I Didn’t Jump on the Wellness Bandwagon

I’m not a wellness influencer. I don’t have a 4:30 a.m. morning routine or a signature green powder I’d like you to purchase.

I came to alternative healing the hard way: my body dragged me there, kicking and screaming, after conventional medicine looked me in the eye and gave me five years to live.

That was 1970.

I’m still here. Make of that what you will.

It Started With Doctors — a Past Life and a Plan

In my most recent past life, I was a doctor. A wealthy Jewish physician in Europe who, along with everyone he loved, ended up in Auschwitz. It didn’t end well, as you might imagine. So when I came back into this lifetime, I came back with a plan: become a doctor again. Finish what was interrupted. Get it right this time.

My soul was enthusiastic. My soul was also, as souls sometimes are, wildly overconfident about what I’d signed up for.

At 18, I was working for physicians, pre-med, absolutely on track. By 20, I was flat on my back in a hospital bed, diagnosed with Rheumatoid Arthritis, parked next to a woman of 52 who had the crippling, deforming kind — the kind where your hands stop working, and your joints make their own terrible decisions.

My adolescent brain looked at her, looked at my own future, and made the completely rational decision to go to Europe while I could still walk.

I went. Came back. Got sicker. Classic.

The Diagnosis That Changed Everything

Eventually, I was diagnosed with Systemic Lupus Erythematosus — SLE. The doctors gave me five years to live and offered me a front-row seat to my own decline, medicated and managed and slowly diminishing.

I thanked them and left. Not because I was brave — because I’d already seen what “managed” looked like, and I wanted no part of it.

What I found instead was Dr. Henry Bieler, a physician with the radical 1970s belief that food was medicine. His protocol was not glamorous. No supplements, no podcast, no retreat in Tulum. Just a very strict way of eating and ten years of patience.

Ten years.

And it worked.

I’ve been in the world of alternative and integrative healing ever since. That’s more than fifty years of lived experience, not a lifestyle pivot I made after a difficult year or a certification I completed on a weekend.

The Comedy Interlude (Because There’s Always One)

While all of this was happening, the illness, the healing, the decade-long reconstruction of my health — I was also, improbably, writing comedy. The first piece I ever sold was published in 1981: “Organic Gardening in Sri Lanka,” a humor column about the psychological warfare of sweepstakes entry forms. It ran in The Phoenix Nest. I was very proud of it. I was also, at the time, extremely sick.

I didn’t wait until I was well to live. I didn’t wait for things to be resolved to be funny. I’ve never waited for the right conditions before showing up.

That’s what I try to help my clients find, not the absence of difficulty, but the ability to act inside it.

What This Has to Do With You

When clients come to me now, perhaps with fear-based patterns, generational loops, the quiet sense that something keeps failing in the same way for reasons they can’t explain, I’m not working from theory. I’m working from a body that was told it had five years and decided that was somebody else’s timeline.

The neuroscience backs this up. Neuroplasticity is real, and hypnotherapy is one of the most direct ways I know to access change at the level where your patterns actually live. Past-life regression goes deeper still: not just what the pattern is, but where it started—and whether you want to keep running it.

My soul set up a spectacular obstacle course for this lifetime. Yours probably did too. The good news is that you came equipped to handle it. The even better news is that you don’t have to figure out how alone you are.

A Small Note on the Book

A lot of what I’ve learned about the soul’s continuity, why we choose the lives we choose, what happens when the people we love die, and how they continue to communicate is in Love From Both Sides: A True Story of Love, Loss, and Reincarnation. The updated edition is scheduled for release in November 2026.

If you’ve ever looked at your own life and thought this cannot possibly be random, you’re probably right, and the book might explain why.

If you’re ready to stop running the same patterns — in love, in work, in your relationship with your own body — I’d love to talk. Through hypnotherapy, Cognitive Behavioral Methods, and past-life regression, we work together to find what’s actually driving the loop, and how to step out of it.

Sessions available in-person in Los Angeles and worldwide via Zoom.

If you need help, please call me: (323) 933-4377

Sending hope,

Stephanie