When I started working with Maria at the end of March 2021, I had no idea what to expect. As a therapist who also has had quite a bit of therapy to heal my own wounds, I already understood that people need to think about their thinking so they heal in their emotions. I was not aware that I needed to think about breathing, since that’s something all of us humans do naturally, right? Wrong. I learned that I did not use my diaphragm when I breathed. I was holding my breath and basically functionally hyperventilating all the time. This meant that my body was holding onto all the toxicity I had been trying to release. By the time I met Maria I had already 6 years of decline from a minefield of traumatic loss and injury. I went from working a full-time, 40-hour per week job at a community mental health clinic, to where I could not work at all. My symptoms of chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia got to the point where most of my days were spent isolated and sleeping. I began to feel hopeless, purposeless, worthless, and wondered how much longer I could believe life is worth living. Within a span of about 5 weeks of working with Maria, some unexpected things in my life radically improved. As I learned to breathe, the last bits of trauma I continued to work on in therapy started to heal because I was able to “breathe out” and “breathe through” the emotional pain which came up as Maria worked with me on releasing my diaphragm and teaching me to breathe effectively. I went from only being able to walk 37 steps to over 20,000 steps. For the first time in my life, I feel grounded, calm and relaxed, and alive on the inside -even though my body has not yet fully healed and I am on short-term disability. More than the breathing techniques themselves, Maria was a godsend. She is one of the most compassionate and skilled practitioners I have met. Knowing what I know as a therapist, the gentle, peaceful compassion coming from someone helping you is a critical element in the healing process for both emotional and physical healing. Because of Maria, I can literally breathe again; and I have hope again. I tell her every appointment how grateful I am to her for literally breathing life back into me.