Brave and Well: Conversations helping mental health professionals build a sustainable, profitable, and values-aligned business

Breathwork for Business Owners with Amy Kuretsky

• Vanessa Newton • Season 1 • Episode 22

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Welcome back to Brave & Well! In this episode, I’m speaking with Amy Kuretsky, an acupuncturist, breathwork facilitator and clinic owner based in Minneapolis, MN.

Amy helps successful business owners tap into their intuition, trust themselves more, and do business differently. Together, we discuss breathwork modalities, how our healing journeys intertwine with our business journeys, and different practices for self-reflection.

Amy also tells us about her experience with Profit First and the financial challenges of being a business owner. And I share some recent fears and struggles I’ve been facing in my business.

Tune in as we explore:

  • How to use breathwork for support in your business
  • Examining our narratives around perfectionism, overachieving & failure
  • Tarot & journalling for self-reflection
  • Embracing change, evolution & discomfort


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Hi, everyone. Welcome to the Brave and Well podcast. I'm your host, Vanessa Newton. I'm a group practice owner and social worker. I'm also a Latina entrepreneur, mom, and recovering perfectionist. On this podcast, we teach mental health professionals how to build sustainable, profitable, and values-aligned businesses. Here, you'll hear all about decolonizing the business side of private practice and supporting the entrepreneur and the therapist. We'll. Music. Also invite fellow therapists and healers to share their stories. Our time together will be raw, honest, vulnerable, and held together by joy. If you like what you hear, subscribe to our newsletter at braveandwell.com slash newsletter dash sign up. Thank you for listening. Music. Amy Koretsky is a breathwork facilitator working on Dakota and Anishinaabe ancestral land. She helps successful business owners tap into their intuition, trust themselves more, and do business differently. She uses a breath as a tool for healing and business building. Along with her client work, she is also organized with a group of other breathwork facilitators for more anti-oppression and trauma-informed training as part of the breathwork for the. People Collective. Along with her coaching business, she also has a background in acupuncture and Chinese medicine and co-owns Constellation Acupuncture and Healing Arts in Northeast Minneapolis. Thanks for being here, Amy. I'm excited to talk with you. And it's always exciting for me because I like to have a variety of healers, I like to call them, on the podcast because so many of us work with healers on our own, right? So many of us therapists and not everybody, but I do personally. And so tell us about who you are and what you do. Yeah, well, my name is Amy Koretsky. I use she, her pronouns. I live in Minneapolis, Minnesota, which is Dakota and Anishinaabe ancestral land. And I wear a lot of hats in the healing world, I guess you could say. I'm trained as an acupuncturist. I'm a licensed acupuncturist, a clinical Chinese herbalist, have been for the last decade. And throughout that time of my more formal education and working with patients with Chinese medicine, I've started to bring in a little bit of other modalities as I personally found a lot of support through them, which is how I got into acupuncture in the first place, through my own healing crises. But so one of the big ones that's been really impactful for me personally and has really shifted my focus My entire healing practice is breath work. So that's what I'm mainly working with patients doing nowadays. And I mean. Breathwork is like an umbrella term that like so many people use for so many different things. I know you just had a baby recently, maybe you did some Lamaze breathing when you were giving birth. That's the type of breathwork. Going to a yoga class using the breath in that way, pranayama, that's breathwork. But even when we work with clients to use the breath for anxiety, like a square breath, like a box breathing. That's a type of breathwork too. While there's so many different types of breathwork out there, I tend to use one specific style. It doesn't have like a trademark name or anything like that, but some of the roots still stem from Southeast Asia, from Pranayama, kind of similar to what some people call the Durga breath, but it's just a three-part active breathing cycle that I'm using more with clients to really go deep really fast, as opposed to necessarily calming the nervous system. We're actually trying to go in and do a bit of activation so that we can fully complete the stress cycle instead of just trying to calm it down while it's mid-activation. So that's what I do. That's incredible. I have never met an acupuncturist or someone who does that type of work, who does breath work or identifies their work in that way. So who are your clients? Like, who are you working with mostly? It's really like anybody, you know, when I'm, when I'm doing one-on-one stuff at the clinic, it could be, you know, a patient that's working with another acupuncturist in our clinic or with. The massage therapist in the clinic or somebody. And maybe the clinician has heard this patient say over and over and over again, I just feel stuck. I just can't get past this one point, whether it's more mentally or emotionally or