I feel like I’ve been headed here all my life. Headed towards breathwork, towards helping others heal and awaken.

In some ways, this path has unfolded slowly through my own self-exploration and curiosity about changing my patterns. In other ways, it was catalyzed by experiences that completely changed the direction of my life. I don’t think I could have arrived here any sooner. I believe I needed to go through every challenge, every victory, every experience to get to where I am today.

I began awakening to self-awareness in my early twenties through an interpersonal communications class. That was the first time I started to see that I had patterns and that the way I communicated, the way I showed up in relationships, wasn’t fixed. I could change it. But at that point, my desire to grow was intertwined with a need to be the “perfect” partner. Events from my childhood had shaped me into a chameleon – someone who adapted to the needs and expectations of others, whether they were spoken or not.

I lost myself in that process.

I met my first husband when I was 22 years old. We were together for nine years and over the course of our relationship, I cheated on him multiple times with multiple partners. At the time, I couldn’t fully understand why I was making those choices. After some therapy, I could see that I was deeply disconnected from myself. I was constantly trying to be what someone else wanted, and as a result, I felt alone, unseen, unloved, and I had no idea who I was. My husband wanted to work things out, but I felt a deep pull to break free from the life I had built with the help of my subconscious patterns. I didn’t understand yet that I would continue to feel lost until I learned how to be myself. 

And how to love myself.

I began therapy to understand why I had cheated, to work through the shame and self-loathing I carried, and to try to understand why I was so unhappy. Around that time, I chose to stay with the last person I had cheated with. That relationship became extremely controlling and psychologically and emotionally abusive, though I didn’t fully recognize it at the time and I was unwilling to admit it until many years into the relationship. In many ways, the relationship was a perfect match for the patterns I had developed. I continued trying to heal, but it often felt like I was taking two steps forward and ten steps back. I slowly started to understand that the environment I was in was reinforcing the very patterns I was trying to break.

In this relationship, there was a great deal of gaslighting, and much of the focus was placed on what was “wrong” with me. It felt like living in a funhouse of mirrors – nothing was as it appeared, and I couldn’t trust my own perception of reality. I tried everything I could get my hands on to heal and to not feel anxious and internally chaotic all the time. I went to years of talk therapy, hypnotherapy, meditation, coaching, neurofeedback, transpersonal therapy, and probably others that I’m forgetting. I was searching for something that could reach the parts of me I couldn’t seem to access on my own. I struggled with anxiety, recurring depression, binge drinking, lack of motivation and energy, and a persistent sense of disconnection from myself. Anytime I tried to leave the relationship, I would become convinced that I was the problem—that I was giving up, that if I could just fix myself, everything would be okay. A part of me knew the relationship was unhealthy, but another part of me believed I was there because something in me needed to be healed.

Toward the last few years of that relationship, I became desperate for something inside me to change. That desperation led me to attend several Ayahuasca ceremonies. Through those experiences, along with hypnotherapy, things began to shift. I started to wake up. It felt like I had been sleepwalking through my life, and suddenly I could see more clearly. Not just my circumstances, but my patterns, my choices, and the ways I had been abandoning myself. Things continued to shift from there. Eventually, I was able to leave the relationship (after going back a couple of times) and divorce my second husband – a process that felt like rescuing myself. 

From there, I spent a couple of years in trauma therapy, working to repair the damage that had been done and to rediscover who I was. This work is ongoing and continues today. I also returned to Ayahuasca several more times, as I still carried deep anger, sadness, and the physical effects of a lifetime of accumulated trauma. Even after all of this, I could feel that there was still something deeper within me that hadn’t been reached. Something stored not just in my mind, but in my body. 

When I sat with Ayahuasca again, I came out of the experience with a deep knowing that I was meant to be a healer, that I needed to return to being a healer. From a young age, my mom told me I had a healer’s heart and called me her “save-the-world daughter.” Most of my early aspirations and jobs throughout my life centered around helping people. Over the years, many people told me I should be a therapist because I was often the one others came to when they needed someone to listen or understand them. It felt like I was being called back to that path in a very deep and different way and it felt like a “calling.” I began exploring what it might look like for me and started by completing my Reiki Level 2 training, while continuing to search for other modalities that felt aligned for me. I revisited paths I had considered at different points in my life like therapy, hypnotherapy, massage therapy, shamanic work, and others, but none of them felt quite right. This is where breathwork comes into the picture. 

Around that same time, I remembered that I had been introduced to breathwork years earlier through a transformational life coaching program. I started returning to it, using longer breathwork journeys I found on YouTube to support my healing, especially as I worked through ongoing health challenges. I had a sense that there was a non-physical component to my health issues, and breathwork felt like a way to access it. From there, something began to resonate. Even though I had only had a handful of experiences with breathwork, and none that I would have described as overwhelmingly powerful at the time, there was something about it that felt right in a way I couldn’t fully explain.

So I followed that feeling.

I began looking into training programs, not because I felt fully ready, but because something in me kept saying “yes.” As soon as I had a call with Megan from Unity Breathwork about her training, I knew. With a quiet and grounded certainty, I knew: I was where I was meant to be. I would later come to recognize that I had been headed here all my life and that I finally felt “home”.