Evolve Holistic: Introducing Jackie Mirkopoulos Q & A
"Jackie Mirkopoulos is a vibrant beam of light infused with pure love. Her hunger for learning and experience has inspired her to find a deeper approach to health.
She has a combined 15 years of experience with Fascial Stretch Therapy, Kinesiology, Massage Therapy, Life Stretch, Reiki, Chi Nei Tsang Thai Abdominal Massage, Mindful Movement and is deeply involved in the Toronto health and fitness community.
At Evolve Holistic, Jackie will help you grow and deal with the physical and mental demands of your life. Her mission is to educate and empower people to connect with and reclaim their inner power, and learn to become their own healer. Her personal evolution in cultivating self-awareness has her excited about igniting that desire in others.”
MD: What inspired you to found Evolve Holistic?
Jackie: What inspired me to found Evolve was in large part my own health journey. It started out as being an athlete, then learning to understand movement, and finally trying every possible way of eating or dieting to figure out what combination worked best for me. When I started to explore more of the spiritual realm with Reiki and energy work in combination with abdominal massage, I realized there was a whole side to my wellness that I was not only unaware of, but that I was completely ignoring.
This part of the journey was me realizing that health wasn’t just the physical, nutritional, or spiritual but that it also encompassed our emotional, social, sexual, and mindful sides, which is ultimately how we founded Evolve Holistic’s 7 Self-Care Essentials. It was largely through self-discovery and working with others in my practice that I learned how each element worked together and that when one was off, the entire system was equally affected.
The collective aspect of Evolve was to recognize the value of each Self-Care Essential and to bring in experts in each area to provide education and support for all of our clients.
MD: Part of our partnership with you is to deliver a Movement, Nutrition, and Intuition retreat (which we're very excited about), though Evolve offers a wide variety of other ones. What initially inspired the thought process towards these immersive workshops and retreats versus simply providing one-on-one work?
Jackie: Many of my greatest lessons have come from retreats. I learned over the years that until you can experience something for yourself, your learning won't be whole. A lot of my personal breakthroughs occurred within some of the retreats that I took as part of my ongoing education.
One of the biggest lessons I had was through a silent meditation retreat that I was going through as part of my teacher training. The first thing asked of us by our instructor was for each of us to allow ourselves to truly experience the retreat as a student versus considering it solely as a necessary part of our training within the program (which it was). When you allow yourself to be completely immersed in an experience, only then can you truly reap the benefits.
When people hear the word retreat, most picture escaping something. While yes we’re retreating from our typical daily environment, what we’re really doing is intentionally retreating inwards to immerse ourselves into a state where the sole focus and responsibility is yourself. When you’re in an immersive environment without standard daily stressors, you’re more receptive to new information and can get a much better sense of what works for your body and what doesn’t.
The focus of the retreats is experiential because books, articles, courses, etc. are all great resources, but the learning doesn’t fully take hold until you can experience something for yourself.
By creating retreats, we’re providing the environment and opportunity for people to retreat inwards to start asking themselves the right questions and acquiring the appropriate tools to make long lasting health changes.
MD: If you could encourage clients to embrace one thing daily, and you had ten minutes to impart with them one thing, what would it be?
Jackie: I am on a mission to change people’s relationships with their abdomen.
I think it’s missing and I want to inspire people to think differently to understand what’s behind that abdominal wall. The abdomen is such an important area that ties in physiological processes such as digestive health and immune function, to intuition and emotions. There is nothing more internal and central to your being than this area of the body which impacts everything we do and feel.
Most people have a negative relationship with their abdomen and suck it in, hide it, and flatten it with tight clothes or other contraptions. Changing the dialogue of telling our tummy how shitty it is for being bloated to appreciating it for all it does starts with being empowered to understand what is happening in there.
There is so much research about the gut being our second brain but we can argue that it is actually the first: We start at the gut and everything within it influences the rest of our systems.
