"True wellness was acting on my intuition."

A vulnerable journal entry by an OG ah.mi member

There are three things you should know:

1. “Redefining wellness” is at the forefront of our ah.mi brand pillars.

2. When you hear someone mention ah.mi [pronounced “ah-mee”], we hope you think of it as a lifestyle encompassed by realistic healthy habits and a community to lean on for accountability.

3. Wellness means different things to different people and we embrace that.

Understanding what wellness truly means is an ever-evolving journey and we’re here to open up the conversation!

I hope you’re seated somewhere cozy and ready to read because this may be the most special newsletter we have shared since moving ah.mi over to Substack: a vulnerable journal entry written by OG ah.mi member, former creative director, and current ah.mi advisor, Robyn Davies. ❤️

Robyn is an incredible writer and creative visionary with a compelling story, so we asked her, “what does wellness mean to you?”.

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Robyn’s story:

What does wellness mean to you?

It’s a question Rachel and I have chatted about ever since ah.mi’s inception. Back then, when we first met in 2019, I had ideas. I was in my late twenties, feeling like I’d mostly figured it out. Wellness was about eating healthy and exercising—which are still a part of my definition today—but they were grounded in what I call my “shoulds,” things I think I should be doing, instead of what I actually want.

I usually ate whole foods, but primarily because I wanted to look a certain way. Exercise was the same, and it only counted if I went to work out classes and got an hour in. Anything else wasn’t worth my time. There was a rigidness to my approach to wellness. If I deviated from my ideaI healthy day, I felt like I messed up. I was starting and stopping, either “healthy” or “not.”

I didn’t want to believe this. My journal entries from college to early adulthood are littered with me writing about getting healthy, wanting to eat better, exercise consistently, and drink less booze because I knew I wasn’t taking care of myself the way I wanted to. There had to be an in-between, my in-between. One where I enjoyed sweets and french fries, wine or a martini, but not to the point where I physically felt bad. I wanted to act on what my body needed, instead of forcing myself into a strict regimen.

Rachel felt similarly. It was through helping her create ah.mi that I started to change my mindset around eating and exercising, which would become the groundwork for other changes in my life.

“Greens. Water. Move. Repeat.” The ah.mi mantra. It was simple, catchy, something Rachel came up with, that she could commit to, that I could commit to, without feeling like we were setting ourselves up for failure. So much of what our culture presents as healthy–it feels unattainable. But I could throw a couple handfuls of spinach in a smoothie, drink a few S’well bottles of water, and go on a walk, do a 20-minute Melissa Wood Health video.

Even the swapping of the word “exercise” for “move,” something I learned from Melissa Wood Tepperberg, felt revelatory. ”Move”—a word free from baggage. It wasn’t me trying to sweat out last night’s hangover on an elliptical in college, or me trying to look good in a bikini for a trip to Miami. It was me moving in a way that made me feel powerful, strong, graceful. Movement that I liked. Pilates, some types of yoga, running, dancing alone at home. Movement that flowed into my life and made me feel better.

A year into ah.mi, I started to wrap my head around this idea of consistently showing up for myself. Listening to what my body needed, and acting on it. I felt better, and I looked better too. I was proud of this in-between I’d developed and yet, there was this uneasiness within my mind. One that had been there for years, but that I was more attuned to now.

The summer of 2020, Antoinette Beauchamp, a coach I’d met through Rachel, asked if I’d like to help her with a retreat she was hosting in upstate New York.  We’d worked together on branding projects for her business, and I instantly said yes, everytime we chatted feeling like a little gift.  

I met her at the Newark airport and we drove two hours north, talking along the way. That night, unwinding from an afternoon of prepping for her guests, we sat on the carpeted floor, lights dim, books surrounding us.

“Would you like to pull a card?” she asked.

I hesitated.

I’d pulled cards before, once with a tarot card reader in Jackson Square, New Orleans, and another time underneath the Southern Live Oaks of Ocracoke Island, but I’d stayed away from them because I was scared of what they’d tell me. A message I didn’t want to hear, an answer that lived within me, but that I was afraid of acknowledging because of the avalanche it’d cause. I wasn’t ready for that, yet.

I looked at Antoinette, the space that she’d created. I was in a good place. I was about to turn 30. Engaged to the man I’d dated since I was 19. I did work that I found meaningful. It connected me to women like Antoinette. I lived in a spacious, sun-soaked apartment in downtown Manhattan. I had friends I cared about, who cared about me. I’d learned how to fuel my body, to take care of it, to change my mindset around food and movement.

And yet.

And yet I still felt this sense of longing, of wanting, of feeling like I was living a dimmed version of myself. It was a feeling I’d had for most of my twenties, something I suspected was the reason my mother wished me contentment on all my birthday cards.

Was it just that—that I couldn’t be content? The easy answer was yes, but despite years of denying my intuition, I knew that it wasn’t so simple. There had to be a reason I felt this way.

I decided to pull a card.