When the weather is nice, Andre Talbot, the retired professional football player, likes to take his clients to the park. He gets them out of their shoes, allowing their bare feet to connect with the soil, and he has them bask in the sunshine before they finally have to shuffle back into the grind of the everyday world.



“On the walk back, I was literally saying to myself: ‘I can’t believe I get to do this for a living,’” he said, sipping an espresso on a sun-splashed Toronto patio. “Help people. Work with people. Help them feel more happy, more embodied, more healthy.”



For a decade, thoughts about health were things to be suppressed, to be ignored in his role as a receiver with the Toronto Argonauts and the Edmonton Eskimos. He hurt his back, he wrecked his ankle, but he still finished with more than 3,700 receiving yards and one Grey Cup ring.



In 2011, he announced his retirement from a computer terminal in a Mexico...