We recently connected with Kara Brunson, M.A., M.H. and have shared our conversation below.
Kara, we’re thrilled to have you on our platform and we think there is so much folks can learn from you and your story. Something that matters deeply to us is living a life and leading a career filled with purpose and so let’s start by chatting about how you found your purpose.
I found my purpose at the doctor’s office. As a mom of 5 children, I can’t even count all the trips to the doctor we’ve taken over the years. When my daughter (now 22) was very little, we had more than our fair share of visits to the doctor. All because she struggled to breathe.
From the time she was two years old, she’d be in and out of hospitals, the doctor’s office, and the ER. Naturally, I wanted to better understand what was going on and going wrong. So, I asked the professionals. Typical conversations went like this: “Could it be her diet?” Their response, “Diet has nothing to do with it.”
Yet, every time she had milk, pizza, ice cream, any dairy—every single time like clockwork—she’d run into breathing trouble: a phlegm-y throat and irritated cough, then wheezing, that descended into a breathing nightmare. The doctor prescribed an inhaler and a nebulizer. The side effects of both were not great.
Every fall, by November, we’d start the rounds of a daily breathing treatment. But I saw what the medical treatments were doing to my baby: She’d get hyper, jittery, wide-eyed, and her pulse would start racing every single time. So after one of those mornings with the nebulizer and an afternoon with her inhaler, I just knew there had to be a better way to help her breathe.
Now the doctor, I really do feel, meant well and was totally faithful to his training and understanding of health and medicine. But it didn’t take long for me to see the limits of his knowledge. In all those doctors’ visits and trips to the ER, no one ever told me the importance of healing the body.
I had to search for answers to my deeper questions about health and wellness to uncover why this was happening to her again and again no matter what I tried. To start, I looked online. The internet was relatively new, but there was lots of information. Plenty of books in health food stores and local chains had tons of information too. Enough information, in fact, to drown in.
That’s when I committed to a disciplined program of herbal studies, and I learned about natural health in a way I’d never encountered before. I encountered case after case of real breakthroughs and deep healing, and after a while I began to feel a bit of light dawning. I started to imagine and hope for an end to this asthma nightmare. No more late nights and early mornings struggling to breathe, no more panicked runs to the ER.
But there was a catch. I had to commit to a complete lifestyle change, and that’s at the core of natural health.
Every herbal healer knows this fundamental principle: True healing, as any of us hopes for, is found in the sustained shifts we make in our diet and environment to transform the body, heart, and soul.
Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?
Growing up, my parents gave us all kinds of medicines, even the natural ones. We would regularly be given a folk remedy for coughs: honey, ginger, and lemon (and it may or may not have had a splash of brandy too). So I had these exposures from my childhood and young adult life. And it all spoke to me that I needed to take a more natural approach in supporting mine and my family’s health.
Before I became a Master Herbalist and completed many years of training and clinical work, I was dealing with my own gut issues & candida, and helping my kids navigate all the usual childhood illnesses, along with eczema and asthma.
As I used what I was learning—first through my own self-directed studies and then in formal training and client work—the power of plant medicine became clearer and clearer. It was exciting and I felt empowered, seeing my health and my family’s health improve. But things didn’t just improve; actually the health breakthroughs were sustained. Instead of getting sick every cold/flu season, it became an exception. Instead of annual bouts of seasonal allergies every fall and winter, it became very rare for any eczema or asthma flare-ups. Plus, I had no more candida imbalance. And then there’s one of my proudest natural health achievements: my fifth-baby was an unattended homebirth.
Finally, I found natural health success. And that gave me the confidence and this bright sense of purpose to help moms, caregivers, and individuals heal their health issues and pay it forward in their own families and communities. Those early successes planted a seed. Soon, women in my community approached me for help with women’s health issues: infertility, PCOS, low libido, PMS, and cramps. Not long after, it wasn’t just women, it was moms needing guidance for their kids’ allergies and fevers. It became men and women working through anxiety and depression. And, as the years passed, word-of-mouth spread. As I traveled the East Coast, and then internationally to Spain, Turkiye, and the United Arab Emirates, I was fortunate to deepen my training and clinical practice. The best part is enmeshing this love of plant medicine with cross-cultural knowledge, gaining herbal experience with plants in many regions of the world.
Now, as a certified master herbalist, I’ve been sharing my tried-and-true solutions that have served my family and my clients well for the past 15 years. And that’s what RIhla Wellness represents, honoring the Islamic herbal medicine tradition dating back more than a thousand years, and combining that with the scientific understanding of today. Through Rihla Wellness I offer community education program and workshops, personalized wellness packages for deep healing work, and custom formulated wholesale herbal formulas.
There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?
I’d have to say that the formal training I received, especially in gaining a solid base of botany, chemistry, and anatomy, is really what I credit for transcending all my previous ad-hoc efforts at natural health. I went from occasional wins with myself and my children to consistent reliable successes with different people, different cases, and different plants. With a grounding in botany, I developed an understanding of not just plant parts but plant chemistry, and pairing that with the chemistry of the human body and its systems opened up a whole new level of understanding about health and wellness.
My advice would be this: stay hungry for knowledge, and do yourself a favor and build a solid foundation in the basics of health and medicine. Plants are powerful healing tools, and extracting their medicine and using it in service of nourishing a weakened system requires some insight, some instinct, and a solid education. But, you don’t have to be a trained herbalist to enjoy the healing gifts of plants. Herbs are for everyone.
Thanks so much for sharing all these insights with us today. Before we go, is there a book that’s played in important role in your development?
There’s one book for sure that has been instrumental in my journey with Islamic herbal medicine. Sacred guidance in Islam instructs us to follow religious dietary laws that call for eating the ‘halal wa tayyib’ – the permissible and wholesome. I frequently turn to these verses in clinical practice and with my family: O you who have believed, eat from the good things which We have provided for you and be grateful…(Noble Qur’an, 2:172)
As science, food, and health research intersect, we can more clearly see the benefits of Islamic dietary law. For instance, when we eat foods that are designated as halal, we maintain a spiritual connection between our food choices and our health. When we eat these halal foods in their wholesome state, we uphold a sacred practice that calls for us to eat and drink according to seasonality, region, and individual need (according to one’s age, temperament, cultural custom, and state of health).
Natural healing is focused on restoring balance, internally & externally. This sacred verse embodies this divine principle of balance: As for the earth…we have caused to grow in it everything well-balanced thing. (Noble Qur’an, 15:19).
Our earthly bodies are designed to be healthy and in balance, but it will need support from time-to-time because of diet, lifestyle, and environmental factors that point to shifts we need to be making in order to restore our health. The focus is on eating well, regularly getting out the waste and toxins, while striving to live well through movement, outdoor activity, and a healthy mindset. And we get there through incremental, step-by-step change. Ultimately, though, our health and well-being is a sacred pursuit, and I find a lot of strength in this traditional prayer: God, grant me wellness in my body, wellness in my hearing, and wellness in my sight. There is no God but You. (Prophet Muhammad, peace and blessings be upon him).
So that characterizes the spiritual grounding of Rihla Wellness: – helping people get themselves back in balance, it is each of our personal God-given responsibility. And I take it as a privilege and a duty to help clients using what is known about medicinal plants & islamic herbal medicine to do it, combined with the latest research that confirms it and explores it more scientifically.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.rihlawellness.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rihla.wellness/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/rihla.wellness
- Other: Email: [email protected] Phone: +1-571-266-7681
Image Credits
Creidt: Rihla Wellness
