New Studio, New Home, New Country: Part 1

Dear Community,

I am writing to you from my new home in southern Spain. This is by far one of the most beautiful places I’ve been, much less had the opportunity to live. I’ve heard it takes the spirit much longer to arrive than the body. Days? Weeks? I’m not sure. I still can’t believe I live here now. It hasn’t sunk in, and I’ve yet to settle.

When I decided to leave my New York home and the life as I knew it, the decision felt fairly easy. I had been living and working in NYC for over two decades and I was ready for a change. I knew that I wanted to invite more beauty into my life. I wanted to know what quiet sounded like. I equated this imagined stillness with a feeling of peace, softness. I craved a deep, environmental serenity. I dreamed of waking up to sunshine on my skin, a refreshing breeze blowing in from the sea. 

When I actually arrived here months later than I had originally planned, I was at a real low point. I was bruised and rather blistered, physically and ego-ically. Relocating my studio under a major time constraint, negotiating a corporate lease, managing a renovation riddled with endless challenges including a contractor walking away from the unfinished project while still navigating through an international move left me overwhelmed and depleted. I was a mess. I felt like I had given birth and needed to keep something new and precious alive. And I had in a way, I had birthed a new business, a new job, a new country to call home—a whole new life in a matter of months. Although there was much to celebrate, there was a lot to heal.

I stared out across the mountains and toward the sea that I now called my backyard. My mind registered it as beautiful but I couldn’t feel the beauty anywhere in my body. The mesmerizing awe that I had tapped into when I decided to move here was gone. The life I had imagined for myself felt like a distant, unattainable alternate reality. 

As a practitioner of the holistic arts, I take well-being and lifestyle medicine seriously. I’ve become an expert at supporting others in their healing from both physical and psychological pain. I’ve studied the cutting-edge neuroscience of how people change. I’ve coached my clients through their most challenging times, offering insights and guidance that helps to transforms their lives.

I’ve meditated for nearly a decade and practiced yoga and Pilates for much longer. I practice somatic therapy, holotropic breathwork, and integrate the wisdom of Ayurveda into my life. I take regular walks in nature and generally get eight hours of sleep. I have all the tools. I teach the tools. And for the first time in my adult life, I knew what it was like to be completely dysregulated.  

It turns out changing everything in your life all at once has its disadvantages. It turns out it is hard. It turns out your landlord is not a man of his word. It turns out you have six weeks to find a new location for your business, sign a lease, and fully renovate a space. It turns out this will happen over the holidays when most people are not working. It turns out the contractor who convinced you he was the guy for the job was not indeed the guy for the job. It turns out you now understand what gaslighting is. It turns out sometimes you trust the wrong people. It turns out you can make bad decisions. 

But this is only half of the story. The other half is better. The other half is more beautiful. It’s about asking for help. It’s about your husband flying back and forth from Spain when you cry to him on the phone that you don’t know what to do but you know you can’t do it alone. It’s about your team showing up for you when you didn’t even know what to ask for. It’s about Charlie offering to roll out your neglected body, tears streaming down your cheeks not from the pain but from the tenderness. It’s about Cristina voluntarily showing up to pack up the old studio, fully understanding the bittersweetness of the moment, knowing you couldn’t do it alone. 

It’s about you and Savannah—Sav who had been anticipating all of the studio’s needs and some of yours while managing so many things when you could not—the two of you now hysterically laugh-crying as you attempt to recycle oversized cardboard boxes in the middle of a windstorm on Kent Ave., unsuccessfully wrangling sheets of ripping styrofoam and airborne cardboard that have magically transformed into sails and wings.

It’s about being sore and bruised from hauling, disassembling, and reassembling heavy equipment but so grateful you have the strength and stamina and support to pull this off. Will you pull this all off?

It’s about you and Sav laughing again as you slow-dance six cumbersome staff lockers to a new location like sixth-graders at a middle school dance.

It’s packing and unpacking and cleaning and emailing and scheduling and it’s 2am and you eventually collapse onto the floor with a mixture of exhaustion and relief, vacuum cleaner still in hand.  Sav takes your picture so you won’t forget this moment, not that you could.

All of this—the good and the bad and much, much more. 

Thank you. 

……

I arrived in Spain 24 days ago to begin this new chapter. And yet, the old chapters are not yet finished. They are here with me, in my afternoon achy tired legs, in my evening accelerated heartbeat. The fear of not getting it all done in time in my bloodstream, the worry about each client not being comfortable in my skeleton, the instructor telling me she’s decided to leave the studio in my lymph, the ConEd bill that is 10 x’s more expensive than the previous one in my adrenals, the winter vestibule door blowing off the hinges down Kent Ave. in my thyroid. 

In New York I had been stuck in fight/flight but it was working for me. In fight mode you know how to get stuff done. Your racing thoughts and pounding heart provide solutions, the adrenaline that wakes you up in the middle of the night is the energy that calls a new contractor the next day. In freeze, when you can no longer fight back or flee the scene, you touch sadness. It feels like grief, but no one has died. Except maybe a version of you. And a life you once had.

The late Vietnamese Zen Buddhist teacher and author Thich Nhat Hanh writes, “No mud, no lotus.” I have been reminding myself of this these last weeks as each day there has been unprecedented rain, muddy earth sliding down rolling hills. Although I anticipated a warmer, brighter Spring here on the Costa del Sol and believed I needed it for my recovery, I’ve found gratitude for the sky’s inconsolable fits—the cries that nourish the Earth, the tears that prevent fire and drought. The rains have given me permission to rest, to wait patiently for brighter days.

A few days ago it stopped raining. I went out for a walk.  I encountered endless fields of yellow and magenta wildflowers sprinkled with ruby red poppies covering the most rich, verdant hills. Persistent rainfall had made the mountains incredibly lush and luxuriant, more beautiful than I had ever seen. A land drenched with life. 

A couple days ago I celebrated my birthday. In New Orleans where I grew up, when someone asks you how old you’re going to be, you say, “I’m making 45,” or “I just made 45 years old.” Some people believe this comes from the influence of French on the local culture, and the word faire, “to do/to make.”

Here in Spain, as in France and other places, you don’t say you are your age, “I am 45 years old,” but you have an age. “Tengo 45 años.” This feels like less of an identity and less pressure to feel any differently on your birthday. I like it. It feels like freedom. And permission to be whoever you want at any age. I especially appreciate that one never refers to oneself as “old” here, but instead in years—years of a life lived.

I have 45 years.

Today I am considering the idea of making something with this age I have.

What do I want to make now with the 45 years I have lived? 

How can I make something beautiful? 

What can I do to experience the beauty that surrounds me, inside of me? 

Does my inside reflect my outside? 

I plan to share more of this new life with you. I hope that is ok. Till then, I am wishing you the life-giving rains and the sun, the unimaginably beautiful wildflowers.  

The mud and the lotus. 

In Beauty and in gratitude,

Brynne