even in physical things where they find a plateau in their healing for whatever specific ailment they're working through. Really, we get to this point and we just feel stuck. And that term, like feeling stuck, is kind of the archetypal clue for me that breathwork is going to be helpful for them. Because really what breath does is it moves energy. When we're moving the breath quite vigorously, we're going to start to feel energy move in our body. And in Chinese medicine, we use the term qi a lot, but really that's just another term for energy or functionality in the body. And I personally believe that when we move our energy, our emotions follow. So we can't really move energy without moving motions. I mean, I've had an experience on multiple occasions where I'm stressed out about something or there's something big happening in my life and I go to the gym or I go for a bike ride or something and all of a sudden, I'm just like, oh, the tears. The tears are just coming while I'm in the middle of the gym right now. And there's nothing I can do to stop them. And it's because we're getting things moving, and it's opening things up that have been really pushed down in different ways. So once again, when I'm seeing one-on-one patients at the clinic, it could be anybody. There was a good time in my life and in my business where I also was doing business coaching and consulting for creative business owners. And in that work, I found a lot of my clients were were people that were very sensitive, very intuitive in their own businesses. So maybe that was Tarot readers, a lot of photographers, very creative, artistic people, but also a lot of therapists. So I worked with a lot of therapists in my one-on-one coaching practice. And it's because therapists really value and can see the value in tuning into their emotional body without really focusing on the brain, because they're doing that all day long with their clients. They have their own therapist they're working with, and they needed a more somatic way of tuning into the body. And that's where breathwork really shines. And I love what you said in the beginning about bringing in other healers because you don't you yourself. Us as healers often have to work with other healers to help us. But I also find that it's really important in whatever modality I'm working with, whether it's breathwork or acupuncture. But I'm also working in collaboration with the other practitioners that my clients are working with because just like we're seeing multiple people, our clients are seeing multiple people too. So to have a better understanding of what they're going through and to not just have it be these siloed healing supports that they're getting, but actually have those work in tandem. So I've started collaborating more with therapists here locally in the Twin Cities, who are, we're sharing patients and we're actually doing that sort of collaboration across clinics. Oh yeah. I mean, I often, often refer my clients to go work with other healers in the area, whether it's acupuncture, you know, Reiki, yogis, like all, all different kinds of healers. And I think it's just so important because we can't be everything for one client and you're not going to get all your needs met here. Right, exactly. And so I know that for me as a therapist, like some of the most transformative work has been when clients really invest in a variety of people to. To help them along their journey. You know, I'm in this place in my life where I'm trying to explore what do I want the next five years of my life to look like? And how do I want my businesses to follow me and support me in that, right? How do I lead? And then how do I figure out, like, what does that mean for my businesses? And I'm really curious about, you know, how using our breath can help us find more trust in our decision-making skills or just in our decision-making process as business owners. Cause you know, I've reached out to a leadership coach. I'm trying to like talk through it and work through it. But there is, like you said, like some inner work that has to happen alongside that. And so I'm very scared of what could happen and what comes up when I do turn inward. I have done enough trainings and recently did a trauma-conscious yoga method training where it was all about the body and getting in the body and it is, it's very scary for me to sit in that discomfort because it's like an unleashing of every emotion that I have suppressed for so long and it's to the point where I will sob and I can't stop, right? And so it's so scary, but I also want to figure out a way to make it a practice. So just want you to share more about that. Oh my gosh, there's so much I could say about this. I'm going to go off on one, route and feel free to rein me back in if I start going too far out in the e-there. But one thing that I've been thinking a lot about lately, and I'll say this, this was not necessarily my own original thought. I think originally I heard this through another therapist that specifically works with business owners, Nicole Keeler Lewis, who talks a lot about how, as business owners, we often are trying unconsciously, using our business to heal our own trauma. So thinking about how some of the decisions we make in our business are based on our own trauma responses from our own life. And so that's not always the best way to run a business. It's not necessarily the most strategic way to run a business, nor is it necessarily the most tender and supportive way for