Carol’s Story — When the Body, the Heart, and the Spirit Speak at Once

I didn’t begin my life as a business owner or a community builder.
I began it as a survivor.

I grew up carrying childhood trauma that shaped my nervous system long before I had language for it. I learned how to stay alert, how to be useful, how to keep moving even when things hurt. Like many people who grow up this way, I learned to override my body’s signals and call it strength.

In my twenties, my body was already speaking.

I was symptomatic of autoimmune disease long before it was ever named. Fatigue. Inflammation. Skin reactions. Pain that didn’t make sense. Things that were easy for others to minimize — and easy for me to push through. I was young. Capable. Functional. So the symptoms were treated as isolated issues instead of warnings.

I adapted. I always had.

I became an Army wife, holding life together through constant change, stress, and separation. Military life teaches endurance and flexibility — but it also teaches you to silence your own needs. You don’t fall apart. You keep going.

Later, I became a cosmetologist. I loved the connection. I loved helping people feel seen, safe, and confident in their own skin. But beneath that, I was still disconnected from my own body. Still functioning through pain. Still believing I could outwork whatever was wrong.

Then my trauma surfaced.

And when it did, my body followed — fully and violently.

The autoimmune disease I had lived with quietly since my twenties didn’t just worsen. It presented in a life-threatening, life-altering way. My system became inflamed and reactive beyond anything I could manage — and it didn’t stop at pain or skin or exhaustion.

It reached my heart.

Suddenly, this wasn’t just about discomfort or quality of life. It was about survival. My heart — the literal organ that keeps you alive — became part of the illness. The fear was real. The consequences were real. And the version of my life I thought I was living disappeared.

 

At the same time, everything I had buried emotionally came rushing forward.

The collision of unresolved trauma and a serious autoimmune flare nearly ended my life — not because I wanted to die, but because I couldn’t see how to live inside a body that felt like it was attacking itself. My faith cracked. My coping mechanisms failed. I was in a full spiritual crisis — the kind where everything you believed dissolves, and you’re left asking whether you’re meant to survive at all.

What changed my path wasn’t a miracle cure.

It was listening.

For the first time in my life, I stopped overriding my body — and started honoring it. I turned to breath, slowly and intentionally, as a way to stay present in my body. And with that breath came a return to the old ways — to plants as allies, to earth as teacher, to ritual as regulation, to practices rooted in relationship rather than control.

Herbs became a way to listen instead of fight.
To soften instead of force.
To support my body — and my heart — instead of punishing them.

The physical healing came slowly, and it came alongside spiritual reclamation.

I began making balms because nothing available was gentle enough for my body. I formulated because I needed answers that didn’t harm me further. I studied herbalism not to start a business, but to survive — to protect my heart, my skin, my nervous system, and my life.

And then other people began asking for help.

Something for pain that doctors dismissed.
Something for sensitive, reactive skin.
Something for migraines, stress, and bodies in constant fight-or-flight.
Something for people who had been told to “just live with it.”

Green Magick Apothecary was not born from a business plan.
It was born from lived experience — and from a body that nearly didn’t make it.

Every product I make exists because someone needed it — often because I did first. Every formula is shaped by the understanding that trauma lives in the body, autoimmune disease is not just physical, and healing must honor the heart — literally and figuratively.

What I’ve built is more than a brand.

It’s a reclamation of my body.
A protection of my heart.
A devotion to listening.
A promise to never dismiss what the body is trying to say.

I didn’t rise from the ashes as someone new.
I rose as myself — alive, intentional, and still listening.

And I’m still here.
Still choosing life.
Still building something sacred from what almost took me.