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My best friend Yvonne collapsed in a church pew on the second Sunday of February. We were singing "Blessed Assurance." That's the part I keep coming back to. We were standing up, we were singing, her hand was on my shoulder the way it always was because Yvonne could not stand up straight in church without leaning on somebody, and then her hand was not on my shoulder anymore. She went down sideways into the pew. Not loud. Not dramatic. Just down. The whole row stopped singing. The choir kept going for about 4 more words before they noticed. Pastor Williams was the first one off the pulpit. He came down those steps faster than I have ever seen a 71 year old man move and he was kneeling next to Yvonne before the song director even put down his hand. Somebody called 911. Somebody else ran outside to flag down the ambulance when it came. I sat in that pew with my friend's head in my lap and I prayed in a way I have not prayed since my mother died in 1998. She survived. I'll tell you that now because if I make you sit through the whole story not knowing I'd be doing you wrong. Yvonne is alive. She is recovering. She is at home with her sister and she is going to be okay. But that Sunday in February changed me. And I want to tell you why. My name is Beverly. I'm 56 years old and I have lived in Mobile, Alabama for all but 4 years of my life. I am a Black woman, a mother of two grown sons, a grandmother of one granddaughter who is the light of my entire life, and a widow since 2019 when my husband Reggie passed from a heart attack at 58. Yvonne and I have been best friends since 1990. We met at a Tupperware party in Prichard when we were both 22 and pregnant with our first babies and we have not been apart since. Our boys grew up calling each other cousins. We took vacations together. We buried our husbands 4 years apart and held each other up through both. She is, in every way that matters, my sister. So when she went down in that pew, something in me went down too. The doctors at Mobile Infirmary told us what happened. Her blood pressure had spiked. They used a number. I'm not going to repeat the number because I don't want to scare anybody and I don't want to make this a numbers story. What I will tell you is that the doctor used the phrase "hypertensive crisis" and that he looked at Yvonne, and then he looked at me sitting in the chair next to her bed, and he said, "Ma'am, has anybody checked your pressure recently?" I said, "It's been a minute." He said, "While you're here." A nurse wheeled in a machine. She wrapped the cuff around my arm. She pumped it up. She let it out. She did it again. She looked at me with the kind of polite face nurses use when they have something to tell you that they do not want to tell you. She said, "Ma'am, I'd like you to follow up with your doctor as soon as you can." I knew. I have known for years. I am not the kind of woman who pretends. My pressure has been creeping up since I was 48. My doctor put me on a medication in 2020 and I took it for 7 months and then I stopped because it made me feel like I was wearing a wet wool coat all day. Foggy. Heavy. Tired in a way that made me dread my own life. I told myself I would handle it with diet. With walking. With less salt. With more water. I did some of those things. Not enough of them. And the pressure kept doing what pressure does when nobody is paying attention. It crept. I sat next to Yvonne's hospital bed and I thought about Reggie. Reggie was 58. Reggie had been complaining of headaches for 4 months before he died. Reggie kept saying he was going to "get in there and get it checked" and he kept not doing it because he was a roofer in south Alabama and he did not have time to sit in a doctor's waiting room for 3 hours on a Wednesday afternoon. He died on a Saturday in our living room in front of the Auburn game. My older son Marcus was sitting on the couch next to him. Marcus was 24 at the time. He is 31 now. He has not watched a college football game since. I drove home from the hospital that February Sunday and I sat in my driveway for 11 minutes before I went inside. I looked at the house Reggie and I bought in 1996. I looked at the porch where I used to drink coffee with him every morning. I looked at the window of the kitchen where his ball cap still hangs on the hook by the back door because I have not been able to take it down. And I made a decision. I was not going to be next. The next morning I called my doctor's office and I made an appointment. She got me in on Thursday. Dr. Akinyemi has been my doctor for 6 years. She is a Nigerian woman my age who does not sugarcoat anything and who once told me I was being "willfully foolish" about my pressure to my face. I love her. She checked me. The number was not good. She did not yell at me. She did not lecture me. She said, "Beverly, what