Hi, and Welcome to Taking Back Wellness!

ABOUT This Site: It’s Like a Little Story!  🙂

Who is Taking Back Wellness?
I’m Paula High, Integrative Holistic Health Coach. I’ve already outlined a bit more about me on the “About Paula” page– appropriately.

Eventually, as things here grow, I might take on more health coaches and other support staff to help deliver resources and services. But for now– It’s just me working to offer you value.

What is Taking Back Wellness? And When Did it Start?
Taking Back Wellness, LLC is the holistic wellness business I sort of started back in 2013. I say “sort of” because it was really only an idea I built upon at the time.

Back then, I tossed up a WordPress website, and I started writing and sharing my research and lessons learned along my frustrated, path to regain my own health after a sudden and mysterious downward spiral. Much of my research was initially hard to find. It frequently felt like swimming upstream to find answers. I figured I should share what I was discovering–in the hopes, it might benefit others. I hadn’t registered this as a real business, until recently. It became an LLC in April 2017.

By 2015, it became a real business– still growing. I do two primary things here at Taking Back Wellness:
#1) I write about the many things I’ve discovered both in my training and in my own research for reclaiming health and wellness. And. . .
#2) I offer Health Coaching to help tired women (& a few men) who are navigating midlife and feeling kind of crummy– to reclaim their energy, inner-spark, focus and wellness– so they can Rock their life, live their dreams, and maximize their potential.

Where is Taking Back Wellness?
I am located in the southwestern United States, in Albuquerque, New Mexico (between Texas and Arizona). Because I live here, so does my business. But I work with people all over the world, thanks to the wonders of technology and the Internet. I conduct most of my meetings over Skype, Zoom, or over the phone.

Why Taking Back Wellness Exists
I won’t bore you with all the details here, suffice it to say, I ran into the proverbial brick wall after my health took a sudden and mysterious downward spiral. The mainstream medical system (so called, “health care”) had failed me. They referred me around to about a dozen doctors and specialists. None of them had the time or inclination to dig for root causes. I felt like Humpty-Dumpty.

Not only were they not able to help me discover what was wrong (and fix it), but they treated me as if I were crazy. The “treatments” they came up with contributed to a worsening of my condition. Then, they told me I needed psychiatric help.

After humoring them and allowing them to “practice” on me for a year, I’d had enough hopelessness. As if that weren’t bad enough, I felt disrespected, minimalized, and degraded. They’d had a year to figure it out, and yet, in that time I had deteriorated to a point where I had to leave my full-time job.

I wondered how much of my life would be wasted on the ineffective guessing. I became furious (in general) with the mainstream medical approach. I felt they did not practice “health care” but perpetuated illness-care. So I made a bold decision.

I fired them all.

I had done enough of my own reading while in their “care,” I’d learned about the terms and phrases I needed to research. I started reading anything I could find on the subjects of Chemical Sensitivity, Toxic Overload, Chronic Fatigue, Brain Fog, Fibromyalgia, among others.

It was difficult because the information was hard to find and I was so exhausted all the time. My sleep quality at night was poor and I had trouble staying awake by day. My mind felt perpetually fried and fogged-in. I frequently had to sleep in the afternoons. But for as long as I could stay awake, I scoured the Internet and various books and articles for information.

How Taking Back Wellness Came to Be
I began learning about preventative health and wellness, also called “Integrative” or “Functional” medicine. I discovered I was not alone in what I was experiencing– all the way down to being told, “you should consider psychiatric help.”  I wondered why it seemed so difficult to find the information I needed.

I wondered why it seemed so difficult to find the information I needed to heal.

Gradually, I learned about getting back to basics– eating “REAL Food,” ditching processed foods, limiting exposures to chemicals (hint: this one is challenging in our society). I learned about swapping out most common hair care and body care products for more naturally made items. I discovered ways to change out all our standard household cleaning and laundry supplies. I found entire websites and books on how to make many products ourselves from natural ingredients while eliminating toxic chemicals found in conventionally popular, everyday items.

I started sharing the resources and information here, on my original website. It was during this discovery process I found IIN®, the Institute for Integrative Nutrition®. I researched them too. I decided I could learn a lot from them, and perhaps come out with a certification and skill set I could offer to others who had been looking for answers.

Taking Back Wellness 2.0

The site you’re reading today is a rebuild in progress– a proverbial reset. Earlier, I mentioned that I wrote and shared all this great material I’d come across and stuff I’d learned.
You might wonder, “So where is it?”

Due to some technical difficulties, my original site was brought down by spam hackers. I was dealing with a bunch of Life Stuff at the time (mid-late 2015) and feeling particularly overwhelmed. I didn’t get back to my host in time to salvage my backups.

It was a soothing and pretty site. . . a nice purchased theme, a cool slider-type header, with several blog articles, photos, a few videos I’d found, some recipes, and lots of tips and advice– All that is now gone.

A tribute, I suppose, to the “Impermanence of All Things.”

But– I guess websites are never really “done,” so it’s not a total loss. That’s how I choose to see it.  So this starting over– I take as a sign from The Universe, I am to start fresh.

Breathe and begin again.
There have been a few bumps in the path, but I’m generally taking them in stride.

Thanks for stopping in. Enjoy the rest of my site and Please– come back soon. I invite you to visit often.
Be Well,
~Paula

Last updated July 2017