I am Johanna, and I am so glad you are here.
Doula, Functional Medicine Health Coach, mother of three, and the founder of Life By Love, a family-focused health practice supporting women and families through fertility, pregnancy, postpartum, and family life.
This is my About page. I have tried to make it feel like a real introduction rather than a list of credentials, because the work I do is personal and you may want to know something about the person behind it before you decide whether to engage further. So this is what I would tell you if we were sitting across a table together with a cup of tea.
What started as my own search for healing has grown into a lifetime's work.
I have been working in family health since 2011, and founded Life By Love in 2013, when conventional medicine was unable to give me the answers I needed. The people who have come to me across that time have most often been at one of the stages this practice now centers on. Preparing for a child, navigating fertility challenges, walking through pregnancy, recovering from birth, finding their way through the early years of parenthood. The work has taken different shapes over the years, but it has consistently lived here.
I have come to understand this is where my work is. Not because it is a strategic niche, but because it is what people have asked of me, and because it is also where I have walked myself. I have been through fertility, pregnancy, postpartum, and the years that follow. I have done the work I now offer to others, on myself, in my own life, with my own three children.
Through Functional Medicine, Mind-Body practices, and the quiet power of presence, I help people come home to themselves and to a steadier relationship with their own health. The work is not separate from my life. It runs through it.
Grounded in both science and heart.
My professional training has been deliberate and substantial. I am a certified Doula and have been supporting women through pregnancy, birth, and the early postpartum since 2011. I am a Functional Medicine Health Coach trained through the Functional Medicine Coaching Academy, and the foundations of that work began earlier with a Holistic Lifestyle Coach training at the CHEK Institute. I have studied Mind-Body Medicine and movement extensively, and I have been practicing meditation since the early 2000s, a less conventional credential, but one that grounds everything else I do.
Beyond any credential, what matters most is showing up fully, with presence, heart, and the willingness to keep learning.
The household, day to day.
I live in Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand, with my husband David and our three children. I have walked the stages I now support: fertility preparation, three full-term pregnancies, three births in different forms, the postpartum that nobody quite prepared me for, and the family-life years that have shaped how I work as much as any training has.
David is my husband and the technical and strategic partner behind Life By Love. He built and continues to develop the systems that make the practice work. The practice itself remains my work, but it is supported by his in ways that are not always visible from the outside.
Our household also includes Zven, a miniature schnauzer with a personality larger than his frame. He is the small daily reminder that not everything in a home runs on a schedule.
Meditation has been the steady thread underneath everything since the early 2000s, drawing on Vipassana, a quiet form of insight practice, returned to year after year. When I am not working, I am usually with the children, walking, cooking, or in a short daily sit. Each of these is part of how the work stays grounded.
A woman came to me once carrying cycle charts in a binder, supplement bottles in a tote, and a written list of everything she had tried. For the first call, we set all of it aside. We talked about how she had been sleeping, and the language she used when she spoke about her own body. The rest of the work – the protocols, the testing, the careful adjustments – is built on that ground, or it does not hold.
If you have read this far, thank you.
If anything in here resonates and you would like to know more about how I work, the methodology is the place to begin. If you would like to find what is available for the stage of life you are in, the four stage pages are organized that way. If you would like to be in touch directly, you are welcome to write to me at [email protected]. And if you would just like to stay in touch lightly, the Living Fully newsletter arrives once a week on a Friday. If you would like to talk, you can schedule a Discovery Call.
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