I chose Encompass Pathways as the name of this business for a few really good reasons:

1. A name can be influential. I didn't want this to be about me. I'm an instrument, a guide, your navigator. I'm not the only possible person in the world that can help you, but here you are, so help you I will!

2. To Encompass means to draw a circle around; to enclose or envelop. Physical healing involves far more than the eye can see. If you have focused your attention on only the physical factors contributing to your unsatisfactory health and wellness, there is a good reason why you haven't succeeded: true health encompasses the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual domains of your being.

3. After working with hundreds of people over the years, helping them to become stronger and fitter (and healthier!), the only absolute I have come to learn is this: there is more than one path to achieving goals. What works for your friend may not work for you. And what you want to work for you, just may not be the most effective way.

4. Finally, who doesn't love a good acrostic??

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. 

(..GOES OFF ON TANGENT...)

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 eliminate 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 wiling 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.

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 or you would already have everything that you want!

Spiritually attune on a daily basis

Whether you call it prayer, meditation, or connection to God, and whether you call 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!