Animari Wellness is built with over 30 years of Nursing experience and a deep desire to help people heal themselves. But deep healing begins with yourself.

In 2019, I was working as a Clinical Nurse Specialist, riding a wave of success. After 26 years in the specialty of Neuroscience Nursing, I had just achieved my dream of opening a Neurocritical Care Unit that would provide the best care to our most vulnerable neuroscience patients and was working with amazing teams. But something wasn’t right. Healthcare was changing, feeling less about patients and more about business… and then the COVID-19 pandemic hit. In an instant, things changed even more. Over the next couple of years, I saw patient care worsen, Nursing colleagues, providers and hospital staff morally distressed, depressed, and many leave, but I didn’t fully notice it in myself. Until one day in the Fall of 2021… the weight of it all was too much and I couldn’t go into the building. My body was giving me a hard no. I was paralyzed. No one knew. I drove home and started to dig deeper.

During the Pandemic, I had become interested in foraging in our backyard and joined the VT Foraging group on Facebook. As I looked at a posting, it was for the Fantastic Fungi Global Summit. I happened to be off the week it would air and I had no idea it would change my life! As I watched speakers talk about all of the amazing things that mushrooms can do, I stumbled on topics, such as cooking, foraging, decomposition, and adaptogens, and how they could help with chronic conditions, mental health, PTSD and existential anxiety at end of life. I had no idea why I was signing up for a course with one of the speakers, but I started to learn about ancient wisdom and traditional earth and plant medicines. It was fascinating! As I learned to connect and listen to my body, mind and spirit, I slowly sensed myself, mired in a rigid box of science and evidence-based practices, longing to understand how we had forgotten about thousands of years of indigenous practices and ancestral healing wisdom. I was starting to change and straddle other ways of knowing. My great deconstruction had begun. And by early 2022, I could no longer NOT see what was happening in healthcare or what was happening in me. I was no longer in alignment with our toxic, broken healthcare system. There is something empowering about letting go of titles, identities and ways of being that no longer serve you. Magic starts to happen and new doors open when you start listening to the messages coming your way and allow yourself to flow. Through self-cultivation practices of grounding, sleeping outside year-round, awakening to the Sun in the East and birdsong, I was connecting to nature and the vibrations of Mother Earth. I looked for more joy in my days and found that teaching Charge nurses how to get through a shift using breath techniques for stress relief. I did reiki for staff and taught new nurses about personal energetic hygiene. I found myself guided by spirit again, this time to a life changing plant initiation with the tree Hawthorn. Through the energies of Hawthorn in rituals and transformational breathwork, I experienced spontaneous healing of a 50 plus year nail biting habit. Something in my nervous system had released. I continued to listen to my inner knowing and at the last minute, enrolled in an 18-month psychedelic practitioner training program through the Synthesis Institute in the Netherlands. I realized that I was feeling excited again and passionate about a different future, one outside of acute care, where I could be helping people heal themselves and coming back to my holistic roots of nursing. Over those 2 years, I’d studied voraciously! In the Summer of 2023, after finishing my Synthesis Immersion retreat in Costa Rica, I made a plan to step away from the hospital and gave myself a timeline. In December of that year, with the support of friends, family and some colleagues who needed to know, I did something most didn’t expect, I walked out of the hospital, into the first crisp, clear morning of the rest of my life. I never looked back. I took a year off to explore other things that I had put aside while commuting 2 hours/day to and from work for 20 years… working at our local farm store (cooking again! Making sandwiches, sauerkraut, and meeting my community), getting in shape using a chainsaw and doing manual labor for my husband’s tree service, and living simply. I continued to connect with plant elders and teachers here in VT and across the U.S., and traveled to meet, train and/or work with international colleagues in Brazil and Portugal. These amazing teachers and plants have helped shape who I am and how I show up in ethical, humble practice. In 2025, Animari Wellness was birthed to honor the “giving life to/inspiring action” of animare, and the spirit of the smartest nurse I ever knew and someone I miss dearly, my friend, Marianne Markwell. I’m grateful for the opportunities offered to me to grow and shine my light more brightly in the world and honored to support and walk beside others on their healing journeys.