What is wellness?

What is wellness? This term has hit the mainstream, but what does it really mean? Here's my take based on my journey into the wellness world.

I come from a competitive family where discipline and exercise have always been part of our lives. In my early 20s, I was in college, racing motocross, working out 5x a week, and doing my best to eat healthy. I lived a very active lifestyle. At the time, I was 195 lbs at 5'8", waking up and dealing with anxiety from morning until night.

It felt like I was doing all the right things, but nothing was helping.

I would ask friends and close family members if this was how they experienced life too, but I couldn't really get any answers. I wasn't familiar with mental health or what depression and anxiety felt like, let alone what overcoming them looked like. I had several close friends and relatives lose their lives to it.

I felt very disconnected from the world around me, and motocross seemed to be one of the only things that allowed me to really feel.

Looking back, I think the feeling I was searching for was a sense of home. Home with myself. At the time, I didn't even know what that meant. I was completely unaware of what was going on inside of me or the patterns I was living in.

Then I got married...

Now I had a relationship where I actually had to show up and be there. I couldn't just isolate and disconnect when I was struggling.

I remember my brother asking if my wife knew how I would retreat and isolate every month. Almost like it was a joke. I was like, "No... what do you mean?" Haha.

I didn't even know I was doing it.

This is when the symptoms really started to show themselves. The anxiety got worse. I would go through these looping vortexes, questioning all of my life decisions. Eventually, the anxiety became unbearable, and I started to self-medicate.

I didn't want to be hooked on antidepressants or pharmaceuticals, so I tried the good ole THC. This quickly became my lifesaver. For the first time, I felt connected to myself. I could express myself in ways I never knew were possible. The anxiety didn't control me anymore.

I started getting really interested in psychedelics, plant medicine, and psychedelic therapy. I was reading about their potential to create new pathways in the brain and learning about how drugs were classified in the 1970s. The way drugs were classified made zero sense to me. Peyote and marijuana were considered Schedule I substances while pharmaceuticals like Lortab and Xanax weren't.

After reflecting and researching, I decided to do my first psychedelic journey.

It was beautiful.

I felt so connected to the world around me. I felt lighter afterward, and now I knew I could feel different.

There's an analogy that has stuck with me where a fish swims by another fish and asks, "How's the water?"

And the other fish says, "What water?"

That's how I felt. I had been swimming in my own internal state for so long that I didn't know anything different. Now my baseline had shifted enough for me to see the water I had been living in.

I started diving deeper into my internal world. As I dug, I started uncovering all this shame and guilt around how I saw myself, a perspective I was completely unaware of. I had always thought of myself in a positive light.

I realized I needed to make some major changes in my life. I didn't know what yet, but the beliefs I was carrying weren't serving me, and if I didn't address them, they were going to eat my life away.

This was around the end of COVID in 2021. At the same time, I was connecting all these patterns and becoming increasingly aware of what I perceived as corruption. I deeply disagreed with how COVID was being approached.

I was enraged.

It felt like everywhere I looked, we were headed toward imminent doom. Underneath all that anger, I think I was just really fearful of the future.

I thought to myself, why sit here and get mad?

Do something about it. Be a solution.

I was going to start the next revolution!!! Haha.

I decided to leave my sales job, where I was making phenomenal money for a 24-year-old college student, and jump into building an outdoor wellness retreat concept.

At the same time, I decided I was going to challenge myself physically and run 50 miles across the Grand Canyon with my brothers.

A common theme in my story is that I've never had a great internal limiter for when enough is enough. It's like I'm in a jiu-jitsu match with my arm locked out and somehow don't realize it's about to snap.

I forgot to mention this is also when I learned my wife and I were going to have our first baby.

So, no job, baby on the way, and all the motivation in the world!

The pressure started to sink in after a few months. We had two houses, cars, bills, and a lifestyle to keep up with. We needed to get some money in the door.

We decided one way we could serve our community was by cooking meal preps and Airbnb'ing our home on the weekends.

I still didn't know what New Primitive was going to be. I just knew I wanted to help people.

I started personal training with my brother. My buddy was a doctor, so we tried putting together a preventive health clinic. I tried building a sauna village on a property. I was talking to any wealthy person who would hear me out about my Airbnb wellness retreat concept.

Nothing really took for almost a year...

Finally, while I was building the saunas for my village, I got connected with a builder who said he'd build the saunas if I could sell them.

So I found a picture online and started sharing it with influencers, asking if they'd be down to put one at their house.

Right away, we got a couple takers.

The OGs, Brody Vannbroklin and Indy Blue.