ourselves to run a business because that really then can put more salt in the wounds that we already have or give us false sense of healing when we're like, oh, well, we succeeded in this way. And so therefore, this past experience I had is no longer bringing up feelings for me where it's like, well, that's not necessarily true. And so one of the things that I love to use breathwork for is to really get into some of those. Deeper places where we have wounding, where it's important that we bring healing to those places completely separate from our business. So even though we're using breathwork in this way to support our business, the breathwork is actually supporting ourselves and our own healing so that we could show up to our business table feeling clear of those past hurts, those past traumas, and actually make informed, strategic, and intuitive decisions going forward that aren't. Being informed by our own trauma. So that's the first thing I'll say. And then alongside that, I, in my own experience, one of the reasons why breathwork was just so illuminating for me and why I gravitated towards it so fully once I found it for myself, was I felt like it opened up my intuition in a way that I had never been able to open up before. I'd always been a sensitive person. I was always... Had intuitive capabilities, but I was also a very. Heavy logistical person. I was someone who... Once again, speaking about coming from our own traumas, my parents showed me love through giving me accolades for doing well at school. Both my parents put a lot of focus into doing well at school. I was a high-achieving person. There wasn't a lot of emotion moved through, but there was a lot of achievement that was given gold stars for. And so I'm real good at going into therapy and being like, boy, I know that I'm thinking this, and that it means this. And I can get real meta about it. And one of my first therapists that I actually believed in- Our favorite types of clients. Right? Like the first therapist that I actually felt really connected to and that I got a lot of support from and healing from was like, okay, that's great. Let's actually drop into the body now. And it was a somatic experiencing type of therapy, which back then I didn't even have the language to know what that was all about. And somatic experiencing was great for me. But then when I did breath work, it was like somatic experience turned up to 11. It was like, oh, here we go. Someone who came to acupuncture through my own healing experiences. I was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease when I was 21 and was very, very sick for a very long time. And so there were literally parts of my body that I hadn't connected to in decades because it didn't feel safe to do so. And here I am in breathwork, all of a sudden feeling my intestines, feeling my stomach in this way that I hadn't felt it, getting messages come through in ways that I had never clearly understood them before. And it really cracked something open for me creatively, intuitively, in my own body, and it allowed me to. Really feel what was mine versus what is somebody else's. And feel this energetic boundary that I. Cognitively understood what that was supposed to feel like, but I'd never actually felt it before. So when it comes to then showing up for my business, I have the tools and the skills now and the better context and understanding to start to notice when I'm making decisions that are more being directed by other people's desires for me than my own desires for myself. I mean, it's two tangents. I'll start with that. Yeah, no, it's really powerful to think about like using it as a tool to really heal. Yourself, whatever you're going through as a way to figure out what is your next step? How does that directly connect or relate to your business and how you're going to show up there? I mean, I think about, for me, like, yeah, growing up too, I mean, it was all about performance, right? It was all about, like, how much can you do? How well can you do it? And, you know, show no suffering, right? Like, in the process. And the whole over-functioning thing and just, like, really learning to excel and, like, do all the things really well. And that's how I was raised. And I think as an adult now, I very much operate in that way and have used Reiki and acupuncture only in times of suffering when I've wanted something. So like I sought out acupuncture when I was going through fertility treatments for like two years and nothing was working and it was like, you know, I read all these things about how it could help and so let's check that off the box. Let's say we did it, right? And tried Reiki when I was having some like physical pain in my right leg. And I'm like, okay, well, let's try to move some energy. My friend said it's great, so I'm going to try it. And only as a tool to like check it off and feel better and move on to the next thing versus as a journey, as a process for me to just discover what's inside me, you know, and what is, what are the stories that are inside me that are needing to come out or. That deserve attention and exploration as a way to guide my next decision and my next step? And I've never used it in that way before. It's also not lost on me that here you and I are having this conversation to high-achieving, functioning people who have multiple businesses. Not just a single business, but even how... It's something I've even been thinking of recently because I'm in this place where I'm starting to