hi® was not dreamed up in a boardroom. I built the very first version in our garage, trying to take away my wife's pain. What happened next changed our marriage, gave thousands of women and men something they had been missing, and eventually gave us a daughter we were told we could never have.
This is Wendy's story, and mine. I am Steve.
Wendy and I tried for five years to have a baby. When we finally saw a fertility doctor and the pregnancy took, it felt like a miracle had arrived right on time. Then, in the last two months, while visiting my mom at a surgical recovery center, Wendy was exposed to an antibiotic-resistant infection.
She got very sick, very fast. The complications forced an emergency c-section. Our son Luke was born, and he lived only a day.
I want to be honest with you about what came after, because it is the part most people never say out loud. Wendy then spent two years in and out of the ICU. The infection resisted every antibiotic anyone tried, until the Mayo Clinic finally found one that worked. For two years, I had to stay strong every single morning without knowing if my wife was going to make it. I held it together in front of her, and fell apart where she could not see.
If you have ever had to be the steady one while your heart was breaking, you already understand the place this story comes from.
"He was here for only a day. He has shaped every day since."
Wendy survived. But she came home to a new kind of suffering. The repeated surgeries had left painful tissue adhesions, scar tissue binding her intestines to her uterus. They would cause her intestines to twist and block, which can turn life-threatening in hours. Surgery to release them often failed, because new adhesions formed right where the new incisions had been.
I had worked in neuroscience research and studied massage for years, so I started reading everything I could find. I came across a manual therapy called the Wurn Technique, developed by Larry and Belinda Wurn at Clear Passage Therapy in Florida. No therapist near us knew it, so I tried my best version myself, gently rocking her lower abdomen until the pain eased. It worked, but I traveled constantly for the company I had co-founded, and Wendy needed it daily, for five to twenty minutes at a stretch, which is exhausting to do by hand.
For a full year I designed and built prototypes in our garage. Most of them failed. My first idea, a machine that simply shook her body, only made her nauseous. Then I wondered whether the ligaments holding the uterus could be reached the right way, and finally landed on something that genuinely helped her. The early version lived inside a big PVC tube and sounded like a lawnmower, but for the first time, Wendy had relief she could reach for on her own.
About a week in, while moving the device across the different scarred areas, something happened that neither of us could explain. Fully clothed, simply holding it over her abdomen, Wendy felt a wave of deep release and pleasure that the nerve damage and surgeries had taken from her. After everything her body had been through, it brought a part of her back to life.
We were stunned, and frankly a little confused. Wendy quietly asked a few trusted friends to test it under an agreement to keep it private. They described profound relaxation and benefits they had not felt in years, several of them women who had been through c-sections of their own.
As a researcher, I needed to understand why. I went deep into the textbooks on the pelvic, pudendal, and vagus nerves. After talking with Dr. Barry Komisaruk and other neuroscientists, the most likely answer was remarkable: the device was producing a pressure wave that stimulated the vagus nerve from outside the body. It appeared to be the first discovery of transcutaneous vagus nerve stimulation of its kind, and it opened doors into pelvic wellness, recovery, and relaxation for both women and men.
As I mapped which nerves answered to which kind of stimulation, the device evolved into a system that could reach several of them at once, all through clothing.
Over time I refined it into something that could help women relax through a whole range of challenges, and the same principles later extended to men. What began as one husband helping one wife had turned into something that could help a great many people.
That was the question Wendy asked me one night, and it changed the course of our lives.
Because here is what was happening. We lived in the South, and the wellness benefit also carried a deeply taboo side for some people. Doctors I respected said they could not study it. Investors and business friends I had known for fifteen years warned me to bury it before it ruined my reputation and the company I had spent half my life building. One close friend asked me to put it on a shelf and promise never to speak of it again, and assured me everything would be fine if I did.
I almost agreed. Then Wendy asked me that question. The next morning I started making plans to leave the company. We decided that helping people was worth more than protecting a reputation.
Saying yes was the easy part. Building it took twelve years. Group after group either did not believe what we were describing was possible, or understood exactly how disruptive it could be and wanted it shelved.
