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 (more likely over 20 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. 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 did come: 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, and from the years of practice it took to find my way back to feeling Alive.
The woman who raised me
I did not learn the stakes of this work only from my own body. I learned them first from my Mother.
She died in 1995, at 58, of a brain tumor. I was 22. Most of my growing up, from about 5 to 18, coincided with her going through Perimenopause and Menopause, though no one called it that at the time, and no one was tracking it.
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. She was, by the standards of her era, a woman with resources. And the care that could have asked those questions did not really exist yet, for her or for any woman.
For a long time I held two truths about her that I did not know how to reconcile. She was amazing, luminous, larger than life, and she showed up for other people in a way people still remember. And she could also be moody, and at times so intense it took the air out of a room, especially at home.
I understand now that I was watching a brilliant woman navigate an unsupported body, in Perimenopause and Menopause, with undiagnosed Autoimmune conditions, with no map and no one asking the right questions. I cannot tell you whether a different kind of care would have changed her outcome. I do not know, and I will not pretend to.
What I do know is this. 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. That is not a coincidence, and it is not lost on me. The thing my Mother lived without is the thing this work now exists to give you.
What I had been teaching all along
Almost everything the Autoimmune Recovery Method teaches, I had already been teaching for decades. Long before I had a name for my own condition, I was a teacher of Conscious, Healthy, and Inspired Living, and I spent years as the lead educator inside yoga teacher trainings, standing in front of rooms full of students learning to teach and to heal. I taught thousands of people this way, in a body of work I called the Awareness Keys.
Community and the foundations of understanding your own life. Love and healthy relationships. Calm and resilience in the nervous system. The shape of a day and the environment you live inside. Purpose and the rapture of your own Aliveness. I had been teaching all of it for decades.
There was one piece I had not yet been teaching: the gut and nourishment work for the Autoimmune body, the AIP. That is the piece my own diagnosis added to everything I already knew. When I brought the AIP together with the Awareness Keys 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. I hold a Master's in Health Education.
I am the founder of the Autoimmune Recovery Method, the Perimenopause Recovery Method, and the Midlife Radiance Course.
I tell you all of 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
My deepest conviction about learning is that we are here to embody our direct experience, and to live what we learn. I want this teaching to become something you live, in your body and in your days, something you can feel working in you.
I bring a particular balance to this. There is an image in my birth chart that has always felt true to me: 'the Mystic & the Scientist, engaged in a game of chess'. I teach from both at once.
So 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. I have always taught in a way that is practical and down to earth, and at the same time insightfully deep.
Nothing thrills me more than teaching this education 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. I am so glad you are here. Let's walk this next part together.
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, CTACC, RYT500. Autoimmune Educator and Functional Wellness Consultant. Education and support, not medical advice.