A New Beginning.
When I opened the doors to Just Breathe Manual Therapy, I had a single mission in mind: I wanted to help people get out of pain and to restore harmony between their mind and their body.
My gut instinct was that most folks have great people in their corner: doctors, chiropractors, therapists, and coaches. What I thought people didn’t have (and that they wanted to have) was someone who could help tie all those different voices together.
Why did I have that hunch? Because I had that same experience.
In 2014, I was training my ass off as an athlete, I was working a high-stress, challenging job. I was on the edge of burning myself out.
That was when my body gave me some really clear messages that I was doing something wrong. My body just more or less failed me and I found myself in a hospital bed learning what a pulmonary embolism was (in the words of my pulmonologist, “it’s like a heart attack, but with your lungs”).
That week in the hospital and the few months of recovery that followed were a turning point in my life. In the lead-up to that hospital stay, I’d worked with my doctor on the physical symptoms I was experiencing (I will largely leave out the repeated misdiagnoses). I’d worked with a therapist to deal with the emotional challenges that came with the stress I was experiencing. I had a coach guiding my workouts. I had a chiropractor and massage therapist to help my body recover. I had an acupuncturist who was helping me keep everything together internally and energetically.
Of all of those people, it was my acupuncturist who took a step back and looked at all the factors and pointed me to the emergency room to get an ultrasound. Without exaggeration, he is the reason I am alive to tell this story.
All of this is to say that when I say I want to help people restore harmony between their mind and their body, it’s because disharmony can kill you. Every single leading cause of death in the US lists stress as a risk factor. And this says nothing about the quality of life of those who are living.
So why share this story today?
Through the survey responses I received over the past month, I learned that almost all of us experience pain and stress. Furthermore, almost universally we know those can be connected and we want them addressed together. I also learned that very few of us have someone on our care team who will take that perspective.
Through Just Breathe Manual Therapy, my aim is to help people realize that wanting a practitioner to take this kind of holistic approach is not only reasonable, but necessary. Just Breathe Manual Therapy is part of a sea-change in how we are address our health and well-being on a larger scale.
Together, we are building a movement that embraces the nuance of our lived experiences. We’re building a movement that will make us better people, partners, parents, and citizens.
Together, we’re going to change the world.
