Hi, I’m Marshall Thompson,
Certified Natural Health Professional
Certified Personal Trainer
Certified MovNat Trainer level II
Certified SpartanSGX Coach
Jin Shin Jyutsu Practitioner
Obstacle Course Racer & Trail Runner
Black Belt in Tae Kwan Do
Relentless realist, optimist, questioner
And…
I’m not supposed to be alive....or so the experts said.
Why? Read my story below...
Failure-To-Thrive Baby
Two months after I was born, even though I was eating (nursing) all the time and getting taller, I still hadn’t gained any weight or taken a daytime nap. I was a jittery, weak baby and looked like an emaciated starving child you’d expected to see on a fundraising telethon on a Sunday afternoon TV special, distended belly and all.
The MDs labeled me a “failure to thrive” baby. Although they didn’t know what was wrong, they proposed exploratory surgery to possibly shed some light on it. Though the surgery would admittedly likely kill me, their position was that I was as good as dead anyway, so what was there to lose?
Finding a Better Way
Needless to say, my mom wasn’t happy with such a prognosis and asked an important double-sided question that both saved my life and has since shaped my life: Just because we can, should we? Is there a better way? Just because we can do exploratory surgery on this child, should we?
This is a question which expands into all aspects of nature: Just because we can farm one area to the point of desertification and move on to the next, should we? Just because we can build up the heels and put arch support in shoes that are a crutch for rather than correcting inefficient movement, should we?
Though she didn’t realize it at the time, that question began her life long journey for holistic answers to all of the health issues in our family and eventually my own.
After looking for a better way, my mom found a practitioner who finally recognized my symptoms as an over-active thyroid. I was given one dose of a homeopathic remedy and took my first nap the same day. Within the same week I was already gaining weight. There was a better way. I continued to grow and thrive over the years!!
My childhood was henceforth filled with watching one person after another find improved health results after feeling like they had tried everything else and being told there was no hope of improvement.
Going the Extra Mile
While these questions in the back of my mind had subtly shaped my life, I didn’t decide to pursue health as a career until I spent a summer in Tanzania during college. There, I was confronted with these questions in a whole new way by some harsh and beautiful realities.
Coming face-to-face with hunger, disease and suffering I had only previously read about and seen in pictures was incredibly jarring. Even more troubling to this day, is how normal, accepted, and commonplace these struggles are there.
However, I also came to see that as a whole, this culture was happier, more content, and more relationally present than the affluent, modern, advanced, successful and comfortable way of life I had come to know in the states. Moreover, those who appeared the most ill were those who had adopted our modern, crowded city dwelling, and consumption of processed foods while abandoning their ancestral way of farming, hunter-gatherer subsistence for industrialized, short cut farming and mono-row-crop practices. I visited the city’s hospital where it seemed that adopting a pharmaceutical disease-treatment and symptom management approach to medicine wasn’t doing much better for their health and wellness than it has for us back in the west.
Reconnecting to Ancestral Wisdom
The healthiest and happiest people I encountered during my travels to Africa were always those who were the furthest removed from these western lifestyle practices.
Among them were the Masai and other rural tribes who were more self-sufficient. Rural farmers who were still growing rice in the presence of other complimentary, nutrient-dense plants, fish, and fowl were creating a remarkably synergistic micro-ecosystem.
While I had been aware of the role that modern industry and excessive consumption has played in over-mining, deforestation, desertification, soil and water contamination and wildlife endangerment, it wasn’t until this trip that I was faced with the extent to which hunger and disease are largely due to “advanced” practices passed down from the affluent, western industry.
From that experience, I chose to dedicate my life educating and empowering others toward full health. Health that takes into account the full person with all life inside and out.
Uncovering a Holistic Approach
From the many synergistic microbiotia (i.e. probiotics), to nutrients and bodily systems, to the air we breath, to the water we drink, to the soil where our food is grown, and how the animals we eat are raised, to the lives of the farmers, workers and local community of where the products we consume originate--all life inside and out.
While I would like to eventually return abroad to teach, perhaps even in Tanzania, I think there may be a better way…
Through my lifetime of ever increasing relentless exploring, studying, investigating, testing and experimenting with health, in my formal education, and in my experience with those I work with, I believe now more than ever that for anyone to really have full health, we must consider the source, quality, and health of that which we consume and produce the environment we live in.
Considering things like: Where does food come from? What’s in it? What did it leave behind? Where does it go when we’re done with it?
How do we approach this? By investing in rediscovering and cultivating our own health and by asking questions like: Just because we can, should we? Is there a better way? The bottom line is that whether we intend to or not, we create a ripple effect throughout the world both economically and environmentally that promotes or stunts full health for all.
Peeling Back the Red Tape
Moreover, I’ve continued to see all the more what is possible for health and healing when it’s not overshadowed by red tape.
Disease management rather than disease prevention, limitation by malpractice, health insurance denials, the fallible schedule and knowledge of one overworked expert, convention, or being pressed to up-sale the next new thing are all examples of this red tape.
Instead of being driven by red tape, can we not be driven by the following question: What will support and restore health in each unique context, while being the least invasive and least potential for harm?
I hope to never discount the potential benefits of any health supportive therapy given the right context, environment, application and knowledge. That said, in my attempt at open questioning, I personally keep coming back to a remarkably complimentary integration of nutrition, herbology, homeopathy, proper physical activity, Jin Shin Jyutsu and other ways of supporting the body’s healthy energy systems.
I’ve worked with countless individuals who had all but given up on their health (myself included), only to rediscover new, full health with a complimentary holistic health approach that incorporated nutrition, natural remedies, and noninvasive therapies coupled with changes in lifestyle and environment.
Don’t settle.
Health and Healing is a Part of True Human Nature
Unfortunately our world has been increasingly saturated with things that inhibit full health potential. Regardless, our world remains even more filled with an amazing variety of things that support our nature for full health and healing, if only we ask the right questions and follow the answers.
Every day we have the opportunity to choose a better way.
With some education and resources, together we can rediscover and cultivate full health, full life, and full you! You’re worth it!
Contact me today for your first session!