Community Highlights: Meet Amy Wilson of Native Natural Wellness

Today we’d like to introduce you to Amy Wilson.

Hi Amy, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
As a child, I was always fascinated by people’s experiences with health issues that fell outside the norm and curious about the journeys they took to find answers and themselves. But my own path into natural health and wellness wasn’t something I originally planned—it grew out of my personal experience with chronic illness and a deep desire to understand why my body was struggling.

For years, I dealt with complex health challenges that affected nearly every area of my life, beginning in my teens and continuing well into my 30s. I experienced chronic neurological Lyme disease, debilitating fatigue, digestive issues, thyroid and hormone dysfunction, multiple autoimmune diseases, brain fog, skin issues, and a long list of symptoms that often felt disconnected from one another. Like so many people living with chronic illness, I spent years searching for answers and trying to understand what my body was communicating.

An important part of my story was also my decision to become fully sober. Sobriety became a major turning point in my life and, in many ways, opened the door to a much deeper relationship with myself and my health. It required me to become more honest with myself, more intentional about how I was living, and more willing to look beneath the surface rather than simply trying to escape or manage what I was experiencing. That same mindset would eventually become central to the way I approached my physical health as well.

Eventually, my search for answers led me outside of the conventional symptom-management model and into the world of holistic and natural health. I began learning about nutrition, gut health, environmental exposures, detoxification, herbs, homeopathy, frequency therapies, nervous system regulation, and the interconnectedness of the body. The more I learned, the more I began to understand that my symptoms weren’t isolated problems—they were pieces of a much bigger picture.

My own healing journey completely changed the way I viewed health. It taught me that healing is rarely linear, that there is no single “magic” protocol, and that the body has an incredible capacity to restore balance when we identify and address the obstacles standing in its way.

What started as an effort to save my own health eventually became a calling to help other people navigate theirs. I went on to pursue extensive education in holistic health, naturopathy, functional health, and nutrition. I became an ANWPB Board-Certified Doctor of Natural Medicine and AANWP Board-Certified Functional Health Practitioner, Certified Holistic Health Practitioner, and Certified Nutrition Consultant. I’ve continued expanding my education through advanced training with the Institute for Restorative Health, further developing my understanding of functional testing, clinical assessment, and individualized, root-cause-focused care.

That journey ultimately led me to create Native Natural Wellness, my private holistic natural and functional health practice. I felt a strong desire—and a calling—to create a healing space where those struggling with chronic illness could receive the compassion, knowledge, understanding, guidance, and supportive modalities that I so deeply needed, but often lacked, early in my own healing journey.

The name itself reflects something deeply important to me: returning to the roots of natural health and working with the body rather than against it.

Today, I work primarily with people dealing with chronic and complex health concerns—especially digestive, hormonal, immune, environmental burdens and inflammatory issues. Close to my heart is working with those navigating chronic illnesses like Lyme disease and autoimmune conditions. My approach is root-cause focused and combines a detailed health history, nutrition and lifestyle assessment, symptom patterns, and objective testing when appropriate so that recommendations aren’t based on guesswork.

More than anything, I want people to leave my practice feeling empowered. Chronic illness can make you feel disconnected from and even afraid of your own body. I want my clients to understand their bodies better, recognize that their symptoms are information rather than isolated failures, and feel like they finally have a clear path forward.

In many ways, Native Natural Wellness grew out of the hardest chapter of my own life. What once felt like something that was taking my life away ultimately redirected it and gave me a much deeper sense of purpose. I’m still a lifelong student of health and healing, and I think my own experiences will always influence the compassion, curiosity, and respect I bring to the people I work with.

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
It definitely hasn’t been a smooth road. My own health journey involved years of uncertainty, trial and error, setbacks, and learning that healing rarely happens in a straight line. There were periods when I did everything I thought I was supposed to do and still didn’t see the progress I hoped for. Living with chronic illness can affect so much more than your physical health—it can change your relationships, your confidence, your plans for the future, and even the way you see yourself.

Becoming sober was another major part of that journey. One of the biggest revelations has been recognizing how cycles of chronic illness and self-medicating once fed one another—and learning how to alchemize those experiences into something different. Choosing sobriety meant learning how to face my life, my health, and myself differently. It required a level of accountability and self-awareness that wasn’t always comfortable, but it became one of the most transformative decisions I’ve made. Both sobriety and chronic illness taught me that meaningful change requires patience, consistency, and a willingness to keep going even when progress doesn’t look the way you expected it to.

Building Native Natural Wellness has brought a completely different set of challenges. I’ve had to learn how to take something I care deeply about and turn it into an actual business while continuing my education and growing into my role as a practitioner. There is a big difference between having knowledge and learning how to confidently apply it, communicate it, set boundaries, and trust yourself enough to lead someone else through their own health journey.

