Your Living Breath

“My experience was exceptional. I learned how to slow down my breathing and breath appropriately. Each lesson allowed me to take time with myself and the Lord and appreciate the beauty of life. Maria was AMAZING and a joy to work with. I haven't had to use my inhaler in weeks and I have had asthma since I was 12. So grateful for this experience and I plan to work with Maria more in the future.”

“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.”