply could not push through any longer. My cognition began to fail. I couldn’t remember my address. I couldn’t remember how to type, how to sign my name, or the lyrics to my favorite songs. Anxiety ripped through me and hollowed me out. Most days were spent talking myself out of a panic attack, or doing my best to breathe through one. I lost mobility in my limbs. My grip strength vanished. My mom literally had to cut my food for me. The list of symptoms was horrific and impossibly long, but somehow still invisible to conventional doctors and the outside world. In the end, my organs began shutting down...

In a final act of faith, I took a leap and went to a natural healing clinic in Tennessee called Biologix. For two weeks, around the clock, they supported my body using entirely natural modalities, herbal medicine included. I arrived barely functioning, but in the quiet hours of those passing days, something started to slowly come back into my body. I found my strength rebuilding, and with that, my hope returning.

I left treatment feeling alive.  More alive than I had felt in months, perhaps years. The practitioners at Biologix quite literally saved my life, and in doing so, they introduced me to a version of medicine that sat with me and listened first, that treated my body as intelligent rather than broken, and that honored the complexity of what I had lived through.

In the days that followed, healing didn’t come as a dramatic before-and-after moment. It came slowly, in layers, through safety, through nourishment, and through learning how to trust my body again. 

Going back to school wasn’t about changing careers after a mid-life crisis, as I sometimes joke, but truly, it was about answering a calling born from survival. I studied because I never want someone to sit in front of me and feel dismissed the way I had. Because I know what it costs to be overlooked and not believed. Because I know what it feels like when your body is screaming and the world tells you "you’re fine, just push harder."

I’m humbly still learning...still becoming...still in awe daily by how much the body wants to heal when given the right conditions and genuine care. I don’t believe I have all the answers, but I do believe in listening deeply, in honoring a person's full story, and above all, in the sacred responsibility of being trusted with someone’s health.

If any part of this feels familiar, if you’ve ever carried symptoms quietly, or grief in your cells, or exhaustion so deep it changed who you were, I want you to know something:

I see you. Truly.

Thank you for being here. Thank you for witnessing this moment with me. This work and this path are born not from regret, but from gratitude. And this, my friends, is just the beginning...🌱