Meet Daniela Hess, Founder of the Autoimmune Recovery Method

Before we walk this road together, I want you to know who is walking it with you. I am Daniela Hess, the founder and creator of the Autoimmune Recovery Method, a complete approach to moving an Autoimmune condition toward Remission. I co-founded the school Great Energy with my husband, Christopher, and this work is the heart of what I do.

I did not come to this from the outside

I lived it. For about 7 years, something was clearly wrong in my body, and no one could tell me what. More than once I was sent home with the word 'normal' stamped on my labs, and the quiet message that I should learn to live with how I felt. I had been vegan for around 20 years, certain I was doing everything right. I was a wellness teacher. I knew my body. And I was still slowly losing my health, with no name for what was happening.

Eventually the names came: Hashimoto's, hypothyroidism, SIBO, low stomach acid. And with them, a way forward. I came to the Autoimmune Protocol (AIP) in my early 50s, and for my Autoimmune body, it was the piece that changed everything. So when I sit with you in this, I am not speaking from a textbook. I am speaking from my own long road.

The woman who raised me

I learned the stakes of this work first from my mother. She died in 1995, at 58. She had colitis and Crohn's, both Autoimmune conditions, though the word 'Autoimmune' was never once spoken in our house. No one ever checked her sex hormones. No one checked her thyroid. No one checked her ferritin. I understand now that I was watching a brilliant woman navigate an unsupported body, through Perimenopause and Menopause, with undiagnosed Autoimmune conditions, and no one asking the right questions. The questions asked, the labs run, the support my mother never had, that is the very thing I have built my life around giving to other women. The thing my mother lived without is the thing this work now exists to give you.

I had been teaching this for decades

Almost everything the Autoimmune Recovery Method teaches, I had already been teaching for years. Long before I had a name for my own condition, I was a teacher of Conscious, Healthy, and Inspired Living, and the lead educator inside yoga teacher trainings, standing in front of rooms full of students learning to teach and to heal. Community, love and healthy relationships, a calm and resilient nervous system, the shape of a day, purpose and the rapture of your own Aliveness. I had been teaching all of it for years. There was one piece I had not yet been teaching: the gut and nourishment work for the Autoimmune body, the AIP. When I brought the AIP together with the teaching I had carried for so long, the Autoimmune Recovery Method was born.

Who I am now

I am an Autoimmune Educator and Coach, a Functional Wellness Consultant, a Yoga and Qigong Teacher Trainer, a Spiritual Mentor, and a trained Ayurvedic practitioner, and I hold a Master's in Health Education. I tell you this for one reason. 10 years of training did not spare me my own diagnostic road, and that is exactly why I can walk yours with you. I know the science, and I know the loneliness, and I know the way back.

How I teach

There is an image in my birth chart that has always felt true to me: the Mystic and the Scientist, engaged in a game of chess. I teach from both at once. I will give you the real science, the mechanisms and the labs and the reasons, and I will hold the deeper, quieter dimensions of healing right alongside it. Nothing thrills me more than teaching this in a way you can actually live, so that it becomes yours, and not just something you read once and set back down.

Where to go from here

I wrote the fuller story of how I came to this work, my mother, my own diagnostic road, and the teaching behind the method, for the Autoimmune Recovery Method. Read the full article here: Meet Your Guide: Daniela Hess, Founder of the Autoimmune Recovery Method. And if you are ready to walk the method itself, you can see the course here: The Autoimmune Recovery Method course.

Related reading on Great Energy

• The 3 Factors Behind an Autoimmune Condition
• Normal Is Not the Same as Optimal: The Thyroid Labs to Ask For
• Qigong for Autoimmune Conditions: What the Research Says

With Great Energy and Great Love,
Daniela

Daniela Hess, MSED. Autoimmune Educator and Functional Wellness Consultant, co-founder of Great Energy. Education and support, not medical advice.