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Holly’s Story

Holly’s Credentials

Holly Reese, MSOM, L.Ac. is a healthy aging coach, licensed acupuncturist, motivational speaker, author, a doctoral candidate in health education and promotion, and chronic illness survivor. Her core purpose is to improve the health & fitness and thereby the quality of life of the older adult population. Holly is a highly qualified and experienced in teaching older adults how to create and maintain or regain vibrant health at any age.

In addition, she holds certifications in Medical Qigong, Acupressure, Hypnotherapy, and as a NASM CPT with specializations in Corrective Exercise and Senior Fitness.

Holly has rigorously studied kinesiology, qi, energy work, and meditation for more than forty years. Holly has trained in the martial arts since the age of 12 and has earned two black belts, one in Tae Kwon Do and the other in Choy Lay Fut Kung Fu.

Her first career was as a software designer with a B.S. in electrical engineering from M.I.T. Holly worked as a highly successful computer programmer for ten years before giving it all up to enter the health field where her true passion resides.

But it was Holly’s ten-year journey from a nearly fatal auto immune illness back to health and vitality that truly sparked her passion to teach others. Her coaching practice specializes in teaching older adult clients how to create and maintain vibrant health at any age using safe and effective health & fitness methods.

MCTD and Wellness Journey

In 2002, Holly contracted a rare and very nasty auto-immune disorder called mixed connective tissue disorder, MCTD. Western medicine offered no hope, only negative projections about a life of misery. She wasted away to near death, and then had a spiritual epiphany, which gave her the courage to try one last time. Since, she could no longer digest solid foods she embraced juicing to attain the needed nutrition and a whole host of holistic methods: herbs, acupuncture, Qigong, reflexology, meditation, and more. She used food as her medicine and healed herself when she was told it couldn’t be done.

My journey to wellness did not truly begin until after I plunged to the bottom of the abyss. It wasn’t until I was well on my way back to wellness, that I started to truly comprehend the power we have to change our own path.
In July of 2002, I developed a relatively rare auto-immune disorder called Mixed Connective Tissue Disorder or MCTD. My life as I knew it was over. This illness has every nastiness one could imagine. I developed chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, Reynaud’s syndrome, scleroderma, trigeminal neuralgia, facial numbness, acid reflux, difficulty swallowing, and loss of motility and digestive capabilities.
My life was filled with one misery after another, and it seemed each day brought a new type of pain or suffering. My brain was in a fog, and I couldn’t distance myself enough from my misery to formulate a healing plan. I took many harsh western drugs. Methotrexate, prednisone, morphine, and Neurontin, to name a few. I felt my body wasting away and my life energy leaving. Realizing that the Western drugs were only speeding my descent I discarded them in 2004, but I continued to spiral downwards. In 2005, I was at a lifetime low, the epitome of misery, and I came within a hair’s breadth to ending it all.
In trying to end my life, I had to give up, completely. In that moment of letting go, I opened myself to receive guidance. I realized I wasn’t finished with this life yet, and I wanted to stay. My guidance revealed the universal truth that led me to know I could change things. I took responsibility for creating my life as it was and resolved to manifest a new one. I embarked on an inner journey of exploration in order to change my outer journey.
I poured nutrition into my body, and when I was strong enough, I added my herbal formulas back into my wellness program. I opened myself to receiving help from people, experiences, and spirit. I discovered treasures of healing: a useful tip overheard; watching someone accomplish a task; a line in a song; a book reread that I had forgotten about; a workshop that inspired. If what I learned helped me, I kept it, if it didn’t, I moved on.
Slowly, inch by inch, I made progress. It was hard work, and sometimes it seemed as if I moved backward. I learned to be grateful for all the little miracles, celebrating my successes. All the while, I did not let anyone tell me I could not be well again. I held tenaciously to visions of my own wellness, constantly creating positive affirmations and working to surround myself with positive inspirational objects and people
Now, there is not a trace of chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, or nerve pain, I have full use of my hands, having beaten back the scleroderma. In fact, I’m back practicing martial arts, working out, and flying in a wind tunnel. My acid reflux is gone, and I can eat and digest solid food once more. I feel great and I’m filled with gratitude each day and look forward to fulfilling my life mission.
My life mission is to work with the older adult population teaching the skills needed to create and maintain or restore health and vitality at any age!
Rising from the Abyss
After significant encouragement from friends, clients, and colleagues, Holly wrote a memoir, released in 2012, called Rising from the Abyss: My Journey into and out of Chronic Illness, which details her personal experiences of rising out of the abyss of chronic illness and back to health.
Her book offers hope for those suffering from debilitating illnesses and her knowledge and lessons learned can serve as a practical guide to others who seek to prevent illness and bolster their health before an illness manifests
As a health and wellness expert, she wants her personal story as detailed in her book to help others embrace holistic healing alternatives, with a long-term goal of improving the medical health system paradigm for this country.
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Special Projects
In her role as a health & fitness coach, Holly spends much of her time educating her clients on the healing properties of foods, and creating dietary plans, complete with recipes for meals, juices and smoothies. She began to provide a number of her clients with her own Juice of Life recipe, which is the kitchen sink of nutritional juices that saved her life during the time she couldn’t digest solid food. The response and results from clients were overwhelmingly positive. Holly began to experiment with food combinations to create organic juices, smoothies, and full meals with a particular health purpose in mind. For instance, her BP Down Under smoothie actually helps her clients to lower blood pressure. She uses only organic, fresh produce in her recipes. There is no soy, dairy, sugar, or other additives. Holly found she thoroughly enjoyed creating these juices/smoothies/recipes with a healing, medicinal purpose and people loved them.
One of Holly’s projects is to take her expertise in the health and wellness field and apply it to create healing recipes that help her customers recover from various chronic illnesses, such as: chronic fatigue, diabetes, fibromyalgia, osteoporosis, heart disease, high blood pressure, high cholesterol. These are all preventable, curable conditions that make up most of our skyrocketing health care costs, and even the CDC agrees on this one “that the right foods will help.”
Holly has conducted many taste-testing surveys with her products at several cafes and many events and found them to be a massive hit with the customers. This led Holly to the concept of the The Vitality Cafe, a community gathering place that serves organic, great tasting, medicinally focused menu items. Holly’s customers will eat and drink their way back to health.
The time for an innovative concept, such as the “The Vitality Cafe” is now. It’s relevant to current news topics and our society as a whole as the theme of simple, holistic methods and alternative medicine becomes more and more prominent in an era of rising health insurance costs, a national diabetes epidemic, impersonal and short-sighted western medical approaches, and Big Pharmaceutical lobbyists.
Holly is currently looking for the right location and investors to bring this special project into reality. Contact Holly for more details.

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