What happened to Jade Teta

For most of my life I thought I was a fitness guy. Then a metabolism guy. It took a long time, and a few hard knocks, to see the pattern underneath. You may be doing the same thing right now. You call yourself a weight-loss person, or a stuck person, when the truer story is something else.

Here's the pattern.

Training people started at fifteen. At about twenty-five, medical school was the plan. But when I looked inside, there was almost nothing about psychology, exercise or how a person really lives. So I took the road everyone thought was crazy and went to naturopathic medical school, back when people called it witchcraft medicine. It was the original holistic, integrative way of doctoring. It looks at the whole person instead of one organ at a time. Today I'm a naturopathic doctor, licensed in California and Washington, with almost thirty years in clinical practice.

At fifty, the same thing happened again. Traditional psychology mostly studies what goes wrong with people, and I wanted to know how people grow. So the PhD went to transpersonal psychology instead, where I'm a doctoral candidate now. It took years to see it, but transpersonal psychology is to psychology what naturopathic medicine is to medicine. It's the whole-person version, the one the mainstream still side-eyes a little (two rounds as the witchcraft guy, apparently by choice).

So the fitness label never fit, and neither did the metabolism one. The word is integrator. Every time a field split the body from the mind, I went looking for the place that put them back together. In my clinical practice that was the only place change ever held. Thousands of people did everything right with their bodies and still got pulled back by a story they couldn't see. Others did years of therapy, journaling and healing work, and their bodies stayed stuck in survival mode, hungry and wired and exhausted at the same time. Both groups were missing the other half. Most of them had no idea there even was another half.

That's why the work lives in two houses that connect. Metabolic Human is the body. It's a $33 a month membership on Skool, with a short lesson and a meal plan every week, follow-along workouts and a daily breath practice. Next Level Human is the story underneath, the identity that keeps pulling you back to old patterns. It's where the coaching and the Human Game live.

Start in either one. I think most people end up needing both. If your body feels like it's fighting you, with hunger that won't quit, energy that falls off a cliff every afternoon, cravings that show up right on schedule at night and weight that keeps creeping back no matter what you try, start with Metabolic Human. If the body is mostly fine and it's the pattern that keeps winning, start with Next Level Human. For some people that's the relationship they keep repeating, or the way they sabotage things right before they get good. For others it's the quiet voice in the back of the head that says you're not enough, and never will be.

Years later the pattern even turned up in my own name. Jade was the old healing stone people held against their side for kidney pain. Teta is the Portuguese name for theta, the slow brainwave of meditation and the rhythm the brain uses to lay down memories and rewrite them. A healing stone for the body, and the brainwave of a rewritten story, are the same two things those houses are built to give you.

My life has not been one collapse. It has been a series of them, in stages, over many years... and each one made me more honest.

The first and one of the deepest came twelve years ago, when my marriage to Jill ended. She is one of the great teachers of my life, and we are best friends to this day. I tell that whole story in my book You Grow Me. That ending taught me what I now teach: growth asks you to become more honest, more humble, and more yourself... even when it costs you.

Much more recently, that came for my career. I had spent years in a corner of the health and fitness industry built on high-pressure, hard-sell marketing that never fit me, and I had quietly wanted out for a long time. Then the world got loud. Watching what happened around COVID, I saw a field I loved become more interested in picking a side than in quietly doing good medicine for the person in front of it. Then a perfect storm hit my work and my businesses at once. It was painful. But I no longer believe it was an accident. That old professional life was collapsing because I had already outgrown it.

So I went back to school. I started a PhD in transpersonal psychology... the study of consciousness and human transformation... and wove it together with everything I already knew about the body. The biology and the belief. That is Next Level Human.

The four I would hand a stranger first: You Grow Me (with Emily Gough), on what love actually asks of two people. Next Level Human, the model behind all of this. Human 365, a year of daily practice. Antidote to Asshole, on what to do with the people who hurt you, yourself included.

All nine books, and where to start →

The founder page at Next Level Human →