City Voices Interview with Nick Loffree
Nick Loffree has been interested in health and fitness since he was 12 when he began to explore strength training and sports conditioning with his Mom who was making a career change into fitness coaching. A few sharp turns later (involving heavy drug use and head traumas), at 17, Nick wound up hospitalized and medicated for paranoid psychosis. Two years of medication left him with cystic acne, eczema, depression, compromised digestion, liver congestion, chronic anxiety and brain fog.
Not being one to take “impossible” for an answer, Nick ignored the cynicism of his doctors and psychiatrists and forged a path back to health for himself. He explored different paths of yogic, Buddhist, and Taoist practices, as well as just about every specialized dietary philosophy available, and slowly uncovered the principles that helped him to heal.
One healing resource Nick found especially useful was Qigong. In 2014, he moved from Toronto to California to spend 3.5 years apprenticing with world-famous Qigong master and Chinese Medicine practitioner Lee Holden.
After his internship, Nick stuck around in California and made a name for himself as a Qigong and Taoist Yoga teacher across Silicon Valley.
There, Nick spent 4 years as an on-site movement teacher at 1440 Multiversity, the mindfulness retreat center of companies like Google and Apple. He taught Qigong as PTSD therapy to police, firefighters, and the military through the non-profit Resiliency First. He helped teenagers with drug addiction and mental health issues at Evolve Treatment’s outpatient mental hospitals. He taught everywhere from Yoga studios to cancer patient retreats, to sports team training facilities, to kids’ summer camps, to nursing homes and retirement communities.
During those 4 years, Nick found ways to make mindful movement and self-healing accessible to a wide variety of populations. He now applies those lessons to his online teaching, where he reaches out through Youtube, TikTok, E-courses, coaching, and teacher certifications to spread the power of mind/body medicine far and wide.
Since going completely digital, Nick has moved to the beautiful city of Boise, Idaho. There he loves to explore the nearby rivers, lakes, hot springs, and mountains where one can so easily seek solitude in nature and return to the source of it all.
