The Beginning: When Plants Called Me Home
My journey into herbal medicine began not with ancestral wisdom, but with a mother's determination to help her suffering child. My son faced a cascade of medical conditions—severe eczema, food allergies, environmental sensitivities that were stealing his childhood joy. We saw specialist after specialist, accumulated prescriptions, followed protocols. But something felt incomplete. I enrolled in nursing school thinking medical training would give me the tools to truly help him, but during my clinical rotations, I realized conventional healthcare wasn't my path. The system didn't allow space for what patients really needed—time to be heard, holistic understanding of their struggles, approaches that honored the body's innate wisdom rather than just suppressing symptoms.
That's when I discovered yoga therapy and began my transformation into a Clinical Yoga Therapist—a journey spanning over seven years that dramatically improved my son's quality of life through nervous system regulation and mind-body connection. But I wanted to go deeper. Plants kept calling me back, and I pursued that passion with professional rigor, completing my clinical herbalist certification and studying botanical medicine, pharmacology, herb-drug interactions, and therapeutic applications with the same dedication I'd brought to healthcare training.
But book knowledge wasn't enough—I needed relationship with the plants themselves, hands-in-soil connection to the medicine I would offer others. So I purchased five acres of forested Arkansas land and built Gaia's Garden Organics from the ground up. Every plant in these gardens has a story. Every herb I harvest carries intention. Every remedy I craft holds the care I wish someone had offered my family when we were struggling. Gaia's Garden Organics was born from a mother's love, a practitioner's expertise, and a deep belief that healing happens when we honor both clinical knowledge and the wisdom of the natural world.