restructure and actually maybe let go of one of my businesses so I can put more effort into the clinic. But even like, okay, where did forming that business come from? Was that another way of me like proving myself in like achievement? Or was that filling a need that I saw was not being filled in the community and wanted to show up? You know, like, where is that actually coming from? And how, how have some of those circumstances changed? And like, where, where are my limited amounts of energy needing to go here on out? Yeah, I mean, this like permission to change, right, and allowing your businesses to change and evolve. You know, I think I'm in the midst of that too, of like, I have three businesses and I can't do all of them well at 100%. And so what's going to happen? What needs to happen? And where do I want to focus my time and energy on? And it's a real... I've never been in this position in my life where I've had to make such a big decision and I don't know where I'm going. That's why I'm trying to enlist a lot of support. I'm like in the in the exploration phase and I I don't know how fast I'll find the answers, but I do know that. I've never, as a perfectionist, as someone who, you know, like we talked about, like high achieving. Letting go of something, saying no to something, shutting down something has never been an option, never something I thought that I would do. And so also grappling with what does that mean? What does that say about me? Right? And what does that mean? It's wild the stories that our brains will come up with. I am in the process of shutting down the coaching arm of my business. And I was having a conversation with my own therapist the other day and I was like, well, the story that my brain keeps saying is that the business failed. I'm shutting it down because it failed. When in reality, that business brought me so many beautiful relationships. It brought me a ton of financial abundance in the last handful of years, even if it's not currently doing so. It brought me opportunities to travel to places I'd never traveled before and have visibility in ways that I had never had visibility before. It was so successful in so many ways. And just because I'm choosing... Because it is a choice, I'm choosing to close down that arm of my business right now. And yet the first thing my brain is like, it's like. Failure. It's like, oh my goodness. Right. Yeah, exactly. That's the same for me. And now I'm like, oh man, I should like start yoga again or something because I didn't even think about doing breathwork. But like, I guess I want to talk about how do we start incorporating that into our practice or our daily practices? So once again, the style that I practice, because breathwork is a big term and like going to yoga guys, that's my way of doing breath work, but the breath work that I work with, where we are really going a bit deeper and getting into that more non-ordinary state of consciousness, there's, What do I want to say about this? I think that when we start a practice like this, because it is a little wild, wild in the best term of the word, where we're going into places in our brain that we've never gone before. We're going to places in our emotional body or our physical body we maybe haven't gone to ever before. And so I do really feel like the very first time that we do it, it can be really important to have guided facilitation. So whether that is, you know, a group or a solo session, I do think that guided facilitation is extraordinarily important because, especially for people who have complex history of trauma. Those people might especially, and I am someone who was, this was me, myself, like I needed that guided facilitation in the beginning because it did feel so wild for me to be in my body after so many years not being in my body. People can be like, is this normal? Are the sensations I'm feeling normal? Because when we do this kind of breathwork, you can not only have a lot of emotion come through, but the physical sensations can feel wild. And that's not to say that if you don't have a really big experience when you do breathwork, that you're doing it wrong, that it's not true whatsoever. Everyone's experience is different. I've done breathwork hundreds of thousands of times and every time is a little bit different. So I do think that in the beginning, it's important to have facilitation, whether that's a one-on-one with somebody in person, one-on-one with somebody online, because this work actually transmits over the interwebs really, really well. And it was something I was doing even before the pandemic. So for me, switching during the pandemic wasn't a big deal. Or maybe it's like a group session in person or a group session online, as long as there's a small enough group so you can really get the individualized support that that you need. And then once you've done it once and you're like, oh, this is how it feels. This is what I could possibly expect. Then I really suggest and support people having a personal practice at home that maybe doesn't include facilitation. So that could be anything from before I got on this call with you, I laid down, set a timer for six minutes on my little Apple Watch and did breath work for six minutes just to let things open and flow. And I like to think of it as opening my creative channel, opening... We're working with that throat a lot. We're breathing in and out of the mouth. And so it's opening our communication centers in our body. So it could be as