How to shake the Sh!t Out of Your Life: The Beginning

Hey y’all! I’m Bree. A few years ago, a near death experience unlocked a new level of life for me. Since then, nothing has been the same.

One minute I was on the back of a motorcycle thinking about how beautiful and wonderful everything was, and the next thing I knew, everything felt like it had slowed down and I knew that the bike was about to go down and that life was about to be completely different than it currently was. I didn’t know what that meant, I didn’t know what was in store- I just knew it was happening and it was happening right now. The next thing I knew I was flipping over the handlebars through the air. I wasn’t afraid. I wasn’t anything. I was just floating in slow motion. My head hit the ground and everything went dark.

When I came to, I wasn’t sure if I was dead or alive. Everything looked the same, but nothing felt the same. I felt completely different. I went to therapy because I didn’t understand why I wasn’t just happy to be alive. Why did I feel so out of sorts? Why did I feel like I lived when I wasn’t supposed to? I couldn’t make sense of anything. I looked at my life and everything felt wrong. I had dedicated my life to drinking and just getting by. Everything was a struggle. Everything was emotional. I was all over the place and I didn’t feel like I had previously had any real direction. I didn’t like where my life was and when I thought about a future that progressed off of the things that I was doing now, I didn’t want to live it. I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life struggling, just getting by and waiting for the moment that I could get messed up and get away from my real life. Everything needed to change, and it all needed to start with me.

The very first thing I did, was sign up for school to become a health and life coach. It was way more money than I felt comfortable spending, and I didn’t really know how I was going to make it work, but I didn’t care. I needed something and this is something that I had wanted for over a decade. I was done waiting for the timing to be right. I was jumping in. I didn’t know what was there that I needed, but I felt such a pull and had for such a long time that I didn’t want to think about logic. I wanted to run head first into whatever vibes were calling me. I had lived an entire life based on logic and emotional logic. All it had done for me was cause a loop of highs and lows that didn’t really feel worth it anymore. I wanted a life that felt like my own. I wanted all the things that I had been dreaming of for a lifetime. I wanted to be the person that I knew I was supposed to be instead of saying “when I” and waiting for something to happen for me. I wanted to make sh!t happen. I wanted to shake the sh!t out of my whole world.

I was really surprised when I started the classes. I don’t really know what I was expecting, but it wasn’t what I walked into. I quickly realized that everything I thought about myself, wasn’t true. I thought I was so confident, so brave, so much farther than I truly was. I thought that I had healed so many old things and that they didn’t affect me anymore. I was good. I was ready to coach because I knew what I was doing. I had already done all of this for myself. Turns out, I hadn’t even scratched the surface. The first thing they made me aware of when I started was that in order to coach, I was going to have to go through the program myself. It was going to be fast, it was going to be wild, and it was going to change everything. It cracked every single thing that had weighed on me- wide open. Looking at all of the things that I had accepted, allowed, and the things that had happened to me like that – all of it right out in the open- shattered me. I went through so many emotions. I felt like I was dying. I felt like reliving all of that heartache was honestly killing me. I didn’t want to feel like this anymore. I didn’t want to live as this person anymore. I didn’t want any more heartache. I couldn’t possibly be the person I wanted to be with all of this weight on my shoulders.

I drove myself out to the lake and sat in the empty parking lot by myself and I cried until I couldn’t cry anymore. I wished so deeply that something would take me from this world. I hadn’t felt this way in so long, I thought I was through this. I thought that I had beat my depression but cracking it all open had me feeling every wave of it all at once. I felt like I was going under and I was never going to be able to come back up. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want to live like this anymore. I couldn’t feel like this anymore.

At that very moment, an alert went off on my phone. I had a coaching session in 30 minutes. I had forgotten all about it. I didn’t want to talk to her. I didn’t want to do the session, but when I tried to cancel it, I got an alert that I wasn’t able to cancel it because I did not give enough notice. I had to go through with it. At that point in my life, I was not the person to open up when I was in these head spaces. All I wanted was to hide away from everyone and everything and isolate my way through it. My sense of responsibility outweighed what I wanted to do, so I showed up.

