My Biggest little victory in years: Spread Your Wings Wellness; a Butterfly Emerges

From the throes of my first hypomanic episode in over six years, this business was born. I shouldn’t say born; more like it was coaxed into being from this part of Bipolar II disorder, that has actually served me well at times. Perhaps that is exactly why, even though I diligently follow my medication and therapy schedule, this episode came out of nowhere propelling me forward into a dream, years in the making. The dots always connect if you widen the lens far enough. With the courage and confidence only hypomania has ever been able to provide me, I created Spread Your Wings Wellness, practically overnight. Well years, and then overnight…

So let me start at the beginning. In 2016, after nearly 20 years of practice and deep love of yoga, I became a 200‑hour RYT.  Yoga was the only thing I’d ever felt truly good at, the steady center in a chaotic life of shifting pieces. After certification I was asked to teach at the area’s largest studio, helped a friend launch her own, and taught children’s yoga at my son’s Montessori. I received warm feedback from all three opportunities and felt, for the first time, a sense of belonging. It felt like the truest part of my identity. 

Around the same time I began raising monarch butterflies with my son as a simple backyard science project. That small experiment became an obsession. Watching metamorphosis never lost its quiet miracle. In ten years I have raised and released over 600 butterflies. Eventually our yard became a designated Monarch Waystation, and I have recently begun contributing to the Monarch Larva Monitoring Project as a citizen scientist. While I have great love for all pollinators, have expanded my rearing to swallowtail butterflies and also keep bees, the Monarch’s struggle and life cycle as a metaphor for personal transformation has always spoken to my heart. In the beginning I had no idea how important this simple project would become to me, but it eventually became one of the greatest comforts in my darkest days and also inspiration for my biggest dream. 

In 2017 a high hamstring injury sustained in a power vinyasa class set off a cascade of misdiagnoses, failed treatments, and ultimately years of debilitating chronic pain. The eventual diagnosis that made sense of it all was Ehlers–Danlos Syndrome, hypermobility type. The flexibility that had made me “good” at yoga — able to stretch well beyond average range of motion — was the reason I’d been vulnerable to injury: lax ligaments, loose joints, and muted proprioception. I felt betrayed by my own body.

My mental health unraveled with the physical. I had long dealt with mental health issues, but yoga had been my keystone habit: the scaffolding that held me together and steadied my days. When practice was no longer possible, I collapsed into bouts of deep despair and self loathing, occasionally followed by highs; which, at times, fueled me with intense confidence and motivation, but more often just meant lost sleep, irritation and extreme paranoia that everyone hated me. After years of white-knuckling through the intense ups and downs, I trusted a psychiatrist who had once been a regular student of my yoga classes. The diagnosis came quickly: Complex PTSD, Bipolar II, ADHD. I began medication, bi-weekly therapy, and a daily meditation practice. I won’t romanticize recovery — maintaing my mental health must be strictly prioritized — but I have not had a depressive episode since I committed to this work and until recently hypomania had been absent as well. As my mind steadied, my body improved: pain became more manageable and movement returned, carefully and deliberately, but I was still too scared to roll out a mat. More than anything I was afraid to try yoga, and have it taken away from me again.

A few years later my husband and I bought a parcel of land in Ellison Bay, Door County, and with it came a big, luminous dream: a greenhouse visitation center where butterflies could fly freely and visitors could experience the beauty of their presence up close. Yoga and meditation classes amidst their serenity and themed around the strength in their fragility, in the power of their surrender to metamorphosis. It was the first time I had considered teaching yoga in years, and I was more excited and hopeful than I had been since my injury. I sketched business plans and budgets, wrestled with zoning, even shopped for land closer to home to make it feasible. In the end it was the complexity of running a greenhouse at that scale that settled the idea quietly onto a back shelf. But a seed had been planted and I started to explore the idea of finding my way back to my mat again.

A little over a year ago, I read The Body Keeps the Score by Dr. Bessel van der Kolk and it changed everything I thought I knew about my chronic pain. The idea that trauma and feelings live inside the tissues of the body — that talking alone does not release them — led me into somatics and fascia work. I found James Knight’s Gentle Somatic Yoga program, began foam rolling, and discovered integrative somatic coaching. I received a deeply impactful Reiki treatment, and followed the path to become a Master Practitioner myself. 

The butterfly greenhouse dream faded as I began to formulate a different project: a somatic wellness program, the name emerged immediately, “Spread Your Wings Wellness.” I enrolled in Gentle Somatic Yoga online teacher training as well as a local YTT program with a popular studio and instructors I deeply respected. Originally I asked to participate as an observer, still unsure my body could handle vinyasa again. I wanted to review the training from my current body to see how I might teach differently with my additional knowledge and experience. I wanted to teach structurally sound classes to protect hypermobile bodies, that would hopefully prevent injury, and be accessible to people in pain. Icing on the cake was that I found that I could practice with careful modification and curiosity. The two trainings of Vinyasa and Gentle Somatic Yoga began to merge in my mind as a fusion practice I wanted to develop.

At first my goal for after my April 2026 graduation was modest: set up an LLC and teach a few classes as an independent contractor. As I began steps toward those goals a hypomanic surge poured fuel on that modest spark. Confidence, creativity, and a rush of momentum pushed me forward with what felt like little choice- an LLC, an EIN, liability insurance, a website, social media pages, a business card, class designs, workshops — all in under seven days. When the high receded, I expected to crash, as I had previously in my dealings with this disorder. But while a shadow of doubt followed, I remained upright and embers of hope remained. I hadn’t spent much money. I could still teach at other studios. Still, I found myself attached to the dream of my own offering and kept looking at commercial listings. Nothing feasible was coming up though. All either too expensive or needing excessive renovation. I had pretty much thrown in the towel when a small downtown space came across my radar. I toured it the next day — rough, needing work but endearingly imperfect, just like me. I tried to be reasonable before signing the lease: “No one here knows you as a teacher anymore. You need more exposure.” This may or may not be true, but I already had a vision and knew if I passed up the opportunity, I would regret playing small, it is the year of the Fire Horse, after all.

Some might say to put myself all the way out here like this is a dangerous business move. Others might think that I am being self indulgent, or that I’m just plain crazy. But it is important to me that this studio be built on a foundation of transparency, and authenticity. I want everyone who walks through my door to know exactly who I am, so they feel safe to be exactly who they are. I am not perfect, far from. I am not to be revered. I’m just a person. A person who has struggled and because of that struggle has something special to offer. Yoga has been in my bones since my first class twenty‑eight years ago. My experience isn’t just my list of certifications, it’s lived knowledge— of movement, of pain, of recovery, of the ways our bodies and emotions hold onto each other. I have spent years learning how to listen to my tissues and getting to know my nervous system. I know how to turn sensations into language that guides movement. I have watched fragile lives transform: from caterpillar to chrysalis to wings.

A butterfly doesn’t have experience being a butterfly before it emerges. It has no rehearsal, no test flight; it simply spreads its wings. That’s where I am now — a person who has chosen bravery over safety. I don’t have to be perfect to begin. I have practice, curiosity, compassion and an earnest offering. I have shed the skin of my caterpillar phase, I have come completely undone and then found rest in chrysalis. Butterflies can’t wait until the sky is flawless to take flight, so why should I? It’s time to complete my metamorphosis. It’s time to spread my wings. I hope you’ll join me.