Honestly, Vanessa

I’ve been in the holistic wellness space for about five years now, and I can confidently say this work will humble you, stretch you, and reshape you, if you let it. When I first started my wellness journey, I was so enthusiastic, so curious, and so passionate…

But also, if I’m being honest, I was extremely shallow in my understanding because I was primarily learning from social media and Google.

I only had the surface knowledge. I didn’t understand or know about terrain. I didn’t know about physiological underlying patterns. I didn’t understand the deeper logic behind why natural remedies work for one person and failed for another.

For a long time, I lived in Group 1 without even realizing it. My turning point happened when I chose to deepen my education. Two core schools shaped me which was The School of Evolutionary Herbalism where Sajah Popham introduced me to terrain patterns, constitutional energetics, and the deeper philosophy of herbalism. He was the first teacher I ever heard speak about the body the way I intuitively believed it worked.

Joyful Belly School of Ayurveda also grounded me in a traditional health framework, from learning about bio-characteristics and the importance of understanding the whole person, not just their symptoms. These schools were also expensive and for good reason.

Those two educations really cracked my brain open and rebuilt my entire understanding of healing. Only then did I start noticing the different groups of people who exist in the holistic and wellness space. And over time, five very clear groups emerged.

This is not judgment, it’s from observation. It helps make sense of why the wellness world feels so chaotic at times and incredibly wise at other times. Here are the five groups.

Group 1: The Well-Intentioned but Shallow Beginners

I was in this group for the first few years of my educational journey. These are the people that care deeply and they’re very passionate. They want to help.

They love natural medicine, but they’re working with a surface-level understanding. They mean well, but they haven’t really gone deep enough into the terrain or the traditional frameworks. 

Some examples are the health-store employees recommending the same supplement to everyone, someone who just discovered herbalism and is learning from TikTok, beginners who know a handful of herbs and apply them universally, long-time practitioners who stayed at the beginner level for years, naturopaths who only rely on their baseline school training without deeper study.

They’re not wrong, they’re simply early on the path. 

Everyone starts here. I started here. Most people stay here unless they deliberately choose to go deeper. We always can learn more so why stop at the basics even if you’ve been in the industry for quite some time. Longevity doesn’t always mean depth.

Group 2: The Confusion-Spreaders

Those who might deliberately (or negligently) put out conflicting or inaccurate information. These are the people who mix, blend, and distort traditions, sometimes out of ignorance, sometimes out of ego, and sometimes because they have an agenda.

They often sound confident… but leave people more confused than educated. Some examples would be a “wellness influencer” who posts conflicting advice from different traditions without fact-checking, a doctor who misquotes ayurvedic principles, practitioners who confuse terrain with pathology and create fear.

Cherry-pick studies without understanding context, individuals intentionally pushing misinformation to sabotage holistic medicine, and just about anyone mixing up or oversimplifying different systems to create confusion, whether intentionally or not. 

This is the group that makes holistic practitioners look inconsistent, when the actual traditions are extremely structured once understood correctly.

Group 3: The Deep Divers

This is the group committed to nuance, depth, and understanding the human body as a living terrain rather than a machine with replaceable parts. They study the patterns, energetics, constitutional types, moisture dynamics, tissue states, gunas, dosha, all the necessary traditional frameworks that explain why one remedy works for one person and not another. They don’t memorize herbs. They understand the human ecosystem. This is where I am currently at with my education. 

Here are the examples of the deep divers: experienced herbalists, ayurvedic practitioners who study bio-characteristics deeply, teachers and educators such as Sajah Popham, naturopaths who go beyond their schooling into terrain theory, any practitioner who combines traditional wisdom with modern insight in a grounded way. 

This is the group I eventually stepped into, not because I “knew more,” but because I was finally willing to learn more. Knowledge doesn’t make you superior. It makes you responsible.

Group 4: The Gurus & Opportunists

Here is the curated aesthetics of “wellness.” This group exists because wellness became trendy. They’re charismatic, often beautiful, often brand-polished, and usually very good at marketing. But their true mission is image, influence, and monetization, not healing. 

These are the people who position themselves as ultimate wellness authorities without real substance. They might have charisma, they might have a huge following, or they might have one shiny credential. But their main goal is to sell a lifestyle rather than educate.

They thrive on being seen as the “expert” but don’t actually engage deeply with the science or traditions. Instead, they tend to recycle buzzwords and sell products or one-size-fits-all solutions. 

They might be the influencers who treat wellness like a fashion trend, or the self-proclaimed “healers” who aren’t interested in nuance. They often contribute to the noise rather than clarity.

Here are some examples: celebrity doctors with wellness brands, influencers who use wellness as an aesthetic instead of a study, people selling detox kits, one-size-fits-all protocols, or trends, “spiritual girlies” who speak in vague affirmations with no grounding, individuals copying surface-level knowledge to gain followers. 

They may not have bad intentions, but they aren’t transmitting depth. They sell the idea of wellness, not the reality.

Group 5: The Isolated-System Specialists

This last category often hides under the “holistic” label, but remains fundamentally reductionistic in its approach. This group is composed of practitioners and enthusiasts who hyper-focus on one specific organ system, gland, or biological pathway.

Some examples are holistic gynecologists who only look at hormones, gut-health specialists who ignore the nervous system, biological dentists focused solely on the jaw and mold-lyme disease specialists who believe mold/lyme is the cause for all of your symptoms.

They often speak in absolutes, suggesting that every health woe can be traced back to a single source, whether that be the gut, the hormones, the vagus nerve, or the mitochondria.

While they use the language of natural healing, they are essentially applying a conventional specialist mindset to holistic tools, rarely pausing to ask why that specific system became dysregulated in the larger context of the body’s terrain.

This approach shows up in many forms, from high-level specialists to “natural-looking” supplement routines that focus on one pill for one problem. However, when we try to treat the liver, the gut, or the nerves as if they aren’t connected, we are still breaking the body into pieces.

True holistic care isn’t just about swapping a drug for a herb. It’s about looking at the big picture. It means understanding how your different systems work together, the underlying patterns beneath the symptoms, and seeing how one part of the body affects the rest.

In this view, a symptom isn’t just a “broken part” that needs fixing; it is a signal. It’s a message from your body telling a story about how it has been trying to survive and adapt to its environment over time.

So Why Does This Even Matter?

Because when you understand these groups, you will understand why advice contradicts itself online, why one person gets results and another doesn’t, why the holistic field feels “messy” to outsiders, why traditional medicine can appear disorganized if people mix systems incorrectly, and why so many people lose trust in natural healing. And this is extremely frustrating for the deep divers. 

And most importantly: People can understand where they truly are in their educational journey. I’m grateful I started in Group 1. I went through lots of confusion and frustration. I eventually found teachers who spoke the language my intuition always knew existed. Healing is not memorizing remedies. 

Healing is understanding the landscape of the human body, the terrain itself. And that requires depth. Real depth. The kind you grow into very slowly and beautifully, with humility.