do you want to do here?" I told her I wanted to try the medication again. She said okay. She also said something that surprised me. She said, "I want you to also think about supporting your body in other ways. Pressure is not just one thing. It's a system. And there are some things that have been studied that I think are worth your time to look into." She wrote three things down on a prescription pad. One was the medication. One was a referral to a dietitian. The third was one word. Amla. I looked at it. I said, "What is that?" She said, "It's a berry. From India. There's been research on it for cardiovascular markers. I am not telling you to take it instead of the medication. I am telling you to consider taking it with the medication. I have patients who do well combining the two." I had never heard of it. I am 56 years old and I have spent half my life listening to women in church and in salons and in the produce aisle at the Winn Dixie tell me about every herbal whatever that has ever been invented, and not one of them had ever said the word Amla to me. I went home and I got on my laptop and I started reading. I want to tell you what I learned. I am not a doctor. I am going to tell you what I read and what made sense to me, and you can do your own reading. Blood pressure is not just about salt. That's the thing I had been missing for 8 years. When your doctor tells you to cut back on salt, what they are telling you is the truth, but it's a small piece of a bigger picture. The salt thing is real. So is the weight thing. So is the stress thing. But underneath all of those things is something happening at a smaller level. In your blood vessels themselves. The walls of your blood vessels are supposed to be flexible. They are supposed to relax and expand when blood needs to flow more easily, and contract when it doesn't. When everything is working, this happens constantly without you ever thinking about it. When things start to drift, those vessel walls get less flexible. They get stiffer. They lose some of their ability to respond. And when they can't respond the way they used to, the pressure inside them goes up. Not because there's more pressure being pushed, but because the pipes themselves can't give the way they're supposed to. That's what years of unchecked pressure does. It's not just the number. It's what the number is doing to the pipes. What I read about Amla was that it has been studied for what it does to support the health of those vessel walls. It is rich in compounds called polyphenols, including a couple with names I had to read 5 times to remember, emblicanin A and emblicanin B. These compounds have been associated with supporting healthy blood vessel function. They work with your body's natural systems for keeping those vessels flexible. It does not push your pressure down the way medication does. That's not how it works. What it does is help support the underlying system so the system can do what it is supposed to do. I read for 3 days. I read a study summary. I read forum posts. I read a thread on a community for Black women over 50 where 14 women had talked about taking Amla for 6 months or longer. I called Yvonne. She was home by then. I read to her over the phone. She listened the whole way through and when I was done she said, "Bev, get me a bottle too." I went looking for a good one. I want to tell you this part because I almost made a mistake here. There are dozens of companies selling Amla. Most of them are not selling what you think you are buying. A lot of them are plastic tubs of dried berry powder with no standardization, which means you have no idea how much of the actual active compounds are in any given scoop. Some of them are pills that have been on a warehouse shelf so long the polyphenols are mostly tired. I almost bought a cheap one off Amazon. I had it in my cart. But my younger son Devon, who works in IT and who reads everything, called me when he heard I was looking and told me to slow down. He said, "Mama, if you're going to take this you need to take a real one." He sent me a link to a company called Alevia. Alevia's version is standardized. That means every capsule has the same amount of the active compounds. It is also a concentrated extract, not just dried berry packed into a pill. And they have a 90 day money back guarantee, which Devon pointed out is the sign of a company that actually believes their product does something. Cheap supplement companies don't give you 90 days. They give you 14, if that. I ordered a bottle. It came in the mail 4 days later in a small brown box. I started taking it on a Tuesday morning in March. One capsule with my coffee. I was already back on my medication, the one Dr. Akinyemi prescribed. The Amla was something I was adding, not replacing. Here is the honest truth about the first month. I felt nothing. I almost called Devon and told him