About
Encompass Pathways
Our Philosophy
Why "Encompass Pathways"?
Embrace—a new mindset. You are going to heal yourself, I will...
Navigate you, by showing you how to...
Center and ground, settle your nervous system so you can implement change and feel better immediately
Optimize your energy and body systems
Move in the way your body needs to move right now.
Purify your environment, your diet, your water, even your thoughts!
Align your intentions with your beliefs, your words, and your actions
Spiritually attune on a daily basis
Sustain a balance, stay in the process, and practice your skills.
Perfection is not the goal...Growth is!
Let's break this down even further, shall we?
Embrace a new mindset
Yes, in order to work effectively with me, you may need to recalibrate your mindset for a minute and embrace a new perspective: YOU are going to heal you. Not me. Not your physicians. Not your medications. Not even your diet and lifestyle factors.
This is actually tougher to wrap one’s mind around than anything else. If you have been deferent to the medical community for a lifetime, believing the “experts” to know more than you, it’s time to acknowledge that this very mindset has disempowered you. You gave your power away to someone else who doesn’t know you, doesn’t deeply care or understand, and even if they did, they aren’t you.
Your body is equipped with an innate healing capacity that has been lying dormant. You may have been conditioned to believe that germs make you sick, that doctors are experts that diagnose your illness, that medicine makes you better, and that you are at the mercy of your environment when it comes to getting sick or getting well.
I’m here to tell you that none of that is actually true.
Navigate the options
Here’s where we have another meeting after I compile all of the data and information I want to share with you and we review it together. We'll walk through all of the information in its entirety and explore the program we are embarking on together. I am the navigator, but you are the captain of this ship! I can't steer you where you don't want to go. The choices have to feel right and appropriate in every moment, if not challenging. I'm not saying this will be easy, but it should feel like a positive journey.
Center yourself
The first step in everyone’s process is centering and grounding for a very good reason—if you are upset, agitated, aggravated, frustrated, or in any way in your feelings (feelings are OKAY by the way—you are human and should be feeling them!) we need to bring you back down into your body and into the Earth to stabilize your system.
Without this stability, you won’t effectively implement anything. Frenetic energy is not healing energy. Being too much in your head and your feelings takes you out of your body. You need to be in your body to connect with it, understand it, and to properly hear the message its been trying to send you.
This will involve specific mind-body techniques such as progressive muscle relaxation, somatic movement, polyvagal exercises, Emotional Freedom Therapy (tapping), and simple breathing techniques.
Optimize your energy and body systems
Once you learn how to ground and realize the immediate benefits it provides, you will continue practicing the techniques that you found most impactful. Then we will build on them. You will practice being present, observing your inner and outer world, and general situational awareness.
How does the energy of certain people and places effect you? What thoughts shift your physical energy, whether positive or negative? When you have emotional reactions, can you feel how that affects your physical body?
You will start to pay closer attention to your thoughts, how your body responds to them, employ techniques, reprogram your reactivity, ultimately leading to an increase in positive energy and raising your vibrational frequency.
You'll also get a brief education on body systems so you understand what is happening when your health starts to suffer, and how to correlate your human energy field damage to your physical symptoms.
Move your body
As a life long health and fitness professional I understand intimately the importance of nurturing the body with exercise. However, I have come to realize that not everyone benefits from the same type or intensity of exercise.
We will explore the best way for your body to move that you are likely to do and what is nurturing to your body, not what society has told you that you should do. You will progress in appropriate ways if your program allows, but at first, we are just going to get you moving in the right way.
For most folks that might mean starting a walking program, it may be Qigong, Yoga, or belly dancing! But I know some of you are already hard-core and perhaps have been Cross-fitting for years. Guess what? You may need to slow down and back off of the intensity. (An important lesson I myself had to learn and now am compelled to share with others).
Purify your environment
I cannot overstate the importance of examining all the ways we are assaulted by toxins in our present-day existence. Our ancestors did not have to battle such difficulties, but here we are. There’s no way around it—we are surrounded by environmental assailants. From pesticides, vehicle exhaust, excess aluminum in our beauty products, foods, and medications, PFAs, plastics, EMFs….oh my, the list just keeps going.
While we can’t ever alleviate these threats completely, we can do our best to mitigate them. You will be provided with the easiest ways to reduce these exposures, how you can take protective measures, and we will go as far as you’re willing to go to eradicate what you can.
Align your intentions, thoughts, beliefs, and actions
You cannot manifest good health, wealth, success, or contentment in life if your underlying beliefs have convinced you that you are not worthy of any of these things. Sadly, the more people I speak with on these subjects the more clear it becomes that most people are harboring self-defeating belief systems and they don't even know it.
Your beliefs were forged starting in early childhood and through developmental years; they've lived a lifetime with you, grooving smooth, wide neural pathways that your brain will reflexively return to you if you don't take a mindful moment to observe and question them.
Contrarily, perhaps your beliefs are sound, but you aren't following through on the action front. Manifesting a life you desire doesn't mean the Universe will just deliver everything on a whim. You have to take action steps toward the space you want to exist in.
