The Return to Coherence:

What a 14-Day Detox Taught Me About Coming Home to Myself

Featured photo, from left: Michele A. Wilson, Dr. Lauren Leiva, DPT, Allana Pratt, and Ann Marie “Annie” Ziegler.

I have now done the Aryaa Organic 14-Day Detox twice this year, and both times I came out the other side a little more myself than when I went in. That’s an odd thing to say about a detox. We’re conditioned to think of these programs as restrictive, starvation, or being hungry all the time. What I found instead was closer to a 14-day journey. Fourteen days of quietly, deliberately clearing space, and then noticing what moves in to fill it.

I’ve spent years writing for magazines, hosting my own TV show, and training and coaching moms who build businesses in the pockets of nap schedules and IEP meetings, moms who reclaim identity while raising children with special needs. My own upcoming book, If Your Laundry Can Talk, is built around what I call the 7 Sacred Threads of Self-Care: Body, Mind, Heart, Relationships, Work, Home, and Spirit- the small, sacred practices that hold a woman together when everything else is asking for her hands. Self-care is one of those threads, and it’s the one moms apologize for the most.

So when I sat down for a special three-part Moms Convo LIVE series with three incredible mompreneurs who have built businesses and become part of the Aryaa Organic detox experience – co-founder Ann Marie “Annie” Ziegler; intimacy coach and Aryaa Master Expert Allana Pratt; and biohacking expert and fellow Aryaa Master Expert Dr. Lauren Leiva – I wasn’t just interviewing three phenomenal moms. I was still inside the experience, having a conversation with them to understand why something built around soup and stillness had reached into so many corners of my life at once.

An Elixir With a 2,500-Year-Old Memory

Annie didn’t set out to build a wellness brand. She built Aryaa Organic out of her own reckoning with autoimmune disease, Hashimoto’s, chronic migraines, the particular exhaustion of a body that keeps sending distress signals no specialist can fully translate. Her search for healing led her, alongside Aryaa CEO Kamal Hans, to something older than the modern supplement aisle: a moong bean soup elixir with roots in Ayurvedic tradition, said to trace back roughly 2,500 years to Master Jivaka, Buddha’s own physician, and carried forward through a lineage of teachers before it ever reached her kitchen.

That soup is the anchor of the program. Around it, Annie and Kamal built a food-first system designed to calm inflammation, support digestion, and deliver a complete plant-based amino acid profile, but she was careful, in our conversation, to frame it through the Ayurvedic lens of vata, pitta, and kapha, the three constitutional doshas the recipes are designed to bring into balance. Participants start with a dosha quiz. The kit adapts. The soup can be made in an Instant Pot or a slow cooker, and, this mattered to me as a mom, the whole family can eat it.

What Annie described, and what I felt after going through it twice myself, is a program that has quietly outgrown the word “detox.” It’s expanded into supplements, expert-led classes, meditation, BrainTap sessions, biophoton work, heart coherence practices, movement, and emotional support, organized now around what the team calls the “wheel of coherence”: body, relationships, purpose, heart, abundance, mind, and spirit. A new Aryaa app lets participants track their own movement around that wheel, which felt less like a wellness gimmick and more like being handed a compass.

The Detox You Don’t See Coming

Annie’s part of the conversation was about the architecture; Allana Pratt’s was about what happens once you’re standing inside it.

Allana has spent twenty years as an intimacy coach, and she was refreshingly honest about where that work began, not in expertise, but in her own insecurity, hypervigilance, and years of overperforming for other people’s approval. That history is exactly why her read on the Aryaa detox landed so differently for me. She’s now on her fifth round, and she described something I recognized immediately from my own experience: the physical cleanse is only the entry point. What actually surfaces, for her, for me, for so many of the women and men in the Aryaa community — is emotional. Suppressed grief. Old beliefs about worth. Sometimes something that feels ancestral, handed down rather than personally earned.

My own two detoxes confirmed this in real time. The first time, the shift was almost entirely physical: I felt lighter, clearer, less inflamed, and I slept better. The second time, the physical changes took a back seat to something quieter: a heightened awareness of myself (emotional detox), of the people around me, of where I’d been running on autopilot. Allana named the mechanism I didn’t have words for: that awareness alone doesn’t transform anything. It’s the embodiment, the meditation, the journaling, the masterclasses, and the willingness to actually feel what surfaces, rather than just note it intellectually, that turn a two-week reset into something that outlasts day fourteen.

