Meet Isabel

A woman with blue eyes and long brown hair smiling outdoors near water, wearing a straw hat, a black top, and colorful jewelry.

Threshold Tender • Folk Herbalist • Earth-Based Energy Worker

About Me

I grew up as the eldest daughter in a family that worked incredibly hard. From a young age, I learned responsibility. I learned how to anticipate needs, read the room, and shape myself into whatever would help keep the people around me comfortable, cared for, and happy. I became deeply attuned to the emotions and energy of others long before I knew how to listen to my own.

Later, I would come to understand this sensitivity as part of being an empath.

As a child of the 90s, I absorbed so many unspoken stories about womanhood, sacrifice, and caregiving. My father was a firefighter and often away working long hours. My mother carried so much while also raising us, tending the home, and nurturing her deep love of plants and gardening as a horticulturist. Watching her, I unconsciously learned that to love meant to hold everything together. To overextend. To keep going no matter how exhausted you were.

And I did.

As a single mother, that pattern deepened. I became the person who could handle everything. The dependable one. The strong one. The one who kept moving even when I was quietly unraveling beneath the surface.

By the time 2020 arrived, I was completely burnt out.

I had spent so much of my life tending to everyone else’s needs that I had lost connection with my own voice, my own body, and my own desires. I was successful by outward standards, but internally I felt exhausted, disconnected, anxious, and deeply unfulfilled. I had become so skilled at performing and holding space for others that I no longer knew how to hold space for myself.

Nature was one of the only places where I could still hear myself clearly.

As a child, I felt most at peace outside. Eating food straight from the garden, making mud pies, sitting quietly in the grass, feeling connected to something larger than myself. My mother’s love of plants and the earth rooted itself deeply into me long before I understood how much medicine lived there.

That relationship with nature became an anchor throughout my life.

When I felt overwhelmed, disconnected, or lost, the earth always brought me back to myself.

Remembering Another Way

My parents also introduced me to energy work and meditation early in life.

At fourteen, my mother began exploring Reiki and introduced my brother and me to meditation and the understanding that the divine was not something outside of us, but something living within us. Before that, I had grown up attending church every Sunday and moving through the Sacraments of Christian Initiation. Those experiences shaped me deeply, but Reiki and meditation opened another doorway entirely — one rooted in inner knowing, intuition, presence, and energetic awareness.

Over time, my mother went on to become a Reiki Master, and my father also trained in Reiki as well. Though I didn’t fully understand the depth of these teachings at the time, they quietly rooted themselves within me and would later become an important part of my own healing and remembrance.

Years later, during one of the hardest seasons of my life, they found me again.

In 2014, I attended herbalism school while still deeply immersed in my career as a chef. Though I didn’t fully realize it at the time, this path became one of the first ways I started returning to myself.

As I studied the medicinal properties and energetics of plants, I began weaving herbs, flowers, and seasonal rhythms into my menus and daily life with greater intention. Food became more than nourishment or performance, it became relationship. Ceremony. Medicine.

Working with plants reminded me that healing does not have to be forceful to be transformative.

The plants taught me about gentleness. About slowing down. About listening. About the intelligence already woven into the natural world and our own bodies.

Herbalism did not feel like learning something new.
It felt like remembering.

Remembering the wisdom of the earth.
Remembering the sacredness of nourishment.
Remembering that the body already knows how to move toward balance when we learn how to listen.

Even amidst the intensity and burnout of restaurant life, the plants continued calling me home.

In 2021, my husband and I filed for divorce. What initially felt like an ending became an invitation into deeper honesty, healing, and transformation for both of us. Through deep inner work, difficult conversations, nervous system healing, and relearning how to communicate and show up for one another, we discovered another way of relating. One rooted in intention, accountability, and truth.

We are still together today.

That chapter changed me.

It taught me that healing is not about perfection. It is about willingness. Presence. Softening. Learning new ways of being. Remembering that we do not have to continue repeating the stories we inherited.

The Path Back to Myself

Leaving the restaurant industry in 2020 was another threshold moment in my life. After years of overworking, people pleasing, perfectionism, and tying my worth to performance, my body and spirit could no longer sustain the pace I was living.

What looked like ambition from the outside was often survival.

I had spent years disconnected from rest, nourishment, pleasure, and my own needs. I was living almost entirely outside of myself — constantly performing, producing, caretaking, and striving to feel enough.

There came a point where I realized I had built a life around meeting everyone else’s expectations while abandoning my own inner voice. I had become so practiced at reading the needs of others that I no longer knew how to ask myself what I needed.

I was exhausted from carrying everything alone.

Leaving the culinary world became one of the first times I truly chose myself.

What followed was not an instant transformation, but a slow and sacred unraveling. Through grief, rest, plants, ritual, embodiment, nourishment, boundaries, energy work, and deep inner listening, I began returning home to myself piece by piece.

I began honoring not only the rhythms of nature: spring, summer, autumn, winter but also the rhythms within my own body. I started living in deeper relationship with my menstrual cycle, learning to honor rest, creativity, action, and inward reflection as sacred and necessary parts of being human.

The earth became both teacher and mirror.

The more I softened, the more I realized that healing is not about becoming someone new.
It is about remembering who you were before survival taught you to disconnect from yourself.

That journey now lives at the heart of the work I offer others.

Rooted in Spirit and Earth

My work is a weaving of many threads:

The folk wisdom of my Irish, Scottish and Mexican ancestry
The medicine of plants, who have always spoken to me
The rhythms of nature, which guide how I live and serve
The sacred cycles of death, rebirth, and everything in between

I walk with others through life’s thresholds with reverence, compassion, and presence. Whether you're facing the death of a loved one, the unraveling of an old identity, or the quiet ache of burnout or change, I hold space for you to be met in it all. To feel seen, softened, and supported.

Path of Study & Devotion

My path has been shaped through formal study, lived experience, ancestral healing, and deep listening.

Herbalism Roots graduate (2014) with over a decade devoted to working with plant medicine and nourishment
Over six years of energy work practice supporting nervous system balance, grounding, and reconnection
Death Doula training through The Deathwives, the International End-of-Life Doula Movement (IDLM), and A Sacred Passing
Over fifteen years of ancestral healing and lineage work
Ongoing mentorship, study, and devotional practice that continue to deepen my work

But my deepest education has come through listening:
To the plants.
To grief.
To the dying.
To my ancestors.
To the quiet voice within.

This work is not separate from my life — it is woven into the way I live, nourish, heal, relate, and move through the world. As I continue to grow, soften, and deepen in my own healing and remembrance, the work I offer continues to evolve alongside me. Expanding organically into new forms of care, connection, and support.