Catherine Gigante-Brown

herbalist. shiatsu practitioner. healer.

8. Educate, don’t fixate.

I asked a handful of women: why are people so scared of ladyparts?

Food can be more than nourishing; it can be healing.

After I got over the initial devastation, I pulled myself up by my big-girl panties and got on with it. Chemo was no picnic—but it was do-able.

Re-imagining the cervix, preserving the earth, facing breast cancer a whole new way…Annie Sprinkle’s wisdom abounds. “Life is a performance art piece,” she said...

TCM (traditional Chinese medicine) has been around for at least five centuries –– there’s got to be something to it.

I was 21 –– a Catholic, heterosexual college student, living at home in Brooklyn and still trying to discover who I was. At the crossroads of her life, Lorde knew exactly who she was. She was waging a war against cancer and sharing an old house in Staten Island with her kids and partner. But maybe we weren’t so different after all.

I saw my present mother-in-law in a whole new light the first time she held my newborn son.

In the photograph, my great-grandmother, Margarita Cirigliano, is sitting at a small table on the front porch of the family home in Borough Park, Brooklyn.