My soul’s purpose is to be of service and to care for people, while helping them on their own spiritual journey. My passion is to provide a safe, sacred space for you to relax, refresh and recharge your skin, mind and spirit. When I opened Alternative Skincare and Wellness in 2019, I knew I wanted to create a place that combined my experience in skincare with energy healing. It has now grown to include Life Coaching with an energetic and spiritual approach. Intuition and positive energy are incorporated into everything I do to help you live your best authentic life.

Skin

My passion for skincare began as a teenager when I had severe acne. I learned first hand how facing the world can be difficult when your self esteem is affected about how you feel about yourself. I began my career in the beauty industry as a makeup artist over 25 years ago and loved to help teens and women feel beautiful. But, I wanted to know how to care for the skin properly instead of covering up imperfections and flaws.

I attended The Skin Care Center in Northern Virginia and post graduate training at the International Dermal Institute. I began working in spas and loved every second of it. However I soon realized I wanted to learn how to help people with their skin with more of a medical approach.

Soon after, I began working as a medical esthetician for a dermatologist, Dr. Terri Morris who had a medical and cosmetic practice. She is one of my greatest mentors and taught me how to identify and treat skin types and conditions with many different techniques, products and lasers. This was by far the greatest training of my career and I learned so much from her.

14 years later, I was a licensed Esthetician in 4 states, owned my own skincare studio, worked at several spas and doctor’s offices. But again, I found myself wanting more ways to help people. When a dear friend who was going through cancer treatments needed help with her skin I got extensively trained in Oncology skincare. I also learned more alternative modalities like Gua Sha, Reiki, lymphatic drainage, and aromatherapy.

I have always had a strong holistic belief using herbs, aromatherapy and eating healthy.  Knowing the body is connected, you can’t treat one part without it impacting another. With all of my experiences and people I have met in the skincare field, I’ve developed a method that gives results in a natural, holistic way.  With my husband’s help, support and website talent, we created Alternative Skincare and Wellness; a holistic approach to healthy skin and well-being. A lot of factors to one’s well-being including diet, stress, illness, medications and sleep all play apart for skin health.

When you come in for a facial, I will look at your body as a whole to treat your skin holistically.   You will experience a relaxing environment that you can escape from everyday life and leave with glowing skin. You will feel lighter, relaxed, and rejuvenated within your mind, body, and soul.

Mind

I have always seen life through a spiritual lens and saw the beauty in nature. I was always searching for my higher purpose and believed that everything happens for a reason. As an empath, I suffered with anxiety and depression and didn’t realize that a lot of what I was feeling and experiencing was not my own but was from other people around me. Discovering this and what it meant freed me from thinking there was something wrong with me. I have had many people come into my life that inspired me as well as teachers from motivational books and seminars. I also had people who weren’t as positive come into my life for a short time to teach me many lessons. I’ve acquired knowledge and life lessons to heal from my past and live a purposeful life. It has always been my goal to turn negative or challenging experiences into a positive. I have done this by helping others and using my experiences to motivate and offer support to my friends and family or anyone needing support.  For years friends would say, “You should be a life coach” as I coached them along their journey in a positive, non judgmental loving way. It literally took a pandemic to go to school to get certified in the thing that always came natural to me, and become a certified Life Coach.

It was 2020 during the pandemic, and it was so hard for me to not be able to see my clients as an esthetician and energy healer. I wanted to help people especially when I knew it was when they really needed self care and energy healing the most. I used the time at home to go within myself to discover how I could help people during this time of crisis. After meditation, reflection and self discovery I knew I needed to finally get certified doing what I like to do best and turn this difficult time into a positive. It was time to become a certified Life Coach to help people navigate the changes that were coming on the other side of this pandemic. I found a beautiful program at SWIHA (Southwest Institute of Healing Arts) that I could take online and make the most out of being at home quarantining. I wanted to learn more modalities to help people on their journey so I also got certified in EFT Tapping, NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) and Heartmath. Energy and Spiritualism is a part of who I am so I knew the only way to be a life coach was to combine them as a Spiritual Life Coach.

Spirit

I have always been an intuitive and empathic person even as a child. I would have a knowing about things that were going on with people around me without anyone telling me. I would often go into crowded places and feel emotions that I didn’t understand and didn’t know where they were coming from. Crystals, rocks and stones were always finding me and I was drawn to them. I was the kid with pockets full of rocks and always wanting a crystal necklace. My mother was also very intuitive.  We had many spiritual experiences when we were together and we loved to go shopping at Metaphysical stores.  She was a great support to me and we were very close and spiritually connected. She told me of stories of her grandmother being a healer and how she could lay her hands on people and heal them. Her belief was that it was passed down through generations and that she was supposed to have received this gift and knowledge but her father, a very devout catholic, was afraid of it and wanted nothing to do with it. She would tell me how she wished she had this gift, how she wanted to help people and that she would have passed it on to me to continue the legacy. In 2009 I learned about Reiki and told my mom about it. She was so excited because it sounded like what her grandmother did to help heal people. So, her and I took Reiki 1 and 2 together and I felt the peace come over her that she had found what she was looking for all these years. By this time, my mom had a lot of pain with fibromyalgia, we didn’t know it yet but she was soon diagnosed with early onset dementia. She would use Reiki to help heal herself but never got a chance to help other people. I continued on my journey and continued to take Reiki classes learning different lineages and approaches and became a Reiki Master/Teacher. In 2014 while living in New Orleans, I met an energy healer and teacher who taught me a new energy healing modality of how to feel chakras, clear and balance them. As well as clearing meridian lines and what she called fluffing the aura and guided meditation visuals.  At that time, I was working for a small skincare company and medical spa as a National Sales Director, Trainer and medical esthetician. I kept my energy healing to myself and continued to study more with only my closest friends knowing about this wonderful gift.

I had this fear of what people might think if they knew and if I would be taken seriously in my professional career. However, I knew it was my soul’s purpose and I longed to do this work.  When I opened up Alternative Skincare and Wellness in 2019, I knew I wanted to be my authentic self  to help people heal and carry on my family’s legacy. It is a gift to finally be able live my soul’s purpose to care for people and help others on their spiritual journey. In 2020 when my mom was in hospice in the last days of her life, I used Reiki to help her transition from this life to the next. Even though she couldn’t communicate well, being in the late stages of dementia, it helped her when she was struggling to sleep and when she was in a lot of pain. I intuitively knew that the journey she and I had been on throughout my life, to find and learn this hands on healing that has been passed down through generations, had all happened to be able to help her in that moment of transition. As I provide energy healing services to help others, I know my mom is with me in spirit to help me do the work she couldn’t do when she was here on earth.