Today we’d like to introduce you to Hanna Livengood.
Hi Hanna, so excited to have you on the platform. So before we get into questions about your work-life, maybe you can bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today?
I grew up a wildling on endless acres of land in rural South Carolina. I played in the forest for hours and was happiest spending the night under the stars. As a young adult, shopping and boys became my new favorite pastime, but the forest remained a place of refuge – a constant through every breakup and high school melodrama. It was always where I felt safe.
To help support myself through college, I picked up a job as a wilderness guide, leading kayak trips down the three rivers and through Congaree National Park. Through that work I learned the ecosystem — the plants, the animals — and found little coves I carved out as my own hideaways tucked away from the city. I would slip away from papers I needed to write and spend the afternoon journaling, soaking up the sun, singing with the birds. And when I hit my rock bottom — spiraling deep into substance use after an assault – I returned to those hideaways often. The wild comforted me in a way that society couldn’t.
After a long period of dissociation, I realized I couldn’t continue on the path I was walking unless I wanted to destroy my life. So, I leaned into the only thing I knew that kept me steady: nature. There had to be something the earth offered, something other than pills or booze, that could help me stay present.
As a history major, my coursework was flexible enough that I could pursue any angle that held my interest. I researched apothecaries of the 1800s, the history of witchcraft in America, and completed my senior thesis on the practices of one successful European apothecary. In my free time, I began learning kitchen herbalism – brewing teas and tinctures, and quietly discovering alternatives to substances that kept me grounded while still letting me feel alive. I became obsessed with plants, and the results only deepened that obsession.
After graduation, I continued pursuing the study of herbal medicine, traveling to India, Guatemala, and Costa Rica to learn from practitioners around the world. I never became the high school history teacher I had spent years training to be. Instead, I kept guiding. Nature became my classroom, and its unapologetic cycles of peace and chaos became my curriculum. Through the wild – a place humanity has feared and tried to conquer for centuries – I found myself again. And I made it my mission to help others do the same.
Now, after ten years of herbal study and practice, I run my own apothecary rooted in that same mission. At Untamed Altar, I don’t just make medicine for health – I make medicine for people to remember their power. But an herbal formula is just the gate to the garden, the entryway into experiencing the wisdom of the earth. I love hosting workshops and herbal ceremonies that offer a new way to engage with the self and the wild – reminding us that we are not separate from nature, but an innate part of it.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
Pursuing a life truly aligned with who you are takes sacrifice – being misunderstood, unsupported, and sometimes outright ostracized. There has been no shortage of personal struggle along the way. But each one has been an opportunity to lean into resilience, trust, and remember who I am.
The harder struggle to name, and one I don’t think is mine alone, is the culture I’m trying to practice wellness inside of. We’ve seen a meaningful shift back toward tending the land, kitchen herbalism, and sustainable living, which is beautiful. But the pendulum swings heavy. What I see creeping in alongside that movement is bio-hacking and life optimization -the obsessive quantification of every habit, every meal, every hour of sleep. And I want to be honest: that’s just perfectionism and patriarchy wearing blue-light blocking glasses.
Wellness has been commodified and systematized in a way that sterilizes the playful, chaotic, fun-loving essence of what it means to be human. So my real struggle, as a wellness practitioner, is finding a way to communicate that tending the land, building basic herbalism skills, and caring for your body are essential, and so is staying up too late, going dancing with your friends, making out with a stranger, and being generally, gloriously messy sometimes.
The water doesn’t shame itself for making a hurricane on occasion. Why do we?
I’m not anti-wellness. I’m anti-perfectionism. I’m against the idea that your messiness is something to fix rather than part of why you’re here.
Great, so let’s talk business. Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
Untamed Altar is an apothecary rooted in the belief that medicine isn’t just something you take — it’s something you remember. After ten years of studying herbal traditions across multiple continents, drawing from Western folk herbalism, Ayurvedic practice, and the living wisdom of practitioners I’ve learned from around the world, I craft herbal formulas designed to do more than address a symptom. They’re designed to reconnect you to yourself.
