For more than a decade, I've worked as a bilingual speech-language pathologist, helping children and families find their voice. I love that work.

 

But over the years, I began to notice something happening within myself and around me: the women who spend their lives caring for everyone else can become very good at leaving themselves out of the equation.

 

The clinicians. The mothers. The daughters. The women everyone leans on.

 

I was one of them.

 

I knew how to care for everyone else. I knew how to keep going. But somewhere along the way, I had forgotten how to listen to my own body.

 

When my body finally started asking for attention, I listened. And my own healing eventually led me back to something that had been with me all along.

 

It began with my grandmother.

 

Growing up in Brooklyn, my grandmother and I would take walks together to the plant shops nearby. I remember the hanging plants. The way the smell of herbs would surround us as soon as we walked in. And I remember watching her move from plant to plant, naming each herb one by one.

 

I was fascinated by how much she knew. She would share with me the healing properties of the plants—the ways they could nourish, soothe, support, and restore the body.

 

I was in awe of her. In awe of the herbs. And in awe of nature itself.

 

I didn't know it then, but something was being planted in me. A curiosity. A reverence for plants. A deep knowing that healing could be found in the natural world.

 

Years later, when I began studying herbal medicine, it felt less like discovering something new and more like remembering something I had known long ago. The thread had always been there.

 

My grandmother planted that first seed in me as a child. As I grew, it became a path of healing that eventually led me back to the plants, back to my body, and back to my roots.