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Dear Student or Graduate... 📣
Welcome to our Sunday Student Spotlight series, where every other week we share the story and accomplishments of a Rockwell student or graduate.
Our community is filled with extraordinary healers doing inspiring work in the world, and we're thrilled to share their stories with you.
Meet Dr. Nena S. Ahmad-El Bey
Charlotte, NC | Class of 2025 | DFM, DNM, DSM, LCMHC
“Remember who you are—that’s where the healing begins.”
From her home in Charlotte, North Carolina, Dr. Nena S. Ahmad-El Bey is quietly building a movement of restoration, one that treats the soul with the same precision that medicine reserves for the body.
A licensed clinical mental-health counselor and lifelong student of the human spirit, she bridges psychology, spirituality, and functional medicine to help people heal on every level. |
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| Her journey into holistic medicine began as an act of survival and remembrance.
“As a survivor of generational trauma,” she says, “I always knew healing had to go deeper than talk therapy or symptom management. I was already working with herbs, energy, and cell salts long before I knew there was a language for it.”
Discovering Rockwell felt like confirmation. “It gave my passion a foundation and my intuition a name, a place where science and spirit could finally sit at the same table." |
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| A First Step Toward Wholeness
Nena’s first step on this path came from a simple but radical desire: not just to survive, but to live whole.
After years of clinical work, she saw the limits of traditional therapy. “My clients were improving on paper but still disconnected inside,” she explains. “I wanted to understand how the body speaks through emotion and how energy guides recovery.”
Her own inner work, through breath, prayer, and reflection, revealed that the mind’s stories and the body’s signals are inseparable. That realization became the cornerstone of her calling: to integrate spiritual and functional medicine so healing could reach every layer of being.
The Turning Point: Science Meets Spirit
During Rockwell’s modules on cell salts and muscle testing, Nena experienced a revelation that changed the way she practiced forever.
“Everything I had been doing intuitively - energy reading, emotional mapping, release work - it all had scientific roots,” she recalls. “For the first time, I saw proof that my spiritual gifts and my clinical training weren’t opposites: they were allies.”
That moment, she says, reframed how she saw herself and those she serves. “We’re not diagnoses; we’re divine ecosystems. When we treat the whole system, not just the symptoms, the transformation is profound.” |
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| A Model of Integrated Healing
Nena completed five Rockwell doctorates; Natural Medicine, Functional Medicine, Holistic Nutrition, Botanical Medicine, and Spiritual Medicine, each one adding a new dimension to her understanding of health.
Her proudest achievement has been weaving them into a unified model that merges therapy with functional, botanical, and spiritual modalities. Under the GrowTherapy platform, she integrates mindfulness, nutrition, Human Design, energy medicine, and emotional-alchemy techniques into her counseling practice. The result is an experience that feels both grounded and mystical, rooted in evidence but illuminated by intuition.
“Every symptom - emotional, physical, or spiritual - is communication from the soul,” she explains. “When we listen with compassion, the body begins to cooperate.”
She is now developing her own practice, Guiding Light Holistic Healing & Wellness, which will expand into herbal consultations, bioenergetic testing, retreats, and online education. “It’s about creating a sanctuary where people can remember themselves back to health,” she says. |
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| The Reward: Watching Light Return
What keeps her work alive is witnessing clients reclaim their power. “There’s a moment when they start to glow again, when their posture, their voice, even their eyes change. That’s when I know they’ve remembered who they are.”
One client, a survivor of long-term trauma, came to her unable to trust her own body. Through therapy, breathwork, and cell-salt balancing, the woman gradually stabilized, then rediscovered her creativity. “She started painting again,” Nena says, smiling.
“That was her healing, made visible. Proof that when energy moves, life moves with it.” She believes these personal victories ripple outward. “When one person heals, it changes generations. Families communicate differently. Children grow up with more self-love. The ripple is real.”
Lessons from Rockwell
If one lesson from Rockwell stands above the rest, it’s that there is no divide between science and spirit. There’s only a connection waiting to be remembered. “The deeper I went into research,” she says, “the more it confirmed what intuition had always known: healing begins in consciousness.”
That perspective reshaped her worldview and fortified her sense of purpose. “Rockwell taught me that healing isn’t linear; it’s layered and deeply individual. It gave me permission to stand fully as both scientist and spiritual teacher.” |
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| Looking Ahead
In five years, Dr. Ahmad-El Bey envisions Guiding Light Holistic Healing & Wellness as a physical sanctuary in North Carolina and a global virtual platform for emotional restoration and holistic education.
She hopes to build a team of integrative practitioners, publish books, and host retreats that unite psychology, herbalism, and spirituality. Her daily grounding ritual keeps that vision clear: breathwork, gratitude, and a moment barefoot on the earth.
“I place my hand over my heart and say, ‘I am both the medicine and the miracle,’” she says. “It reminds me that service has to come from alignment, not effort.”
Words to Live By
“Remember who you are. That's where the healing begins.”
For Dr. Nena S. Ahmad-El Bey, those words are more than a mantra. They are the blueprint of her life’s work: guiding others back to the truth that wholeness isn’t found outside of us. It’s remembered within. |
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