We will dig uncomfortably deep to find out what you really think about the way this world works and your role in it. Chances are, if you're here right now, this area needs more work than you realize!
Spiritually attune on a daily basis
Whether you call it prayer, meditation, or connection to God, and whether you call it a higher power God, The Divine, the Source, Spirit, Higher Consciousness, Reiki, or whatever makes sense to you, the important thing is that you make the conscious effort to connect to that power that resides within each of us every day.
That connection allows you to quiet the ego mind that interferes with your health, your bliss, and your ability to grow. The more quiet we allow, the more connected we are to our inner wisdom and the power of Source, and the more healing can take place. Period.
Sustain the changes
As previously mentioned, the goal is not perfection, it is growth. You are undertaking somewhat of an overhaul of your lifestyle, cognitive processes, and behaviors. Change is rarely linear. It is often one step forward, two steps back. In the best of scenarios in can be two steps forward and one step back.
Celebrate the changes you have made and stayed committed to. As time goes on, you might circle back to certain practices that maybe didn't stick the first time that you're ready to incorporate at a more appropriate moment. That's great! There simply is never a reason to feel defeated or ashamed if you haven't made the progress you have hoped for.
If you've decided to invest in this process, it means that your health and wellness is important to you and that you understand that it takes involvement, attention, and action.
No one can be your savior. It will always start and end with you!
How It All Started
Michele G Rogers Bio
Born in Philadelphia, PA, Michele and her family moved to the suburbs when she was 11.
They spent summers at the Jersey shore living in a family-owned and operated Doo-Wop motel by the beach where Michele learned the realities of family business ownership. A strong work ethic was instilled; probably at the expense of developing other parts of her character, that would thankfully eventually emerge.
At 4 years old Michele was first ensnared in her passion for health and wellness by doing Jane Fonda workout videos with her mom, and stuck with it for years after mom quit.
Fitness as her sport continued to develop into her teens when she discovered Bodyshaping on ESPN, bought hand weights, and followed along with their strength routines on TV.
Later, she signed up for her first gym membership at 16 years old. By the time she started college at Loyola College, MD she accumulated a pile of Muscle & Fitness magazines about two feet high. Inspired by a movie she saw in the 5th grade and with little other direction, Psychology became her selected major there.
She voraciously consumed all information that she could about being healthy, not knowing how much all of that information was apt to change on a dime, and most certainly did in the last 30+ years.
Most influential in directing her future career path was an unfortunate incident while riding go-karts the summer before her freshman year in college. A friend rear-ended her stopped kart, causing an injury that wasn't immediately addressed or even taken seriously for months.
When Michele finally got an x-ray two months later, she was diagnosed with a grade II spondylolisthesis--a vertebra that had been pushed forward, now out of alignment with the rest of the spine. It does not reverse itself.
If it didn't ever worsen, the moderate pain (that occasionally turned severe) could be managed. Without any medical guidance or PT, she learned over time how to deal with the condition, a LOT about anatomy and kinesiology, and eventually, about held trauma in the body.
Her senior year at Loyola College in MD, she enrolled in an elective called Health Psychology where she learned about progressive muscle relaxation, biofeedback, and the numerous ways behavior can manifest as good health (or the absence of).
Totally mesmerized by the subject matter, she scoured the brand-new World Wide Web for a post-graduate program in Health Psychology, successfully discovering, applying for, and getting accepted to an applied health psych program in Flagstaff, at Northern Arizona University.
Those two years in Arizona were life-changing and invaluable. Much happened personally, but also professionally. Michele would still have a lot to learn (a LOT), but, was headed in the right direction. It would be another 25 years before she arrived at her true calling.
She returned to PA after graduating with a 4.0, yet struggled to find a job that felt like a match to her dreams: healing a community at a large level. Alas, society on the East Coast was not yet there. To stay engaged and to make cash, she got certified as a personal trainer and also worked the front desk at a Hilton while she figured out what other "better" options existed.
Within a year, she was offered a position as a health educator at Fox Chase Cancer Center--part-time. Grateful to get her foot in the door of any respected institution, she gleefully accepted. For that time, she held a support role in two psychosocial cancer research projects reaching out to the siblings of cancer patients who are at high risk for the same cancer, and convince them to come in for a screening. She was promoted to project manager of those projects within a year.
Noble work for a start, and she learned much...including desk work wasn't her "bag".
She decided to take another leap and take an entry level position at a gym that was walkable to her apartment at the time, and continue working at the Cancer Center until her client list grew long enough to quit her desk job.
After about five months, she began the beginning of the rest of her health and fitness career that has never felt like work a single day.
Today's Situation
Michele has been married 16 years to a Marine Corps veteran who was trained to be an Air Traffic Controller during his service--a job that he was very good at until the schedule wore him out. After a bold decision to quit, they bought an RV, sold their things, and hit the road looking for a new place to call home somewhere in the US.
They thought that would be the Pacific Northwest.
However, after 7 months of glamping and learning that they were expecting their second child, they ended up in Virginia, where they have been happily settled now for 9 years.
