My Why

I want to speak about how I got here.

What led me to this space of going deep. Of exploring the inner landscape of my mind and my body. Of becoming curious about the places inside of us that most of us spend our lives trying to avoid.

I started this journey many years ago, although I didn't know it was a journey at the time.

I have always felt things deeply. Almost as if my body needed to feel something intensely in order for me to know I was alive.

Even when I was young, I was drawn to intensity. To complicated people. To darkness. To stories about women who felt too much and lived somewhere outside of what was considered normal. I remember watching Angelina Jolie in Girl, Interrupted and being completely fascinated by her character. There was something about that kind of wildness and pain that I identified with before I even understood why.

And eventually, in my own way, that story became my life.

I slowly slipped into a sadness that I didn't know how to name or hold.

And then I discovered something that could make it disappear.

A pill.

A drink.

Anything that could change the way I felt inside my own body.

There was this ache inside of me that I couldn't explain. A longing I couldn't name. A deep disconnection from myself that felt almost spiritual in nature, like I was searching for something I couldn't find in the world around me.

And substances filled that space.

Until they didn't.

But in the beginning?

They worked.

They worked incredibly well.

For a long time, they gave me exactly what I had been searching for.

Relief.

I could separate myself from reality. I could stop thinking. I could stop feeling. I could leave the small, painful world I had created inside of myself and disappear into something that felt like bliss, even if it only lasted for a moment.

Those were the best days.

The days when I didn't have to be Sarah.

I didn't have to think about what I had done.

I didn't have to think about who I was becoming.

I didn't have to feel the shame or fear or sadness underneath everything.

I could just leave.

Of course, that relief came with a price.

And for a long time, I was willing to pay it.

Over and over again.

Until the price became bigger than anything I could manage.

The shame got heavier.

The grief got deeper.

Relationships started falling apart.

People who once thought my behavior was funny or wild or something we could all laugh about weren't laughing anymore.

And neither was I.

The fantasy faded quickly and reality became impossible to ignore.

Eventually, I started thinking about what it would be like to simply not exist.

And at the time, that thought felt like relief too.

What a gift, I thought.

To not have to be here anymore.

To not have to think.

To not have to feel.

To not have to become anything.

I was exhausted from being myself.

And even then, I didn't stop.

I didn't stop when I was jumping out of moving cars.

I didn't stop when I was punching people in the face.

I didn't stop when I started hiding in the bathroom for days until my boyfriend had to take the door off the hinges.

I kept riding that train for years.

There is a line in recovery about continuing on to the bitter end, and I understand that now.

Because that is what I was doing.

I was going to ride it until there was nothing left.

Until eventually my body said,

We cannot do this anymore.

Something in me knew.

You either stop or this is going to be over.

After being in the hospital twice in three days, I was asked to go to a state-funded detox.

I don't know if I actually said yes and meant it.

I don't remember having some beautiful moment of surrender where I suddenly wanted a different life.

I was just out of answers.

So I said yes to whatever might make this go away.

And while I was sitting in that detox, a woman came in and told her story.

She didn't come in polished.

She didn't come in pretending she had never been broken.

She told the truth.

She told us about the painful, ugly, vulnerable parts of her life. She talked about reaching her own version of the gates of hell and eventually deciding to say yes to something different.

And something about her reached me.

Maybe because she wasn't talking down to me.

She had been where I was.

And she was standing in front of me as proof that another life existed.

So the question became very simple.

What was my choice?

Continue toward the bloody end?

Or try something I had never tried before?

Reluctantly, I said okay.

And the next day, I called that woman.

I wish I could tell you that from that moment forward I became fearless and surrendered and spiritually enlightened.

I didn't.

Because underneath the addiction was something much deeper.

Fear.

I had lived most of my life in fear.

Fear of disappointing people.

Fear of being rejected.

Fear of being too much.

Fear of not being enough.

Fear of what people thought about me.

Fear of how my choices might affect someone else.

Fear of making someone uncomfortable.

I learned very early how to be the good girl.

Tell me what you need me to say.

Tell me who you need me to be.

Tell me how to behave so everything can stay peaceful and I can feel safe.

I thought keeping everyone else comfortable would eventually make me comfortable too.

It never did.

Sobriety began with putting down drugs and alcohol.

But recovery became something completely different.

Recovery became the slow, painful, beautiful process of meeting myself.

Without anesthesia.

Without running.