I had been bamboozled. He said, "Mama, give it the full 90." I gave it the full 90. Around week 6, something I did not connect to the Amla started happening. I was sleeping better. Not falling asleep faster, although that too. But sleeping deeper. Waking up actually rested instead of waking up still tired and pretending I wasn't. Around week 8 I noticed I was not getting that heavy head feeling I used to get in the late afternoon. The one that always came around 4pm where I had to sit down for a minute and close my eyes and just wait for it to pass. I had told myself for years that was just getting older. It was not. It was something else, and whatever that something else was, it was easing up. Around week 10 I went in for a check with Dr. Akinyemi. She checked my pressure. She looked at the number. She looked at me. She said, "Beverly, what are you doing?" I told her. She nodded. She did not act surprised. She said, "Keep doing it." I am not going to tell you my numbers because the rules around what I can say are clear and I am not going to break them for the satisfaction of an Instagram post. What I will tell you is that I left her office that day and I sat in my car and I called Yvonne and I cried for 6 minutes. Yvonne started taking Alevia Amla too. She has been on it for 4 months now. She and I walk together 3 evenings a week now down by the bay. We did not do that before. We could not do that before. Either she did not have the wind for it, or I did not have the wind for it, and either way we had become two women who stayed in the house and called each other on the phone instead of being two women who walked together at sunset. Last Tuesday she and I walked 1.4 miles down by the water and we did not stop once. I watched her hair blow back in the breeze coming off the bay and I thought about a moment 11 months ago when her hand left my shoulder mid hymn and I thought I was going to lose my second person. I have not lost her. And I do not believe I am going to lose me. I want to tell you something now. I have to be careful here because I do not want to tell you something that is not true. I do not know what Alevia Amla will do for anybody else. I am not a doctor. I am a 56 year old Black woman in Mobile, Alabama who has been quietly losing a long fight with her own pressure for 8 years and who is, for the first time in 8 years, not losing it anymore. If you are reading this and you have been having a similar quiet fight, with a doctor who has run out of things to say to you, with medications that make you feel terrible, with a body that feels like it is slowly turning into your mother or your husband or somebody you watched leave too early, I want to tell you something. It is worth a 90 day look. Not instead of your medication. Please hear me on that. If your doctor has you on something, talk to your doctor before you change anything. I am not telling you to stop taking what your doctor prescribed. I am telling you that there is something else that may be worth supporting your system with at the same time. Alevia Amla is what worked for me. The bottles come in the mail in a small brown box. You take one capsule a day. You will not feel anything for 4 to 6 weeks, which is the part where most people give up. Don't give up. The 90 day money back guarantee is the reason I trusted them with my money in the first place. If 90 days goes by and your body has not responded, you send the bottle back and they refund you. No fight. No phone tree. No 14 page form. I read the policy myself before I bought. It is the cleanest guarantee I have ever seen on a supplement. I am not a brand ambassador. I am not getting paid to write this. I am a widow in Mobile who sat in a church pew on a Sunday in February with her best friend's head in her lap and decided she was not going to be the next casualty of a number on a piece of paper. If you've been carrying a fear like the one I was carrying, you can find out more here. P.S. Yvonne and I are going on a cruise in October. Out of Mobile, around the Gulf, 5 nights. We have not been on a vacation together since 2018. Her sister thinks we are insane. Her sister is also coming. We are bringing our Amla bottles. P.P.S. The 90 day guarantee is not a marketing line. It is the entire reason I tried this. I have been burned by enough supplements in my life to know that companies that mean it give you time, and companies that don't, don't. 90 days is the window where you will know if your body is responding. Trust your body. Not the company. Not me. Your body. P.P.P.S. Reggie's ball cap is still on the hook by the back door. I am not going to take it down. But this past Sunday I sat on the porch with my coffee and I talked to him for a while, the way I sometimes do, and I told him I was doing the thing he never got to do. I was paying attention. I think he would be proud of that. 👉 alevia.com/amla/33