Their current home is situated above a river, in a rural county where Michele has learned to really slow down, go inward, and reflect deeply on what her purpose has become after mothering her babies into independent young kids.
An unexpected twist of fate at the company she had been working for over 6 years, caused her to cut ties with the company completely and unexpectedly.
The dark night of the soul from which she after three months of sorrow and meditation illuminated the important new path ahead:
She realized she always had the potential to do more with her clients. Having stayed in her lane as a personal trainer despite being Master's level educated and yearning to help on a deeper level, "fitness only" as a career path was no longer going to cut it.
Over the years, she had become skilled in more in-depth areas like naturopathy, homeopathy, cognition and health behaviorism, spiritual healing and advancement concepts, always offering suggestions to clients for their health issues, doing research on their behalf, and of course, modeling the lifestyle that is possible for everyone.
She read, and read, and read some more.
She gained new knowledge, learned new modalities, received new attunements, obtained new certifications.
She developed a daily spiritual practice that took her deeper into her purpose and her own self healing.
This process has culminated in the manifestation of Encompass Pathways, where Michele is fully confident and equipped to help others find their own true path to self healing and to embody their full health and wellness potential.
Credentials
This list may inspire additional credibility, but know no amount of education, training, and endless letters behind a name inherently qualifies someone be great at what they do. I'm no different.
I want you to believe in me and the help I can provide because you feel intuitively pulled to entrust me with the guidance you seek. If seeing this list helps (or doesn't, then the Universe nudged you in the direction you should go in).
Bachelor of Arts, Psychology
(Loyola College, MD now Loyola University) 2000
Master of Arts, Applied Health Psychology
(Northern Arizona University). 2002
(Thesis titled: Factors Influential in Childhood Obesity)
Here I was trained in:
-Cognitive Behavioral Therapy
-Clinical Hypnosis
-Biofeedback
-Progressive Muscle Relaxation
-Stress Management
-Investigative Critical Thinking and Research Methods (ie, discerning the strengths & weaknesses of experiments & research studies)
-Motivational Interviewing (helping to resolve ambivalence around desired behavior change)
Personal Health and Fitness Professional (2003- to present)
Certifications received:
-International Fitness Professionals Association (IFPA) Certified Personal Trainer (2003)
-National Academy of Sports Medicine (NASM), Certified Personal Trainer and Stretching Specialist (2006)
-Athletics and Fitness Association of America (AFAA), Pre-/Post-Natal Exercise Specialist (2007)
-Evidence Based Fitness Academy (EBFA), Barefoot Training Specialist (2012)
-National Federation of Professional Trainers (NFPT), Certified Personal Trainer (2018 to present).
---Served as Subject Matter Expert; Exam Development Coordinator; Blog Editor and Publisher.
Main skills gained within this profession include:
-Corrective Exercise Techniques (myofascial release and movement prescription for muscle imbalances and postural distortions)
-Strength and Hypertrophy Training
-Weight Loss Principles
-General Fitness Principles
-High Intensity Interval Training
-Metabolic Training
-Fitness Nutrition
Additional Certifications:
Upeksha Reiki Master (Reiki Wellness & Meditation Center)
Sylvotherapy Practitioner
(purposeful forest bathing and connection with nature to improve health and wellness)
IHTMA-P, Instant Hair Tissue Mineral Analysis Practitioner
(certified to collect and interpret results of HTMA, which provides vital insights to mineral and heavy metal presence in soft tissue)
Currently pursuing:
Flower Essence Healer Certification
Geobiology Certification
Self-Guided Interests and Learning (hint, hint, some things I may be suggesting for you)
A lifetime of yoga practice and Qigong
Emotional Freedom Technique (Tapping)
Somatic Movement Healing
Feng Shui and Geobiology
Traditional Chinese Medicine Concepts
--Acupressure
--Meridians
--Qigong
Sound and Frequency Healing/Biofield Tuning
Crystal Healing
Chakra Alignment and Aural Cleansing
Germanic New Medicine
Biogeometry
Homeopathy
Naturopathy
Metaphysics and Manifestation
Tarot and Health Oracle Card Reading
Our Approach
Holistic Health: A Four-Dimensional Approach
At Encompass Pathways, we believe that true healing requires addressing every aspect of the self
Physical Domain
I work with you to meet your body’s immediate needs by stabilizing the nervous system, identifying mineral needs or heavy metal presence and address lifestyle factors to effectively heal the body. HTMA provides the foundational baseline assessment for uncovering the root causes of physical problems.
Cognitive Domain
What entrenched thought patterns and subconscious programming might be holding you back or contributing to your physical ailments? By answering this question, you will learn to elevate your mindset with proven and applicable strategies.
Emotional Domain
By exploring your historic and current emotional state, we work to identify and resolve stress and/or trauma via somatic processing, cultivating true self-love, and a embracing deeper sense of contentment through raised awareness.
Spiritual Domain
Through practices like energy healing, breathwork, meditation, gratitude, and connection to the divine within each of us, you will discover the joy in aligning your spirit with your daily life, irrespective of creed or religion.
