Hello dear! I’m Chelsea, your wellness practitioner
I’m here to welcome marginalized women deeper into embodiment and intimacy with themselves and one another in a community of practice.
The Heart Behind The Butterfly BushIn spring of 2025, I decided that I didn’t want to be a professor anymore. I couldn’t. My health was declining under the weight of a toxic institution that did not affirm my work or my worth. What I believe about well-being and reciprocity was increasingly at odds with what the clinical setting demanded of me. My vision for the work my soul needed was expanding beyond what the university could hold. When I told a mentor-friend of mine that I was preparing to leave, along with my two best friends, she said that she was sad to hear that academia was losing not one, but three Black women. She also said that she was glad that we were doing what we needed to do “because we know all too well that we die here. So, butterflies, go!” She waved her hands in front of her as if to send us off on our migration with a sack full of love and support. And we’ve been flying ever since.
The original butterflies: Drs. Chelsea Privette [me], Karina Saechao, and Enjoli Richardson
I was privileged to be at a place in my career where I had the time, material resources, and health literacy to devote to my health. In that final year as a faculty member, I completed formal training as a health coach and herbalist in pursuit of my own wellness. I also worked with a somatic therapist for the first time. And, honey, let me tell you, my life was changed. I want your life to be changed too. Coaching the women around me motivated me to build something just for us – those of us who are looking for deeper rest, reconnection, and alignment across every aspect of our lives.
When most people hear “health coach,” they think diet plans and exercise regimens. That’s not what I do, love. Sure, I talk about food (especially herbs!); and bodily movement is certainly a part of my practice. However, these are only parts to your whole. I’m most concerned with the holistic integration of your body, mind, and spirit. This work focuses on how you live in your body, fully present with yourself and deeply aware of and responsive to your inner world. I am also wholly convinced that wellness is a collective endeavor. The Butterfly Bush was created as a gathering place for redefining health, wellness, and self-care in our own language and for practicing mutual care.
As The Butterfly Bush came to be, I recalled of the words of June Jordan:
“power and happiness and every good thing that we want and need and deserve must come to us as we truly are: must come to us, a Black people, on our terms, respect our definitions of our goals, our choice of names, our styles of speech, dress, poetry, and jive. …in the struggle to reach each other, there can be no right or wrong words for our longing and our needs; there can only be the names that we trust and we try.”
June Jordan, 1972
White English/Black English: The Politics of Translation
This is liberation work - co-creating hope, beauty, and joy in ways that sustain us and affirm the deepest parts of us.
Welcome to The Butterfly Bush!
Chelsea Privette, PhD