Perhaps, when you look at Jardim da Alma today, you see flower essences, therapies, the Caredolls, the atelier…
But Jardim da Alma did not begin like that.
It began long before it had a name.
It began inside my own story.
I am Michelle.
I am a woman, a mother, a therapist… but, before all those titles, I am someone who has had to rebuild herself several times in her life.
After I became a mother, I went through postpartum depression.
It was a time when, in a way, I had to learn to look at myself again.
And it was also along that path that flower essences came into my life.
Back then, while I was trying to recover, a small idea was born: to make a doll filled with herbs so that my baby could feel comforted even when I couldn’t be as emotionally present as I wished.
I didn’t know it then, but a little seed was also being planted of what, many years later, would become Jardim da Alma.
Life went on.
Other challenges came.
Relationships.Farewells.New beginnings.
Moments when I had to ask myself who I was and who I still wanted to be.
Until one day I crossed an ocean.
I left Brazil and came to Portugal with my children.
And here I had to start again.
I worked in places I had never imagined.
I met people and stories that changed the way I see life.
And I began to realise that, with every new beginning, I found a little piece of myself that had been left behind.
That is how I understood that everything I had lived through did not have to be only pain.
It could become a path.It could become a place of welcome.It could help other people who, at some point in their lives, had also lost touch with themselves.
And it was from that journey that Jardim da Alma was born.
It wasn’t born because I simply wanted to create a brand.
It was born because I wanted to create a place.
A place where someone could arrive tired of life and breathe.Where they could be heard without judgement.Where they could take care of themselves.Where integrative psychotherapy, flower essences, frequency biomagnetism and the Caredolls could be part of an experience of care and reconnection.
And perhaps that is why I chose the word Jardim — garden.
Because a garden never forces any flower to bloom.
It offers soil.Water.Light.Time.
And each one blooms when its own season comes.
That is how I believe in care.
Today, when I look back, I see all the Michelles I had to be to get here.
The mother.The woman who suffered.The woman who started again.The Brazilian who crossed an ocean.The therapist.The craftswoman.The dreamer.
And, above all, that little girl who once imagined so many things for her own life.
Today I can look at her and say:
The girl I was is proud of the woman I have become.
And I am proud to keep building who I still wish to be.
Perhaps Jardim da Alma is exactly that.
An invitation for you, too, to come back to yourself.
To recognise your story.To embrace what you have lived.To discover what you still long for.
And to understand that, no matter how many seasons have passed…
there can always be a place within us where it is possible to bloom again.
I am Michelle.
And this is the story behind Jardim da Alma.
Where nature embraces, the soul blooms.
