Newly certified!
and what I want from leaders in 2023
In early 2018, I was living in Los Angeles, but in truth, I wasn’t so much living as existing. I was technically alive (vital signs, check) but internally I was a disconnected, dead thing, a dial tone flattened by years of stress and overwhelm dressed up as success.
I didn’t know how to take care of myself (take a bath? put my phone in the other room at night? decaf???), and I also didn’t believe I could simultaneously take care of myself and keep my business running. It was a real ”one or the other” type of situation in my head, and since 2013, I’d been picking the business.
For five years, I’d been shoving all my emotions down, telling myself I didn’t have time to feel them; there was too much on my to-do list. I was in survival mode, afraid to stop even for a few minutes, because I knew if I did, I wouldn’t have the energy to start again. I had two primary fuel sources: quad-shot iced espressos and the crippling fear of screwing everything up. IT WAS AS FUN AS IT SOUNDS!
I can’t remember how I first ended up in Jon Paul Crimi’s breathwork class, and I can’t even remember how I first heard about breathwork. Truth be told, I was such a mess that lying on the floor and breathing was about as much of an activity as I could handle, and I probably showed up because the class description mentioned lying down in the dark.
I assumed we would be, like, meditating.
I was wrong.
Breathwork moves and clears emotions that I couldn’t talk out of my body with a lifetime of therapy. Of all the things I’ve ever done in service of my own healing — and the list is ridiculously long, especially for my reluctantly-woo, Boston-native, recovering-cynic self — breathwork has been the most transformative. Ironically, it’s also the easiest and most accessible.