I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder at 20.
Over the years that followed I spent time in psychiatric hospitals — three times.
I went through addiction and rehab. I developed a binge eating disorder and spent a long time learning to self-soothe in ways that didn’t always serve me.

I’m not telling you this to shock you. I’m telling you because it’s where this all begins.

The turning point came in a psychiatric hospital, unexpectedly — I stumbled across meditation. That was the first time I had ever felt any real sense of control over my inner world. It didn’t fix everything overnight. But it opened a door I’ve been walking through ever since.

Over the next twenty years I threw myself into learning — meditation, mindfulness, NLP, hypnotherapy, somatic practice. Not because it was fashionable. Because I needed it to survive. I’m ADHD and an empath, which means my inner world has always been loud. Finding ways to understand and hold it has been the work of my life.

Two years ago, that work was tested in ways I couldn’t have prepared for.

I had two cardiac arrests. I died twice.

The recovery wasn’t just physical. Facing your own death — really facing it — forces a reckoning with everything. The fear, the shadows, the parts of yourself you’ve been running from. Everything I had spent twenty years learning, I needed. All of it.

A year later, the business my husband and I had built together for thirteen years collapsed. We went bankrupt. Six months after that, our marriage ended.

I’m sharing this not for sympathy. I’m sharing it because I believe — genuinely, from the inside of it — that our greatest learning lives inside our hardest chapters. That the shadows we run from are where our gifts are hiding. I know this because I’ve had to live it.

Ecopsia was built from the other side of all of that.