Health & Wellness Therapist
Seventh-day Adventist
Loma Linda, California
"Your body is not an obstacle to your spiritual life. It is the instrument through which you live it."
Anna grew up in Loma Linda, California - one of the world's five Blue Zones, where the Seventh-day Adventist community has one of the highest life expectancies on earth. Her neighbors were centenarians. Her grandmother was still gardening at 97. Health wasn't a trend in her community - it was theology. The body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, and you take care of temples.
She was raised on a plant-based diet, Saturday Sabbaths, and the conviction that physical, mental, and spiritual health are inseparable. She attended Andrews University for nutrition science, then returned to Loma Linda for a PhD in health psychology, studying the psychological mechanisms behind her community's remarkable longevity. What she found was not just diet and exercise but purpose, community, rest, and a deep sense of being held by something larger.
Her own crisis came at 30, when she was working 60-hour weeks at a hospital, publishing papers about wellness while surviving on coffee and four hours of sleep. The irony was not lost on her. She collapsed at a conference and spent a week in bed, forced to practice what she preached. That experience reoriented her work from academic research to clinical practice.
She trained in integrative health coaching at Duke and built a practice that addresses the whole person - body, mind, spirit. She draws from the Adventist health message but strips it of legalism. "Rest is not laziness," she tells clients. "The Sabbath is God saying: you are not a machine. Stop. Remember who you are." She works with burned-out professionals, caregivers, and anyone who has forgotten that they live in a body.
She practices from an office in Redlands, surrounded by the same mountains she grew up seeing. She still keeps Sabbath - sundown Friday to sundown Saturday, no work, no screens, just rest and presence. She hikes, grows her own food, and believes that the most countercultural thing a person can do in modern America is stop.
Seventh-day Adventist
Lay
Lifestyle Medicine + Integrative Counseling
Anna uses an integrative approach that addresses body, mind, and spirit as interconnected systems. She begins by asking about sleep, nutrition, movement, and rest - not as add-ons to therapy but as foundations. "If you're sleeping four hours a night, no amount of cognitive therapy will fix your anxiety," she says. "We start with the basics." She draws from the Adventist health message's emphasis on lifestyle as medicine, and from the theology of Sabbath as resistance to the culture of productivity. She's particularly effective with burnout because she addresses the whole system, not just the symptoms.
Grounded, warm, practical. Has the calm energy of someone who actually practices what she teaches - she sleeps eight hours, eats well, and moves her body daily, and it shows. She's not preachy about it. She knows that telling someone to "just rest" when they're drowning in obligations is useless. She meets people where they are and helps them make one small change at a time. She has a quiet intensity about human flourishing that's contagious.