For a year before that I was misdiagnosed — getting sicker and sicker while doctors told me I was fine. I was in constant pain, emotional, suicidal, barely able to walk. Something deep down told me this wasn't right. Nobody was listening.

I was a world-travelling whitewater kayaker. Physically gifted, mentally tough, someone who had always found a way. And I was falling apart in ways I couldn't explain and couldn't outrun.

Then they found it. Cancer.

"When they told me, something extraordinary happened. The thoughts stopped. For a brief moment it was just me — and the processes of my body — and a feeling of love and trust in myself I had never felt before. Then I watched the ego reveal itself again. And that's when the suffering returned."

That moment is the closest I have ever come to pure presence. It's also what I spend every session trying to help other people find. Not through crisis. Through breath.

Breathwork and yoga didn't save my life the way medicine did. But they saved everything else — the paralyzing fear, the identity loss, the long work of deciding who I wanted to become on the other side. Before cancer I used movement to escape. After cancer I use my gifts to serve.

I don't teach breathwork because I studied it. I teach it because it kept me alive when nothing else could. And now I show up every single day to give that same space to someone else.