Desert Healing

On paper, life looked beautiful.

I was running a thriving non toxic lifestyle store featuring some of the most iconic wellness and home brands, getting featured in magazines, and wrapping up an incredible design build project. My days were full, balancing design meetings, sourcing materials, managing installations, and overseeing the final details of a home coming to life, all with my two little daughters often in tow. From the outside, it looked like everything I had worked for was unfolding. Family. Business. Momentum.

But inside, I was unraveling.

Every day felt like a battle. I was losing weight so fast my clothes stopped fitting. My joints ached like I was decades older than I was. Fatigue settled into my bones. Insomnia kept me awake until I hallucinated. Anxiety and depression wrapped around me like a second skin.

And still, I kept pushing through.

I told myself this was what success looked like, that exhaustion and pain were just the price of building something meaningful. I ignored my body’s alarms until I couldn’t anymore. One year postpartum, I could no longer function. My body was in a full collapse. I felt electric, constantly buzzing with anxiety, panic, and dread. I could not sleep, I could not think, and no one could tell me why.

I was told it was hormones. Postpartum. Burnout. All the usual answers, none of them enough.

So I did something radical. Something that surprised even me.

In August of 2018 I checked myself into a month long wellness retreat in Sedona, Arizona. Not for a reset. For survival.

The moment I arrived and stepped out of the car, I started crying. Not the kind of quiet tears you brush away politely. The kind that take over your whole body. I cried for two straight days. I could not even introduce myself to people. Every time someone asked my name the tears started rolling again and I could not get the words out. It was embarrassing and strangely relieving at the same time. I had been holding so much together for so long that the moment I landed somewhere safe enough to fall apart, my body took full advantage of it.

After those two days of crying something unexpected happened. I slept. Deeply. The best sleep I had had in years. The kind of sleep where you wake up and realize your body has actually rested. I still wonder about that night. Was my body finally letting go? Was my nervous system realizing it no longer had to fight quite so hard? Or had I simply arrived somewhere that could finally carry the weight I had been carrying alone.

Sedona itself was beautiful, but if I am being honest the desert was not exactly my dream setting. Colorado mountains feel like home to me. Bears, elk, even the occasional mountain lion sighting. Those encounters I understand. Scorpions and tarantulas, however, feel like a completely different category of life lesson.

The wildlife encounters began almost immediately. Tarantulas crawled along the outdoor stair railings above my head as I walked down to the community dining room. I tried to act calm while quietly speeding up my steps.

Another morning our group gathered for meditation. As everyone unrolled their mats, a tiny baby scorpion scurried out of the mat next to mine. Needless to say the meditation that morning was not exactly peaceful.

On another day I stepped outside after the session and found a snake coiled just a few feet from the door. I remember standing there thinking very clearly, where the hell am I.

The desert seemed determined to introduce me to every creature I had spent most of my life avoiding.

One afternoon another woman and I wandered down toward the riverbed behind the retreat property. The basin was completely dry, just sand and rock winding through the canyon. While we were standing there I noticed the sky shift quickly. Dark clouds started rolling in and something in my gut told me we should head back.

Within minutes the dry riverbed began filling. Water rushed toward us through the canyon in what can only be described as a flash flood. One moment it had been empty. The next a wall of water was moving quickly through the basin.

I ran. Straight up a field that I later learned was known for rattlesnakes. At the time instinct took over and the only thought in my mind was getting out of that canyon. By the time I reached my room I was soaked, shaking, and breathless. Moments later the rain came down in a sudden desert downpour, loud and relentless.

Looking back now, the irony of that month still makes me laugh.

I had arrived in Sedona feeling completely out of control. My body was failing. My mind was spinning. My life felt like it was collapsing beneath me. And suddenly I found myself surrounded by the exact environments and creatures I normally would have gone out of my way to avoid. Scorpions. Snakes. Tarantulas. Flash floods.

Nature at its most unpredictable.

But something about that wildness mirrored exactly what was happening inside my body. Chaos. Uncertainty. A nervous system that no longer knew how to slow down.

The desert stripped away the illusion that I had ever really been in control in the first place. And strangely, that realization was the first moment I began to feel powerful again. Not control. Agency.

The sweat lodges, the heat, the earth, the silence reminded me my body was still mine. The Wim Hof breathwork and plunges into cold water taught me how to breathe again, how to stay present inside discomfort instead of running from it. Dr Joe Dispenza’s work helped my nervous system believe healing might actually be possible.

For the first time I was not simply surviving symptoms. I was learning how to come home to my body.

I vividly remember sitting in one of the group gatherings, exhausted but open, telling the circle that I had a strong feeling I was meant to work with women. I did not know what it would look like yet, only that the pull was real.

Sedona planted the first seed of what would later become Outlaw Woman.

When I returned home, I did not have answers yet. What I had was a foundation, a way of living that felt steady enough to return to when everything else felt uncertain. Mornings anchored in prayer before the day began, movement that supports the body rather than depletes it, heat and sweat, simple nourishment, water with minerals, food built from whole ingredients, evenings that slowed instead of accelerated. Nothing extreme, nothing complicated, just the basics practiced consistently. But more than anything, it was a shift in how I approached my life. I began to slow down. To pay attention. To choose things with more care, what I consumed, what I put on my body, what I allowed into my environment.

Over time, I began to build a rhythm around these things. Not perfectly, but enough to feel a shift. It became the first version of what I understood as healing, not a solution, but a starting point. I simplified where I could. I began to favor fewer, better things. Products and practices that felt supportive rather than excessive. It was less about doing more, and more about choosing well. And it was this foundation that I carried with me as I returned home, into a life that would soon ask much more of me than I could have anticipated.