Without leaving.

For the first time in my life, I had to learn how to stay.

Stay when I was uncomfortable.

Stay when I was afraid.

Stay when shame came up.

Stay when someone was disappointed in me.

Stay when I couldn't control the outcome.

Stay inside my own body when every part of me wanted to escape it.

And somewhere along the way, sobriety became spiritual.

Not religious.

Spiritual.

I started to understand that the emptiness I had spent years trying to fill wasn't asking for another substance, another person, another accomplishment or another escape.

It was asking for connection.

Connection to myself.

Connection to other people.

Connection to something greater than me.

Connection to my body.

Connection to the present moment.

I began to understand that maybe the goal wasn't to stop feeling so much.

Maybe feeling deeply was never the problem.

Maybe I just never learned what to do with everything I felt.

That realization changed my life.

Because the very thing I spent years trying to escape has become the doorway into almost everything I do today.

I became a mother.

And motherhood gave me another reason to look at myself differently.

My daughter has been one of my greatest teachers.

Being her mother has made me look at the woman I am, the woman I want to be and what I want to pass down.

I don't want to teach her that strength means never struggling.

I want her to know that strength can look like telling the truth.

Asking for help.

Changing your mind.

Starting over.

Feeling something all the way through without allowing it to destroy you.

I want her to know she doesn't have to abandon herself to be loved.

And I know the only way I can teach her that is to keep learning it myself.

My marriage has been another part of that spiritual practice.

Because real intimacy asks you to stay too.

To be seen.

To communicate.

To repair.

To allow another person to know you beyond the version of yourself you learned to perform for the world.

Today, my marriage is not something I take lightly. It is part of the life I once couldn't imagine having.

And then there is the woman I have become professionally.

Sometimes I think about the woman sitting in that state-funded detox and I wish I could show her my life now.

Not because my life is perfect.

It isn't.

But because she couldn't imagine that she was capable of building anything.

Today I work for one of the top catering and events companies in Southern California. I manage venues, relationships, sales, clients and events. People trust me with enormous moments in their lives.

And I have founded businesses of my own.

I own recovery homes where people are given the opportunity I was once given: a safe place to begin again.

And I created Althea Breathwork.

That one feels especially full circle.

Because I spent so many years trying to get out of my body.

And now I help people come back into theirs.

I spent years trying not to feel.

Now I create spaces where people are allowed to feel.

I spent years believing the darkness inside of me was something I needed to hide.

Now I sit beside people while they meet their own darkness with compassion.

Through breathwork, sound, Reiki, retreats, recovery and community, I keep coming back to the same thing:

Can we learn to stay with ourselves?

Not fix ourselves.

Not become some perfectly healed version of ourselves.

Stay.

Listen.

Become curious.

Feel what is here.

Because I don't believe healing is about becoming someone new anymore.

I think so much of healing is remembering who we were before we learned we had to leave ourselves in order to survive.

And that is why I do this work.

My life today isn't meaningful because I escaped my past.

It's meaningful because I stopped running from it.

I went back.

I looked at her.

The scared girl.

The angry girl.

The woman hiding behind a bathroom door.

The woman who wanted to disappear.

The woman sitting in detox with absolutely no idea what would happen next.

And instead of trying to erase her, I learned how to love her.

She is part of me.

She is why I can sit with someone else's pain without needing them to hurry through it.

She is why I believe so deeply in the body.

She is why I believe in breath.

She is why I believe in recovery.

She is why I believe that sometimes one person telling the truth about their life can change the entire direction of someone else's.

Because a woman once did that for me.

She walked into a detox and told the truth.

And because she was willing to tell the truth about where she had been, I began to believe there might be somewhere else for me to go.

Seventeen years later, I am still saying yes to that somewhere else.

I am still learning.

Still uncovering.

Still meeting parts of myself I didn't know were there.

Still afraid sometimes.

Still sad sometimes.

Still human.

The difference is that today I don't need to leave myself when those feelings come.

I can stay.

I can breathe.

I can listen.

And maybe that is my why.

To create spaces where other people can discover that they can stay too.

To remind people that there is so much more underneath the ways we have learned to survive.

To help someone feel safe enough to become curious about their own inner landscape.

And perhaps, through my willingness to tell the truth about where I have been, someone else might hear their own story.

The same way I once heard mine in the voice of a woman who walked into a detox.

And maybe they will think,

If she found another way, maybe I can too.