Fortunately, sauna and cold plunging were also starting to become trendy. This kicked everything off, and we built 45 saunas our first year in business.

The funny part is, I had never built anything in my life. I knew nothing about construction or manufacturing. We learned as we went, made plenty of mistakes, and got better with every build. What we build today has come a long way from those first saunas, but those imperfections are part of the story.

I found a videographer who was willing to put in some sweat equity and help me get this thing off the ground. Neither of us was making any money at the time.

I would cry and pray at night to God to please help me make things work. My intentions felt just and pure. Why wouldn't He support me in this endeavor?

"The world needs it," I would tell myself.

But my mental health started taking a serious toll.

I was having panic attacks almost every week, every Saturday, to be more specific. I'd lost all of my money, and there were debts hanging over my head. I felt like I had completely and devastatingly failed.

I had taken myself and my family through some really difficult times, and I became convinced we were going to end up on the streets.

The shame got so heavy that I began thinking I didn't want to be on this earth anymore.

I remember sitting in my bathroom with a razor to my wrist.

That's when I decided I needed to get some help.

I was not OK.

I invested everything I had left into mentors and retreats, and this changed something for me. These spaces gave me room to feel through all of the explosive emotions I was experiencing and to feel witnessed.

As I dove deeper into my own experience and mental health, it kept lighting this fire in me to help others.

I just wanted to build something that provided a useful service.

I wanted to help people.

I wanted to find myself and just feel OK.

Around this time, I started putting on retreats, touring my mobile sauna around, and continuing to sell saunas.

My business partner and I had agreed to part ways, but I didn't realize the business bank account had been drained. My lack of construction knowledge had led me to put too much trust in the people around me, and everything seemed to be failing at once.

We learned that the roofs on our saunas were failing, and I had to replace all of them.

I parted ways with my builder and partner.

Long story short...

Now I was completely on my own again.

My marriage was falling apart.

I was falling apart and felt broken in every way.

I had gone from 195 lbs to around 145 lbs. I was dealing with addictions. Everything felt like too much.

The downhill spiral is real, am I right?

It sure felt real at the time.

For some reason, I decided to keep pushing on.

My wife told me early on that the only thing we can hold on to is our light, and no matter what we go through, we always find our way back to God.

I held on to that.

I still felt like I needed to stay on this mission and not give up.

Although, at this point, I hated New Primitive. It had dragged me through hell, and I couldn't quite say "and back" yet.

I kept my head down and fought my way forward. I started learning this strange dance between softness and the warrior in me. One part wanted to surrender and stop fighting everything. The other part wanted to put his head down and keep pushing through.

Then I got an opportunity to go to Peru for something called the Warriors Retreat.

It was a twelve-day experience. We would start in the Amazon jungle with ayahuasca and then spend the rest of the time doing community service and sharing love.

This experience felt like the closing of a difficult chapter in my life.

A rite of passage.

I had a beautiful, life-changing experience and felt like I was finally able to reorient where I was in my life.

It was a burial.

I had gone into all of this thinking about how big New Primitive could become. But the lesson kept bringing me back closer to home.

To myself. My wife. My family. My community.

I came home inspired to create tools and spaces that help people feel grounded and reconnect, but most importantly, I wanted to show up for my wife and family as a more mature version of myself.

It was time to let the old black-and-white, rigid, wounded version of me, the one who always felt like he had something to prove, go.

I wanted to live with more color, more softness, more presence, and more gratitude for the life that was already sitting right in front of me.

I no longer felt like I was searching for something outside of myself.

I think what I had been searching for all along was a sense of home.

Home in my body. Home with my family. Home in my community. Home with God. But most importantly, home with myself.

And I think this is where my definition of wellness changed.

For a long time, I thought wellness was about doing all the right things, working out, eating well, being disciplined, getting stronger, pushing through discomfort.

Those things matter.

But I was doing all of them while completely disconnected from myself.

Now I see wellness more as a practice.

I still get off. I still disconnect. I still lose myself in stress, work, fear, and all the noise of life.

The difference is, now I have ways to come back.

Sauna, cold water, exercise, time in nature, retreats, community, prayer, plant medicine, these things have all been medicine for me at different times in my life. Not because they fix everything, but because they help me reconnect to myself when I feel off.

One of the biggest lessons for me is that every wellness journey is unique. It's messy, and there's no right way.

We all have our own medicine and our own way back to ourselves and our potency.

For me, wellness has become that practice.

Not trying to live in some perfect state of wellness, but recognizing when I've drifted and knowing how to find my way back.