How I Found My Way Back to Plants.

Hi. My name is Ashleigh, and I’m the founder of Sanare Botanicals.

I’ve been a registered nurse in the Emergency Department for over ten years. I have spent more than a decade working within Western medicine, seeing firsthand just how incredible it can be.

But at home? Western medicine has never been my first stop for every little thing.

And here’s why: I believe Mother Nature has been caring for us far longer than any laboratory ever could.

I got into emergency medicine when I was 24 years old. It was fast, exciting, challenging—and I loved it. I still do. There is something incredible about modern medicine when you truly need it.

A broken bone. A severe infection. A heart attack. Uncontrollable bleeding. A life-threatening emergency.

This is where Western medicine shines. We can save your life.

But as the years went on, I started noticing something that bothered me.

People seemed to be getting sicker younger. Families were struggling to get answers—or sometimes even struggling to get an appointment with a primary care provider. In the ER, I was seeing children struggling with allergies and asthma, and young adults coming in with conditions I once associated with much later stages of life.

At the same time, it felt like we were losing something else: our basic understanding of our own bodies.

Every fever became terrifying. Every rash required an answer immediately. Parents would bring their children in terrified over a bug bite because something online told them it could turn into a deadly infection. Antibiotics were sometimes expected for illnesses they couldn’t treat. Somewhere along the way, many of us stopped seeing medicine as one tool among many and started feeling like we needed medical intervention for anything happening inside our bodies that we didn’t understand.

And I started asking questions.

Then I Became a Mom

Having my own babies made that disconnect even more obvious to me.

Friends, family, schools—it seemed like everyone was afraid of the bodies we were living in. We weren’t being taught how to nourish them, understand them, or support the normal processes happening inside them.

Nutrition had always interested me, so when I had my babies, I breastfed and made their baby food myself. I wanted to know what they were eating. I wanted real food to be normal for them from the beginning.

Then, when my oldest son was two, I enrolled him in a new daycare.

I was told I wasn’t allowed to send his food unless I had a doctor’s note. The daycare explained that they had nutritional guidelines they were required to follow as part of their program.

That afternoon, I walked in to pick him up and saw the class eating bags of bright blue Doritos.

I was fuming.

Here I was being told I couldn’t send the foods I intentionally prepared for my child, while highly processed snack foods were being handed out.

Needless to say, we didn’t stay there long.

But that experience stuck with me.

It made me realize how far removed we had become from something that should be incredibly basic: feeding and caring for the human body.

So I Started Learning

I dove into nutrition.

I wanted to understand how food interacts with our bodies—not simply calories and macros, but nutrients, digestion, inflammation, the microbiome, and the incredible biochemical processes happening inside us every day.

I read the books. I researched. I experimented in my own kitchen.

Yes, I became that lady reading every ingredient label in the grocery store.

I shopped the perimeter. I bought produce from local farmers when I could. I taught my kids that something sweet didn’t always have to come out of a package.

And eventually, that knowledge began to follow me into my nursing practice.

At discharge, I found myself spending extra time with patients talking about nutrition and simple lifestyle changes they could actually take home with them.

I wanted people to feel some sense of autonomy again.

Because the knowledge wasn’t gone.

It was just buried.

And I started believing that if we could teach people how to nourish and care for their bodies again, maybe we could change something for the generations coming after us.

But then I realized something else.

It wasn’t only about what we were putting in our bodies.

It was also about what we were putting on them.

That’s When I Found Aromatherapy

I came across someone online teaching about the chemistry behind aromatherapy, and I was immediately intrigued.

Not because essential oils smelled nice.

Because there was chemistry behind them.

I started researching. Then I took an aromatherapy course. I learned about plant constituents, dilution, formulation, safety, and how different aromatic compounds interact with the body.

Suddenly, essential oils weren’t simply little bottles that made a room smell good.

They were concentrated botanical extracts containing naturally occurring chemical constituents—and I wanted to understand every bit of it.

As a nurse, that fascinated me.

I already understood pharmacology. I understood that substances have chemical properties and that those properties matter.

Now I was learning about plants through that same scientific lens.

And an entirely new world opened up.

I Became a Little Medicine Maker

Before long, my kitchen started looking a lot like a tiny apothecary.

I was making salves for my great-grandmother’s knees. Botanical rollers for massage around old scars. Soothing products for irritated skin. Balms, butters, oils, and all kinds of little creations for the everyday things families deal with.

And everyone around me became my unofficial product-testing crew.

Christmas?

Here’s a salve.

Birthday?

You get a botanical roller.

Mention something bothering you during a casual conversation?

Congratulations, I’m probably going home to formulate something for you.

But something beautiful started happening.

I watched people genuinely enjoy using these products. I watched them come back and ask me to make more. I watched plants become part of their everyday routines.

And I kept thinking:

How did I go so much of my life without knowing any of this?

That’s when I knew I wanted to share it beyond my own family.

And That’s How Sanare Botanicals Began

Sanare Botanicals isn’t about rejecting modern medicine.

I’m an emergency nurse. I’ve watched modern medicine save lives.

It’s about remembering that caring for ourselves doesn’t have to begin only when something goes wrong.

It’s about food.

Plants.

Movement.

Sunshine.

Our microbiome.

Our skin.

Our environment.

And understanding the incredible body we get to live in.

I believe there is so much wisdom in the natural world that we’ve simply stopped paying attention to.

We are not separate from nature.

We are nature.

We are little ecosystems walking around on this Earth, constantly interacting with plants, microbes, food, sunlight, soil, and everything around us.

Sanare Botanicals grew from my desire to understand that relationship—and to share what I’m learning along the way.

I want to help families feel curious about their bodies instead of afraid of them. I want people to understand the plants growing around them, the ingredients they put on their skin, and the food they put on their tables.

Most of all, I want to bring a little bit of that knowledge back into our homes.

Because I don’t think we have to choose between science and nature.

Nature is science.

And maybe the future of wellness isn’t about abandoning everything we’ve learned.

Maybe it’s about remembering everything we’ve forgotten.

Welcome to Sanare Botanicals.

I’m really glad you’re here.

— Ashleigh