Alta wellness pro looks for holistic remedies
By Tibby Plasse
Aligning business and wellness comes naturally to Cate Stillman.
It’s an unlikely pairing: an alternative medicine and wellness practitioner with an instinct for business.
But since 1996, Cate Stillman has been aligning chakras with commerce, like the tea recipe that she shares with clients when they embark on ayurvedic cleanses.
Stillman, 51, didn’t intend on settling in the Tetons.
After graduating from Carleton College with a major in international environmental politics, she was inside the Washington, D.C., beltway and working on global warming policy in the early 1990s. But in 1996 she convinced her bosses to let her telecommute from Driggs, Idaho.
“Working on global warming policy made me very aware of where the most snow was falling, and back then the Tetons were getting 700 inches of powder,” Stillman said from her office in Alta as she talked about finding her path in the wellness world.
“I had been to China and eastern Pakistan for policy stuff, and I just kept asking the question: Where is human consciousness best understood, and how can we shift it?
She changed her professional track entirely, going to school in the summer and skiing through the winter. She attended California College of Ayurveda and the Iyengar
CLOSE-UP
Yoga Institute.
“I put a tipi up in my parents’ backyard in Teton Valley and started my ayurvedic practice next to the creek running through their yard,” she said.
She found traction with the local wellness community and expanded her clientele to both sides of Teton Pass to experience therapies like abhyanga massage.
“I had this little office in Jackson and would teach yoga over there one day a week, and then I’d go to Sun Valley for one weekend a month,” she said.
It took time to build up a clientele, but as the dot-com industry boomed in the early 2000s, Stillman saw the value and started YogaHealer.com. She began collecting emails, and now her mailing list has 60,000 subscribers.
What began as a yoga detox program for clients transitioned into a nine-month “innovative course,” an online experience that included a stockpile of interviews from gurus and experts from around the world, while simultaneously creating a virtual community, a club she dubbed “Living Ayurveda.”
“At that time, people were not on the internet like they are now, and a friend of mine from the yoga world who went into podcasting saw the volume of information I had gathered,” Stillman said.
“She’s like ‘You have a podcast!’ So we dumped all the files around 2010 or 2011 and put out what was probably the first Ayurvedic podcast.”
The “Thrive with Cate” podcast now has racked up more than 600 episodes.
Stillman’s business intuition mirrors the beliefs that have carried her career further, thinking on planetary and cosmic scales. But one theme continued to reveal itself over and over the further she got into her modalities: the American diet and chronic inflammation always being associated with how well people felt. She also saw it in herself.
This month she released a new book through Amazon, “The Witch’s Cancer Journal.” It’s a combination of a meta-awareness reflection on inflammation and physiological predisposition that intersects with the era of COVID-10 and the unlikelihood of a clean holistic lifestyle getting sucker-punched by cancer.
“Witch’s” as Stillman refers to it, is her journey not just as a cancer survivor but also as a publisher and learning how to share a story. Stillman is looking to take on inflammation in the corporate world now that’s she conquered her own body and helped others take control of their own.
“I’m super thrilled about helping companies explore the correlation between having regenerative habits that decrease chronic inflammation and decrease overhead with health care, but also activate focus,” she said.
Though Stillman is no longer working out of a tipi but in a house in Alta she designed with her husband and daughter, and traveling the world, she has never stopped asking the question: Where is human consciousness best understood, and how can we shift it?
Contact Tibby Plasse via valley@jhnewsandguide.com.