What Stayed

By the time I was twenty five, I had been from doctor to doctor searching for answers. I was dealing with issues I couldn’t seem to resolve and felt increasingly frustrated by the lack of clarity. I could feel that something was off in my body, even if I couldn’t fully explain it.

At the time, I didn’t understand the mind-body connection. I wasn’t thinking about awareness, energy, stress, or any of the things that would later become important parts of my journey. I simply knew that I didn’t feel well and that no one seemed able to tell me why.

I remember sitting in a doctor’s office feeling completely defeated. I tried to explain what I was experiencing, but left with the sense that no one had really listened. The solution was another prescription. Not even for the issue itself, but something that might help.

What frustrated me wasn’t the medication. It was the absence of answers. No one could explain what was happening. No one seemed particularly interested in asking deeper questions. I wasn’t looking for a quick fix. I wanted to understand what was going on in my body.

More than anything, I wanted someone to take seriously what I was experiencing.

I remember leaving that office thinking there had to be another way.

Shortly after that, I met someone who opened my eyes to an entirely different way of thinking about health. For the first time, I was introduced to the perspective of an herbalist and healer, and it felt like stepping into a completely new world.

The approach was fundamentally different from anything I had encountered before. Instead of focusing solely on symptoms, the conversation centered around prevention, nutrition, cleansing, detoxification, and understanding how different systems of the body work together. The question wasn’t simply how to make something go away. It was why it was happening in the first place.

The more I learned, the more I realized how much there was to understand. Food was no longer just food. It became information. Ingredients mattered. Quality mattered. How something was grown mattered. The body wasn’t a collection of separate parts. Everything seemed connected.

What fascinated me most was the idea that nothing existed in isolation. The intestines, liver, kidneys, blood, nervous system, hormones, and immune system were all influencing one another. Depending on who I was learning from, that understanding extended beyond the physical body to stress, emotions, energy, and the ways our internal and external worlds affect one another.

The more I learned, the more I realized how much of the picture I had never been shown.

What started as a search for answers quickly became an obsession with learning. This was long before wellness became mainstream. There were no podcasts, social media accounts, newsletters, or endless experts sharing information online. If you wanted to learn, you had to seek it out yourself.

I started reading labels. I spent weekends at farmers markets. I became interested in Ayurveda and different approaches to understanding the body. I read books, asked questions, sought out teachers, and absorbed as much information as I could.

My kitchen eventually started to look more like a laboratory than a kitchen. There were herbs covering the counters, books stacked on every available surface, and more tonics, teas, concoctions, and experiments than most people would know what to do with. I was constantly testing, learning, researching, and trying to understand how different practices affected the way I felt. There were protocols and concepts I had never heard of before. Some stayed with me. Others didn't. Looking back, I probably seemed obsessed, but I was finally finding answers where I hadn't been able to find them before.

One of the first things my herbalist recommended was an aloe shake made from an actual aloe leaf. Most of us know aloe as something you put on a sunburn, but I had never considered cutting open a leaf, removing the gel from the inside, blending it with pineapple, mint, and ginger, and drinking it. Years later, it remains one of the simplest practices I return to because I genuinely feel the difference.

What stayed with me wasn’t the aloe itself. It was the realization that meaningful solutions aren’t always complicated. One of the first things that genuinely helped me was something most people walk past every day.

Around the same time, I immersed myself in yoga. What surprised me most wasn't the movement, but the breath.

Before yoga, I had never really thought about breathing. Through the practice, I began to understand the relationship between breath and movement, and how both could influence the way I felt physically, mentally, and emotionally. For the first time, I felt safe in my body. I learned how to slow down, how to be present, and how to listen.

Years later, when I launched Live The Process, much of that philosophy was woven into the brand itself. The connection between breath, movement, and awareness had become part of how I viewed life.

What followed was years of exploration. Meditation entered my life. Journaling became a daily practice. Transcendental Meditation became another tool in a much larger toolkit. Some practices stayed. Others served a purpose and fell away. Along the way, I explored countless teachers, healers, modalities, and approaches.

Over time, I became just as discerning with healers as I had been with doctors. Some changed my life. Others didn’t resonate at all. That turned out to be another important lesson. No one was going to hand me a perfect roadmap. I had to learn how to think for myself, ask better questions, and develop a relationship with my own body.

Recently, I completed a comprehensive functional health assessment and blood work panel. One of the findings was that my biological age measured at 34.

At 48, I was grateful to hear it, but the number itself wasn’t what mattered. What mattered was what it represented: years of learning, years of paying attention, and years of showing up for myself.

I wasn’t searching for a cure. I was searching for understanding.

What began as frustration eventually became curiosity. The more I learned, the more I wanted to understand. This journey was never really about finding the perfect supplement, teacher, protocol, or answer. Ultimately, it was about learning how to pay attention.

Over time, I realized that what I was really developing was awareness. Not just awareness of my body, but awareness of my patterns, my habits, my energy, my emotions, and the choices that supported me or pulled me further away from myself. The more aware I became, the better questions I asked. The better questions I asked, the more empowered I felt to participate in my own well-being.

Today we’re surrounded by more information than ever before. Everyone has advice. Everyone has an opinion. Everyone is trying to sell a solution. The challenge isn’t access to information. The challenge is learning how to stay connected to yourself while navigating it.

What began as a search to feel better eventually became something much bigger. It became a relationship with myself.

I don’t typically share this much about my personal health journey. For most of my life, these experiences have remained exactly that: personal. But this medium feels different. It feels more connected. More conversational. A place where ideas can be explored rather than prescribed.

This is simply one perspective. One experience. One path.

I don’t claim to have all the answers, and I’m still learning myself. What I hope to offer is not a blueprint, but a possibility. A reminder that there are often more options than we realize, more questions worth asking, and more than one way to approach healing.

Navigating your health journey is rarely straightforward. It takes patience, curiosity, and a willingness to remain open. If sharing my experience encourages someone to ask a deeper question, trust their intuition, or feel less alone in the process, then it’s worth sharing.

The practices have evolved. The teachers have changed. The things that support me today are different from what supported me twenty years ago. What stayed was the willingness to remain curious.

You don’t need all the answers to begin. You simply need to remain connected to yourself long enough to hear what is asking for your attention.