My Story of Recovery & Rebuilding Health

For decades, I lived with disabling chronic illness that took over my life. This is the story of how I lost my health, reclaimed it, and what I learned in the process.

I’m Amari Love; a coach, writer, and filmmaker who recovered from over 30 years of invisible chronic illness, including three years bedbound and housebound with Long Covid.

For so much of my life I lived with unexplained symptoms, eventually receiving a long list of diagnoses, but it wasn’t until Covid triggered a full collapse that I finally understood the deeper drivers: how stress, emotion, and survival patterns shape the brain and nervous system.

What followed was a focused and transformative journey through somatic healing, emotional integration, and brain rewiring. It changed the course of my life. Today, I guide others on this same path, especially those who, developed long-term symptoms after a viral illness or life collapse.

Before becoming a health coach, I spent years as a filmmaker and acting teacher; work that showed me how emotions shape the body and behaviour. I saw how the nervous system stores fear, holds back expression, and runs old protective patterns. Later, I realised those same forces were impacting my health, and could be changed.

For much of my life, I cycled through diagnoses: chronic pain and gut issues that ruled my life from childhood, then fibromyalgia, CFS/ME, IBS, anxiety, depression, and even cancer. These symptoms didn’t just affect my body; they shaped my thoughts, energy, relationships, and sense of self. I also experienced migraines, lung issues, heart rate irregularities, insomnia, muscle weakness, extreme fatigue, blackouts, pots, brain fog, and memory problems; symptoms that made daily life feel overwhelming and unpredictable. Each label came with a new treatment, a new hope. But nothing lasted. My body always returned to illness. 

I felt trapped, and along the way, repeated traumas intensified my symptoms. My grief was overwhelming, and my hope was often crushed. I wrestled with painful questions about the purpose of life. And then, after a viral collapse, I spent three years housebound with LongCovid, much of that time bedbound in a dark room. I tried everything: diets, treatments, supplements, protocols, functional medicine, programs, acupuncture, energy healing, shamanism. None created lasting change.

It wasn’t until I began working with brain rewiring and nervous system regulation that I started to feel real shifts. And even then, it took time. Only when I had enough internal stability could I begin the deeper emotional work that moved everything forward.

When I was bedbound and my body was breaking down, I began to seek from the heart. I studied neuroplasticity, somatic approaches, emotional healing, and cross-disciplinary frameworks. I trained professionally in trauma recovery, somatic tools, mind-body practice and meditation. But it was only through applying these pieces in real life that my system began to change.

It was on this foundation of soulful healing that I began to experience physical relief and mental clarity. I discovered how mind, body, and emotional patterns interact in chronic systemic illness; and started to recalibrate my system using a blend of cognitive, somatic, and emotional tools. 

Through this process, I realised something essential: lasting recovery doesn’t come from one strategy; it comes from realignment across mind, body, and emotion.

I know now that this journey is about creating the conditions where the mind-body system can rewire. My work is about helping others create those conditions, through brain and nervous system rewiring, emotional recalibration, and clear, structured guidance.

Over time, I began to get my life back: from bedbound to sitting up, walking, then traveling, and eventually building my coaching business. As my neurological capacity opened up, I intentionally processed grief, strengthened boundaries, and watched my system continue to shift.

I expanded my research, studying in person with leaders in somatic, neuroplastic, and mindbody approaches. Lifelong learning has always been a core part of who I am, with honours and postgraduate degrees from my earlier career, and it felt energising to pursue it again.

Today my focus is to honour and resource mind, body and spirit by offering structured mind-body practices for the brain and nervous system.

Healing starts with symptom relief, but the real goal is getting your life back. Today, I live in ways that once felt out of reach. I spend time between Europe and the U.S., often near the sea, grounded in the clarity and energy that now define my life. This is the kind of transformation I help others create.

A message for you

If you’ve found your way here, you’re likely looking for something real, just as I once was. Recovery is possible. It’s not always quick, but it can be steady, structured, and deeply life-changing with the right tools and the right guidance. If you’re ready to take that first step, I invite you to explore how we can work together. You don’t have to keep figuring this out alone; real change is possible, and it starts with clarity, commitment, and a new direction.