For Our Eminent Family
Celebrating the Semiquincentennial birth of our nation
Our nation was founded on a bet: that free people, governing themselves among equals, will pursue flourishing, beyond survival. Eminent is founded on that same bet, made about the body.
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This page is a thank-you, to you, our members and partners. Especially to those who have given their hearts and lives to serve our country and fight for the freedoms we enjoy, as we honor the 250th anniversary of its founding.
To mark it, we've made you a gift: a short book called Sovereignty Through Health.
Those who read it receive an additional gift: free access to a 28-day online guided program to put the material into practice. Both are yours, free. Our way of saying we're grateful you're part of this journey with us, and maybe, just maybe, empower you a little more in your own pursuit of happiness.
The book is part of something we care deeply about here: education and awareness. Not only of the tools and technologies in our space, but of the techniques, the fundamental forces underneath them, how they interact with us, and the results we get.
We believe knowledge is power, and the more knowledge you have of your own body, the more power you have to honor it, support it, and let it do what it already knows how to do, best. The result? Freedom to play, full out.
Or, as our founder Mark Cottom puts it: everything in this place exists for one purpose, to give the body what it needs, so it can operate correctly.
What follows is the idea underneath all of it: the same idea the country was founded on, taken all the way down to a single body. Read on, claim your copy, take the 28-day challenge, and let's see just how much richer our lives become.
Let's play!
Your Eminent Crew
When Jefferson wrote happiness, everyone raised on the classics heard a different word. Eudaimonia: flourishing, the fully-lived life. Not pleasure. Not relaxation. Not a number going up.
That single word is the whole argument. The pursuit of happiness was never the pursuit of a metric, and that is exactly what separates us, without a word against anyone, from every business that took one slice of being human and built a model around optimizing it.
The discovery gets replaced with discipline. The mystery gets replaced with metrics. That is exactly what happened to wellness.
None of that is a knock on discipline or measurement. They're beautiful, and we use them here every day. Strength you can measure and habits you can keep are real gifts. It's only that discipline and metrics alone, without the discovery underneath them, quietly miss the magic. We simply refuse to let the whole of your experience be reduced to the part a number can see.
So Eminent didn't build around a slice. We have gym equipment, clinical-grade technology, spa modalities, aesthetic tools, all under one roof, because the point was never to optimize one number. The point is exploring the full depth of experience your own body is capable of, together as a community.
You don't measure a sunset. You let it move you.
You have probably seen the gym-poster version: a shame to grow old without seeing the beauty and strength of which your body is capable. It has moved a lot of people, and there is truth in it. The closer you get to the original, though, the more the words carry.
About discipline. Work harder. No excuses.
About discovery. There is a version of your experience you have never met.
And here is where the circle closes. This line comes from Xenophon, the same classical bookshelf the founders were educated on. Our brand's oldest idea isn't a decoration bolted onto an American theme. It's from the exact syllabus of 1776. A 2,400-year-old thought, carried into a new nation, landing in the desert in 2026.
And the nation itself, at 250: still discovering what it's capable of. Not declining into neglect.
The founders' wager was that people don't need to be ruled from above. Ours is the same, about your health.
A body in dis-ease can't govern itself. Dis-ease is the enemy of free will, and health, in the end, is freedom.
Eminent is a passionate community of life-love peers in Scottsdale: doctors and first-timers, athletes and retirees, first responders and veterans, entrepreneurs and people who simply got tired of outsourcing their health and being told to wait and see. Some of us carry decades of clinical training. Some of us are brand new. Everyone walks in as an equal. There are leaders and mentors, and the leaders have their mentors, but no one hands down authority from on high.
Exploration,
over prescription.
With peers,
alongside providers.
Through use,
not marketing.
If this reads as being against doctors or medicine, it's just the opposite. When something needs real clinical care, we'll be the first to help you find an excellent provider, and we're proud of the community of physicians growing around us: some of the most forward-thinking doctors we've met, and some of the biggest hearts. "No kings" doesn't mean no experts. It means no one rules over your own experience but you, with great people beside you.
You are not a patient here. You are a citizen, sovereign over your own experience. Your success is your own, but you never have to do it alone. Out of many nations of one, one community. E pluribus unum.
You are less a machine than a field: a conductive, electric thing, humming with information. The modern malady is disconnection. Everything here is a way of re-connecting.
Look closely at everything in our space, the light, the cold, the pressure, the current, the fields, the breath, and under the different names, they're all doing one thing. Each one, in its own way, restores conductivity: clearing the static, re-opening the channels, helping the signal move cleanly again through a body that modern life had begun to insulate. Different instruments, one work. We're not chasing symptoms one at a time; we're helping a living electrical system remember how to conduct itself.