simple as that. But then it can also be a more dedicated longer practice. I generally think that in the more 15 to 30 to 45 minute ranges is when we get to some of the deeper things. So for my own personal practice, What it looks like is this. Pretty regularly, maybe a couple times a week, I'll put on Spotify and I'll do the active breath for like two or three songs and then maybe rest for one or two songs. It's enough to get things moving, get energy flowing. I especially love doing it when I'm having a writer's block or a creative block. If I need to write my newsletter and I don't exactly know what I want to say, those sorts of things. I'll sit down and it'll just open things out. But it's not going to be enough that I'm like a puddle of tears on my office floor. And then one to two times a month, I will do a longer session. Those for me are always facilitated. Not necessarily because I need the facilitation, because I am familiar enough with this work that I'm not afraid when I do breathwork. I'm not working through huge traumatic things anymore. Most of my big trauma, I've worked through already. But there's a lot of resistance that comes up when we do breathwork. And resistance is normal. I mean, people who are listening to this podcast are therapists. I'm sure you all see it in your clients all the time. Resistance is so natural. And guess what? I'm a human being. So I have resistance just like every other human being in the world. And so I know myself well enough to know that if I actually want to really go there, I need the accountability of facilitation. So one to two times a month, I'll do a one-on-one session or go to one of my friends' groups and have that accountability there. That's about as simple as it gets. Yeah. I mean, I think about... I mean, for me, and I'm sure a lot of people listening resonate with this, if they're running a business or if they're leading a business or leading a team or have multiple projects and businesses happening, you can go from seeing a client to leading a team meeting to having a difficult conversation with an employee to recording a podcast, doing a speech. I mean, there's so many, we just are constantly switching gears. And I know that it can be difficult to switch so quickly and to figure out, okay, what hat am I wearing right now? Or what, what is my energy need to be right now? Or how do I get ready for this conversation after just just getting out of this really heavy client session. And so I can see these practices really helping with that from like creating space in your schedule where you're not going back to back. I mean, that used to be me. I used to see six, eight clients back to back. With five minutes between sessions. And those were the days when I was living in scarcity, fear, and just working myself to the ground. And now have just realized like, I cannot see clients past three. I need an hour between sessions. I need Mondays to be a clear admin day so I can just focus on one task at a time. Like really learning what is my body telling me about, how it feels and what it needs at different times in the day and within the week as well. And so, yeah, I mean, like a recalibration. Yes, yes. And I can just see like this type of breathwork and these practices helping and supporting that process of figuring out, you know, how am I feeling at different times of the day and what am I needing? Hey y'all, I'm coming to you to share an awesome resource that I don't know if you all know about, but it's my workbook called Laying the Foundation for Your Private Practice, a workbook specifically for mental health professionals who wish to launch or grow or refine their private practice or group practice. Now this workbook captures all of the exercises that I have gone through specifically with my business coaching clients to help them build sustainable, profitable and values aligned businesses. We go through everything around money mindset, around running your numbers and making sure that you are implementing the profit first model into your business. We talk about how to identify your ideal client, how to identify alternative streams of revenue that are outside of traditional one-on-one therapy. We talk about marketing strategies, branding, self-care. This workbook is jam-packed with every resource you can think of that'll help you get started from beginning to end to get you ready and set up to have an amazing practice that supports your vision, your future, and you, most importantly, having time to give back to yourself so you can continue to grow. You can purchase the workbook at my website, braveandwell.com forward slash workbook, or just go to bravenwell.com and click on book. Music. And also like, what is the business needing? So I have this kind of maybe, I don't know if it's a unique point of view or not, but I, for anyone listening who's like into tarot, I'm a tarot nerd and I love the card, the three of pentacles. And if you think about the three of pentacles, even like a Venn diagram, because really that's like three circles, three disks. And they can be separate, they can be individual disks, or they can lay on top of each other like a Venn diagram where there's going to be some overlap in between each two and then some in the middle of all three together. And I, a while ago, kind of started thinking about my business as like, its own energetic entity. And then me as my own energetic entity, as someone who is both, very much of my business, my business is me in so many