04/26/2026
Here’s what I’ve learned since that moment. And it took a cancer diagnosis, a seven-hour surgery, years of training as an herbalist, and sitting in ceremony in the Peruvian Amazon to learn it.
The wellness industry has it backwards.
Wellness, the way most of us practice it, comes from the same framework as modern medicine: biomedicine. It treats the body like a machine. Something’s wrong? Remove it, repair it, manage it. Wellness is just the lifestyle version of that. Optimize, supplement, track, manage.
But there is another way of seeing the body. One that many of our grandmothers already knew. In holistic traditions, the body is not a machine to be managed. It is an intelligent, self-healing organism. And the goal is not wellness. The goal is vitality: the full expression of your life force.