About hOMnaturale

& Rebecca

Some of My Trainings that have shaped my well-rounded Health Coaching Practice:

Rebecca’s Nutrition Education Certifications: Functional Nutrition Alliance, 2024; Integrative Institute of Nutrition, 2014; National Institute Nutritional Education, 1997.

Rebecca’s Registered Yoga Teacher Certifications: Interdisciplinary Vinyasa Yoga, Nosara Institute, 2002; Anusara-inspired yoga teacher, 2009; Prenatal, Post Natal- Kripalu, 2002 (Ashtanga Yoga, Baptist Power… & many more through the decades)

Therapeutic Massage Trainings: Lek Cheia “JapSen-nerve touch” Traditional Thai Massage & Herbal Therapeutics, 1998, Chaing Mai, Thailand

Botanical Medicine Education: American Herbalist Guild, 1997 & 7 years with Herb Pharm, Williams, OR

Bachelor of Science, Education: University of Rhode Island, 1986

I am like the Lorax, I speak for the trees. More specifically I speak and teach for Mother Nature, reminding people that well, our Mother knows best and her wisdom is patience. Also, that God the Father, is within and throughout, for his Divine miraculous spirit and supreme intelligence crafted us into existence. (Scientifically this potential, manifesting, yet mysterious energy is referred to as the God Particle.) It’s this great wonder that I trust as everlasting love, which keeps me in awe and gratitude.

So I like to remind people that we need to treat ourselves as spiritual vessels, with kindness and care, for our bodies love us, and are waiting for us to love them back. Our bodies strive to keep us healthy even with abuse, but if we gave them the sleep, movement & food nutrients they need in order to function optimally, well, we’d all be a whole lot healthier.

Of course we all go in and out of pulsations of sickness & health, darkness & light. It’s not easy to remember the importance of self care, or to sometimes even recognize that we are harming our bodies. Putting our health first when we have others to care for, and both minor and major challenges to try to figure out how to live through, often just makes us default to whatever we know as familiar, or to whatever comes naturally easiest. But, at least we can take recognize the consequences on reflection to our choices, and that it’s our choice to respect our bodies as indeed this life is an amazing opportunity.

I learned early on, at age 18, to be in awe of my existence as I risked loosing it all. I spent three months on the top floor of the University of Vermont’s Mary Fletcher Hospital, in a mental health ward after experiencing the dangerous confusion I created within my body, mind and spirit after experimenting with LSD.

What a mismatch of providing my body’s needs with such a poisonous mind altering drug, especially on top of a sensitive belly, brain & body, as I had grown up with a steady intake of sugar & caffeine and had serious hyperglycemia, and systemic candida albican over growth, which played havec on my hormones and nervous system. My family owned a fabulously well known RI institution, Allie’s Donuts, which my 6 other siblings and I all worked at (me all through my teen years). All of us also held an unspoken, emotional trauma in our hearts after loosing our 15 year old eldest brother in a car crash en route to delivering doughnuts one January day after school. I was age 6.

So needless to say I was a sensitive being, and shocking my systems with such a toxic chemical, and then being given even more toxic substances, as prescribed by the team of doctors at the well known teaching hospital, threw my body way off. I was so high I probably did not sleep for days, and my mania was quickly moved from psychotic drug espisod to bipolar disorder, for after a senior year in high school of noted depression (post heart breaking boy problems) the manic-depressive label was slapped on to my every emotional mood swing and personality.

I knew what stable health and happiness were though. I knew my mom’s garden fresh food and traditional home cooked meals felt good inside my body, and that when I played softball, or hiked and biked in the great outdoors I felt grounded, and when my family was altogether laughing, or when I danced to live music or smoked a little pot my spirit always got easily ignited, often to the point of fainting in overwhelming bliss. I knew I passed out at the sight of blood, or super bad menstrual cramps, and that I had lots of migraines growing up and serious stomach pains sometimes after eating and often when nervous before an oral report I wasn’t prepared for or with the pressure of a homework deadline. Hmmm is that manic-depression, or was it stress I was having a hard time processing adequately?

I remembered who I was A lover of nature, a teacher of what I most needed to learn, and a courageous soul wanting to fulfill dreams and visions of travel and experiences that served others and respected nature.

