My Path

At thirty-one, the whisper became a word. I was diagnosed with Mixed Connective Tissue Disease, a condition that carries within it the patterns of lupus, scleroderma, and rheumatoid arthritis, all woven together in a way that asks the body to learn a new relationship with itself. I remember the way the room felt when the words landed, the way everything went quiet except the question forming inside me: what do I do now?

Six years later, the word became a sentence. Hashimoto's arrived, another autoimmune condition layered alongside the first, and I understood then that this was not a single chapter but a long conversation, one that would unfold over seasons and years and ask me to listen more deeply than I ever had before. My autoimmune conditions, plural now, were not something to fight or to fix. They were invitations to tend.

I chose to answer that invitation with learning. I enrolled at the Institute of Holistic Nutrition in Toronto, because I wanted to understand everything I could about how to support my body's innate capacity to come back to balance. I wanted to learn the language of inflammation, of immunity, of digestion and hormones, all the systems that were asking for my attention. Currently, I am training at the Functional Medicine Coaching Academy, deepening my understanding of how to walk alongside others on their own paths. I share that openly, because the learning itself is part of the path, and I am still on it.

The first changes I made were the ones closest to my skin. I filled my home with pure, clean products, natural fragrances, gentle formulations that honored my body and supported my liver. I replaced conventional skincare with pure, organic formulations and began reading labels with the kind of attention most people reserve for contracts, understanding that everything we breathe and touch and absorb through our skin enters our bloodstream and becomes part of us. Every small change became an act of love for the body that was working so hard to come back to balance.

Then came the food, a turning toward what was grown from the earth and full of life. I chose to nourish myself in a new way, turning toward foods that truly fed my body. Every meal became a conversation with the land, a way of saying yes to what the earth offers when we slow down enough to receive it.

I started walking, rain or shine, for grounding, for moving energy through my body, for reminding myself that I was still here and still capable of meeting the world with my feet on the earth and air in my lungs. It is the same way a root reaches toward water, with knowing, with a quiet certainty that needs no effort, and I think that is the moment I began to understand that tending asks for presence. It invites us to show up and be with what is, gently, consistently, the way the earth shows up for the seed.

My journey with skin health has been its own long season, woven through all of this. It began in my teens, when hormonal acne moved through my face and my life with an intensity that left me searching for answers. Through my twenties and thirties, the acne came and went with my cycles, accompanied by inflammation and redness that I learned to manage but never quite understood. Then, about nine years ago, alongside the height of my autoimmune challenges and the beginning of perimenopause, rosacea arrived. It settled into my cheeks and stayed, and with it came hyperpigmentation, the skin itself becoming a map of everything moving beneath the surface.

And then, a year ago, something shifted. Because I had turned inward, because I had been tending the soil and the roots and the rhythms of my body with patience and consistency, my rosacea cleared. My skin, for the first time in years, is calm. What my skin was showing me all along was something I would come to understand more deeply with time, that everything in our bodies is interconnected, that the skin is a window revealing what is happening beneath, and that for me personally, everything is rooted to the gut. When you begin to tend one area, the care ripples outward, touching everything else, and slowly, gently, the whole garden begins to shift. I have walked this path as a student, learning in my own body what it means to tend a garden from the inside out.

My personal journey has led me to the role of Director of Care at May Lindstrom Skin, where I have had the privilege of tending at the most intimate level for over eleven years. I learned to listen to skin the way I had learned to listen to my own body, with patience, with reverence, with a willingness to meet it where it was. I came to understand that the most beautiful results come from consistency, from gentleness, from the kind of care that asks you to show up again and again, season after season.

All of this is flowing together into the practice I am offering you. I share this because I want you to know that I bring both training and lived experience, both professional understanding and the intimate knowledge of what it feels like to receive a diagnosis and choose, again and again, to walk a gentler, more nature-based path.

And somewhere along the way, the flowers found me. For years I have stood behind the lens, captivated by their quiet elegance, and each petal has taught me something beautiful about impermanence, about beauty, about the courage it takes to bloom. What began as an artistic practice slowly revealed itself as something deeper, a quiet communion with beauty and impermanence, until I understood that flowers were my teachers as much as my subjects, showing me in their own language the same patterns I was living in my own body.

Navigating my own seasons of autoimmune challenges and hormonal shifts, I learned that transformation unfolds in its own time, that it is cyclical, just like nature, and that there is such grace in allowing something to unfold gently, in its own perfect season.

Today my autoimmune conditions are in remission, and I am still learning, still tending, still arriving a little more whole with each season. This is my offering, and this is my path. It is what the flowers have been teaching me all along, that we bloom and we rest and we release what is ready to go, and then we bloom again, more fully, more freely. That coming back to yourself is possible, that beauty matters in all of this, and that our bodies, given tenderness and someone willing to listen alongside us, know exactly what to do.

Perhaps something in this story speaks to something in yours. I hope it reminds you that your body is wise and worthy of trust, and that whatever season you find yourself in right now, there is healing waiting to meet you there, sometimes in the most beautiful and unexpected of places.


With warmth,
Elena