🌿 A Bit More About Me

If you’ve ever wondered how someone ends up doing this kind of work — the kind that sits at the crossroads of hormones, healing, and soul — well… it’s rarely a straight path.

Like many women, my own journey into functional medicine wasn’t planned. It was born out of necessity — out of years of pushing, crashing, questioning everything I’d been taught about “health,” and slowly finding my way back home to myself.

The truth is, everything I teach now was learned the hard way — through lived experience, late-night research, and a deep determination to heal what traditional medicine couldn’t explain.

I’ve always been fascinated by the human body.

When I was thirteen, while other girls were reading Seventeen magazine, I was curled up with books about health, vitamins, and how everything in the body connected. I didn’t know it at the time, but those pages planted the first seeds of the work I do now.

When it came time to choose a career, I had no guidance on what was possible. I didn’t even realize there was a School of Nutrition on my university campus until I was already a year into my Commerce degree. Holistic or functional medicine wasn’t part of my world — not in my family, not in my education. So I did what seemed logical and safe: I entered the corporate world.

Eighteen years in finance taught me discipline, leadership, and how to carry responsibility — but it also nearly broke me. I lived on caffeine, low-fat diets, birth control, and stress. I believed what the magazines said: fat was bad, sugar was fine, and pushing through was strength.
What I didn’t realize was that my nervous system and hormones were quietly collapsing under the weight of it all.

By 37, everything came crashing down.
I was a single mom, the sole provider for my two kids, and I could barely get out of bed. My neck and back froze, my brain felt like mush, and I’d collapse on the living room floor after getting the kids off to school. I couldn’t work. I couldn’t drive. I was in pain and terrified.

A psychiatrist diagnosed me with bipolar disorder, said I had a degenerative brain, and handed me medication with no questions about my diet, stress, or sleep. The pills numbed me, but I felt like a ghost. I remember thinking, this cannot be the rest of my life.

So I became my own experiment.

This was long before wellness was mainstream — before Instagram experts and podcasts. But I stumbled across a small study that said omega-3s were essential for brain health. I changed my diet — more protein, real fat, less sugar — and noticed a shift. Around the same time, I found a lecture by Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn on mindfulness at Google. His words lit something inside me. He spoke about awareness, about meeting life as it is. His book Full Catastrophe Living became my lifeline — because I was, quite literally, living the full catastrophe.

I practiced mindfulness daily. Eventually, I applied to his MBSR teacher program — even though I wasn’t qualified by conventional standards — and somehow, I was accepted. That retreat changed everything. In one silent week, I learned that my mind wasn’t my enemy. I began to heal. Within a year, I was off medication, free from depression and anxiety for the first time in decades.

I didn’t go back to corporate. I couldn’t.
I knew I had to help others find their way back, too.

I started a small in person practice — before “coaching” was even a thing — and called myself a life coach. I worked with people over the next decade, helping them transform anxiety, emotional eating, and self-sabotage through mindfulness and mindset work. But eventually, I saw something deeper: mindset alone wasn’t enough.

The body needed to be supported too. Hormones, minerals, liver health — they were all part of the story. I couldn’t just coach someone out of fatigue or anxiety that was rooted in inflammation or adrenal collapse. Around that time, functional medicine began to emerge, and I dove in headfirst. I studied with some of the pioneers and began blending mind-body medicine in a way that just made sense.

Then life invited me into another layer of initiation.
I got married and divorced in a single year; then moved unknowingly into a house full of hidden mold. That experience dismantled me again — almost bedridden for two years ridding the mold and parasites that had taken over my body. As hard as that was, it rebuilt me in a deeper, more embodied way. It’s how I learned, once and for all, that healing isn’t linear. It’s cyclical, like nature herself.

That’s what led me to where I am now — 55, Hashimoto’s in remission and living in a little farmhouse, working with women in midlife who are navigating their own turning points. Because I know what it’s like to lose yourself — in illness, in survival, in roles — and then slowly find your way home.

Everything I’ve learned — from finance to functional medicine, from mindfulness to mitochondria — comes together in this work.
It’s science and soul, structure and surrender.

It’s the work that saved my life — and it’s the work I now offer to others.