I didn't set out to become a health practitioner. But I did always feel called to serve. I attended the United States Naval Academy and became a Surface Warfare Officer in the Navy.
Service was not just a career choice — it was a lineage. My father, grandparents, uncle, and brother all served in the military. In many ways, the path was already laid before me, and I walked it willingly.
I was proud to continue the legacy. I believed in honor, discipline, and commitment to something larger than myself. But somewhere along the way, I began to realize something important:
just because a path is noble, doesn't mean it's yours.
A serious back injury during my time in service became my first real introduction to holistic healing. Breathwork, yoga, chiropractic care — practices I once would have dismissed — became the very things that helped me recover physically and mentally. That experience planted a seed: the body has an intelligence that conventional approaches often miss.
At the same time, I began to feel something harder to name: a fundamental misalignment. On paper, I was succeeding. Internally, I felt radically off my path. The tension between who I was expected to be and who I actually was became impossible to ignore. So I left the Navy.
Shortly after, my body forced me to pay attention again. Persistent digestive issues began to dominate my life. I saw multiple Western doctors, was misdiagnosed, and found no resolution. Out of frustration, I sought a functional nutritionist who approached the body through muscle testing and a systems-based lens. We discovered a parasitic overload and poor liver function that had been overlooked for years. Within weeks of addressing the root causes, I felt better than I had in years.
That moment changed everything. It wasn't just about health — it was about truth. About learning that symptoms are signals, that the body speaks, and that real healing requires going to the root, not suppressing what's on the surface.
Not long after, my girlfriend — now my wife — and I drove our car from San Diego to Panama and spent six months exploring life outside the structures we had known. During that time, I became a certified 200-hour yoga instructor and fell deeply in love with the practice — not just the movement, but the awareness it cultivates. The body, I kept learning, is the doorway to everything else.
Once back in San Diego, I volunteered for two years helping facilitate men's group therapy sessions at Donovan State Prison. In that environment, I witnessed how vulnerability dismantles armor, how honest self-inquiry reshapes identity, and how
transformation begins when someone is willing to tell the truth about themselves.
That experience profoundly shaped how I hold space today.
What I've come to understand through all of it — the injury, the illness, the years of working with people in crisis and people in comfort — is that the body is where the story lives. Physical symptoms are rarely just physical. And inner work is rarely possible when the body is overwhelmed, inflamed, or carrying a burden it doesn't know how to put down.
Today, I am a certified holistic life coach and health practitioner, and am pursuing my Master's in Integral Health, concentrating in Transformation, Consciousness, and Psychedelics. My work integrates functional health protocols, lived experience, nervous system awareness, and grounded action. But the foundation is always the same: we start with the body, and we follow what it's trying to say.
If you feel ready, we can begin.