I arrived in the world unable to breathe.

I was born with choanal atresia, a condition that blocked my nasal passages completely. Newborns are obligatory nose breathers. Without intervention I wouldn’t survive. I was airlifted to a trauma center two hours form home, where I spent the first five months of my life in an incubator. Fluorescent lights. Suffering from maternal deprivation. My mom came as often as she could, but she had another child at home. So my parents took turns visiting.

My body eventually said what bodies say when they’re not held by the person they belong to.

I failed to thrive.

My parents brought me home to die.

I had other plans.

I’ve spent my whole life learning how to breathe. And it is what has saved me. Over and over again. Because energy flows where the breath goes. The breath is the pathway to healing.

With the breath, we guide the energy, the literal life force, to move what’s stuck. It’s how we release what our bodies have been holding for years, sometimes for generations.

It all comes back to the breath.

And the breath and the energy have been my path all along.

As a little girl growing up on the shores of Hampton Bays, I found my solace in nature. It was where I felt held. My dad taught me that when the world felt like too much, I could walk into the woods, or on the beach, and things would become clearer.

And they did. In nature, I would listen for songs to come through me. And I would sing them, To the trees. To the horseshoe crabs I threw back into the bay. So, they wouldn’t suffocate after spending too long on the sand. So they too had a chance to survive.

Looking back now, I see that I was always helping others heal. Helping others survive. And thrive.

Between the ages of four and sixteen, I had thirty surgeries.

I remember the first one. I remember being ripped from my parents’ arms, kicking and screaming, and dragged to the operating room, then being forcibly put to sleep. I remember the putrid smell of the mask over my mouth. The loss of consciousness. And then waking up in recovery, being told not to cry or I wouldn’t be brought to my mother.

And I remember feeling numb. I was alive. But I wasn’t in my body. I didn’t know it then. But my body was doing the most intelligent thing a small nervous system could do to be able to endure repeated trauma: I was dissociating. Leaving my body.

And the work of my adult life is supporting others to come back into their body.

With the breath.

I was seventeen when I lost my dad.

He was 87. A British aerospace engineer who had worked for NASA A sailor. A nature lover. Who called me his first mate when we sailed together. Who made me feel safe in a way no one else has. Anchored. Held. Loved without condition, without performance. Without having to be anyone other than exactly who I was.

I watched them wheel him out of our home in a black body bag.

And just like that, I was unmoored.

He was the one person whose love had no terms attached to it. And without him, the world became a place where loved had to be earned. And cost something.

I didn’t know it then. But I was about to spend the next three decades learning how to become my own anchor.

In fact, one of the energy tools of the Foundations course is an anchor.

My body broke down in my twenties. Doctors called it chronic fatigue. Looking back, it was a body in rebellion. One that couldn’t carry any more.

Fevers. Hair loss. Blindness in one eye. I was told I’d never have children.

I lost my first sibling, Christopher, when I was 29.

I got married when I was 30. My brother Martin, one of my main anchors, walked me down the aisle. My brother Russell and my sister Laura were also at the wedding.

Then, when I was Thirty-four, a colleague invited me to a Reiki class. I went because she said it was healing. It seemed a little woo woo to me. But a week after the class, my fevers disappeared. Something was happening at the cellular level.

I decided to train as a Reiki Master. Three years later, my first child was born. After having him, I trained in seven healing modalities and founded the Whole Self-Healing System.

When I was 40, I lost my brother Martin. He had stepped in after my dad died. Attending all of my important events. I had lost another one of my anchors.

Three months after founding the Whole Self-Healing System, I felt a swirl of energy entering my womb, Life force energy. And I knew I was pregnant with my second son. Before I ever took a pregnancy test. It was like he had waited until my vibration was high enough to be the container that could hold him. And anchor him to this Earthly realm.

When he was two months old, we moved our family to the coast of North Carolina to be closer to my mom and my sister. I began grad school to train as a clinical therapist. All was well for a couple of years.

And then I lost my sister Laura.

Another one of my anchors.

She had come back from so much. Getting sober just as my first son was coming into the world. Training as a Reiki Master herself. In energy healing and spirituality, she found her passion and her purpose. We were going to do a podcast on healing together. Three weeks before she died, I felt the energy of a healing symbol coming in. The same way I had felt all of the symbols of the Whole Self-Healing System. The way I felt my second son’s soul come in. But I couldn’t see the symbol. So I texted my sister. And she texted right back “It’s a wrench and a rose.”

After her funeral, people were sending me roses. My screensaver mysteriously changed to a rose. And then my second son, then two, began bringing me wrenches from his dad’s toolbox. When I asked him why he was bringing them, he said “From aunt Wawa.” And then I remembered: The wrench and the rose. We never got to work with it together.

Less than three weeks later, I was diagnosed with stage four cancer. I was told I could only receive palliative care. I wouldn’t be eligible for treatment.

I asked my then eight-year-old, who was already a gifted artist, to draw the wrench and the rose for me. He drew it with the infinity symbol inside it and said “Send it to people who love you mom. They’ll heal you.”

So, I did. When my best friend used the symbol, she saw my dad and my sister using a force to “Send you back here. Back to us.” Life force energy. From another realm. From two of my anchors.

Sending me back to life.

When my best friend told me what she’d seen, I knew I wasn’t stage four. So, I went to my colorectal surgeon, who was also a mother, and said “I know it’s not stage four. I can feel it. I’m not going to die from this.”

“You’re right. And here’s why.” It turns out the original oncologist didn’t know how to read PET scan. He thought a node under my arm that had been enlarged since my second son was born was evidence of metastasis. It was not. So, my surgeon went to the board and argued for me to be treated based on a misdiagnosis. She prevailed.

I asked for a new oncologist.

And I began treatment.

Every time I got on the table for radiation, I had to fight a panic attack. Knowing I was willingly submitting myself to being burned. Over and over.

The radiation left third degree burns. I lived on the toilet. When my two-year-old wanted to play, I played with him on the bathroom floor.

Three weeks into treatment, my brother Russell died. The last of my siblings. I couldn’t attend his funeral. The burns were so bad, I could barely walk or leave the toilet, let alone travel.

And then, one night, facing another round of radiation, knowing it was killing me, I laid down on the bathroom floor and whispered the following “I am scared. But I trust that there is a plan. I surrender. Show me what to do.”

I felt into my heart for an answer, and I was able to hear the whispers of people praying for me. I was able to feel the energy of the wrench and the rose from all of the people who were sending it to me.

And I knew I needed to walk away from treatment.

Six months later, scans showed the cancer was completely clear.

Three years later. I walked away from my marriage.

We were together for almost two decades.

We tried. But I married my trauma. And he married his.

I stayed longer than I should have. After all, I’d invested so much. And so had he.

But, in the same way that I knew I needed to walk away from radiation, I knew I needed to leave the marriage. To save my life.

And the result has been a miracle to me. Life now looks like walks in the woods with my boys. Roasting smores after supper. Under the stars.

We are free. And he is free. To be exactly who we need to be. Our nervous systems can finally rest.

We can finally exhale.

And it all began with the breath.