Our Story

For several years I worked in corporate sales in New York City - a fast-paced, high-pressure world that I was good at, but slowly worn down by. 

By the time I started questioning it, I knew I needed something different. I just didn't know what that would look like yet.

I was burnt out enough that even planning a vacation felt like too much. I'd been half-considering something, anything, just to get out - and then I came across a plant medicine retreat in Peru. I couldn't have told you why I chose it. I just knew, with a certainty I couldn't explain, that I had to go.

What I found there I still don't have the right words for. A connection to plants, to something slower and older, to a pace of life that felt more honest than the one I'd been living. I came home knowing I was in the wrong life. I didn't know yet what the right one looked like.

What I didn't know yet was that my body was already trying to tell me the same thing. For years I had been managing chronic pain - bladder pain, digestive issues, an inflammation that was disruptive and hard to understand. I saw doctors. I got diagnoses. I adjusted, adapted, and kept going, because that's what you do when the job demands it and the pace of the city doesn't stop. But the pain was always there, underneath everything, insistent on being heard despite my desperate attempts to ignore it in the hopes it would just resolve itself. 

On the last day of 2019 - December 31st, a date that feels almost too symbolic now - my partner and I bought a cabin in the Catskill Mountains of New York. The plan was practical: fix it up, offer it to guests as a retreat from the city, have a project. We had no idea that three months later the world would stop, and that the cabin would stop being a project and become our life.

When the pandemic moved us out of New York City in March 2020 and up into the woods full time, something shifted almost immediately. There was a quiet different from any quiet I'd known in years (or ever, possibly). The air was different. The pace was different. And for the first time in a long time, I started to notice things.

That first spring, dandelions came up everywhere. I couldn’t help but to notice their bright yellow blooms, the first bit of color to break the monotony of stick season - that grey, bare stretch between the last of autumn and the first real signs of spring. I found myself drawn to them in a way I couldn't quite explain - wanting to be close to them, to understand them, to learn what they knew. It wasn't a plan, it was a pull. And I learned in Peru to trust that kind of pull.

I started reading about dandelion root. What it had been used for in various traditions across the world. I was amazed at what it did for the liver, the lymph, and for digestion. And then, with curiosity and gratitude, I started working with her. I blended dandelion root with burdock root - two of the great clearing herbs -  and what began as an experiment by a riverbank in the Catskills would eventually become our Glow blend.

What happened next is the reason MediTea exists.

After the first few cups, the stomach pain I had been dealing with for years began to ease. Not completely, but enough for me to notice - and there is no greater proof of something working than experiencing it yourself. I could feel the difference in my body with these herbs -  something was genuinely shifting, I hadn't been making it up. These plants, overlooked and sold to us as weeds, were capable of real things. 

That was the beginning of everything. I started studying in earnest - taking courses, reading everything I could find, making blend after blend, attending herbal conferences, learning the stories that had been passed down through generations of herbalists.The more I learned, the more I fell in love - with the intelligence of the plants, the depth of the traditions behind them, and the way every hour spent in this world opened into something bigger.

In one of those courses, a teacher summed up what it means to truly commit to this practice: “If you dedicate your life to learning about herbs and how to properly use them,” she said, "you can spend the rest of your life making other people's lives better, all through the relationship you have forged with plants."

I wrote it down. I've thought about it nearly every day since.

In 2021, after a year of learning and making and testing and living inside this practice, MediTea Wellness was born. Every blend in this range came from the same place that the first dandelion did - real curiosity, real symptoms, real plants, real relief. I grow and forage what I can from this land, and I source the rest from growers I trust. I blend everything by hand in small batches, surrounded by the same mountains and the same land that started all of this.

I made these teas because I needed them. My body was asking for something and the plants graciously answered. I've come to believe that in this fast-paced world, there is something genuinely radical about slowing down enough to let plants do what they've always known how to do: ground you, restore you, bring you back to yourself.

If you're here, I'd guess your body is asking for something too. Maybe you've tried everything your doctor suggested and still don't feel like yourself. Maybe you're functioning, technically, but exhausted in a way that sleep doesn't fix. Maybe you've started wondering if this is just what your body does now.

It's not. I know because I was there.

These blends exist because real plants did real things for a real person who needed them. That's the only reason any of this is here. And if something in you pulled you toward this page, trust that. 

The plants always meet you where you are.

With gratitude,
Liz