
about me

welcome
My name is Samantha, but I go by Sam a lot too. I'm so glad you found me, and I'm so excited that our stories may start to intertwine here.
A quick synopsis of me: I am a writer, a yoga teacher, an herbalist, a photographer, a deep lover of nature, a wonderer.
But if you'd like to know a lot more about me, and about the things I'm doing, thinking, and sharing then read on...
so what am I doing here?
(I ask myself daily)

I've spent years trying to decide how and what I should be bringing to the world and offering up. And though it’s ever evolving, I've found in that seeking a deep longing to find truer connections with others and more honest, vulnerable, and meaningful ways to live my own life and appreciate with our earth.
Let me first start by saying that I do not have it all together. I struggle, I digress, I distract, I get so frustrated by this world we've been handed, so frustrated by myself too, I make mistakes, time and time again I make mistakes. Yet through a lot of unravelling in the past few years, I've started to see glimmers of light, and I've found more and more a desire to keep pushing the bounds of what this world is asking of us and pushing deeper into the mysteries of what our earth is offering us.
So let’s go back in time…
In 2020, confused and scared as we all were, filled with a constant low-grade anxiety, and feeling a deep dissatisfaction with my career choices, I took a reach for something that gave me a bit of hope - I started a 200-hour Yoga Teacher Training. What started with excitement took me many long months to get through, and like everything else I tried to do, it turned into a bit of a slog and I didn't know if I’d ever finish it. I did eventually get through it, and as typical for me, once the pressure was off, I was suddenly so excited to take in all of the continuing education my school offered. I dove into trauma informed yoga, yoga for anxiety, yoga for depression, Yin Yoga. I started to see ways I could support myself more, maybe find a path through all of the turmoil 2020 and 2021 was bringing to us. As learning started to feel more attainable again, I started to get more curious about other ways to support myself. I started an herbalism course, I started to learn more about our nervous systems, our anatomy, our brains and bodies as a whole. I started to learn about cycle and hormone health and the haze hormonal birth control was causing me. And as I said, I tried and failed and made mistakes, and still do, daily. But slowly, I started to heal parts of me that felt impossible to deal with.
In 2021, I moved away from Chicago and to a more rural area of Colorado - I felt I was going crazy in the glass and concrete of the city and felt in my bones I needed a more natural world around me. After moving, I began to explore with photography as my guide. I'd wake up for sunrises and take my camera out to a new vista and just sit with my cup of tea, watching the light begin to fall again on the earth. I began to fall in love with the natural world again, reigniting a deep sense of wonder I had possessed as child, but had lost in the sprint of early adulthood. I found as I wandered the landscapes around me a deep sense of presence, of clarity, so bright and pure. The more I experienced it, the harder it was to return back to my day job, to put on a smile and pretend I cared about all the silliness our society has manufactured.
As I kept learning, kept trialing things, kept pushing my own boundaries, I started to talk about it all too. I started to teach yin yoga at a local studio, then started to offer classes online too, geared towards helping us calm our over-worked nervous systems. I started sharing my herbalism knowledge, I started talking about cycle health with other women around me. And slowly I started to write as well, about harder things too, digging deeper into our emotions, our patterns, our pain and discomfort. Digging deeper too into the mysteries of what our earth and our ancestors have gifted us. And I stated to see that we've need to talk about all of this. If we want any hope for ourselves, we've got to get down to the hard topics, be vulnerable, be there for one another, work through this all together, heal together.
And that brings me here, to this place of exploration let’s say - a place where I’m pushing my own bounds and digging deeper and hoping to forge connections as I do. This place where I’m sharing my trials and my failures and the small glimmers I see peaking through the cracks. I don’t have it all together, my gosh not even close, but I’ve felt this pull to begin. To initiate. To connect so that we can start to share our lives, support each other, and push more into the mysteries of this experience of being human.
me, in my happiest state, collecting rocks