Rising Stars: Meet Maria Baab

Today we’d like to introduce you to Maria Baab

Hi Maria, we’re thrilled to have a chance to learn your story today. So, before we get into specifics, maybe you can briefly walk us through how you got to where you are today. 
When I look back on my life as a whole, I can identify that my physical and mental health challenges were tied to greater dysfunction within my body, and that’s really where my story begins— wanting to find answers to understand my body better and heal naturally from a lifetime of chronic issues. 

From a very young age, I suffered from debilitating stomach pain, anxiety, chronic nose bleeds, dermatillomania, sleep-disordered breathing, and nightmares. As I got older, some of these conditions went away, some remained, and I gained some new ones (like depression and PMDD). I was medicated through my teenage years with anti-depressants and hormonal birth control as the remedy to relieve my symptoms, which only had side effects worse than the symptoms themselves. 

I don’t think at that time many people understood that these symptoms were communication from within—my body telling us that things were not balanced. Many systems needing to be restored at a cellular level and nurtured back to health. The symptoms were viewed as the problem, and so the root causes were never explored. 

It wasn’t until after becoming a mother that I really opened my eyes to the impact that our external environment has on internal health that I started to understand the true tenants of foundational and holistic wellness. Through my own healing and my calling to raise my son in the healthiest environment possible, I started to learn more about basic toxins in the home (cleaning and personal care products), our food and water systems, conventional medical system, and what TRUE wellness embodies from a physiological, emotional, nutritional and holistic standpoint. 

Today, I am so proud to say that my healing happened, by the grace of God, without traditional medication, and my medicine cabinet at home is 100% natural, using only plant medicine, herbal remedies, and homeopathy for our occasional illnesses, injuries, etc. 

When I started to examine my own health, I began the healing journey that completely changed my life and through this accumulation of knowledge and experience, my passion for helping others connect to their intuitive sense of well-being and intrinsic healing was born! 

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?
Gosh, no. The road was as bumpy as it could get! 

I was born and bred in NYC with divorced parents, which was really hard on my spirit as a little kid. There was a lot of pain in that time of my life, and even though we got through it, I don’t know that I can say we *worked* through it. In my work now, I see how these origin stories, which a lot of us have, by the way, shape our physical health and our ability to align our physical, emotional, and spiritual bodies. 

I went through decades of therapy, various diagnoses, medication, and when nothing worked, I completely removed myself from that system and didn’t do anything about the way I felt. That ultimately led me down a path of alcohol and substance addiction and pure disregard for myself as a person in an attempt to deal with my discomfort, both physical and emotional. 

At some point, I realized that I was destroying my life from within and that I needed to make a massive change if I wanted to give myself a chance to live a life that I could be proud of someday. I claimed sobriety in 2014 and really, for the first time, learned to sit with my discomfort and find new ways to handle my emotions and care for myself in deeply nurturing ways. If you’ve ever dealt with addiction or gotten sober, you know that this part of my story was RAW. It was like everything that had ever happened in my life: childhood trauma, sexual assault, reckoning with my failures, shame, guilt, anger, sadness, and embarrassment, came flooding to the surface all at once. I had to ride that wave! But then also had to clean up the wreckage. It wasn’t pretty, but it was the turning point for me, and when I look back, I’m so thankful for that time because it taught me how to truly connect with my body and also how to be grotesquely honest and accountable with myself. I had a few really really good years between all of that and what happened next… 

Fast forward to post-partum in late 2017, after my husband and I welcome our beautiful son into the world, my OB recommended that I be put on the non-hormonal birth control (copper IUD) since we weren’t planning on expanding our family. As my history taught me, hormonal birth control propelled suicidal tendencies, depression, and manic episodes for me, so the non-hormonal option seemed to be the “best fit.” Within three months of having the copper IUD, my health took a dramatic turn for the worst. I was experiencing extreme vertigo episodes, dissociation, skin rashes, gut issues, migraines, insomnia, anxiety worse than I’d ever had in my life— all while having a newborn at home. My mother pushed me to advocate for myself to have the IUD removed (because that was the only thing that had changed before the onset of these symptoms), and sure enough, within the hour of having it removed, my skin rash started to go away, and within the month the vertigo spells and dissociation stopped. I continued to live with the anxiety, gut issues, insomnia, anxiety, and migraines for years before I found a solution, but that’s where things really get good because my healing journey actually kickstarted my career. 

Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
I am the Lead Wellness Coach and HTMA Expert at Omne Wellness. We specialize in helping women achieve natural hormone balance by addressing internal and external factors that contribute to their symptoms, helping our clients optimize their total body well-being. 

There are a LOT of health coaching programs out there! What makes us different is that we use mineral testing (biological data) to identify and correct mineral imbalances, as well as addressing systemic issues (like gut dysbiosis, nervous system dysregulation, etc.) and underlying heavy metal toxicity. What is really transformative about our process is that we promote lifestyle improvements through custom-formulated supplementation, holistic support, education and emphasize the importance of addressing the emotional body in physical healing. 

I am currently enrolled in the Functional Diagnostic Nutrition certification program, which adds to my wealth of knowledge in the field of Holistic Wellness. My vision is to make optimal health accessible to everyone, and I am passionate about the availability of alternative and natural treatments alongside traditional medicine. There is a time and place for conventional medicine, but when naturopathic and holistic approaches are not considered in someone’s healing, especially in the beginning, we miss the mark in a big big way. There is SO MUCH we can do to support health in our daily lives as we age, especially when it comes to basic biological functions such as hormone production/regulation. 

Victoria Franca, the Founder of Omne Wellness, is actually the Practitioner I worked with to balance my body coming out of post-partum copper toxicity— her program completely transformed my health, my life, and my understanding of what foundations of health are. Suffice it to say, my journey has become my business card, and I am so proud to be part of this practice that empowers women worldwide to take control of their health and how they age. 

Separate from my client work with Omne Wellness, I am also on the Board of the Psychedelic Association of Arizona— we are a non-profit organization dedicated to the passage of legislature to legalize the clinical use of psychedelics, ensuring individual access to therapies in a regulated and controlled manner, prioritizing safety, ethics, and responsible practices. Tying into my passion for ensuring the availability to all for alternative and natural treatments alongside conventional medicine, I believe that the integration of psychedelic medicine in the alignment of the mind-body-spirit offers a unique perspective that emphasizes modern medicine as a whole. I am beyond excited to be part of the movement to drive transformative change in mental health care in the state of Arizona. 

What has been the most important lesson you’ve learned along your journey?
The most important lesson I’ve learned in my journey is that you know your body best and you have to build trust within yourself if you want to evolve in health, business, personally, etc. The body is innately equipped with a unique intelligence that we each have access to. When it comes to health, every person has the ability to connect deeply within themselves to understand the signals and communication coming from our bodies, whether that be through symptoms, emotions, reactions, or behaviors. The surest way to heal thyself is to align your physical, emotional, and energetic bodies and learn to understand how (and why) your body communicates certain things to you. Though it is important to work with a wellness team that will guide you and facilitate your journey to optimal health through their expertise, no external source can know you better than you know yourself or do it better for you. When your body is telling you something, trust it, and if the person you’re working with isn’t listening to you, find someone who will. 

Contact Info:

• Website: www.omnewellness.com and www.paaz.org
• Instagram: @livewellcurious
• Other: https://calendly.com/livewellcurious/30mins

Image Credits
Wildbird Photography
Kimberly Faye Photography
Spintown Creative