She also said something I’ve been sitting with since we recorded our conversation: that transformation happens best in community, not isolation, like a rising tide, where someone else’s breakthrough becomes permission for your own. That tracks with everything I’ve built this show around. Moms, especially moms raising children with special needs, are so often taught that asking for support is a failure of capability. The Aryaa community, global, generous, down-to-earth, supportive, and loving, quietly busts that myth.

A Marker Worth Trusting

Dr. Lauren Leiva joined the series as the science check on all of it,  a Doctor of Physical Therapy, biohacker, and founder of The ExerScience Center, who introduces herself, half-joking, as the “Queen of Biohacking.” Her own health story is the reason she can’t talk about inflammation in the abstract. She was diagnosed with severe Crohn’s disease at thirteen, lived through a colostomy bag before eventually reversing it, and watched her mother move through a stroke and lung cancer,  all of which, she told me, shaped a conviction that families should never be defined by a diagnosis.

That line landed harder than she probably knew. My own son has lived on TPN for sixteen years, carries an autism diagnosis and an ileostomy bag, and I’ve spent those sixteen years learning how brutal it is to navigate schools and medical systems when a disability doesn’t announce itself visibly. Lauren and I didn’t plan to end up there in the conversation. We just did two moms who’ve had to build health literacy neither of us asked for.

Lauren already had a serious detox regimen before Aryaa ever entered her life: regular fasting, sauna, chlorella, spirulina, lymphatic support, IV therapy. What set Aryaa apart wasn’t novelty; it was orientation: cellular support paired with intentional eating and an actual, repaired relationship with food, rather than one more protocol to white-knuckle through. She was also clear that detox isn’t one-size-fits-all; it’s patient-centered, individualized, free of the comparison trap that makes so many moms feel like they’re failing a test no one told them the rules to.

The number that stuck with me was her HS-CRP, the inflammatory marker she watches closely. She told me hers once sat at 14.8. Fasting could bring it down temporarily, but it was the sustained dietary change that kept it there. She layers in red light, UVB exposure, meditation, and visualization work, and she’s built BrainTap meditations, some co-created with Dr. Patrick Porter, for stress, sleep, focus, and helping children regulate their nervous systems, including her own son’s early developmental challenges.

What I learned during our conversations is that Annie built the framework, Allana showed me what surfaces emotionally inside it, and Lauren gave me the clinical permission to trust that what I was feeling in my body had a measurable, real reason behind it.

What “Return to Coherence” Actually Means

We closed each conversation with the same question: what does Return to Coherence mean to you? Each woman meant something a little different by it, so I’ll let their answers stand on their own instead of folding them into one tidy line. For Annie, coherence is physiological, the body finally speaking one language instead of several conflicting ones. For Lauren, it’s clinical, the day her lab markers finally told the same story her body had been trying to tell her for years. For Allana, it’s relational, the alignment between how you feel and how you show up. For me, now twice through the program, it has come to mean something simpler: the absence of noise. The version of me that isn’t performing calm, but actually is.

That’s not a small thing for a mom who has spent years believing rest has to be earned. It’s the whole premise of my Sacred Threads chapter on self-care — self-care isn’t a luxury, it’s essential. It’s the thing that makes finishing everything else sustainable. That’s what real work-life harmony looks like.

If You’re the Busy Mom Reading This

I asked each guest some version of the question I know is coming from you, the reader: I don’t have fourteen days to make myself a priority. Their answers, each in their own way, gently remind us that the premise doesn’t hold up. The program is built to fold into real life, a soup you can make once and portion out, a kit that adapts to your body, a community you can log onto over Zoom, live when your schedule allows or by replay when it doesn’t. Lauren’s version of that answer was clinical and blunt: there is no universal protocol, and the moms who succeed are the ones who stop comparing their fourteen days to anyone else’s. Fourteen days isn’t a pause from your life. It’s a recalibration you carry back into it.

Disclosure: I’m an affiliate for the Ayraa Organics 14‑Day Detox. If you register through the links below, I may earn a commission—at no extra cost to you. Aryaa Organic runs this detox four times a year. To watch the full, unedited conversations with Annie, Allana, and Lauren, visit my YouTube channel. For the link and registration details, see the show notes or go directly to detox.momsconvo.com.

Aryaa Organic has become part of my life well beyond those fourteen days each round. I still make the Moong Bean Soup Elixir weekly, not as a detox, just as a ritual, a grounding practice that keeps me tethered to what those two rounds taught me about slowing down and listening to my body.

I went in twice looking for less inflammation. I came out both times with more clarity about who I actually am underneath the roles. That’s the deeper gift this 2,500-year-old soup, and everything the Aryaa community built around it, gave me. And exploring it, then sharing it with you, is exactly the kind of journey I love to be on.