From Nursing to Nurturing Roots: My Journey

Before I was a nurse, I was a little girl watching my grandmother tend to everyday ailments her own way. She didn't reach for the pharmacy; she reached for what she knew. Black salve for boo-boos and burns. Salt water gargles for a sore throat. Epsom salt for a wound that needed cleaning. I didn't know it at the time, but that was my first education in natural remedies, long before I had a name for it.

Years later, I became an ICU nurse. It was intense, meaningful work, but somewhere between the long shifts and high-stakes moments, I hit burnout. Hard. That's when the searching began, about fifteen years ago now. I wasn't just looking for ways to support my patients differently; I was also looking for ways to support myself.

That search deepened when I moved into hospice care. Being present with people at the end of life has a way of clarifying what actually matters, and my curiosity about holistic approaches turned into something much more serious. I got more serious about studying essential oils and plants. I began making my own body care products, just for myself at first, mixing things in my kitchen. My friends and coworkers started noticing and loved what I was creating. They were the ones who pushed me to actually sell it.

In 2018, I finally listened. I opened an Etsy shop. I started doing pop-up markets, and I discovered something I didn't expect to love as much as I did: standing across from strangers, talking about plants, watching a stranger's face light up when something finally clicked for them. That was the real beginning, even though I had no idea yet how long or how winding the road ahead would be.

Then the world shut down. Every market I had planned for 2020 disappeared almost overnight. I had to pivot, so I did. That’s when I found health coaching, enrolled in a certification program, and from there fell down the functional nutrition rabbit hole until I became a certified functional nutritionist, and later a functional diagnostic. I genuinely loved deepening my understanding of holistic and alternative approaches to health, and I loved supporting people who were open to looking outside the box and get to the root of their health challenges. 

But if I'm honest, something still felt unfinished. I was searching for clarity, not just in my professional life, but in my personal life too. I didn't know exactly where any of it was leading, or what I was supposed to do next.

I was a member of the Holistic Nurses Association, and in the spring of 2022, that organization had gifted me a ticket to the Medicines of the Earth symposium in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. I almost didn't go. I had other responsibilities that weekend, and it would have been easy to skip it. But at the last minute, something told me to show up anyway.

I can't fully explain what happened there, but the clarity I was seeking was shown in the most beautiful way. I left with an overwhelming sense that I had found my calling. These were my people; herbalists, naturopathic physicians, people who saw the body and healing the way I had always sensed it, even before I had the language for it. This was the path I needed to follow.

I came home and started searching for a program that would work for my life at the time. I found one, and finished my herbal studies in 2024 — while simultaneously completing my FDN-P certification, because apparently I've never been someone who does things one at a time.

This past year, I've been building a service-based holistic health business. And I'll be honest, it has been hard. Building a client base of people ready to invest in their health and wellness has been slow, and somewhere in the middle of it, I started losing sight of the bigger picture. The whole point had always been to help people, doing something I genuinely loved, and building a life around that. But I wasn't loving it. At least, not the way I was doing it.

Marketing myself has never come naturally. I'm not an influencer. I'm not a social media guru. And somewhere in trying to build and promote a service-based business, I lost touch with the actual joy of my craft — the part that started this whole journey in the first place.

But there's something funny about how things come full circle. I started this entrepreneurial path years ago creating natural products with my own two hands, just because I loved doing it. And now, after everything — the burnout, the pivots, the certifications, the mountain weekend I almost skipped — I've landed right back there. Creating herbal medicine to support people's health, the way I did at the very beginning, except now carrying everything I've learned along the way.

This is Nurturing Roots Healing. It took fifteen years, three certifications, a global shutdown, and one weekend in the mountains I almost didn't attend to get here. But the spark that started all of this has been reignited, and this time, I'm not letting it go.

Join my community below to see the herbal apothecary grow online and someday in the physical sense, as this is my ultimate goal.