I didn't find this practice at a wellness retreat. I found it at rock bottom.

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I grew up in a comfortable Chicago suburb until I was 13 — the night my mom told me my dad wasn't coming home. What followed was years of instability I couldn't have imagined. Divorce, losing our home, moving back and forth between states, my mom's mental health unraveling, my dad disappearing into his own pain. By my teenage years I was drinking, using drugs, and dropping out of high school. I was completely on my own and I was drowning.

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When I was 20, I found my father in his house. He was 50 years old. He had given up on himself — slowly, quietly, the way people do when they don't have any tools left. An alcohol-induced heart attack while I was literally looking up rehabs for him.

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Two years later I was at my own edge.

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Twenty-two years old. Living in a borrowed house with my mom. Crying through every shift at work. No money, no connections, no examples of what a different life even looked like. The day my car needed a $200 repair I didn't have, something in me finally broke open. I was suicidal. And in that moment I made one quiet desperate decision — It had to be better than this. I might as well try. I had nothing to lose.

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That decision didn't change everything overnight. It changed one tiny thing at a time.

One of those things was walking.

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At first it was just movement — getting out of the space I was in. But over time the walks became something else. They became the one place that was just mine. A place where I could practice feeling something different than what my circumstances were handing me. I would walk with my grief, my anger, my shame — and I would also walk with the feelings I wanted to have. Confidence. Hope. Peace. The version of myself I was trying to become.

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Something started to shift.

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Not dramatically. Not all at once. But slowly, impossibly, my life began to match what I was practicing on those walks. I finished school. I built a career. I bought a house. I became — one step at a time — someone I actually recognized.

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That was over fifteen years ago. There have been many more chapters since — more loss, more walls, more walks that carried me through things I didn't think I could survive. My mom battled mental illness and cancer for years before she passed. I became her caregiver. I kept walking.

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And one day, mid-stride, I had a vision of sharing this practice with the world.

I laughed at first. Me?

But the vision kept coming back. And I've learned to listen to those.

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This is why The Walking Meditation exists.

Not because I studied transformation from the outside. Because I walked my way into it from the inside — one breath, one step, one feeling at a time.

Everything you want is already inside you. This practice is just how you find your way back to it.

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I'm so glad you're here.