I always felt confused when just going along with my doctors wishes, prescribing me drugs that numbed me to the point of forgetting how to laugh and converse. I always felt wiser listening to my gut, and knew I must follow my souls directive to take care of myself on every level, with my food and nutrition, my sleep and my ambitions.. I had to surround myself with healthier food and nature. I wanted to teach school out west, and be of service to this world that I was so in awe of.

I gradually got off the prescriptive drugs for my “mental illness diagnosis of Manic Depressive, Bi-polar disorder” - it was 1982. I knew my symptoms were diet & lifestyle caused. I felt it in my gut!

By the time I graduated from college and was living out west teaching second grade at West Sedona Elementary School, I was still experiencing migraines, brain fog and super bad menstrual pain. I sought out acupuncturists & nutritionists, my first, a Seventh Day Adventist, had me juicing cabbage before meals & eating no sugar, grains or fruit; she had me waking at 5 am for runs to a beautiful spot (I lived in Sedona AZ!! the spot was Cathedral Rock and Oak Creek). I was taking cold showers and eating no food after 3 pm! That was 1987. My issue.. chronic yeast from years of sugar.

I tackled my candida (chronic yeast infections) with The Yeast Connection book & fulfilled my nutrient deficiencies with nutrient dense, low glycemic veggie juices I made or purchased at a little health food store I worked in on weekends and summers in Sedona. I learned to calm my nerves and GI tract by massaging my lower abdominal where my ileocecal valve was, in a downward motion, and I made my own goat yogurt and sauerkraut, as taught my Nancy, my Adventist Nutritionist. I was basically healing my leaky, stressed gut, which back then was still called a nervous stomach or ulcer. AND I was improving my methylation and B Vitamin issues, by balancing my blood sugar, eating a lot of folate rich greens and by reseeding and feeding my micro biome, then referred to as my inner eco-system.

Prior to moving out west, while still in college and recouping from my “nervous breakdown” years, I joined a healthy food cooperative, started buying & preparing my own healthy meals, and I asked the Universe, aka God for help. I wanted to learn everything I needed to know to help my self. I wanted to know how to prepare natural foods and herbal medicines. I knew I needed to help my “nervous stomach”, as I was told growing up is what I had, as every time I got anxious or excited I would keel over in pain and pass out. I wanted to feel less gaseous and in pain after eating. I wanted my brain to feel less confused, and my energy & emotions to be more balanced.

I also desperately needed to fulfill my soul’s desire, to teach and travel and be an advocate for what I believed in… that working in my family’s popular coffee & donut shop wasn’t for me, nor were the drugs I grew up taking “to prevent ulcers”, and were later told I’d need lithium all my life. These were not the answers, not when something inside me noticed I felt better when I went to beach, ate veggies & seafood, not white wonder bread n butter, or potatoes & pasta, and worse, subway sandwich & a donut a day. Nope, I began to trust as that we must follow our hearts and soul’s desires, and respect our true Nature.

After graduating from The University of Rhode Island, I moved out west, to teach on the Navajo-Hopi reservation, and advocated for Earth First - saving the Grand Canyon from Uranium Mining. I got my first full time teaching job in Sedona, AZ and after teaching elementary school for five years, I became a Certified Nutritionist because I realized my students and most people were not healthy, that was in the 1990s!! Later when living in New Mexico, I volunteered with Citizens for Health, and became a Natural Products Sales Broker. I eventually moved to Ashland OR and then later to San Francisco CA before moving back east and becoming a Holistic Health Educator, Certified Yoga teacher and Mother.

But in the early days of my illness, it was nature and doing what I loved that really made the transformation in my health. I ran rivers, mountain biked, listened & danced to great guitar playing by my then fiance and later husband & I fought to save the threatened old Redwood trees in the Pacific Northwest, and lobbied for the protection of native plant medicines & nutritional supplements and healthcare via the Dietary Health and Education Act that I helped get passed in 1994. Health care after all comes naturally, like from a cup of soup, a hot bath & a mothers nurturing instincts and from plant medicines and healthy meals, good sleep and doing joyful kind acts.

In my thirties, when living in Oregon and California, I traveled around the world with Master Herbalist Ed Smith of Herb Pharm, and I learned a great deal of what I still teach from many of America’s great reknowned renaissance herbalists.