ways. I started it. I'm the owner. It's my personal brand in so many ways. But I'm also an individual separate from my business, and I need to have a little bit of that separation energetically. And then I have, the third pentacle as... I like to say the word spirit, but you could use whatever word you want, but it's that sort of energy that's bigger than us that we feel like influencing our lives in different ways. And so I started thinking about the Three of Pentacles as those three energies. Me, my business, and spirit, and then how those things are... They can have different desires. My ego can want something very different than what spirit wants to have show up for me. And that can be very different than what my business wants to be true in that moment. And so finding where those things can work in tandem and in synergy and where there's actually. Some bumping up against boundaries there. And that also has helped me define a lot about, what the future looks like. And it's not just what I want. It's not just what my business wants. It's not just what Spirit wants, but it's finding the place that all those three things overlap. Yeah, I have never done a tarot reading and I don't pull cards myself but I do have a lot of therapist friends who do that and I'm very interested in it I just have never explored it much for myself but I know that it can be another way to just reflect and look inward. I'm a fan of journaling though. Do you have... Prompts or questions you ask yourself that could elicit something that you want to offer? Yeah, well, there's two things I'll share. Like one, I love doing breath work before journaling. It's like one of my favorite things ever. Because once again, it's opening up that communication center, whether or not you're verbally communicating or like communicating by writing, whether you're communicating to somebody out there in the world or just communicating with yourself, It really opens that channel up. And so I'll often do breathwork, and then I'll sit down and write. One of my favorite prompts isn't even really a prompt. It's just an intention that I'll set before breathing, which is just to be open and curious to whatever arrives in the session, and just really allowing that to be there and seeing what drops in. I've actually started doing here in Minneapolis. Before the pandemic, I had this amazing group that that would gather every other Wednesday at this yoga studio and we would do group breathwork. I did it in collaboration with a friend who's an astrologer in town and she would give the hot gossip about what's going on in the planets that week. And then we would all lay down and breathe. It formed this really beautiful community. We would get like 40 people in a row and it was wild and amazing. And we did that for years. And then pandemic, everything got moved online. And we did it every week for a while, for like a year in the pandemic. And then I got real burned out on that. And that has slowly pulled back. But I've recently started doing it in our clinic. One of our treatment rooms is actually quite large. And we can get eight yoga mats in there. So I've started doing this breathwork and writing workshop every other Tuesday at the clinic. And it's so fun to have people gather together for not just the purpose of breathing, but then actually taking the time to internally process through writing, through journaling. And that's been really beautiful. And I'll sometimes give prompts in there. I've got some really cool cards that I'll share and whatnot, little affirmation cards and whatnot. But I do have a, for people who are interested in learning just the very beginnings of breathwork, On my website, on amykretzky.com, the opt-in for my newsletter is actually... I think it's a five-day Breathwork mini course. Oh, my god. And basically, every single day, you get an email with a three-song playlist on Spotify, a prompt, a journaling prompt, and then a little business theme. So it's very business focused. So it's more for you business owners out there. Love that. of them in there. And it kind of has an arc to how from day one to day five. Yeah, I love that. I love that. Definitely be. Yeah, I mean, you know, both of us are kind of on a sabbatical or just have taken a step back in some way from our businesses. And I, I think during this time, and I think a lot of people that I'm talking to, even though they're not on sabbatical, they are doing a lot of reflection about their businesses, how involved they want to be, what direction they want to go, what it they want it to look like and what types of services they want to offer and so but I find that so many folks are afraid to talk about this like out loud that they're in this process or that they're in this stage of really rethinking things and I get it I mean I think there's part of it that's like if, people find out what will they think or you know will I just be forgotten in some way and lose my credibility or my visibility in the community things like that. And so I guess I'm curious to hear your thoughts about being in a space of change and evolution and growth and the discomfort that can come with that and how to sit with that. Yeah, I think it's so interesting that that's that you're finding that that is true for so many people that you're talking to. And I the first thing that comes to my mind even is like, let's not forget to name that we live under capitalism. We live in a structure and a bunch of structures, a bunch of oppressive systems