What sets Untamed Altar apart is the philosophy underneath everything. This isn’t wellness as a performance. This isn’t a 12-step optimization protocol or a detox that makes you feel guilty for being human. The medicine I make is for the person who is done shrinking and ready to remember their power — whether they’re brand new to herbalism and just curious, deep in a healing journey, or looking for a grounded alternative to what conventional medicine has offered them. My community is all of the above, and what they share is an instinct that there’s another way.
The formulas are available both online and through my local apothecary pop-ups, and every one of them is made with the same intention: the herb is the doorway, not the destination. It’s the entry point into a deeper relationship with the earth and with yourself.
Beyond the formulas, the heart of Untamed Altar lives in the philosophy – the stubborn, unapologetic insistence that wildness is not a problem to be solved. That your chaos, your hunger, your refusal to be perfectly well-behaved and optimized are not flaws. They are the most human things about you. And the earth, which has never once apologized for a thunderstorm, already knew that.
That’s what I want people to know about this brand. We’re not here to make you better. We’re here to remind you that you already are.
Can you talk to us a bit about the role of luck?
I’ve always loved the Seneca quote: “Luck is where opportunity meets preparation.” And looking back, that’s exactly how my life has unfolded — not as a straight line, but as a series of moments I was somehow already prepared for, even when I didn’t know it.
From a young age I believed I was meant to do something big. Write a bestseller. Be on television. Become a pop star. So, when I found myself in the limelight, even as a child, it felt very normal to me. At 6 months old I won a contest for Paddler Magazine, as a teenager I was a fixture in the local papers, and in college I was featured in the campus news for various extracurriculars. So, when I was asked to be interviewed by Jesse Watters in 2024, it just felt like another conversation with the local news.
Little did I know that I would become Chapter 13 of Watter’s book, Get It Together: Tales from the Liberal Fringe. The book frames me as a lunatic — an earth lover gone too far, radical in my relationship to the natural world and in my expression of my sexuality. It was hard to read such a negative interpretation of the work I poured my heart and soul into.
I didn’t tell my family. I was ashamed. And then my grandmother saw the FOX interview the night it aired, and I had to navigate that fallout in real time. Reading the comments online was its own kind of gauntlet. And a wave of men, who assumed I had an OnlyFans, began to watch my every move.
If Jesse Watters was the opportunity, the preparation was my own resilience. Having navigated adversity of all kinds in the past, my nervous system was more regulated for that fallout than I would have expected. I believe how you respond in these moments, when the doom is looming, really tells you what you’re made of. And amongst this chaos, something unexpected happened. My inbox flooded, not just with the ugliness, but with messages from people telling me I had shifted something in them. That I had changed how they thought about what it means to love the earth and love their own body. That was genuinely inspiring, and something I didn’t see it coming.
I continued my work without pause, not letting anyone’s opinion stop me and just a year later I was featured in the New York City Journal as one of the Top 30 Women Entrepreneurs to Look Out for in 2025. Did the negative press from FOX help me gain visibility? Probably so. And I’ve also worked hard to build my skills to be someone who could meet the luck of opportunity with dedicated action.
What all of this taught me is that visibility and success is not the same thing. In the age of influencer media, that lie is remarkably easy to believe. But follower counts aren’t proof of worth and being seen comes with more than just likes. What has actually carried me through every stroke of luck, good and bad, is the time I’ve put into developing not just my craft, but my identity. Who I am when the limelight finds me. Who I am when it leaves. The inner work, the study, the decade of showing up — that’s what determines whether a lucky moment builds me or breaks me.
Luck doesn’t always work out the way we imagine it will. It’s who we become in the stroke of luck that really matters.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.untamedaltar.com
- Instagram: @untamedaltar
