IMIN: The beginning
I cannot begin to tell you the story of IMIN without mentioning my absolute favorite client, Sarah. I know you're not supposed to have favorite clients, or students, but Sarah broke my heart open. She was suffering from really bad anxiety and panic attacks. At 32, she had an independent life and then suddenly found herself living at home with her parents, avoiding socially stimulating environments and no longer going to work at the office. Her life had become very small, right as it was supposed to be expansive. It broke my heart when she told me her father had wanted to get her a dog for Christmas, something she had really wanted, but she had to say no because she could barely take care of herself.
Sarah tried a lot of different things and somehow ended up in front of me, an intuition teacher. The timing, as it turned out, was everything. For months I had been puzzling over a certain question I was seeing with clients: no one size fits all when it comes to wellness tools. I was frustrated that in order to teach people to be in tune with their bodies, their inner wisdom, I had to teach them how to relax, but the tools currently available in the world to help people relax seemed to work for some and not for others. In fact, one client would do really well with breathwork and the other would get super anxious. What was that about? It didn't feel right to me to teach a group of people one exercise, knowing that it wouldn't work for half of them, and just tell them to trial and error it.
The annoying part? I had nowhere to send them to. The wellness world is still operating in the stone ages, believing that one wellness practice is good for everyone. And this wasn't just my experience. I saw it reflected in the research too. Most of the time a wellness technique would be "proven" effective for 50% of the participants. What about the other 50%? Do we just ignore the ones that need it most?
I had a very deep intuitive knowing that this was a part of my purpose, creating a new way of understanding what works for the nervous system and why. So I started with what I knew.
I knew that I could spot the patterns of what would work in my clients. Different types of stress in the body would show up in people's energy, in how they spoke, how they held their body. There were indications. Take Sarah. By feeling into who she was, how she moved her body, and her energy, I knew vagal toning would really work for her, breathwork would not, and traditional meditation would be catastrophic. She confirmed she couldn't meditate at all and hated breathwork, and when we started the vagal toning, we hit gold. But even that wasn't the full picture. In the mornings, when her anxiety was at its peak, vagal toning was too intense. What she needed in those moments was sensory input, something to ground her body before it was ready to go deeper. It wasn't just about finding the right technique. It was about finding the right technique for the right moment. In four short weeks she was able to get serious control over her anxiety and move back to her own home. In eight weeks, she went back to the office at work. And she got the dog.
That's no time at all. I watched that when someone was matched with the right technique for their nervous system, at the right time of day, they could heal and regulate quickly. After thousands of students, I knew I was able to match people pretty accurately. Breathwork for one, movement for the other, sound techniques for another. I knew if I could spot these indicators, I could find them scientifically. The body would show signs. The data WOULD be there.
So I found it. I dove into biometrics and discovered that the patterns I had been reading intuitively for years were visible in the data. The patterns held – measurable, consistent, and reproducible. The story your body tells through its heart rate variability, its stress responses, its recovery patterns, it maps to the kind of regulation it's asking for. That was the breakthrough. Not just measuring stress, not just looking at population baselines, but understanding the holistic orchestra of the body and what it was actually asking for.
I also wanted to find an affordable way to bring this to people. I didn't want to create another expensive Whoop or Oura Ring. I wanted anyone to have the opportunity to use it. 91% of the world has a smartphone, so let's do it there. In the course of a few months, IMIN was born, which can scientifically scan your face in 50 seconds with rPPG technology and measure your biometrics, then match you to the right intervention, and test to see if it delivered.
However, IMIN is not just about matching. It allows people like Sarah to create sovereignty with their bodies. When the body has been dysregulated for a long time, you start to see it as an enemy. It isn't working with me, you think. It's broken. It can't even meditate! But the body is doing its best. It really is on your side, but maybe it's asking you to go right when you just want to go left. Not realizing that three rights is a left.
That's what IMIN does. It doesn't just match you with the right nervous system regulation technique, it builds an understanding of why your body is doing what it's doing. It is a translation from your body to your mind. I believe the body has so much wisdom, and for many of us it has been trying to get our attention for a long time. Someone like Sarah, who could barely leave the house in week one and had her own home, her job, and her dog back by week eight, made me know I needed to build this for those who can't work with a coach one on one for that long. It's why IMIN is here, so you can make peace with your body. So it can finally tell you what it's been trying to say, in a way that feels actionable, and kind.
A note on language
Regulation -- the nervous system's ability to be flexible, balanced, and coordinated, regardless of whether you're calm or activated.
Dysregulation -- when the nervous system's ability to be flexible, balanced, and coordinated breaks down and the system gets stuck, rigid, or collapses, regardless of whether you feel stressed or fine.
Nervous system regulation technique -- any practice or intervention designed to restore or maintain the nervous system's flexibility, balance, and coordination, particularly when it has become stuck, rigid, or collapsed (dysregulated).
rPPG (remote photoplethysmography) -- a non-contact technique for measuring physiological signals using a camera to detect subtle color changes in skin caused by blood volume pulse variations as the heart beats. It's distinct from PPG (photoplethysmography), used by wearables such as Oura and Whoop, which requires a physical sensor (e.g., a pulse oximeter) touching the skin.
How rPPG works:
A camera captures video of a person's face or skin
Algorithms extract tiny color fluctuations (especially in the green channel) from regions of interest
Signal processing isolates the pulse waveform from noise (motion, lighting changes)
Physiological metrics are derived from that waveform