that for many reasons only give us value or make us believe that we only have value if we are growing. Not just maintaining, but actually growing. I mean, the whole basis of capitalism is like, you always have to be improving your growth every single year, whether it's financially or evolutionary or whatever. And this idea that even maintenance, even just having a goal of maintaining is like somehow. Failing in some strange way. And I think that whether or not we've intentionally started to. Question those systems, it's really normal for us to kind of subconsciously have these big resistance around maintaining or even intentionally declining for really important reasons. I actually, just this morning, was on a hike with a friend. And she's also a business owner, and she has a 5-year-old kid. And her business is successful. But she's been in a real state of maintaining. And she was like, someone was asking me about my 5-year goals for business. And she's like, I'm coming up with all these plans. And then she's like... And then I actually sat back and I was like, Wait, my kid is 5 years old. There's at least going to be 5 more years where I need an incredible amount of flexibility in case she's sick someday. All these different things where her focus and priority for the next 5 years is being incredibly present with her little kiddo. And she's like, honestly, when it comes down to it, for my business for the next 5 years, I'm happy just maintaining. And I was like, yes. Yes. Because we can't... We are multifaceted human beings. We have so many different things going on in our life. And our business is only one part of them. And it's beautiful if you want to grow that. That's amazing. But then that means that there's other parts of your life that are probably just going to maintain. Because we can't be intentionally growing all of these things all at the same time. That's just not realistic in so many ways. We only have so much energy we can put towards so many things. And so I think just being really clear about where our priorities priorities lie. And everyone's priorities really shifted in the last handful of years with the pandemic. Think about all those people out there that... Granted, the pandemic was fucking awful in so many ways for so many people. But I can think of a large handful of my friends that are like, Oh, I'm just learning how to bake bread at home. I'm on all this time off that I have. And I'm trying to run a business, buying PPE so we can actually do acupuncture and people with like all these things. I was losing it. I feel like business owners were on adrenaline for that first two years. We were just running on empty. We were running on adrenaline, doing whatever we needed to do to pivot and survive. And then finally, in the last year, we've all of a sudden emptied out all the gas and we're just taking a breath finally. And I mean, therapists, you all have waitlists a mile long, I imagine, because so many people need your help right now. And we're all finally to this point where we're like, okay, we can't keep doing it in the way that we've been doing it because we're running ourselves ragged. And people are finally getting to this point where they're like, okay, priorities need to reassess what's actually important for me right now. So I think even just really taking time to acknowledge that it is not a personal failure if we want to take time back. And really, it's a bigger systemic problem. Yeah. I love everything you just said, because it really rings true for me. And I know friends and colleagues of mine who are in this place. I mean. Like, even this idea that we're multifaceted, right? We have so, yes, like, owning a business is just a part of my life. I know it's what you what people see when they pull up my Instagram account, but if you pull up my personal account, which is private, you're going to see that like my life is my kids right now. This is the season of life that I'm in. I have two small children who require all of me every day, and I don't have the bandwidth. To give of myself 100% the way that I used to. I mean, before kids, my whole life was my business. I was a workaholic, you know? Those are those things that are like, okay, as long as you're going into it, like with with intention, like I am choosing to give everything to my kids right now. Right, and I think that I've just, for me personally, I've tried to sit with this fact, that I am in a season of life. There will be another season that will come at another time and I may be in a different space, to be all in again with my businesses, but right now I can't. And I've just decided I don't wanna be responsible for anyone else but me and my family right now. That's all I have. And I think that's really hard to sit with because when I think about that. It has a lot of implications, right? And there are a lot of things that have to happen for that to be true. I mean, you're sending my brain down an entire spiral right here about like the unfortunate martyrdom that I think a lot of us business owners go into who are creating. Jobs, that want to create jobs in this ethical business way. We want to pay people well. We want them to have PTO. We want them to have full lives, and have benefits, and all these things. And we often put a lot of that responsibility that, let's be honest, we live in a country that doesn't actually support people in the ways that they need to be supported through health care, through family leave, all these things. So