Gardeners of Light represents a library of healing resources and creative expression inspired by the path of healing.

Founder and Lead Curator of Gardeners of Light, Ana Juliana overcame 6 years of daily drug abuse through natural means. Ana has also reversed numerous autoimmune diagnoses through these same natural healing principles.

Having come from a trauma rich background, Ana had a list of physiological shortcomings that included mental health diagnoses (with medicated intervention), chronic Lyme Disease, Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, Ankylosing Spondylitis, and countless co-morbid autoimmune infections. These manifestations were accompanied by encounters with domestic violence, EDs, and acute physical trauma. In 2024, Ana is on no medication and lives a happy life supplemented with plants and daily rituals of harmony with her body and the earth.

Ana Juliana had graduated Dartmouth College in 2017 with a bachelor’s degree in fine arts and a proclivity for crack cocaine. Over the course of her college career, prescription pill abuse had morphed into using anything and everything with only a hard-line at heroin.

A fatal ketamine-fentanyl overdose in 2019 would scare her just enough to be open to getting clean. From attending a Native Sweatlodge to eventually participating in a Shipibo ayahuasca ceremony, Ana owes her sobriety of nearly five years to plant medicine intervention.

Transitioning from abusing drugs to living with reverence and respect for the gift of life, the world of traditional plants was an incredible ally in a seemingly unsurmountable turn of fate.

Through plant medicine, Ana found her voice again and shares about her addiction recovery through poetry and storytelling.