Jenny Johnson is an ISEAI Full-Allied Member and Functional Medicine Certified Health Coach and Physical Therapist. She is the founder and owner of Simplified Wellness Designs, providing private and group support services for individuals with EAI worldwide. 

What is your primary field of work, where are you located, and do you offer remote consultations?

My practice is based in Woodland Park, CO with the majority of services taking place virtually via telehealth. I am a licensed physical therapist and national-board certified health and wellness coach with additional formal training in functional medicine, the Shoemaker Protocol, the Bredesen Protocol, HeartMath, and the Safe and Sound Protocol (nervous system support). 

What are your specialties and unique perspectives on environmental health?

As a Functional Medicine EAI Coach, I serve alongside clinicians and IEPs to support the whole-person recovery of individuals facing EAI. Private coaching services often include mindset work, exercise and nutritional considerations, stress management and nervous system rebalancing, goal-setting, and accountability. In addition to private coaching, I offer patient education and supportive community through 12-week group programs, a self-paced online course, and a low-cost virtual support group called the CIRS Healing Collective. 

How did you get into your field of expertise and what led you into the realm of EAI?

While taking a hiatus from professional life to homeschool my young children on an organic farm 10 years ago, I experienced the downside of living so closely with nature. Watching my children run barefoot through the tall pasture grasses and placing buckets under the leaks of our little cabin felt idyllic, but our family of four ended up experiencing the devastating power of biotoxins firsthand. As with most who experience EAI, every aspect of our lives was impacted – our bodies, our finances, our lifestyle, our home, our social life, our careers, our hobbies, our marriage, our mental health, our spiritual health, and more. While we eventually found the information we needed to pursue clean housing and proper medical care, it was not without a fair share of collateral damage. 

My training as a physical therapist over 20 years ago had given me a mechanistic perspective on healing – if you do the work, you should heal. At the time of my illness, I didn’t yet have much appreciation for mind-body medicine or the influence that non-medical obstacles can have on our ability to heal. The functional medicine practitioner who helped our family recover from EAI helped us see the interconnectedness of all systems, and appreciate the importance of managing our challenging emotions, relationships, thoughts, nervous system states – not to mention diet, sleep and movement. It’s embarrassing to admit how novel this basic information felt! Don’t we all as humans already know these things? For the organic gardener in me, it was a great reminder of how important it is to cultivate conditions for growth. I had all sorts of compacted soil, rocks and weeds in my “inner garden,” and it was no wonder that I needed more than meds and a clean house to get well. My personal journey through EAI resulted in much suffering, yet also much transformation. Our family is now healthier than ever before, because we have learned how to tend our inner gardens for foundational wellness. 

Following my personal recovery, I was motivated to pursue certification in functional medicine coaching so that I had more tools to empower my clients with, based in behavioral psychology, lifestyle medicine, and mind-body practices. My passion is to equip my EAI clients with the information, tools and supportive community to cultivate conditions for whole-person recovery and resilience, to minimize overwhelm and trauma as much as possible, and to use unavoidable suffering as an invitation for personal growth.

What are one or two of your biggest EAI “aha” moments?

The whole-person must be addressed for true healing! Stress, trauma, negative emotions, challenging relationships…they all dysregulate our nervous system and can serve as obstacles to healing, even if we’re “doing all the right things.” Full recovery and long-term resilience are absolutely possible when we address all the layers.

What would you like the public and other ISEAI members to know?

  1. It sometimes takes a village. Don’t be afraid to put together a multi-disciplinary team of professionals, so that whole-person recovery and resilience is more likely! When we all respect each other and “stay in our lane,” collaboration is truly beautiful.
  2. Community is powerful. It can be powerfully destabilizing, or powerfully healing! Finding a positive and supportive community of overcomers can be a key part in one’s recovery. I facilitate such an online community called the CIRS Healing Collective, and am sure others are out there as well.

Get in touch:

Simplified Wellness Designs
Phone: (303) 501-3784
Website: Simplified Wellness Designs
Email: jenny@simplifiedwellnessdesigns.com