It all started when my mom was battling terminal cancer.
My name is Elle and I have a story to share with you.
I have always been a free spirit. Someone who questioned the status quo and felt called to create a life outside the lines of “normal.”
In my 20s and early 30s, I traveled a lot, lived around the world, and built a life that looked adventurous, expansive, and free. And in many ways, it was.
But living an unconventional life also meant moving through constant transitions: new countries, new identities, new relationships, new beginnings, and many seasons of uncertainty.
I didn’t always know how to navigate those transitions. Sometimes I stumbled, resisted, doubted myself, and had to find my footing again.
Fast forward and I’m thirty-four years old. I’m currently finishing up my fifth year in South Africa. I thought I had my life together. I thought I had everything figured out. And then I received a phone call that turned my entire life upside down. My mom had been diagnosed with Glioblastoma-a rare and aggressive brain cancer. So, I packed up my life into five suitcases, and moved back home to Colorado.
Little did I know, the most impactful transition of my life had begun.
Over the next fourteen months, while the woman who gave me life was coming to the end of hers, I was faced with the hardest conversations and the most unfathomable decisions.
It was during that dark and painful chapter of my life that grief cracked something open in me. In the rawness of it all, breathwork found me. It gave me a place to truly grieve not only what was happening in that moment, but the emotions, stories, limiting beliefs and pain I had been carrying for years.
For the first time, I learned how to stay with the grief, with the fear, and with myself instead of numbing out or rushing to fix it. Breathwork didn't take the grief away. It encouraged me to stay in it long enough to be changed by it.
It became the through line - the thing I could return to no matter what else was changing. I didn't get my old life back. I became someone new. And that, I'd later realize, is what every transition is really asking of us.
I believe breathwork has the power to heal individuals and transform the collective. Because when we remember how to breathe fully, we remember how to live fully.
And I'm here to walk beside you through these transitions, big and small. Not to lead you back to who you were, but to help you stay long enough to meet who's next.
I didn't just survive that transition. I learned something from it that's changed every transition since: transition isn't something that happens to you. It's a skill. And it can be learned.
And so, the Courageous Life was born.