Hi! I’m Denise
Clinical Herbalist, Cycle and Sexual Health Educator, Certified Fertility Awareness educator
How I got here
Let’s start off with my own journey of struggling with a hormonal imbalance.
Growing up, my cycles weren’t that much of an issue. I barely had any breakouts and my periods weren’t really painful. Then in my early 20s while finishing up my bachelor's in Psychology, I decided I wanted to get on hormonal birth control because I knew I didn’t want to have kids. At the time, I didn’t know much about birth control. So I opted for the ones with the highest efficacy. Those being the Depo Provera Shot and then the Nexplanon Implant a year later.
Shortly after I started getting the Depo shot, I noticed that my clothes weren’t fitting me anymore. No matter how hard I worked out, I couldn’t lose any weight, if anything I was still gaining it. After a few months, I started experiencing cystic acne.
At first, I didn’t know if the acne was caused by what I was eating, the makeup I was using, if I wasn’t drinking enough water, or if my pillowcases needed to be washed on a daily basis.
It took me 3 years to learn from an online forum that acne was a common side effect of the birth control I was on, the implant.
On the bright side, I had found the cause of the acne. So now all I had to do was stop it and the acne would go away, right?!?
Oh boy was I wrong. Even after I got off, I was still suffering from weight gain, acne, irregular periods, and I was a sugar addicted monster. The only solution I was given by doctors was to go on a different birth control. When I asked If it would help re-balance my hormones they said "It would help with the acne".
That answer didn’t sit well with me, so I went to a dermatologist, who then prescribed me a blood pressure medication (Spironolactone) to help with my severe cystic acne at that point. (One of the side effects is that it helps with acne).
It did help my acne, but it did much more damage to the cause of the problem. Whenever I asked when I could stop taking it, my dermatologist would tell me that the acne would just return. No one talked about why my body was reacting this way. Instead, they focused on putting a band-aid on the issue.
I followed every research breadcrumb I came across:
I tried different diets like Keto, Vegetarian, and Vegan.
I learned all I could about ingredients in makeup and skincare products. I tried literally hundreds of different skincare combinations.
Worked out 5x a week and was super strict with my body.
I came across plant medicine when I visited my homeland of Colombia. Where plant medicine is a lot more common. In fact, it was my dentist who prescribed me Calendula flowers when I got my wisdom teeth removed.
That’s wild! That’s when I knew I had found the path I needed to heal myself.
My herbal, cycle healing and learning journey:
I tried learning how to balance my hormones using herbs on my own. But there was so much information that I didn’t know where to start. That’s when I decided to start taking courses.
I did my first few courses at The Herbal Academy. Doing their Introductory and Intermediate courses on herbalism. That gave me the foundations to understand why balancing our hormones can be so difficult. It’s because they are affected and interact with so many different aspects of our overall health. (2018- 2021)
At this point, my hormonal acne which had haunted my thoughts on a daily basis finally started to go away after 6 years.
Along the way, I began to realize just how amazing herbs are, but also our own bodies in their ability to heal themselves given the right support. This started out as just a journey to heal my cycle, but it turned out to also be a journey to finding my passion. (eh sappy I know) Once I realized that I wanted to help others struggling with hormone imbalances I went to the School of Evolutionary Herbalism to get my clinical in herbalism (2022).
Because I had become a little obsessed with cycle health, I decided to go through a 2-year certification to become a certified Fertility Awareness educator at the Well School of Body Literacy. Just when I thought I knew enough about our cycle anatomy, this course brought that understanding to a whole new level. That’s when I started to put the pieces together. That our cycle is so much more than just for reproduction. That ovulation was KEY to our hormonal health! Now I had Cycle Mapping as a tool to really understand what’s going on in our cycles. (2025)
I now use everything I’ve learned to help others heal their cycle naturally using:
Lifestyle habits: I’ve learned just how much of an impact things like getting good quality sleep and stress reduction are on our hormonal health. As well as how important it is to reduce hormone disruptors in our environment, tracking our cycles, and other lifestyle habits that seem small but really start to add up.
Nutrition: Our food is how we nourish our bodies and get the fuel that we need to function. Our building blocks to our hormones come from the food that we eat. It is the fundamentals of how we support our body.
Herbs: Herbs help support the body in many different ways. From helping you wind down to get good quality sleep to helping support our digestion to better assimilate the food we eat.
Herbs are here to help us reconnect with our bodies.
This is why I truly believe our body has a blueprint of how it should function
We just need to learn its language!
If healing your cycle naturally is something that interests you, I have a few suggestions.
There is the Healing Your Cycle Naturally starter kit that has an introduction to hormone disruptors, description of what’s going on during each phase of your cycle, nutrition guides, among other goodies. You can get that for free when you sign up for the newsletter below.
If you’d like to learn more about what it would be like to work together you can find out more here.
Happy to have you here!