About Me — Olivia Love
(Yes, it’s a pen name and my alter ego as a healing practitioner.) As a healing practitioner, I center my work on holistic health and earth medicine coaching and advocacy. I write. I am a mom. I am a reformed reckless party-girl who is grateful to have come out of my 20’s alive.
I am also a drop out of a Ph.D. program in education. I was studying information literacy from the perspective of an educator, a research focus that had grown out of my experience as an adjunct instructor and test prep tutor who had seen first-hand the decline of students’ research skills over the years. I’d conducted surveys on both disciplinary faculty and librarians to gain information on their perceptions of the state of information literacy instruction in higher education and to the extent that it met students’ needs. While I’d completed the data collection phase, I questioned the meaningfulness of the data collected and my research design. Even if I would’ve been able to swing the data analysis and try to make meaning from the data, I knew this work really was meant to prove myself as a budding researcher. But I wasn’t passionate about research, and I knew the challenges of entering academia, a profession increasingly notorious for its competitive and exploitative nature.
While I believe our world is in an information crisis and that information literacy and critical thinking need to be taught much more systematically in our education system, I believe a greater, more urgent, overlapping crisis is our health literacy crisis. I am talking about our collective cultural relationship with both physical and mental health, the tendency to treat symptoms rather than causes, and the over-reliance on pharmaceuticals as a Band-Aid approach. I am talking about the lack of readily available, affordable preventative health support. The proliferation of junk food and the opiate and meth epidemics. We have learned erroneously that the power to be healthy, mentally and physically, lies outside of us, and that we need to rely on medical professionals to help us to treat physical and mental ailments.
We have unwittingly given our power and our authority over ourselves and our bodies away, while also tending to fault people who struggle with their mental and physical health. The collective tendency is to fault the individual who struggles (and perhaps his/her genetics as well), rather than to acknowledge the toxicity of this fast-paced, individualist, materialist culture and its quick-fix solutions that are really not solutions at all.
Shortly before the pandemic, as my father was battling an extended battle with Stage 4 colon cancer, I began shifting my focus toward holistic health. While I was unable to help my dad, who has since passed (at the young age of 66 years old), his passing helped to crystalize for me the importance of holistic health and the usefulness of intentional integration of earth medicines in a wellness routine. I’d also endured the passing over the years of several very close friends due to mental health and substance abuse problems, one of whom had passed not long before my dad had. Such momentous, tragic events, along with my own rebirthing of myself with my pregnancy and then motherhood, further propelled me in my own journey toward finding a healthier relationship with myself and my life.
I’ve written about how, in overcoming my destructive party-girl ways in my 20’s and in leaving my habitual alcohol abuse, I learned to replace alcohol with a growing intentional practice and relationship with cannabis and mushrooms. That shift in my behaviors, together with motherhood and my gratitude for being able to come out alive through the other side, catapulted me toward a realization of my purpose and my passion.
Once awakened, I’ve become determined to pursue my goals. I have always seen myself a writer, but a label means little without practice. So now, I write to share my journey and my perspective, to help destigmatize natural substances that have been wrongfully demonized, and to help others become empowered to find mental, physical, and spiritual healing and health. I am a certified holistic health and transformational coach. (I’m officially able to take on clients!) I am also a writer and advocate to help people become empowered to heal themselves.
I believe a lot of the problems we are currently facing in the world stem from a crisis of consciousness. We must all strive toward being more conscious, to reconnect with ourselves, with each other, and with this earth, and I am here to serve others to help them in remembering this connection.
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