It takes time to heal °Carly Brown°
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Between the healing and the version of you that awaits, there is a threshold — a kind of still life where nothing seems to move, yet everything does.
Healing rearranges us — what falls away makes room for what needs space.
Carly Shankman — known to many as Carly Brown — once lived in that in-between. She grew up in New York, surrounded by the rhythm of work, ideas, and motion. At Penn State, she studied public relations and business, learning how to navigate rooms and stories. For years, she was the woman behind the scenes of other people’s voices — coordinating events, setting the stage, making space for others to be seen and heard.
Then one day in 2013, at her desk, she wrote in her journal:
“…So far in my career, I have created a platform for other people to be seen and heard. I’m ready to be the one to be seen and heard.”
It’s easy to brush off certain desires when they first awaken — to let regret lean in early and let you know that you gave up too easily. Carly didn’t. She didn’t wait for permission or perfection; she simply acted.
No space for the “Why didn’t I.”
“Because if my mindset was, who are you? Why do you think you can do this? Who do you think you are to do this? Someone would be better fit. I would've never stepped into that. But the internal dialogue was this, you can figure this out, Carly. Yeah. It's gonna be hard. It's gonna be a lot. But you can do this. You've got it. It's also just a testament to how important our internal, internal dialogue is.”
A negotiation between doubt and change — that’s where her life began to shift.
In 2010, she flew to India. There, she lived in ashrams, grew her food, and practiced what she calls alignment: a coherence between mind, body, and what is yet to come.
In Hindu tradition, Saraswati — goddess of wisdom, music, and speech — brought the world into form with her voice. Her song turned chaos into meaning. Carly didn’t know the myth by heart, but she was living its pattern: giving sound to what had been silent, allowing creation to rise from within her own life.
By 2019, she was married to Ross and had just become a mother. The rhythm of life had finally steadied — until, four months later, she found a lump on her neck.
The diagnosis came: metastatic thyroid cancer.
“And I, I always say that I'm not grateful for the diagnosis, but I'm grateful for who I became because of it.”
During treatment, she looked for ways to help her body heal. Each morning she juiced, not for trend or taste, but for survival.
“At the time I was juicing an hour a day, 64 ounces of raw, organic, cold pressed juice. And there were a couple days that I couldn't get to it, and I looked around Austin and no one was doing a hundred percent organic juice in glass, and I'm like, this is ludicrous, because when you juice, you condense all of the micronutrients, the phytonutrients, the plant enzymes, but if it's not organic, then you're just condensing all of those pesticides and herbicides that are sprayed on the plant. So non-organic juice is a no-no. And then everybody was bottling it in plastic and then it's sitting on the shelves in plastic with microplastics leaching in. And I wasn't juicing out of it being this new trendy thing. I was healing of cancer. And so I thought, well, if I want this, there must be other people who need and want this.” —
In Indian mythology, gods and demons once worked together to draw out amrita — the nectar of immortality — from the depths of the ocean. Carly’s kitchen became the vessel for that same effort. Out of illness came invention; out of need, nourishment.
In her own way, she began drawing out her own kind of amrita.
“My faith in God came from in a, in a much deeper way because I was like, this is not accidental. This is not bad luck. This isn't, I sinned and did something wrong. This is, there's, there's a reason that this is happening. And that's how I navigated the healing journey.”
From her home, she founded Alchemy Juice — a small kitchen operation that grew into an Austin-based company offering 100% organic, cold-pressed juice in reusable glass bottles. What started as a survival ritual became a seven-figure business with multiple cafés. Her next venture, a company focused on molecular hydrogen water systems, extended that mission: to bring purity and vitality into people’s daily lives.
“And really it's only really turned in the last three years. Yeah. So it's, it's it, I hope it's a testament to like. Just consistently putting one foot in front of the other, and for anybody who wants this quick overnight success, I really don't believe that it exists because you have to become the person who can hold for the success. Because now when I did will get there, but when I did finally create the financial abundance, I was like. This is exactly how it's meant to be perfect. I wasn't like, oh my God, am I gonna lose it? No. I had worked for 15 years to become the type of person who could hold for that financial abundance.” —
Carly reminds people that her companies didn’t appear overnight. Years of work, faith, and repetition built what she now holds — a growing brand, two businesses, and a deep belief that health and entrepreneurship are intertwined acts of creation.
Our host, Natalie Peyton, met her there — in that same space between survival and rediscovery.
“I was telling my therapist yesterday, I'm gonna tell my story about redemption and how I've overcome addiction and have the mercy and grace that I need to give myself despite my past, despite my present. Through my present. Like all of, I've got off antidepressants since I've joined and like there's so much growth has happened. So much hardship has happened. And I'm still standing today.”
Endurance and faith sculpted two lives that now cross paths on Uncharted: Your Sidekick for Life Podcast — not to prove anything, but to remember how to begin again. To shape-shift until every layer that doesn’t belong has fallen away, and what’s left finally feels like home.
As Carly puts it:
“First and foremost, know that you are worthy of whatever life that you wanna create for yourself. No matter what your backstory is, no matter what your background, no matter what has or hasn't happened to you, we are divine children of God. and we are meant to be here to prosper. You are worthy for whatever dream that you desire for yourself. Maybe you haven't given yourself permission to dream.”
And in that process as she says: Proximity is Power.
“Proximity is Power. And mentorship has the ability to close the gap and take what could take 10 years on your own and do it in, in one to two years.”
Carly’s work continues to draw from that same belief — that faith and creation are inseparable, and that the real task isn’t to wait for the perfect time but to live fully in the imperfect one.
Maybe healing isn’t the return to who we were. Maybe it’s the slow, deliberate act of becoming — again and again — who we dream to be.
Love this story?
You might also like “Three Women and the Thread” — a meditation on mental health, control, and the quiet work of forgiving ourselves.
It follows three women — Ann Kelley, Becky Henderson, and Jennifer Hill — whose intertwined reflections explore how we rebuild trust in our minds and in one another.
For the commuters and wanderers: there’s a podcast version waiting for you too — available on the article.
Listen to Uncharted: Your Sidekick for Life Podcast.
Permission to Begin: Carly Brown Mentorship, Mindset and Freedom
Listen on Spotify
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This blog was written by Anais Schmidt, part of the team at Founding Up.She is also an aspiring musician. When not in her studio, she tours Europe with Monte Mai.