We refused to let it go. The work took us across the United States, the Caribbean, and Asia. Along the way, Wendy and I both earned doctorates in human sexuality focused on clinical sexology, so we could properly understand and teach what was happening in the body. I refined the Sensate Focus techniques that Masters and Johnson pioneered, mapping them to a modern understanding of the nervous system, and developed gentle, fully clothed approaches for areas that had always been treated as off limits.
Six patents later, after testing with thousands of people and partnering with a brilliant product team to finalize the design, hi® became what it is now: a completely new way for women, men, and couples to relax, recover, and reconnect.
Sixteen years after the first prototype came out of our garage, Lifespanning Magazine named Steve one of its Global Top 50 Innovators for wellness and health technology. The issue also carries a full feature interview about how hi® was discovered, and why he walked away from an 8-figure company to build it.
The recognition followed independent review of the invention itself. The hi® System is Lifespan Certified, a mark granted after Lifespanning's validation board of scientists and longevity experts reviewed it for scientific grounding and ethical standards.
We had been told, plainly, that the damage meant we would almost certainly never conceive again. We had made our peace with it. Then, five years later, Wendy began having strange symptoms that none of her specialists could explain. They only got stronger.
Twenty-four weeks and seven doctor visits in, a nurse's assistant glanced over and said, "you know, that sounds like you might be pregnant." The doctor shot her a look, because they did not want to hurt Wendy with a hope that was supposed to be impossible.
We bought a test on the way home. We were pregnant.
Sixteen weeks later, our daughter arrived. Daniela is the greatest blessing of this entire journey. Everything we had been through, all of it, somehow led here.
After what happened to us, we could not keep it to ourselves. Natural fertility specialists now work with us on a protocol built around the hi® 3-Step Method, designed to take the stress out of trying to conceive.
So much of the time, trying to get pregnant turns into a stressful science experiment instead of making love. What feeling would you want your baby to be conceived from, stress or love? First Step for Fertility is a weekly ritual where each partner relaxes deeply and reconnects, helping both bodies get in sync and supporting natural conception the loving way.
It is not a replacement for your doctor. It is the part most fertility programs leave out: what actually happens in the bedroom, made calm, warm, and something you both look forward to.
Explore First Step for Fertility
Remember where this all began. hi® was first built to help Wendy recover from the painful tissue adhesions and pelvic trauma left behind by her emergency c-section and the surgeries that followed. That was the original purpose, before any of the rest.
Today, thousands of women use hi® for that same kind of recovery, whether they are healing after a c-section or after a natural birth. Pregnancy and delivery ask an enormous amount of the pelvic floor and the surrounding tissue, and that region is too often left to recover on its own.
Used through clothing, in just a few minutes a day, hi® supports pelvic floor tone, circulation, and the deep relaxation a recovering body needs. It is the same gentle, fully clothed approach that gave Wendy her comfort, and a piece of herself, back.
See how women use hi® for pelvic health
We did not survive that decade because we were special. We survived it because we kept choosing each other, on purpose, with our hands and our attention, even when words ran out. That is a skill. It can be learned. And it is exactly what hi® and our training teach.
You do not need a tragedy to discover what we did. The weekly ritual at the center of hi® gives you a simple, repeatable way to care for each other's body and nervous system, the kind of care that keeps passion and tenderness alive instead of letting them quietly fade.
Couples who learn this describe a closeness that keeps deepening for years. It is the thing they end up protecting on the calendar above almost everything else.
This is not only for couples. hi® lets you take exceptional care of your own body, recovery, and pelvic wellness right now, with no one else required. You become more relaxed, more confident, and more at home in your own skin.
And the skills you build do not expire. When you do choose to share them with someone, you will have an ability to care for a partner that very few people ever develop, and that any partner would be amazed to receive.
If our story moved something in you, this is the simplest place to begin. The free guide lays out the framework we spent sixteen years refining, the one we now teach thousands of women, men, and couples.
Everything we learned across sixteen years, six patents, and one impossible miracle is built into the hi® System and the training that comes with it. Whether you share it with someone or keep it just for you, we hope it gives you even a fraction of what it gave us.