Between The Mat and The Microbiome: My Journey Into Holistic Wellness

Wellness wasn’t always my world. For years, I lived inside the fast-paced rhythm of fashion and creative production deadlines, jet lag, the never-ending hum of “what’s next.” From the outside, it looked golden. On the inside, I was tired, bloated, my skin was inflamed, and my nervous system was running on fumes.

Yoga was my first lifeline. It gave me perspective, a tool to pause, breathe, and reset when everything else felt unrelenting. Eventually, it became more than a practice. It became a compass. I trained as a teacher, not because I had mastered yoga, but because yoga had quietly mastered me.

But even as I deepened into the practice, something wasn’t adding up. No matter how much I moved, sweated, meditated, or taught, my body wasn’t thriving the way I imagined it could. That’s when a simple question from different therapists opened the door: Are you vaccinated? Not just recently, but across a lifetime.

Curiosity led me to take a live blood analysis, performed by a naturopath, a microscopic window into what was living within me. The results were confronting: bacteria overgrowth, traces of heavy metals, blood parasites, reduced immunity. Suddenly it made sense why movement and meditation weren’t enough. My body was carrying an invisible toxic load within.

That moment shifted everything. I began to focus on healing from the inside out. Gut health became my foundation. Slowly, through liver cleansing protocols, supplements, mindful eating, nervous system regulation, and yoga as movement medicine, my body started to transform. My skin cleared. My energy returned. Brain fog gone, My digestion found balance. I began to look in the mirror and see not just health, but youthfulness I thought I had lost.

It wasn’t vanity, it was vitality. Healing my gut made me feel and look younger than my age, not because of quick fixes, but because my body was finally aligned. Radiance, I learned, is an inside job.

This shift also reshaped my practice. Yoga became stronger, more fluid, more connected once my gut was healed. Breathwork carried further. Movement felt lighter. Teaching became deeper, because I was no longer navigating from a place of depletion but from restoration.

It’s also what led me to start hosting retreats. Because sometimes healing requires stepping outside of daily life, regulating the nervous system, and giving the body time to catch up to the soul. My retreats became living laboratories where food, movement, stillness, and community weave together into something more powerful than any single class.

This is only the beginning of what I want to share here. In future columns, I’ll be opening up more about the tools that worked for me: gut-healing practices, nervous system resets, rituals that slow down aging, and the small daily shifts that create a life of energy and glow.

Because wellness isn’t about perfection. It’s about listening. And when you start listening to your body, your gut, your breath you’ll be surprised at how young, radiant, and alive you can feel.