One of my biggest challenges has probably been learning that I don’t have to know everything or have everything perfectly figured out before I can make a meaningful difference. Health is incredibly complex, and I think being a good practitioner means remaining curious, knowing the limits of your knowledge, continuing to learn, and being willing to look deeper when something doesn’t make sense.

I’m still building, learning, and evolving, both personally and professionally. But I think the obstacles along the way have ultimately made me a better practitioner. They’ve given me a level of empathy for what it feels like to be the person searching for answers, and they’ve reinforced why I created Native Natural Wellness in the first place—to give people a space where they feel heard, supported, and empowered while they work toward better health.

Thanks – so what else should our readers know about Native Natural Wellness?
Native Natural Wellness is a holistic natural and functional health practice rooted in the belief that symptoms are not simply problems to suppress—they are a form of communication from the body and clues that can help us understand where support may be needed.

The name Native Natural Wellness reflects the heart of my philosophy: returning to the roots of natural and holistic healing and working with the body rather than against it. I believe there is tremendous wisdom in traditional approaches to health, but I also value the information available to us through modern assessment and objective testing. My practice brings those worlds together—honoring foundational and time-tested principles of natural healing while using modern tools to better understand the individual in front of me.

I work primarily with individuals navigating chronic and complex health concerns, including digestive dysfunction, hormonal imbalances, immune and inflammatory issues, environmental burdens, chronic fatigue, Lyme disease, and autoimmune conditions. Many of the people who come to me have been struggling for years, have tried numerous approaches, or simply feel overwhelmed and unsure of where to begin.

What sets Native Natural Wellness apart is the depth and individualized nature of the assessment process. I don’t believe in looking at one symptom in isolation or recommending supplements simply because they are commonly used for a particular complaint. I look at the whole person—their health history, symptom patterns, nutrition, lifestyle, environmental exposures, stress and nervous system patterns, medications and supplements, and objective laboratory testing — to begin identifying underlying patterns and potential contributors to what they are experiencing.

My approach brings together principles of functional health, holistic nutrition, traditional naturopathy, and natural healing with modern testing. I like to think of myself as a “Spiritual Scientist”—someone who deeply respects the intuitive, energetic, and spiritual aspects of healing while also valuing objective data, critical thinking, and the science of how the body functions. Depending on the individual, care may incorporate personalized nutrition and lifestyle guidance, targeted supplementation, functional laboratory testing, detoxification and drainage support, herbs, homeopathy, biofeedback and frequency-based therapies, PEMF, infrared sauna, and other supportive modalities. The goal is never to throw everything at someone at once, but to determine what makes sense for that individual and work through priorities in a thoughtful, manageable way.

One of the things I’m most passionate about is helping people understand the interconnectedness of the body. Digestion, nutrient status, hormones, immune function, detoxification, metabolism, the nervous system, sleep, stress, and environmental exposures don’t exist in separate boxes. When we begin looking at those relationships rather than chasing individual symptoms, we can start asking much better questions about what the body needs.

Education and empowerment are also foundational to my practice. I don’t want clients to feel dependent on me or blindly follow a protocol without understanding why they’re doing it. I want them to become more informed about their own bodies, understand the reasoning behind their recommendations, and develop tools they can carry with them long after our work together.

Ultimately, what I’m most proud of is creating a practice where people with complicated health stories can feel heard rather than dismissed or reduced to a list of symptoms. Native Natural Wellness is about reviving the roots of natural healing while recognizing that we have valuable modern tools available to us, too. It’s about respecting the individuality of each person, returning to the foundations of health, and helping people reconnect with their body and its innate capacity for healing.

Is there a quality that you most attribute to your success?
Curiosity has probably been one of the most important qualities in both my personal and professional growth. I’ve always had a strong desire to understand why—why something is happening, why the body is responding a certain way, why something works for one person but not another, and whether there might be another perspective worth considering.

My own health journey taught me not to accept things at face value simply because they were presented as the only answer. I learned to ask questions, research for myself, remain open to different perspectives, and trust myself enough to think independently. At the same time, I’ve learned that independent thinking also requires humility—the willingness to recognize when you don’t know something, change your mind when new information warrants it, and continue learning.

That curiosity is a huge part of how I approach my work today. I don’t want to look at a symptom and immediately assume I know the answer. I want to understand the person, look for patterns and connections, gather objective information when appropriate, and keep asking better questions.
I think being a lifelong learner while remaining willing to question what I think I know has been essential to my success. Health and healing are far too complex for any of us to ever know everything, and I hope I never lose the curiosity that led me down this path in the first place.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.nativenaturalwellness.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nativenaturalwellness/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61573012510475

Image Credits
Leigha Smith Photography