The Puurlee Podcast with Nika Lawrie

Every Body Has A Story: Mine Led Me To Creating Puurlee

• Nika Lawrie • Season 2025 • Episode 109

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The Puurlee Podcast with Nika Lawrie: A Journey to Whole-Person Wellness

The debut episode of The Puurlee Podcast with Nika Lawrie dives into the power of holistic wellness, blending personal experience, scientific insights, and real-world solutions to help you optimize your health.

From growing up off-grid in New Mexico with solar panels and rainwater collection systems to working in film, music, psychology, and Alzheimer’s awareness, Nika shares how her diverse background shaped her approach to whole-person well-being.

In this episode, you’ll hear about:

  • Early exposure to herbalism and nature-based healing through her mother’s influence
  • Her shift from entertainment to health research and what she learned from top scientists
  • Personal health struggles, including severe stress reactions and a Graves’ disease diagnosis
  • How she combined conventional medicine with holistic practices for true healing
  • The key pillars of whole-person wellness—nutrition, mental health, purpose, community, and spirituality
  • The vision behind Puurlee, a comprehensive wellness platform designed to empower you

Subscribe now to stay inspired on your wellness journey! Share with friends who are ready to take control of their health, and follow @Puurlee on all platforms. Got questions or topics you’d love to hear? Reach out—we’re here to support you!




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DISCLAIMER:
*This podcast and its contents are for informational purposes only and are not intended to replace professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always consult your physician or a qualified health provider for any questions concerning a medical condition or health objectives. Additionally, the advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for every individual and are not guaranteed for business, personal, or wellness success. Use discretion and seek professional counsel when necessary.

AFFILIATE DISCLAIMER:
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Nika Lawrie:

Free audio post- production BioPhoniccom. Welcome to the Purely Podcast. I'm your host, Nika Laurie. Hey and welcome to the Purely Podcast. I'm your host, Nika Laurie, and for those of you who followed me on this journey for the last couple of years, you know that the podcast was formerly called Inspired with Nika Laurie. I have rebranded to call the podcast the Purely Podcast with Nika Laurie, of course. Your host, Nika Laurie.

Nika Lawrie:

The reason I'm doing this is because I'm launching a wellness platform called Purely and I wanted to rebrand so that everything was together and kind of under the Purely umbrella. I'm really excited to launch the platform. I promise details are coming soon. For right now, check out our website. You can learn a little bit about what I'm working on, but you'll find lots of tools and resources there available to you. I promise I will share details on the platform as we get ready to launch it, so that's in the coming months, but for now, just enjoy the podcast, Enjoy the content on the website. So I'm really excited to have you join me on this journey.

Nika Lawrie:

I wanted to tell you a little bit about myself first, For those of you who are just joining or haven't listened to some of the past episodes. I figured it'd be really important to share a little bit about my journey and why I'm so fascinated with health and wellness and more of a holistic, natural approach to overall health. So let's start way, way back when I was a kid. I grew up in the mountains outside of Albuquerque, New Mexico, and I grew up off-grid. So what that means is that my parents had solar panels before they were cool. So this is like 40, 50 years ago. They had solar panels on their house and we also collected rainwater and filtered it. We had big cisterns. The rain would collect in there and we'd filter it and we'd use that for our drinking water and our bathing water and just water in the house. My mom also had a large garden where we would collect veggies and goodies from the garden for dinner and different snacks like that, and my parents ran their own business together. So I think I got kind of that entrepreneurial spirit from my parents.

Nika Lawrie:

The two things that I really were instilled in me as a child was the importance of trying to care for nature as much as possible or to leave as little of a footprint as possible so that nature can thrive alongside humans or humans can thrive alongside nature. Right, it goes hand in hand. But the other piece of that was that it was important for our bodies to connect with nature or to use tools from nature in order to heal our bodies and take care of our bodies. So my mom got really into herbalism when I was a kid and I remember we had a cabin in northern New Mexico and she'd go up hiking around the cabin looking for osha that we could use to make teas to help heal our bodies and take care of our bodies, and so that nature aspect was always really instilled in me at a very early age. But as I grew I really decided to rebel.

Nika Lawrie:

I moved to New York City and then eventually to Los Angeles. I had a couple different jobs there, but primarily I worked in the film industry. I worked on several major movies in the costume department and then I also worked in the music industry and I helped do A&R for a music publishing company along with a couple other things in the music industry. I also launched a small music platform that was similar to like Pitchfork or a very, very small baby Rolling Stone kind of thing, where we would review music and artists and do interviews and different things like that. So it was pretty cool.

