Meet Your Guide, Daniela Hess, the Founder and Creator 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 (ARM), a complete approach to moving an Autoimmune condition 'Toward Remission'. The whole method is laid out in 'The ARM Map: The Whole Method, Start to Finish'. The Map shows you the method. This article introduces you to the person behind it.

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. I was sent home more than once with the word 'normal' stamped on my labs, and the quiet message that I should simply 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 did come: Hashimoto's, hypothyroidism, SIBO, low stomach acid. And with them, finally, 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

Here is the part that surprised even me.

Almost everything ARM 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.

I spent years as the lead educator inside yoga teacher trainings, standing in front of rooms full of students who were learning to teach and to heal. I taught thousands of people this way. At the time, I called that body of work the Awareness Keys.

The Awareness Keys and the 6 Keys of Action in ARM are the same living teaching, grown up and brought into one place.

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 this for decades, one-on-one, in group courses, and in those trainings.

There was one Key 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 taught for so long, the Autoimmune Recovery Method was born. The whole-life teaching I had carried for years, now shaped around the specific science of an Autoimmune body. The 3 factors behind that body are walked through in 'The 3 Factors Behind Every Autoimmune Condition'.

You may already know my work

Many people knew me for years before they ever heard of the Autoimmune Recovery Method.

Some know me through Sacred Sunday, the free monthly online gathering I hold on the 4th Sunday of each month, from 11:00 to 12:00 Eastern. Others come through Community Sunday, on the 2nd Sunday of each month, from 12:00 to 1:00 Eastern.

Some learned the Awareness Keys curriculum directly from me, or the Healing Keys, or the Foundations of Awareness, all curricula I have taught over the years.

Some came through my Spiritual Mentorship, for young women in their 20s and for couples. And some found me in one of the hardest seasons of a life, through Grief Keys one-on-one or the Grief Course.

Many also came through the yoga teacher trainings where I was the lead educator, teaching the deeper work of healing alongside the postures.

If you are one of those people, welcome back. You already know how I teach, and you will recognize it here. And if you are meeting me for the first time, welcome. I am glad you found your way.

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, and I co-founded the school Great Energy with my husband, Christopher.

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 we go from here

You are not being handed a stranger's protocol to follow alone.

You are being met by a teacher who has spent her whole life on this work, who has walked the Autoimmune road herself, and who built this method so you would not have to walk it the hard way I did.

When you are ready for the whole map, it is waiting for you in 'The ARM Map: The Whole Method, Start to Finish'. I will be right here.

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