Highlights of my years out west and at Herb Pharm with Ed, were our many trips partaking in ethnobotanical research, from OR’s native Saint John’s wort and pipssissawa, goldenseal & Oregon grape root, found high in the Siskiyou mountains. We sourced arnica montana & thyme in the Italian Alps & cat’s claw (una de gato) in the Amazon rainforest, where we stayed with the Shipibo native tribe, along the banks of the Pulcapa River. We researched and sourced Maca root high in the Alta Plano of Peru and ate with the local campesinos/farmers. I traveled to Southeast Asia quite a bit with Ed as well, and studied Traditional Thai massage and Thai herbal medicine, and became a Certified Thai Massage Practitioner.

I practiced yoga since my UVM hospitalization and intensified my daily practice after a divorce at 28 and became an Interdisciplinary Vinyasa Yoga and PreNatal yoga teacher at 38 and have studied with Master Yoga Teachers around the world, and have continued to practice & teach this modt vslued practice of mine. I’m also a trained TM meditation practitioner and teach meditation and breath work as part of my Health Coaching & Masssge practice.

One of my greatest successes, was helping to pass into law, DSHEA, The Dietary Supplement, Health and Education Act of 1994. I organized a large Health Freedom Rally in Albuquerque and flew all over the US educating, lobbying and advocating for herbal medicine and nutritional supplements to be considered as Dietary Natural Supplements, as opposed to theFDA’s & AMA’s desire to regulate nutrients and plant medicines as drugs.

I had a 2 hour Make A Difference radio show when living in Santa Fe, NM before podcasting was a thing, and facilitated the 1997 American Herbalists Guild Symposium at the historic Lloyd brother’s herbal pharmacology museum in Cincinnati, Ohio.

I have taught in school kitchens, gardens and classrooms the virtues growing & eating local, organic, nutrient dense vegetables and for the past decade experienced regenerative agriculture first hand with my Martha’s Vineyard amazing, farmer friend Andrew Woodruff. I know that untilled soils, cover crops & animals raised humanely on organic, regernative farms can produce and sustain a wealth of healthier food, communities and biologically rich top soil, while also creating much needed carbon sequestration.

Bringing it all together now with decades of studying with reknown herbalists, yogis, farmers, doctors and nutritionists, from Ann-Louise Gittleman in the 80s, to gaining IIN’s certification in 2017, and learning from Functional Medicine greats, like Dr. Joe Pizzorno, Dr. Daniel Kalish, Dr. David Perlmutter, Dr. Daniel Amen and Dr. Mark Hyman, my mentor, massage client (yes) and most influential and inspirational teacher.

Be it native cultures, endangered animals, redwoods, canyons, rivers, native plants, traditional foods and recipes,

I am very focused on education, & on saving & enriching our planet’s biologically diverse topsoil, & on saving humans from themselves, for we are forgetting how to live as nature intended, as ONE whole, miraculous life - symbiotically we need to use our connections to each other and to the earth’s circadian rhythms to remember who we are, and how we were/are designed to more than survive, but thrive.

It’s almost a battle of sheer survival as we are dealing with non nutritious foods, fake foods, serious toxins and weakened bodies and minds co-opted by Big Pharma, Big Tech & Big Autocracy with the excessive manipulation of our food, health care and disempowered masses walking around unknowingly unhealthy to the point of zombie like pain ridden long deaths, instead of vital long lives.

When we give our hearts and minds and bodies what they need, we became whole again; it’s a journey that we have to remember started millions of years ago.

I remembered who I am, and I reversed a mental illness diagnosis with an advocacy for Mother Nature & God’s gift to me, my innate wisdom, and with practices of care, like a yoga practice (asana, breath work & meditation), and with daily praise and prayer for the virtues of God’s creations, the phytonutrients and vital elements my body longed for from real, colorful, nutrient dense whole organic foods, I begin to take a path that was in line with my soul, and of which carved a deep purpose to teach what I will forever need to keep learning. How to love and care for this one wild & precious life.

I’ve been practicing what I preach for 30 plus years, ever since I recovered from those 3 months in UVM’s Mary Fletcher Hospital’s top floor mental ward.

My aim is to teach natural health care awarenesses, and what I say is not to advise or replace the care and treatments prescribed by your physician, but to educate and inspire you to listen & respect Mother Nature, for I speak for the Trees.