Nika Lawrie:

I did that alongside working in the music industry, but the thing that happened to me working in New York and LA was that I worked really long hours, I partied pretty hard. I've never really been big on drinking and drugs, but I definitely would stay out late and hang out and, just, you know, be a 20-something kid. And with all of that for years and years and years, it really started to take a toll on my health and I could feel that I didn't feel as good as I knew I should, especially being in my 20s. Long story short, and lots of other things played a role in this, which we can get into in another episode. But I decided to leave Los Angeles and move back to New Mexico, mostly to be closer to my family.

Nika Lawrie:

I really miss being around my parents and so when I moved back to New Mexico I decided to go to college, or go back to school, and I pursued a degree in psychology. I double majored in psychology and strategic communication and after I left college I got a job working for the Alzheimer's Association here in New Mexico and I worked primarily in the fundraising side of that organization. I eventually became the development director for the full New Mexico chapter of the association and in the process of working there I had the privilege to interact and work with lots of top dementia and Alzheimer's researchers, really from around the world. There's a lot of really great researchers and physicians here in New Mexico, but we would do educational conferences and events and we would fly people in from all over the country. We even had several researchers from outside of the country come in and speak at our educational conferences and the thing that kept again being instilled in me over and over again was the importance of diet and lifestyle. They would talk about the Mediterranean lifestyle. They would talk about the need for connection and social support and having that community to engage with. They would talk about lowering toxin exposure, making sure that we don't have heavy metals or lots of plastics and things like that in our lives. They would talk about the need to be close to nature and to have that connection again. And I just learned over and over and over again that if I didn't want dementia, the best thing I could do was take care of my body through diet and lifestyle support.

Nika Lawrie:

As I continued to work at the association, I started to get even more sick. I started to have these crazy pains in my chest. At one point I even thought I may have been having a heart attack. I rushed to the emergency room. They didn't really help me and they rushed me to the ER. That's a whole other story we should get into, because inappropriate care, especially towards women, is a whole issue, but we'll do another episode on that some other time. I can go on a whole soapbox about that. But eventually I got to the ER and I spent hours and hours in the ER and I couldn't figure out what was going on with me. I wasn't actively dying. I wasn't having a heart attack thank goodness I was very lucky. But I knew something was wrong. I was having severe chest pains. I was really struggling with anxiety. What it ended up being was some other issues going on with my body caused by stress and anxiety from the unhealthy job environment. I was in Long, long story short.

Nika Lawrie:

I decided to leave the Alzheimer's Association and start my own business in health coaching through some major stress issues relating to my daughter's father, who became addicted to drugs and we had to deal with drug addiction, and then him going to prison, which was very, very difficult, and then he also got hurt in prison and we had to deal with the long-term repercussions of him being hurt in prison. Alongside that, my daughter was also born. I had a very, very difficult delivery and my daughter was born with a congenital heart condition, and so we've had to deal with that over the years as well. She's doing great. I'm extraordinarily lucky for how healthy she is, given the situation. But that still takes a toll on the stress that I had to deal with over the years Flash forward to starting my own business.

Nika Lawrie:

So leaving a career I'd been in for a very long time to start my own business is very, very hard. It's very emotional, it's very difficult and I had very few people to share the struggles with, to share my emotions with, to have those conversations about what was going on. So most of that was internalized and over the years I've had to recover from trauma, recover from stress, recover from loss of identity and building a new identity. I've had to deal with building up my confidence and my resilience after dealing with all of these different traumatic events. Long, long story short, it's gotten me to a point where I've been diagnosed with an autoimmune disease.

Nika Lawrie:

I have what's called Graves' disease, which is hyperthyroidism, so my thyroid is overproducing and I've had to figure out how to support that through more holistic approaches. It's a journey that I'm on. I will continue to work on it and I'm going to share those things with you as we go along. But my belief is that the reason that's likely happening inside my body is because of the stress and trauma I've been through over the years, and so it's learning how to support my body in the best the stress and trauma I've been through over the years, and so it's learning how to support my body in the best way possible, using both modern medicine and more holistic or alternative options to care and support for my body, or to provide the care and support that my body needs. I also am a massive believer in reducing environmental toxins that we're exposed to.

