Why I Started Tending Practice (The Real Reason)

The version I could tell you is the clean one. I have 20 years of experience, 10+ certifications, a background in Ayurvedic medicine and clinical herbalism, and I saw a gap in professional education for holistic estheticians. So I built something to fill it.

That version is true. But it's not the whole story, and I've made a commitment to myself — and to this community — to tell the whole story when it matters. This one does.

The Long Road to Here

I've been in the wellness industry in one form or another since my early twenties, when I left Missouri to work in the national parks and ended up, through a series of decisions that made complete sense at the time and look slightly unhinged in retrospect, living in a tent in Bolinas, California, completing a Permaculture Design certification while learning how to grow food in the coastal fog.

Permaculture gave me a framework I've never stopped using: everything is connected. Health of soil affects health of plant affects health of the animal that eats it affects health of the ecosystem. You cannot treat a part without understanding the whole. I didn't know it at the time, but that was the lens through which I'd eventually understand skin.

From there: Atlanta, spa management, esthetics school. Herbalism certification. Yoga teacher training. More spa management in more cities. Portland, Ayurvedic spa, the decision to go back to school for Ayurvedic medicine myself. The Ayurvedic Health Counselor program. Panchakarma training. Coming back to Kansas City in 2023 with more knowledge than I knew what to do with and, for the first time in my career, a real answer to the question I'd been asking for twenty years: why does skin do what it does?

The Question Nobody Else Was Asking

Here is the thing about esthetics training that nobody who's been through it needs me to explain, but that's important to name plainly: it teaches you what to do to skin. It does not teach you why skin does what it does.

Why does one client's skin clear completely with a specific protocol while another client's skin with apparently identical presentation gets worse? Why does a client's rosacea flare every fall with no change in products or routine? Why does the undereye puffiness that responds beautifully to lymphatic drainage come right back if she doesn't change how she sleeps? Why does the skin of a client going through a divorce suddenly age five years in six months?

The answers to these questions are not in the professional product training. They are not in the standard CE curriculum. They are in Ayurvedic medicine, in clinical herbalism, in understanding the lymphatic system, in the neuroscience of stress and the skin-brain axis, in the whole-body perspective that the conventional esthetic world treats as a nice-to-have rather than a clinical foundation.

I spent years piecing this together from different sources, different teachers, different traditions. And I kept meeting estheticians who were doing the same thing — smart, skilled, deeply committed practitioners who knew there was more and were building their own curricula out of whatever they could find. Some of them found good teachers. Some of them found bad information dressed up as credentials. Almost none of them found a single place that taught the depth of the work in an integrated way, from the original sources, by someone who had actually practiced it.

I didn't start Tending Practice because I had a gap in the market. I started it because I was the student I'm now teaching — and I know what it cost to learn this the long way.

The Moment I Decided to Build This

I was in a sound bath — which tells you something about the kind of person I am — and I was in that particular state of non-thinking that happens when you've been lying under Tibetan bowls for forty minutes, and the thing that came through with unusual clarity was this: the knowledge that changed everything for me should not take twenty years to find. It should not require a tent in California and a Ayurvedic medicine school and stumbling into the right spa at the right time. It should be accessible, rigorous, and taught by someone who understands both the clinical depth and the reality of esthetic practice.

I know what you are experiencing. I was the same for a long time — the esthetician who can feel the edge of what she knows, who suspects there's a whole other level of understanding available, who is tired of CE courses that teach a new technique without a framework for why it works or where it comes from. I built Tending Practice for you because I needed it for myself, and it didn't exist.

What Tending Practice Is (and Is Not)

Tending Practice is a professional education brand for licensed estheticians. It offers workshops, courses, and eventually a full certification program. It is rooted in the Ayurvedic tradition, clinical herbalism, and an integrated understanding of skin as a whole-body organ — not a surface to be managed.

It is not a wellness coaching brand. It is not a consumer skincare brand. It is not trying to be a spa school or compete with esthetics licensing programs. It is specifically and intentionally for the licensed esthetician who has foundational training and wants to go deeper — who wants the clinical rigor, the lineage, and the community of practitioners who are asking the same questions.

I teach lineage before technique. I believe, completely, that knowing where a practice comes from — understanding its history, its philosophical foundation, its original context — makes you a better practitioner than someone who has learned the strokes without the story. Not because the history is interesting (though it is). Because the history tells you what the practice is actually for, which changes every decision you make in the treatment room.

The Honest Part About Being at the Beginning

I want to be transparent about where Tending Practice is right now, because I think the esthetic education world has a lot of people performing further along than they are, and it creates a particular kind of distrust that I don't want to contribute to.

As of March, 2026, Tending Practice is new. The website is being built. The first workshops are in April. The community is small. I am, in many ways, starting from scratch — which is both humbling and clarifying.

What I am not starting from scratch on is twenty years of practice, eight certifications, a genuine and well-documented teaching philosophy, and a curriculum I've been building in my head — and in various notebooks and training programs — for longer than I want to admit. The offer is ready. The audience is being built.

I'm telling you this because I think the estheticians who resonate with what I'm building deserve to know they're getting in early, and what that means. It means the community is intimate. It means your feedback will directly shape what gets built next. It means the price points are accessible right now in ways they may not be later. And it means — this is the part I care about most — that you will have access to me in a way that becomes harder to maintain as a brand grows.

What I Want For You

I want you to have what I had to work twenty years to find. I want you to understand skin the way I understand it — not as a surface with conditions to manage but as a mirror of the whole body, communicating in a language that Ayurveda and herbalism and the neuroscience of touch have been learning to translate for thousands of years.

I want you to have the clinical confidence that comes from understanding why your treatments work, not just what to do. I want you to be the practitioner in your market who other estheticians look at and think: I want to learn what she knows. I want you to be paid what you're worth. I want you to have the community of colleagues who speak your language and push your thinking.

And honestly? I want the company. Twenty years in this industry, a lot of it solo, piecing together a curriculum from whatever I could find — I know how lonely that is. Tending Practice is partly for you and partly because I want the room of people who light up when we talk about marma points and the history of kansa metal and why the lymphatic system is the most underrated organ system in esthetic practice.

If you're reading this and any part of it sounds like you, come find us. This is exactly where you belong.

→  Join the Tending Practice Collective  (tendingpractice.com/community)

→  See upcoming workshops  (tendingpractice.com/workshops)

→  Browse what I teach  (tendingpractice.com/what-i-teach)