About

When I was young, it never occurred to me that maybe I wasn’t normal. That maybe everybody else was able to function because they weren’t exhausted all the time.

It never occurred to me that maybe I wasn’t lazy, that maybe I needed the arts simply as an escape from the world because it was so hard to meet everyone’s expectations.

It didn’t occur to me that maybe something was wrong – deeply wrong – with my body, and my impaired functioning was a result of imbalances that never had to have happened.

No, not for many years – not until my mother got chronically ill around age 45 and suffered miserably for several years before dying decades too early.

Then I realized that everything that had happened to her was what was starting to happen to me – plus more, a lot more.

My gallbladder was keeping me up all night and making me feel chronically nauseated and in pain. My pancreas, thyroid, and adrenals were under severe stress and pushed my moods and stress levels out of control. My digestive tract was a nightmare, and I developed a very wide variety of sensitivities and intolerances. My allergies kept me constantly exhausted, and my throat swelled up so badly that I could sometimes barely swallow or breathe at night. I developed a heart arrhythmia and chest pain, which led to exercise intolerance, which led to the progression of two hernias, which made it even worse. I got to the point at which I developed knots in the muscles in my neck and shoulders that turned into severe headaches every time I would even try to clean the windows. I had chronic headaches and weird neurological symptoms. My immune system went into overdrive and I began developing psoriasis. My immunity went down the tubes, and I started becoming susceptible to colds and miserable infections.

I went to doctors who tried to put me on medicine, but all they did was make me worse. Waaaaaayyyy worse.

And the scariest thing? I could see all these things beginning to happen to my daughter at a very early age.

Finally, I said, enough.

Once and for all, I began to listen – really listen – to what my body was telling me.

I started going to alternative doctors who helped me understand what was happening to me. Apparently I’m not alone – there are a lot of people struggling with many of the things I’ve had. Maybe not a majority, but the prevalence of chronic disease is becoming scary – one in five people in 2019.

I started reading everything I could find about the origins of chronic disease and accounts of people who swore they knew how to reverse it. I found a diet that claimed to help people with gallbladder problems and dove right in. And that was the beginning of a huge awakening to exactly how many foods were bothering me because many of the things I cut out were not able to be resumed.

Once I stopped eating the things that were causing me problems, replaced my chemical products with less toxic versions, and started thinking about my own personal needs instead of simply running myself ragged to try to cater to everyone else’s whims and expectations of who I should be, my body began to heal.

But by then, I had no career, no friends, and no one who understood me – not to mention barely any food I could eat – in a small town in the middle of nowhere.

I had to make sense of everything while I regained my strength and figured out what the heck to do with the rest of my life.

I went back to school to finish my baccalaureate in psychology and discovered a whole new world had opened up since (I had to drop out to raise a child) twenty years earlier – and I loved it. I decided to go into health and wellness coaching because I couldn’t stand being the only one to benefit from all the hard work I’d done through the years.

All the things I’d gone through, all the things I’d learned – the hard way because I’d had no one to guide me for a long time – have enabled me to empathize with and understand others who are dealing with crippling chronic disease and/or anxiety, and help them figure out what they might need to consider to create wellness in their own bodies.

I truly love coaching, and I found out that I’m actually maybe even pretty darn good at it. Everything I’ve done to heal myself has come in handy in helping others to find their own ways to heal. But I really missed the corporate world and wanted to spread the message of wellness there, where it was so desperately needed – after all, it was where I got really sick, mainly, I learned, thanks to stress and poor diet.

Had I not been under so much stress, my genes would probably not have expressed the defects as harshly, I found out. I became desperate to encourage as many people as possible to take charge of their own health with the support of their employers, but I had no idea where to start.

I went to a Forbes conference and was welcomed to the Forbes Fellows program upon sharing my ideas. My goal is to make businesses aware of the many benefits of keeping their people happy and healthy – benefits to the business, the workers, and the rest of the world – as we pioneer a new model of wellness, one with a focus on incentivizing prevention. Perhaps it would force needed change within the current broken institution of healthcare, providing a viable alternative for those in the workforce.

I enrolled in the Chapman Institute’s WellCert program to obtain certification within the field, and I hope to meet more like-minded people who can share in this dream and help make it a reality.

In the meantime, I am pondering which Masters program to take. Decisions, decisions. Yes, I know I need to pick one and go with it .. but hey, it’s a big decision, and I’m still walking that road, just like you. I’m proud of myself: Monday I opened a Twitter account and started posting. Tuesday I made my first TikTok video and post. Wednesday I set up my Zoom account, and yesterday I began building my website to launch today. One step at a time. One breath at a time. And that’s how we make the biggest progress.

I really hope that COVID will change the nature of businesses, making them more receptive to wellness programming. I am excited about the potential and ready to get going. For now, I’m just putting all the content I can out on social media to help whoever needs it however I can from isolation. It’s there. Free.

If you are in need of something, there’s one thing I know for sure – I can help you. If I can’t, I’ll find someone who can.

Get ahold of me.

Peace, love and sunshine.. to the best of our ability right now. Yeah, it’s hard. I know it’s hard. That’s why I’m here.