therefore, us as these little micro-businesses all of a sudden feel like it's our responsibility to do all these things. And it blows my mind. Or it's our fault if we can't give our people what we need, what they need. Oh my goodness. I mean, you're inside my brain right now. Yeah. It's so infuriating. Drives me nuts. And so once again, let's talk about breathwork. That's one of the places that breathwork is really helpful for me, is I do hold a lot of unwarranted guilt and shame even when our own business. Like the clinic, amazingly survived through the pandemic. I am grateful a million times over. I listened to one of your episodes recently about the woman who wrote the book about Profit First for therapists. And I was like, I was like clapping so loud as I was listening to it because I've been doing Profit First for years. And when we, the clinic originally opened because I had a solo practice and my business partner had a solo practice and we decided to merge together in 2017. And from the get-go, we started that business using Profit First. And I think that is like the only reason why we survived COVID because we actually did shut down completely. And we didn't take that much government money either like for various reasons. And so this is all to say that this last year has been really difficult financially in different ways the clinic and I've had a lot of feelings come up around it and I've had to do a lot of breathwork around those feelings because I can't bring those into the HR room. I can't bring those into to a team meeting, like I have to deal with those in my own space. That's right. And we hold so much as business owners that people don't even realize, you know, I always say that, like, same, our, our practice has really struggled in the last year as well, because, you know, we're a highly insurance-based practice and, and a lot of our clinicians who are provisionally licensed can't get credentialed with insurance. So there's self pay and, clients, a lot of clients can't afford that right now because of the economy. And so it's just like a trickle effect, right? And insurance companies is reimbursed like shit. So of course we don't get our full rate. And so it impacts the financial health of the business. And so it's just been really hard. And thinking about some of the hard decisions we have to make that affect our team directly and what we can give them and provide them and how much guilt and shame, like you said, that we carry, and it's not even our fault, But we carry that because we feel responsible for them, and their whole livelihood. It's a lot to carry. Well, that's the fucked up thing about like capitalism is it tries to like put individual responsibility on people who are like, it's not an individual responsibility sort of problem. Right, right. But I don't know this, I'm really glad that we talked because I think this is something that a lot of us can need to tap into and access. And so I'm curious, can people work with you from all over And how, how do we find you? Yeah. What I would love, what I would dearly, dearly love is if people who are interested in breathwork started by going to my website, amykoretsky.com, and getting on my newsletter list and getting that five-day breathwork class because it teaches you just the really beginnings. And then at the end of that, it invites you to join my Patreon community, which I only do one thing for my Patreon community. I've had to learn this the hard way over the years of like overgiving, overgiving, overgiving. And I've pulled myself back because my Patreon is cheap as fuck. It's $5 a month. I really try to do more accessible pricing in that. So it's sliding scale starting at $5 a month. But we have one breathwork group a month. So once a month, we gather live over Zoom. We do a full 90-minute session. So I do an introduction, a little. Talk about whatever theme. We have some private journaling time, so quiet journaling time, a full 45-minute breathwork practice, and then a little bit of group sharing for those who want to share afterwards. And it's just Patreon. So you can show up on the months you want to show up. We always record the audio only of my audio only. So people who are sharing their stuff's not getting recorded, it stays private. And then you have a whole library of breathwork recordings to come back to. And so for the people, you know, who, after they've done it once or twice and they're like, Oh, you know, something really stressful happened at work today. I need a breathwork practice, but Amy's group isn't for another two and a half weeks, they just pull up the recordings and then have, you know, my voice. In their ears while they breathe. What a gift! That is a gift. Yeah, that's amazing. Okay, I'm so glad you shared that and we'll include all of that in the show notes for sure. Thank you for being here. Thanks for talking about this with me. It's so, I just feel like so many people need to hear this. It's already sitting on their hearts and minds and I'm glad that we could wrap words around it. So thank you. Thank you so Thank you so much for having me. It was a pleasure to be here. All right, y'all, thanks for listening. Until next time, stay brave. Music. Thank you so much for listening to the Brave and Well podcast. You can find links and resources from this episode in the show notes at www.bravenwell.com. Music. On your favorite podcast listening platform. Then send it to a friend. 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