And here's the part that still moves us. Conductivity doesn't stop at your skin. As your own signal clears and strengthens, as you come back online, something opens between you and the people around you, too. A settled nervous system settles the room. A person running clean is easier to reach, easier to trust, easier to build alongside. So the quiet work you do under a light or on a mat ripples outward, into the conversations in our lobby, the dinners at your table, the team on the field or the mat. Restore the current in one body, and you feed the current between all of us. That's how a room full of nations of one becomes a community: not by talking about connection, but by each of us becoming a little more conductive to it.
You may have noticed some technologies appearing, and others quietly fading away. That's because the technologies in our space are not treatments we prescribe. They are conditions for experience: instruments to help you sense and circulate what is already in you. Chances to feel, in yet another way, the aliveness of conductivity building in you. And the ones we keep earn their place the only honest way: vetted by leaders, loved by members. A lot of things look great on paper but don't translate into practice, or results.
So next time you come in, as you move from modality to modality, ask yourself: how is this improving my flow? And remember, you don't have to answer with words. Just awareness of how electric it is to be alive.
The American grain of this was never hustle. It was the deliberate, self-reliant life.
Thoreau went to the woods to strip life down to the essential. Emerson told a whole country to trust itself. That impulse, to live on purpose, to answer to your own conscience rather than the crowd, is the same one that fuels us and draws people here. We don't care to optimize you against a benchmark. We care how well you live deliberately in your own body, and whether you find, in the plainest moments, the depth of experiencing life that was always the point.
"Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string." That line is Emerson's.
Tocqueville marveled at it: more than any people on earth, Americans band together freely, to do what neither the state nor a lone person could do alone. Eminent is exactly that. A private membership association: a community of equals, freely joined, pooling access to the tools and the knowledge to use them well.
Out of many nations of one, one association.
From extremely sick to extremely fit, from the curious to the concerned, every one of our members is sovereign over their own experience. And together, we create something none of us could alone, and grow grander in ourselves for it.
So thank you, for all you do to honor your health, your journey, your family, and your work in this world. We are honored to journey alongside you.
A note before you claim your free book
We didn't write this to sell you anything. There is nothing in these pages you have to buy, and the practice that follows it costs no money at all. I wrote it because I kept meeting people, good, capable, well-meaning people, who had quietly lost the thread of their own health, and with it something harder to name: the felt sense of being free in their own body.
If you've ever felt that sense of "existential claustrophobia," then you know how desperate we can become to just feel good again. And this leads to the other challenge I've spent a career addressing: chasing healing or hunting optimization at the cost of living, at the cost of joy and discovery.
I have become convinced the healing journey doesn't have to be so heavy, and that we don't have to wait to heal to play.
I have also become convinced that when we don't do the things we want to, or do the things we don't, it's not because we're broken, or lazy, or short on willpower. Rather, we get buried. Buried under noise, under fatigue, under the limitations, the inflammation, the pain, the remembering of what we used to be able to do but no longer can, under a hundred small things the modern world piles on without asking.
So this is my attempt to hand you a shovel, one that can clear out the clutter, carve out some space for yourself, and play with to enjoy shaping your potential in this world.
What you will find here is not a regimen, or a diet, or a set of rules. It is an idea, an old one, older than any of us: that your capacity to live well and to choose freely is downstream of the state of your body, and that clearing what is in the way is mostly a matter of subtraction, not addition. I have tried to write it the way I would explain it to a friend across a table. Honestly, without jargon, and without pretending I have it all figured out. I don't. I am walking this too.
Here is the one thing I will ask of you, and it is the whole price of admission. This book costs no money. The practice that comes after it costs no money either. But nothing worth having is truly free, so here is what you pay: your attention while you read, and your intention when you begin. That is the currency. Give the words your real attention, give the practice your honest intention, perhaps try reading it out loud, and you will get back more than you put in.
So claim your copy (PDF and epub reader versions available) and enjoy. When you're done, come walk the twenty-eight days with us. I will be there, live, to answer whatever it stirs up.
I appreciate your energy, your time, and your attention. May they be the first thing you start to reclaim more of, as you read.
Ryan Today
Experiential Anthropologist
Written with
Mark Cottom Jr.
Co-founder · Certified Hyperbaric Technologist & Safety Director
Mark came to this work through a game. A Philadelphia kid with a lacrosse stick in his hands from the age of seven, he played hard enough that his body eventually needed to recover as fiercely as he competed — a search that carried him to a hyperbaric chamber in Vancouver, British Columbia. Twenty-six years later he is a Certified Hyperbaric Technologist and Safety Director, and the operational backbone of Eminent. Where Ryan tends to the idea, Mark tends to the room: the protocols, the safety, the hundred quiet details that let people breathe easy and trust what is happening to them. His conviction hangs on our wall in three words: every breath matters.
The book moves in four turns
Our gift, on the anniversary
To thank our members, and to thank the country on its 250th, we've made a new edition of the book, and a road to walk it. It's yours.
Your copy of Sovereignty Through Health is on its way. If it isn't in your inbox in a few minutes, look under promotions or spam. Welcome aboard.