Dr. Dianna Emory is a retired licensed clinical mental health counselor,well-versed in holistic approaches to healing. She is an educator of professional and general audiences, a builder of relationships and teams that advance personal and environmental wellness and a volunteer working on behalf of human health and the natural world. She is also an athlete with deep knowledge of natural resources and their support systems, including local land trusts,state and national parks, and other protected areas. As a survivor of a rare childhood cancer, and a mother of a daughter who survived traumatic illness, as well as parent to a family of seven, she has used every approach in this book many times over to enrich her life and to forge through the challenges.

Emory founded the Behavioral Medicine Center and Training Institute, where she worked for over twenty years providing cognitive behavioral therapy to groups and individuals and trained mental health providers and physicians in those techniques. During that time, she served on the Allied Health Professional Staff of Mount Desert Island Hospital and as an Adjunct Faculty member at College of the Atlantic. Emory has been a leader on boards of several nonprofit organizations, including Friends of Acadia, Maine Coast Heritage Trust, Schoodic Institute at Acadia National Park, the Northern New England Society of Clinical Hypnosis, Maine Clinical Counselors Association, and the American Mental Health Counselors Association.