I want to take a minute and publicly thank two of my best buddies Mark Johnson and Joel Bratsch for help making this website and my professional website, www.michaelmathieu.com, possible! They also are both instrumental in helping me launch my fundraiser/practice building campaign! I feel very honored and blessed to have such wonderful friends who are willing to share their skills with me and help me move towards having a more successful and rewarding life! I have known both of them for 34 years now… We all met while interning at Eastman Kodak in Rochester, New York while we were in college. Thank you my friends, I love you both dearly!

I have started blogging on my business website www.michaelmathieu.com. So far I have a video which gives an introduction to my work. I will be blogging about bodywork related topics and since I have over three decades of experience and research around various healing modalities and nutrition related topics I will be blogging about them as well. I have already started offering my services as a health coach in an informal way over the past few months. I will be putting myself out there in a bigger way shortly. At the moment I’m consider calling myself “ The Health Freak” because it not only is catchy and memorable, it also is a silly way of playing off of My partner Beth calling herself the grief freak! :-). My first nutrition blog will be about creating a foundation for proper nutrition with supplementation. A focus on The critical nutrients that pretty much everybody should be taking to support their bodies. In my humble opinion of course!

This is the best website I’ve ever had, I was so busy working before I got injured that I never took the time to make a proper website. Many thanks go to Joel Bratsch for volunteering his time Setting this website up for me!

I recently read a book called “I’ll Push You“ written by two amazing friends, Justin Skeesuck and Patrick Gray. Years ago Justin developed A progressive neurologic degenerative condition that now has made him effectively a quadriplegic. They’ve been friends since they were young children and they have done many travels over the years. A few years ago, Justin saw a Rick Steves travel special on television about the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage trail in France and Spain. He got excited about it even though he knew his disability would make it quite challenging. The next time he saw Patrick he showed him the video of the Rick Steves program that he had recorded and when it was finished he asked him what he thought about that for a buddy trip. Patrick was quiet for a long time and then he looked at Justin and simply said, “I’ll push you.“ And that was the beginning of what became an amazing journey for the two of them. With great effort, they completed all 500 miles of the pilgrimage trail, they created a documentary, they wrote a book and they created a business all from the lessons that were gleaned from this Journey!

For obvious reasons their journey has deeply inspired me! It’s a story of hope and it’s the story of teamwork and it’s a story of trust and faith. This inspiration has led me to setting a goal to do part of the Camino myself with friends and family supporting me. my partner Beth, has walked approximately 120 miles of this pilgrimage trail on three separate occasions. It has been a powerful experience for her emotionally and spiritually. The past two times she has walked part of the trail, she has lead a small group of women on a grief focused journey. These two inspirations have come together for me and I already have a small handful of people who want to come with me and support me on this journey! People have been walking this trail for hundreds of years and I have learned there are many stories of emotional and physical and spiritual healing.

My goal is to build my business enough so that I can pay for this trip for myself out of my own money that I have earned instead of money from donations. Justin and Patrick’s trip is a potent reminder to focus on the why and not the how! My engineering brain off and gets lost in the details of how to make something happen, even though I know from past experience says the magic, the real magic happens when I set my sights of the positive aspects of why I want to do something and also how It will feel when I do.

My house is very close to some hiking trails that my current wheelchair cannot handle. The intention of this off-road chair is to provide therapy for mind, body and soul by allowing me to get a little bit more out into nature and go hiking with Beth and other friends, while confident that I will not get stuck.

​Also, I have a motivating two-year goal to build my practice enough that I can self-finance a trip to complete a portion of the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage trail in France and Spain. I already have a handful of people committed to come along and support me on this trip! An off-road wheelchair would make this trip possible. Unfortunately, Medicare/Medicaid will not cover any chairs that are off-road. The off-road wheelchair that fits the bill, sells for about $35,000 new plus a significant fee for adapting this chair to my body and I would have to pay for repairs myself. If you are curious what this wheelchair can do, check it out:

Dearest community,

Here is part one of a long overdue update

The autumn of 2014 started out looking really good. I seemed to be feeling a little more energetic and I seem to be sleeping better and I started doing more outings and I seemed to be building up my manual therapy practice. I had one week where I had six clients and the majority of them were paying clients. Some of those clients had some significant improvement with my work in a very short period of time.

But then around December some symptoms started showing up which would later turn into some very serious struggles with my health. I had a urinary tract infection that I couldn't seem to kick and then my digestion which is already struggling a lot really tanked and I started feeling really crappy most of the time. I also started having a lot of trouble breathing in early March because of such severe tightness in my lower rib cage and chest areas. My breathing got sorry restricted by the end of a April that we called 911 and I went to the hospital and ended up staying there for a week. I honestly really thought that was the end. I felt so miserable that one of those nights in The hospital that I said the big goodbye to my parents and my sister Linda. We tried finding a short-term rehab facility as a transition to going home but that failed. Thank god my parents came out to stay for the whole month of May because they were able to meet my extra needs as I started coming out of my funk.

The hospital seemed convinced that I was having some cardiac problem so they did extensive testing only to come up with nothing, my heart was looking great. Their best recommendation was to take more anti-spasm medication and to take an antidepressant.


Shortly out of the hospital I stumbled upon a protocol for doing a comprehensive healing of the digestive system and my entire body. Many of you probably don't know that I have had a lifelong history of severe digestive issues. These issues have manifested as severe food sensitivities, vulnerability to pathogens, slow healing, weakness, joint pain, brain fog, poor sleep, inability to gain weight and much more. These issues of course have been deeply compromised by my spinal cord injury. I believe these injuries will heal a lot faster and more fully if my digestive system is functioning on all cylinders.

Life can be terrible living in a body that's as broken as mine has been but to add insult to injury with severe food allergies and poor assimilation of nutrients and poor energy levels and poor sleep and lots of physical discomfort makes life quite unbearable at times. Although I don't think I could actually do it, I have thought very seriously at times about what would be the easiest way to end my life.

Currently I have nursing assistants spending about five hours a day with me three in the morning to get me out of bed and two in the evening to get me back into bed. I have a homemaker attendant Who spends about four hours a day with me, two hours around lunch and two hours around dinner time. And I have people who come and do overnight support with me and they are in the house from 10:15 PM until 7:30 AM in the morning. They help me get propped up with pillows before bed and then in the middle of the night they shift me from one side to the other with pillows and they're often up once or twice more with me because of some sort of discomfort or needing some water, etc. it really isn't much of a life at times. However, it seems there is something here for me to uncover or Discover, and thus I persist.

Regardless of what I just wrote I still continue to feel incredibly grateful for being here. Alive on this amazing planet and surrounded by so many beautiful people. All of you have touched me in someway. Weather through generosity of time or love or prayer or donation. At times I see the sheer magnitude of all this giving and I am completely blown away!