About Mee

Healing With Food

On the day I was born, a surgery left my intestine permanetly damage. From the very beginning, my body asked more of me than most. Illness had an easy doorway in, and for many years, I was simply learning how to live with that reality. But somewhere along the way, something unexpected happened.

The very thing that challenged me most began to teach me.

My body started whispering its wisdom, and food became the language I learned to listen through. Cooking wasn’t about becoming a chef or building a career. At first, it was simply about caring for myself, finding ways to keep my body working, my spirit steady, and sometimes even discovering small moments of joy in the middle of it all.

More than twenty years ago, that quiet listening led me toward something most people weren’t talking about yet: the living world inside the body, the microbiome. Long before it became a popular word, I was in my kitchen learning how food could nurture the delicate balance of bacteria in the gut. By feeding that inner ecosystem with care, I began healing intestinal ulcerations and bringing my body back toward balance.

What began as necessity slowly grew into devotion. Once I was well, and on my way I enrolled in a professional culinary program in Los Angeles, where I trained in French and American classics. Studying what we crave and why led me to adapt traditional recipes by thoughtfully swapping ingredients to better serve our bodies while mastering the craft of allergy-conscious cooking.

Farm to Table

Years later, that work found a home on our ranch and farm when I opened The Pinewood Kitchen and Mercantile. For seven beautiful years, Pinewood was a true farm-to-table restaurant in the deepest sense of the phrase. The beef, pork, honey, vegetables, and even the mushrooms served on our plates were raised right there on the land. The seasons shaped the menu, and the farm itself was part of every meal.

It was a welcoming kitchen, the kind of place where everyone could sit down and feel at home. Long before it was common in our rural Southern county, we embraced food allergies, dietary needs, and the many ways bodies ask to be nourished differently.

We created keto meals for our diabetic diners, comforting soups for patrons making their way through chemotherapy, and dishes adapted for a wide range of dietary needs. We cooked for guests living with Alpha-gal tick allergy, for those with celiac disease, for vegans, and for the good old boys who came in for homemade sausage and biscuits. And all of it was down home Southern deliciousness, made with ingredients straight from the farm.

In a place where “special diets” were often misunderstood, we quietly made room for everyone.

Neighbors, travelers, and strangers gathered around those tables. There was laughter, long conversations, and the quiet kind of healing that happens when someone knows the food in front of them supports their body and will not hurt them.

Over the years, I’ve come to believe something simple and true: Food carries a kind of quiet power. It holds the story of the land, the care of the hands that prepared it, and the intention behind every ingredient. And when it’s made with love and shared around a table, that power has a way of nourishing far more than the body. It feeds the soul, too.

Learning to cook for my own wellness, opened the door for me to cook for my community and then my loved ones when they needed me most.

Dreaming as Guidance

When I was a teenager, loss arrived like a sudden winter. Within three weeks, my mother, two of my closest friends, and my grandmother were gone. Grief drained the world of color, and I began searching for my way back to myself.

That search carried me to the wide desert of Santa Fe, where wise shaman women welcomed me into the quiet mystery of conscious dreaming.

Conscious dreaming is the practice of listening to dreams and working with them while asleep and while awake. It is a path of healing for the heart and spirit. Through it, we meet our fears, release the stories that bind us, and begin to imagine a life filled with light again.

Through dreamwork, I discovered that fear can soften, grief can open, and the future can be dreamed larger than the past. Along the way, I embraced many forms of healing. I worked deeply with a psychotherapist who honored both spirit and science. I filled journals with my thoughts and practiced yoga, meditation, and tai chi. Each practice slowly untangled the threads of sorrow and revealed new possibilities for my life.

Dreaming eventually led me to my husband, Lee. In many ways, we dreamed our way to one another. Together we built a life rich in experience and wonder, from the jungles of Mexico to Sausalito, Malibu, and the quiet beauty of our ranch in Tennessee.

Together with Veronica and Alberto Hernández, Lee and I helped bring The Dreaming House Teotihuacán into being. It is a sacred place where people gather to remember the power of dreaming.

Today, I continue that living tradition. I guide groups through the pyramids of Teotihuacán and share the practice of conscious dreaming at The Dreaming House, helping others remember that our lives can be dreamed into reality.

Whole Person Healing and Resilience

When I married Lee, he was already the owner of The Recovery Ranch in Tennessee, a place devoted to deep healing and renewal. During the course of our marriage, we went on to build and steward two more centers together, The Canyon in Malibu and The Integrative Life Center in Nashville. Lee was the visionary, the face, and the director of this work. I stood quietly beside him as a devoted supporter of the mission he carried forward. Each center grew from the same guiding belief that true recovery embraces the whole person and that lasting healing touches body, mind, and spirit.

Along the way, I witnessed thousands of people reclaim their lives. I also became a mother of two daughters, and more recently, a widow. Loss and reinvention have walked beside me all my life. I know what it takes to fall apart and what it takes to create yourself again, both in the world and in the kitchen.

My story is full of those bits of loss and resilience, food and dreams, spirit and humor. They're what brought me here, and they're what I now share with you.

I've learned that The Juicies Bits of life are rarely perfect.

They're the golden scraps at the bottom of the pan - the tender truths and messy moments that make us who we are.

All of these experiences with food, dreaming, healing, loss, and love are what I call The Juicie Bits.

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