When I was a teenager my parents went through a devastating divorce. I felt like my whole world had crumbled. My most important relationships were in shambles. I was hurt. I felt abandoned. And, I had no idea how to deal with all my emotions and devastation. I felt so broken inside.

I did my best to pick up the pieces and decided that I wasn’t going to let this keep me from reaching my dreams. In order to cope, I buried myself in busy-ness and overachievement working to achieve my dream of becoming a pharmacist.

Over the years I did pretty well at keeping my pain covered up. I even had myself convinced that I had dealt with everything and was perfectly fine. It wasn’t until I started pharmacy school that I realized this wasn’t actually the case…

Pharmacy school pushed me beyond my limits of what I could continue to cover up. It was incredibly challenging. One day during my first year of school I came home completely exhausted after 8 hours of class with hours upon hours of studying to do. I went to my room and before I could even make it to my bed, my knees buckled. I fell to the floor and I sobbed, and I sobbed, and I sobbed. I felt so broken.

When I was finally able to pull myself together, I realized that my emotional meltdown didn’t have anything to do with pharmacy, it was about everything else I had buried for several years. It was about broken relationships, feeling abandoned, abandoning myself, trying to meet expectations, being so lonely and discouraged and trying to cope with the devastation of my parent’s divorce. For the first time in my life I was finally willing to admit that I was not okay.

I spent the next several years going to therapy, researching online and reading every self help book I could get my hands on. The next several years were a very fragile and intimate journey of finding and healing myself.

Once I finally graduated from pharmacy school and completed a year of post-graduate residency, I felt like I had finally made it. I had worked through so many of my struggles, I was finally feeling healthy, and I started my dream job as a pharmacist at the Mayo Clinic.

Now, because life always turns out how you want it to, a short 9 months into my job, I began to get a pain in my wrists and within two weeks I could no longer use the computer. “I’ll just take a short break,” I thought “and then everything will be back to normal.” Two months later I became severely fatigued, incredibly weak, in an unbearable amount of pain and nearly bedridden. I found myself miserable and sitting in the office of a rheumatologist. I won’t go into all the details of how significantly my life had changed, but I knew it would never be the same and neither would my career.

There’s one part of my story still to this day that I don’t like to think about and it’s the part where I have enough medical knowledge to know how significantly mental and emotional stress can impact your physical health. I can’t help but ask myself, “What if I had lived differently then, how would my life be different now?”

I laid in bed month after month and began compiling a program that could provide individuals with all the tools and education they would need to completely transform their health in four months instead of the 7 years it took me.

I now spend everyday doing what I can to make sure you don’t ever have to ask yourself the same question…