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Kitchen Table Wellness
+ Vedic Meditation
My Story
For as long as I can remember, my favorite place in our family of eight’s hectic home was the kitchen table. It was the place where anything of importance happened: family meals, homework assignments and school projects, artwork and jigsaw puzzles, board games, coffee, gossip, financial worries, time outs, heartfelt conversations and small moments of connection.
I especially loved my Italian grandfather's basement kitchen. Italians always have two kitchens in their homes: the upstairs one that is for show and the one in the basement where the deliciousness happens.
Whenever we visited, I would head straight to the basement kitchen to watch my grandfather cook.
He would prepare tomato sauce from scratch with homemade sausage and meatballs, imported olive oil and homegrown garlic and tomatoes. He would toss a salad of greens from his garden, red onion (salted of course), tomato, cucumber, olive oil and red wine vinegar. He’d serve the sauce over homemade ravioli and pair it with wine he made from grapes he had grown and pressed himself.
The cooking smells were amazing and his garden was spectacular, a little slice of heaven in the middle of Queens, New York.
My grandfather came to New York City all the way from a small town near Naples, Italy, bringing his food and traditions with him. I loved learning about the Mediterranean food that he grew and prepared for us whenever we visited.
It’s no wonder that my passion for food and time spent in the kitchen developed into a deep love and appreciation of nutrition that I went on to apply in my studies and beyond.
In fact, nutrition came so naturally to me that when I was in college studying nursing, my nutrition professor took me out to dinner for having a 100% average at the end of the semester!
When I graduated in 1981, I landed my dream job at a New York City hospital and spent the next 15 years working in cardiovascular surgery, and Emergency Room nursing. Early on, I found that what I enjoyed most in caring for my patients was including their family members in the care plan and creating new diet and lifestyle habits together.
I loved working with families so much that I went on to become a Family Nurse Practitioner and provide community primary care to children and their families at a public school in Brooklyn, New York. The school's population was very diverse and composed mostly of immigrants from all over the world. This experience and the relationships I built with this population helped me to gain a deeper understanding of the impact that ancestry, culture and community has on our diet and our health.
Fast Forward...
...to the year 2000 when our four-year-old daughter Carly was diagnosed with a form of autism. At that moment, I realized that I could continue caring for other families or stay home and care for my own I chose to take a break from my career in nursing to create a specific treatment plan and targeted homeschooling curriculum for my daughter. We were living in Charlotte, North Carolina at the time and I had received little hope from traditional doctors and educators. In fact, many suggested I accept that her options were limited and there was nothing that could be done.
Well, I was having none of it. I knew that the experts were wrong and that my daughter was not only intelligent and creative, she was extremely frustrated by her disability. I did my own research and embarked on a different path—the path of nutrition, occupational therapy and integrative medicine. By following the advice of an enlightened team of practitioners that I had tracked down from across the country, we soothed her inflamed brain slowly by removing inflammatory foods and adding in healing foods and supplements.
Having made the choice to stay home, I was able to apply my clinical experience and training to the home setting and create a protocol that incorporated dietary, occupational, language and sound therapy along with a curriculum that targeted her special needs all day long, five days a week. The results were amazing. Carly was able to enter public school after four years and she is currently enrolled full time at The University of Virginia with aspirations of becoming a School Counselor.
Your Best Life is Your Best Medicine
I have seen firsthand the power of the body’s innate ability to heal when the root cause of illness or pain is identified and eliminated. This insight has been the driving force behind my determination to learn as much as possible about Functional Medicine, an approach that focuses on uncovering the root cause of inflammation in the development of chronic disease and our ability to prevent or reverse illness through diet and lifestyle. The benefits are cumulative and much more powerful than the 15-minute appointment and accompanying prescription we typically get one or two times each year.
As a retired FNP with over 20 years of clinical experience in the traditional healthcare system, I am in a unique position to help you navigate our current insurance-driven healthcare model while also incorporating functional medicine principles into a plan for healing that we create together.
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My Education and Training
Vedic Meditation Initiator Training, Tilwara, India with Thom Knoles, Shri 1008 Mahamandaleshwar Maharishi Vyasanand Giri Maharaj.
​​National Board Certified Health and Wellness Coach NBC-HWC
Applying Functional Medicine in Clinical Practice, The Institute of Functional Medicine
Certified Functional Medicine Health Coach, The Institute for Functional Medicine Coaching Academy​
Certified Integrative Nutrition Health Coach, The Institute of Integrative Nutrition, New York, NY
MSN, Family Nurse Practitioner, Columbia University, New York, NY
BSN, Nursing, Molloy College, Rockville Center, NY