LIVED EXPERIENCE
MY JOURNEY
Everything you experience becomes a part of you.
I ignored the signs for years.
My twenties were spent over-exercising, over-achieving, and over-compensating in every way for deep cracks in my foundation. Unease from deep in my soul was slowly leaking into my physical body. Unhealed parts of a scared little boy cried out through subtle symptoms. Slow digestion. Crippling fatigue. Pain in the joints, racing in the heart and mind, tremors, dizziness, I felt like I was falling apart, yet every specialist told me my tests were normal.
Being sick and being told nothing was wrong sent me further into panic. In 2020, it caught up with me — a full nervous system crash, and an ER bed. My partner Renee walked in, scared.
“What is going on with you?”
My eyes welled up and I squeezed my lips as tightly as I could to avoid bursting into tears... “I don't know.”
It was a lie.
My subconscious, my body, and my soul knew what my conscious mind had trained itself to forget.
A few weeks later, a vivid dream revealed to me the pain, fear, and shame that I'd kept buried inside of me for decades. In the dream, I re-lived one of the many explosive domestic violence episodes I helplessly witnessed between my parents as a child. The screams, the breaking glass, the crashing furniture, all of it. As I sprung awake completely covered in sweat and tears I received the message that changed the trajectory of my life.
“Nate, this is all still here. It's time to face it.”
Overnight, my one dimensional pursuit of restoring physical wellness became a holistic spiritual reckoning. I stopped waiting for the doctors to solve my problems for me and I took full responsibility for my self and my health.
GOING INWARD
March 2020. The world was shutting down, and I was just getting started — thousands of hours chasing every research article, podcast, and perspective I could find. Western medicine hadn't had the answers. My own nervous system did.
Breathwork. Nutrition. Cold. Heat. Sun. Nature, in every form I could access it. Slowly, in 2021, the fog began to lift. I could eat again. Move again. Hope again.
Not long after, a job offer pulled me to Sedona.
I said yes.
One more layer
On the drive out, a home inspector called. Black mold (one of the worst readings he'd ever recorded) in the home I was about to sell. Another piece of the puzzle: childhood trauma doesn't just live in the mind. It shapes how the whole body responds to everything- all the way down to the cell. After living in a body on high alert my entire life, the toxins from the mold were finally enough to make my stress buckets overflow.
You can't change what happens to you. You can change the story you attach to it.
Though it absolutely ravaged me, mold illness served an important purpose in my life. It woke me up. It forced me to slow down. It gave me the opportunity to look within, to let go of what was no longer serving me, and to allow myself to dream of who I could become if I was to keep putting one foot in front of the other.
Where I am now
My story is still unfolding. And somewhere in the unfolding, I found a calling: to help other people turn their pain into something worth carrying forward.
If you're done ignoring the signs and ready to start moving —
I'm here by your side.
Want to connect?
Tell me where you are. I'll reply myself.