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It began with our own search for better health.
The Journey of Compassion began with our own search for better health. After both of our families were impacted by cancer, we began asking deeper questions about prevention, long-term well-being, and the role our daily choices play in our health. That search became a journey of self-discovery that eventually took us to Rishikesh, India, where we attended an Ayurvedic medicine program and immersed ourselves in a philosophy of healing centered on prevention, balance, and caring for the whole person.
For more than 12 years, we have embraced a plant-based lifestyle rooted in conscious living. For nearly 16 years, I have worked as a trainer and mobility specialist, helping people improve their strength, movement, and overall well-being. Tatum works in Los Angeles on commercial and production sets as a hairstylist, building relationships that often extend far beyond the salon chair.
Although our careers are different, they share something important: they are centered around people. Whether someone is training in the gym or sitting in a styling chair, conversations naturally become personal. People open up about stress, anxiety, physical pain, relationships, and the challenges they carry. Those experiences reinforced what we had already learned through our own lives and our studies in Ayurveda—true health involves the whole person.
True health involves the whole person.
That understanding inspired us to create The Journey of Compassion. We formulate our supplements and manufacture them in our own USDA Organic certified facility, allowing us to oversee every step with intention, transparency, and care. Each formula is thoughtfully developed with carefully sourced botanical ingredients, rooted in traditional Ayurvedic wisdom, and produced according to strict quality standards.
Our Story
Everyone is on a journey.
We are all learning who we are while unlearning behaviors, beliefs, and survival patterns that can pull us away from our natural selves. The journey is the process of growing into who we aspire to be while finding our way back to who we have always been beneath the conditioning, pain, and expectations we have carried.
Compassion is how we move through that process, without judging ourselves for what we learned in order to survive, and with patience and honesty as we choose differently. As we learn to care for ourselves more deeply, we become more capable of extending that same care to others.
This is The Journey of Compassion.
Meet the Founders
The two behind the formulas
Tate
Co-Founder · Hairstylist · Ayurveda ConsultantSeems like so many lives I’ve lived to bring me to a true life of service. To a belief in community purpose and giving of gifts. The realization that our gifts are for others. Deep in our soul we attempt to uncover the intimacy of our true nature.
A long story as a highlight reel. I grew up in a household where I didn’t feel safety. I had a father who used drugs and a mother who was very much the victim of abuse. I am the oldest daughter and I was my younger brothers’ keeper. I grew up feeling responsible for everyone’s feelings and strived to play the peacekeeper. I sacrificed myself in order to become a buffer system for unregulated emotions. As I got older I lacked boundaries and people pleased my way into feeling acceptance and validation. I had no idea the experience of real love or of self identity as I spent my time in deep observation of the environment I was attempting to adapt in to.
I left the house at 17 and began working in a barber shop braiding hair. This is where I experienced for the first time in my life the vulnerability and openness of barbershop culture. They spoke of trauma without shame. They allowed me to be open about my experiences and showed me where to see the silver lining. They planted seeds in me that set the rest of my life in discovery of my own psychology, along with the psychology of society. For the first time in my life I felt real acceptance, for all my darkness was validated.
I always felt called to understand why we are the way we are. I felt called to counsel and serve others who maybe hadn’t had the opportunity I had to be in a safe space. To help connect us with the unwanted parts of ourselves. I stood behind my stylist chair with the intention of making others feel what I felt being in the shop. The sacred space, where shame dissipated and truth could be held.
I moved to LA in my early 20’s set out to scale my talents in entertainment. I ended up in magazines such as Vogue and GQ. Now that story is of a whole other adventure, but the same principles I always had allowed me in to the creative spaces of many artists and entertainers such as Nipsey Hussle, 50 cent, Brent Faiyaz, Wale, and I even had the opportunity to braid Snoop Dogg. Although at the time these accomplishments seemed to make me feel purpose, something else was calling me.
I eventually burned out of doing hair and decided to shake my life up by selling everything and putting life into a backpack to travel the world. I spent about 4 years in and out of the U.S. traveling Europe, Australia and Asia. On one of my stays in NYC I had a horrible accident that fractured my face and left me not knowing if I lost my eyesight. I was put on medication and struggled with suicidal thoughts. I was so deep in depression until the day I finished my medication. All of a sudden the world went back to being tolerable. As my recovery continued I lost the ability to digest foods I loved, I suffered from hives, and blackout migraines. I figured I had head trauma but didn’t want to return to the doctor because of the side effects of medication. This sent me down my research journey of holistic health and medicine. I began fruit fasting and taking herbs. I became fully sober. I spent 3 years as a raw vegan and yoga disciple. I completely shifted my life and my perspective. I felt the dance with god, no longer a theory in my mind but a full experience of reverence.
Here I am today, a living testimony of the power of herbal medicine and faith. Excited to share, to give, and to inspire where I’m called.
Nellie
Co-Founder · Exercise and Mobility Specialist · Ayurveda ConsultantI didn’t come into this with a business idea. I came into this because I was hurting.
In 2011, I felt disconnected, heavy, stuck, and depressed. I didn’t like the person I was becoming, and I knew something had to change. I started working out, not because I wanted to look good, but because I wanted to feel alive again.
When movement started helping me, something shifted in my mind. I remember thinking, if this is helping me find my way back, I want to help other people do the same. That is what pushed me to become certified and get into personal training. Helping people gave me a sense of purpose at a time when I was still trying to understand my own.
Then my mom was diagnosed with cancer, and that changed everything. I had always been curious about science and the body, but now it was personal. I wanted to understand what affects our health before we ever reach the point of a diagnosis. I started paying closer attention to food, stress, thoughts, environment, movement, and the choices we repeat every day.
In 2015, before I became plant based, I was drinking heavily. My lifestyle wasn’t right, my energy wasn’t right, and deep down I knew I wasn’t living in alignment with who I wanted to become. I eventually got stabbed, and that experience forced me to look at where my life was going. I was sick and tired of being sick and tired.
That was the point when I decided to change everything. I stopped drinking, became plant based, and started taking my health and my purpose more seriously. I am now over a decade sober. My energy changed, my mind became clearer, and I started connecting things I had never thought to connect before. I could see how food affected the way I felt, how stress showed up in the body, and how trauma could live in the nervous system. I realized that health was never just one thing. Everything was connected.
I also come from an environment of addiction. It was in my home, my family, my neighborhood, and the world around me. I watched people carry pain they didn’t know how to process. I saw how that pain turned into coping, how coping turned into patterns, and how those patterns moved through families. I didn’t have the language for it when I was younger, but I knew I wanted to be part of something that helped people heal.
For nearly sixteen years, I have been a trainer working in health and wellness. Throughout those years, people have trusted me with more than their fitness goals. They have talked to me about stress, grief, depression, relationships, physical pain, and the things they were carrying silently. That showed me that training was never only about sets, reps, or changing someone’s body. Sometimes movement is where people begin rebuilding a relationship with themselves.
I kept studying nutrition, herbal medicine, the nervous system, and eventually Ayurveda. The more I learned, the more I understood that health requires looking beyond symptoms and seeing the whole person.
The Journey of Compassion grew out of that entire process. It came from my pain, my family, the people I have trained, the things I had to unlearn, and my own search for a different way to live.
I don’t believe healing is about becoming perfect. I believe it is about becoming more honest and finding our way back to ourselves.
I’m not here to sell a perfect lifestyle. I’m here to share what helped me come back to life.