We started and she asked me how I was and I immediately burst into tears, which, I hated more than anything. I was so angry at myself that I couldn’t suck it up and pretend my way through a 20 minute coaching call. How weak I felt, not being able to hide away for 20 minutes. But, here I was, crying and bearing my soul to a stranger who, probably didn’t want to deal with this today either. She surprised me though. She didn’t think I was weak. She didn’t think I was ruining her day. She just started breathing. Deep, slow breaths in and out as she let me cry it out. Then she asked me to walk her through what I was feeling, and I did. She asked me to breathe with her and I did, mimicking her pattern.

When I calmed and the tears stopped falling, she told me that everything I was feeling was natural at this stage of this journey. She made me feel connected. She made me feel seen. She made me feel like there was absolutely nothing wrong with me. She had been here too. She informed me that this is part of understanding how to truly coach. Getting all of this out and off of me was going to help me understand others more deeply. This was all building me for something bigger. She told me to feel it all the way through, and when I did that I would understand how to use it to fuel me. She was guiding me into rerouting my thoughts around my traumas. She was showing me how it’s done.

Instead of giving these things that I thought happened TO me so much power, I needed to see them as things that happened FOR me, even when it felt impossible to see it that way. Especially when it felt impossible to see. The more impossible the task, the bigger growth it holds. The more I lean in, the more easily the lessons come. I needed to find my way to that understanding to be ready for the life I was here to live for.

Suddenly, so many things started to make sense to me. So many things that made me different from others, stood out so clearly in my brain. I had been living a life of trying to stand out while still fitting in. Trying to do what was “right”, instead of allowing myself to flow. Instead of diving into the uncomfortable. Instead of taking risks. Instead of listening to my intuition. I was listening to logic that wasn’t even logical for me. Staying small, and “safe” while pretending I wasn’t.

I was different, I always have been. Why did I view that as a bad thing? Why did I listen to the opinions of others over my own? Why did I build this life, this way? I needed to have some really honest conversations with myself. I needed to be my own best friend. I needed to love myself and give myself the grace that I gave so freely to everyone around me. I saw everyone’s uniqueness and wanted it brought more to life, yet I was hiding my own. I truly was my own worst enemy and I didn’t want that relationship with myself anymore. I wanted the worlds greatest relationship, within.

That is how my two books came to be (The Accident: How to Shake the Sh!t Out of Your Life and Young Writers Day: Fragile Minds and the Adults that Mold Them).

I wanted to take things that I had lived through, things that weren’t fair or beautiful and release them while showing people that it didn’t matter what happened. You can do whatever you want with it. I choose to turn things into something beautiful, I call them lessons. I wanted to show people another path, one filled with hope- inspiration- and love.

The outpouring of support and hearing how much my stories affected the lives of others has made my heart swoon. All the perspective shifts that happened in reading them, changed my soul. It lit a fire so deep that I knew I would spend my life doing this in various forms.

I started recording my podcast: Breealizations and making all of my social media platform posts and videos around everything that I have been learning and everything that has been enhancing my evolution. I want everyone to see a way to do things differently and my hope has always been that by paving my own path- others will see the value in their own lessons and want to listen to their own intuition more deeply and find the courage to become more of themselves in this world. I want to help people find their own path, their people- I want to help them find their happiest home.

This is truly my passion. Becoming this version of myself has been more than I ever could have dreamed. The best part about it is that I know, I have only scratched the surface. There is no end to this. I will find new depths, unleash new levels, and live dreams that I didn’t even know I could dream yet, because, I already have. There is no quitting. This is the life I love. I will continue to build this until my last breath and who knows what happens after that. When it is my time, I hope that all of these things that I create continue to inspire others to chase after those dreams and build a life that you absolutely love to live.

Here’s to making our time here so fulfilling and worthwhile.

Bree