Meet Jordan Dozzi-perry

We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Jordan Dozzi-perry. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Jordan below.

Hi Jordan, appreciate you sitting with us today to share your wisdom with our readers. So, let’s start with resilience – where do you get your resilience from?

Resilience is something that I see as an innate quality of all life. The process of living, whether as a single being or in community is a process that requires a dynamic response to all sorts of inputs, beneficial or harmful. That response is an expression connected to a life’s very identity, what makes it uniquely itself. Thanks to my family, I was very fortunate to grow up around a lot of wilderness and so that natural expression of being that’s integral to resilience was emphatically on display. Seasonality alone was a wondrous display of resilience in Northeastern Canada. Winters were brutal and very much quieted the explosion of life the spring and summer brought. Fall and the leaves colors were also this incredible display of resilience, deciduous plants coping with the incoming frost. Feeling connected to the natural processes around me and the immense complexity life demonstrated gave me this foundational understanding of how resilience works, and spending time with it I understood I also possess this quality.

Appreciate the insights and wisdom. Before we dig deeper and ask you about the skills that matter and more, maybe you can tell our readers about yourself?

I’m Jordan Dozzi-Perry, artist, filmmaker, and founder of Repose Health. I’ve pivoted somewhat from my filmmaking and art practice of late to put the bulk of my energy and focus towards launching Repose Health, a novel, integrative digestive health therapy I developed that – I think – will change the landscape of digestive healthcare and therefore the overall health of many.

With each passing day the scientific community is validating how our inner ecosystem of microbes – called the human gut microbiome – is critically important to our health and well being. It does some heavy lifting for us, affecting our metabolism, our immunity, our inflammation response, and even creates much of our neurochemistry. I came to learn about the microbiome while battling chronic health issues in 2018 via one of the first services that looks at the genetic information of your microbiome (think 23&Me but for your microbes not your human cells). This put me down the track of getting to root cause of what’s a massive contributor to so many health issues and chronic disease states.

For more than half a decade prior to learning about the microbiome and developing Repose, I dealt with severe gluten intolerance and other food sensitivities, skin issues, digestive issues, depression/anxiety, and other health issues that left me simply going through the motions of life, not feeling the creative spark that led me to my earlier career and basically experiencing creative burnout in the process, making matters even worse psychologically.

I feel incredibly lucky to be someone that persevered through the challenges – through my faith in the body as part of nature and its desire to find balance given the right inputs and heal – and has not only reversed my health issues completely, but has done some pretty remarkable things for other people dealing with a range challenging chronic health issues connected to their digestive system. It has been amazing to see several people who have been at the end of the road in terms of treatment options, not getting the results they need to reach their health goals get those results from Repose, whether they’ve been diagnosed with a chronic disease or are just suffering in their daily with reduced energy, digestive issues, fatigue, and general malaise.

The exciting – and somewhat daunting – part of all of my current work is just how much of a health crisis we’re in currently in North America (and increasingly, the world) and how interconnected our guts are in this tragically unnecessary moment. Over forty percent of adults globally report at least one digestive issue per week, and moreover, chronic inflammation of the digestive system and dysbiosys (or imbalance) of the microbiome is correlated with every single disease of our modern age, from metabolic diseases like diabetes and obesity, to neurodegenerative diseases like MS and Parkinsons, to depression and anxiety, and even cancers. I aim to make a real positive impact in human health with Repose and help to reverse these trends.

There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?

Looking back, I think my determination (or stubbornness if you’d like to call it that) was what helped me push through that first 6 years of my health journey, trying things and feeling some benefit, failing with other approaches, but still feeling like there had to be a way to correct what had gone out of balance in my body. I was in a symptoms management framework, dealing with general diagnoses of IBS and auto-immune conditions. Few treatments were provided by allopathic (or modern) medicine short of being on one or more drugs for life to manage said conditions bringing along with them unwanted side effects. This is where the determination kicked in, to know there must be another way through. I think this same determination continues to serve me in my entrepreneurial journey with Repose as well.

Two areas of knowledge that were critical to my journey is science and art. I’ve been able to have the privilege of studying both in my time in academia and used critical thinking unique to both realms as well via applying integrative thinking to my process, something that I actually accredit art for providing more in practice. To have the scientific literacy to dig into research papers was absolutely essential to me being able to piece together the many mechanisms that are at play in dealing with microbiome, inflammation, and the immune system. I think the intersection of art and science is a fascinating space to think and it helped me greatly. I don’t think these fields are as disparate as they’re considered to be, and an artistic – more often integrative – process really does help augment the critical thinking and conceptual frameworks of what goes on in science. There was heavy overlap in the two realms in ancient times (for example, in ancient Greece) and the observation and reasoning that science provided was continuously fed into the creative process of artistic expression and crafting of objects. I think I’ve harnessed a bit of this with Repose.

For people that are early on their journey, I’d say to them harness a determination, be a voracious learner, and think not only critically but in an integrative framework. How are things the same? How are they connected? There is so much thinking to be done in this meta-space that will yield novelty and all sorts of discovery.

Alright so to wrap up, who deserves credit for helping you overcome challenges or build some of the essential skills you’ve needed?

Friends and family. They helped me overcome the challenge of getting out of some pretty psychologically dark times and were key sounding boards for ideas, and research (some are scientists and medical doctors). They were there to provide each their own unique style of support, often just to listen to me vent or hear what was happening to my emotional self. Trying to do something as vital as healing yourself can be a lonely journey, especially without an infinite budget to do so while also feeling alienated from how people traditionally socialize.

During my search for health I was spending a lot of money on supplements, the highest quality food I could afford, and alternative therapies. I felt supported by some health professionals, but then I would be sacrificing my budget for social outings, music, and travel in favor of trying to heal. It put me in a sort of isolation I wasn’t used to, so having friends and family to connect with and share research was massively helpful. This whole experience from healing to now expanding into a new field of work has also really crystalized in my mind that the self-made person is a falsehood and that being in healthy community is key to an organisms ability to thrive in the world, whether they’re a human or a microbe.

On the subject of community, I feel like I’m standing on the shoulders of giants in the scientific community. Without their work and discoveries, I would not have been able to create what I have with Repose.

Also, big shoutout to just being in nature! Just having a relationship with the natural world and engaging in activities that immersed me in it helped me overcome so much. Whether that was surfing, backpacking, splitboarding, or gardening, it lifted my spirit and health in ways that have been essential and these small or big affirmations to keep going forward in this incredible journey of life.

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Image Credits

Manasa Thimmiya, Sam Gillis, Dave Waddell

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