Nika Lawrie:

I believe it's extraordinarily important to support our body through good quality diet, organic foods as much as possible, limiting ultra-processed foods as much as possible, minimizing how much sugar we're taking in to keep our glucose and insulin balanced, our insulin response balanced, and really just trying to feed our body with those really good, nutritious foods. So, as we go through, as I launch the platform, as I share blogs and articles and our email newsletter, and as I share things here on the podcast with you. I want you to know that I'm on this journey with you. It's not me just trying to share things with you to be the expert. It's me trying to show these are the things that work for me. These are the things that work for me. These are the things that have worked for my health coaching clients. These are the things that I'm learning from new research that's going on, and the idea is to distill that down into a easy to use bit of information that you can use to implement in your own life to heal your body.

Nika Lawrie:

For me, it's really important to know or to share that health and wellness. While we've talked about diet and lifestyle so you know the food on our plate and the exercise that we do every day there's a lot of other pieces that really play into overall whole person health. Those things include our mental health, which is connected to the stress and anxiety and difficulties of everyday life, but it's also connected to our hormones. If they're out of whack, you're going to have anxiety or depression. It's going to connect to nutrient deficiencies If you're low on vitamin D or omega-3, you're going to have issues. Some people have low serotonin and that can cause mental health issues. So, knowing that the whole person is really connected, and we've got to link everything together in order to heal the person completely.

Nika Lawrie:

The other aspect of that is people really need to have personal growth. They need to feel like they have purpose, like there's something for them to get up and do every morning. They need to feel proud of the work that they're doing. Their connection to their community is important. They need to feel needed and wanted and cared for as well. And then, of course, there's also spiritual connection and that looks different for everybody. Some people that's connecting to God or a spiritual leader that they have. Other people it's connecting to the universe. Other people's connecting to nature, it really doesn't matter but it's understanding that we are connected to something larger and we are a piece of that. That's really important.

Nika Lawrie:

And we're able to get the quote I'm doing air quotes for those people listening, but do the, you know, get the downloads, the air quote downloads that we get from our spiritual connection, that we're able to feel guided by something. And when we have all of those pieces, when we have good nutrition, we've got time for personal care, we've got good mental health, we've got good community connections, we've got clean products that aren't impacting our hormones. We've got a spiritual connection to something larger than us. We've got our purpose or a connection to our reason to get up every morning. We've got financial security. All of those play a role in overall health and whole person wellness, and so, going forward, the platform that I'm building, the content that we share and, of course, here on the podcast, is to support all of those pieces, the entire circle of whole person wellness.

Nika Lawrie:

So, coming up in the episodes, I want you to know that we have so many great wellness and lifestyle experts coming on. We have so many great thought leaders coming on, lifestyle experts coming on. We have so many great thought leaders coming on and we have so many really cool people with really inspiring stories of how, you know, they figured out how to feel their best, and they're just everyday people. They're not even researchers or experts in their field. It's just people who figured out how to feel their best through different little steps that you can use to implement in your life as well. We're going to talk about upcoming research that's coming out or breaking news is coming out, all related to health and wellness, but the point is that we're going to break it down and simplify it so that you know exactly what to take from it to implement in your life to feel your absolute best.

Nika Lawrie:

My goal is to help your whole person, every part of you, thrive and feel as good inside as it looks on the outside. I want to help you thrive. That is what Purely is here for, that is what the Purely platform is going to be for, that is what the Purely podcast is here for and that is what I am passionate about and so excited to share with you. So I ask you, my friend, please take a few minutes to subscribe to the podcast. You never miss an episode. Please be sure to share this with other friends who are ready to elevate their lives. Please share all the episodes. Reach out to us on social media. You can follow us at Purely that's P-U-U-R-L-E-E on all of the social media platforms.

Nika Lawrie:

Share with us your thoughts, Ask us questions. If you have an expert you'd love to have interviewed, let us know so we can reach out to them. If you have a topic that we haven't covered that you want answers about, reach out to us so we can cover those topics. If you need guidance on something or you have a question and we haven't covered it. Reach out to us because we want to be there for you, to support you on your holistic, full wellness journey. We are here for you. With that, my friends, I'm wishing you a happy, healthy hustle. I will see you in the next episode and I'm so grateful for you. Have a great day. Free audio post-production.

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Nika Lawrie

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