Healing for free

or nearly at least.

AS I SHOVELED YET ANOTHER HANDFUL OF SUPPLEMENTS INTO MY MOUTH

As I shoveled yet another handful of supplements into my mouth, I sat contemplating how hundreds of dollars of supplements were keeping me alive — and how stopping even one of them might reverse everything I’d worked for.

Right outside my front door, aloe vera grows wild in my yard. And yet there I was, driving to the health food store to buy it in a bottle. That image keeps coming back to me. That’s the whole problem in one picture.

Here’s the embarrassing part: I thought I had it all figured out. I’m a spiritual guru of healing. Healing was supposed to be easy for me. I thought I had healed. But really I was just masking symptoms with supplements and hope, and hope, it turns out, is not a protocol.

The human body is resilient. It’s actually really good at healing. Mine just seemed to want to murder me at every turn. Multiple autoimmune diagnoses, endometrosis, rare diseases like Eagle Syndrome, mold toxicity. Was there no end?

What I’ve lost isn’t just my health. I’ve lost the spark and joy that makes me me. Every turn of my head brings pain, so I guard my movements, fearing what’s coming next. I don’t have the energy to dance. To play softball. To be the person I actually am. Bad days are spent in bed, crying, begging God to heal my body. God has been silent. I get mad at God. I beg Mother Gaia. And then I get mad at her too.

And then I realize: there is no prince charming coming to save me. Prince charming is me.

My grandfather knew this. He healed his glaucoma by mixing cayenne pepper in water and pouring it in his eyes every single day. My grandmother drank corn silk tea. They healed everything they could naturally, without a credit card, without a supplement stack, without a naturopath charging $150 a month for a single bottle of modified citrus pectin. They just knew. And somewhere between their generation and mine, that knowing got replaced by a product.

Conventional medicine, while fantastic in emergencies, offers zero solutions for the chronic and often debilitating illnesses I deal with. 90% of the medications we take are synthetic versions of something that already exists in nature, loaded with side effects and rarely producing true healing. Stop taking them and the symptoms come right back.

There has to be another path. Food. Meditation. Ancient wisdom — Chinese medicine, Ayurveda. Not instead of modern medicine, which has its place, but alongside it. And maybe, sometimes, just the aloe growing wild in my front yard.

The piece I kept coming back to was the gut. I thought about studies showing that when Native Hawaiians returned to their ancestral pre-colonization diet, their bodies healed rapidly. That landed somewhere deep for me. I knew that’s where I needed to start.

My naturopathic doctor put me on modified citrus pectin. The results felt like a miracle. My blood sugars stabilized. My body felt better. The cost? $150 a month — on top of the hundreds I was already spending, while not being able to work the way I wanted to because of my chronic illness. Which meant limited funds. A literal impossibility for healing.

Herbal medicine, food, the earth, our mother earth, this was our ancestors' medicine. She was the mecine that held us in her arms. This was the medicine of the people, long before healing got commercialized and bastardized into a profit machine for corporations and supplement companies. Your great grandmother didn't have a wellness budget. She had a garden. She had knowledge that got passed down around kitchen tables and through back screen doors, not sold in brown bottles with health claims approved by the FDA. Somewhere we got convinced that the answers were always just one more magic pill or supplement purchase away. They weren't then and they aren't now.

So I decided to try to make it myself. I bought oranges, limes, and lemons and cooked them in a slow cooker for hours with water, convinced I’d cracked it.

The blood sugar stabilization did not materialize. It was a failure.

Or was it?

Maybe it was an invitation. A reminder that there is no shortcut, no hack, no single supplement that is going to save me. I have to actually do the work. My grandparents didn’t have a shortcut either. They had knowledge. Passed down, earned, lived. And I’m going to find my way back to it.

At 47 I don’t have time to mess around. Somehow the world whirled by and here I am, nearly 50, a healer who needs to heal herself. Healing for free isn’t just about money. It’s about remembering what my family already knew. That the answers are older than any bottle on any shelf. That healing is a birthright, not a subscription.

So come with me. This is the beginning of the real work, the hard work, healing body, mind, and soul. And I’m not doing it alone, so buckle up buttercup and joinme for the ride.