I'm Danielle
I'm not here because I healed. I'm here because I got tired of pretending the problem was me.
The Dream
For a long time I was very good at performing okay
I was sold the same dream as all women.
Get the job. The house. The husband. The kids. The car. The money. Manage your weight, get the facial, do the class, buy the right outfits. Hire help, buy a bigger home, a newer car, more more more.
Do it right, do it well, and you’ll finally feel it — that quiet, settled kind of happy everyone else seems to have found.
But that’s bullshit. It’s a nice story. Not a real one.
The reality is that reaching the point where the world tells you you’ve made it often gets most women the opposite of settled and happy. It gets them exhausted and frustrated.
I had the career. The money. I had the cleaner and the nanny to help at home. I even left my corporate job, doubled my income building my own business. I did it my way.
Still, I was unhappy. And for a long time, I felt like something was wrong with me.
Not Broken
It was all a dream.
After building my company, for a while, things felt better. I had made a change.
People were paying me to do work I was actually passionate about. I was making way more than I ever did working for someone else. I even worked less. More time for the bubble baths, the facials, the workouts — doing the things.
But still. Not settled and happy.
Why? What was wrong with me? Why, when I sat down at the end of the day, was my head still racing? Why did I feel disconnected from my body? Why did I feel so unsatisfied?
So I stopped trying to fix myself and started asking a different question. Not what’s wrong with me — but what is this actually? Where does this exhaustion come from? Why is every woman I know carrying the exact same weight?
I started reading, learning, trying to figure out why I couldn’t meditate my way into more joy. Why I couldn’t optimize and track my data until I finally reached it, the satisfaction. Wellness had promised me that if I did the things, I’d be joyful and blissed.
And who were these women who actually expressed joy, and it felt genuine, not manufactured? I started to see patterns when I really looked.
I looked to the past, not the trad wife past that was sweeping the internet, but the past when women had agency and power. And I saw women holding each other up, connecting to community, leading spaces with more peace — for everyone, not just them.
Women used to lead. They used to be connected. And then they weren’t.
I wasn’t broken. I was living in the aftermath of something.
Standing Still
I wanted to make a change. I just couldn't find the space for it.
All the time I’m getting curious, work never stopped, the kids still needed me, my partner still couldn’t go to the grocery store without me writing a list out for him, and I was starting to understand more and more that my frustration, my anger, my rage wasn’t alone.
I’d spent a life centering men, when it had always been women who supported each other. It was men who:
- are six times more likely to leave a wife after a cancer diagnosis,
- kill their partners — homicide being the leading cause of death for pregnant women in the U.S.
- consume our bodies, consume our workload, take our labor… and then disregard us when we age, get sick, or expect true connection.
It’s women who hold us up. Or it used to be.
So I left again. This time the country not the corporate job. I started learning from a country that actually knew how to rest — how to let my body stop moving, and listen to what it needed.
Not because I had a plan. Because my body had stopped cooperating with the performance, and I needed to find out what was underneath it. What I actually found was that slowing down was the hardest thing I’d ever tried to do.
Your nervous system doesn’t know it’s allowed to stop just because you changed the location. I spent the first months waiting for the other shoe to drop. Bracing for something. The absence of constant fear felt suspicious.
And then, slowly, it didn’t.
I started to hear myself think. I started to feel what was actually there underneath the hustle and the helping and the performing okay. Some of it was grief. Some of it was rage. A lot of it was relief.
But I was finally, for the first time in a long time, standing still enough to see what had always been there.
Still Here
It's still not perfect. I'm still figuring it out.
I still don’t have endless ease and joy. Yes, I needed to change my life — work less, find work that actually lit me up, eat better, move more, spend less time on screens. It all made sense.
But slowing down also meant more time to be curious. So I got curious.
I started asking myself: when did I feel my best? Every time I thought about the moments I’d been most joyful — the answer was the same. It was with my girlfriends. On my women’s trips. Doing real, vulnerable work with other women.
That’s why I’m pivoting again. Still doing the other work, just less of it — so I can build the space online that I’ve had in person for years. So we can all find this together.
A space for women who’ve done the work, built the things, shown up for everyone, and still feel like something is missing. Who are starting to suspect the problem was never them.
Here we talk about the rage honestly. We research the history — why women feel cut off from themselves, from the earth, from each other, and from the kind of power that doesn’t require performing. We practice the tools that actually help — not because they fix us, but because they give us somewhere to stand while we figure out what we’re actually dealing with.
I’m not perfect. I’m not “healed.” I’m a woman mid-reclamation who did the research and wants to do this part with other women instead of alone.
You’re welcome here exactly as you are.
By the way.....
If it matters
Besides lived experience, I’ve done the training and done the work.
I’m a certified meditation and mindfulness teacher and coach, trained through Brown University’s Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) Teaching Certificate program, the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley, and Tara Brach and Jack Kornfield’s Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Certification Program (MMTCP) — learning along the way from teachers like Tara, Jack, Sebene Selassie, Konda Mason, and others. I’m also a certified Somatic Experiencing guide and a 500-hour ERYT yoga teacher with thousands of hours of teaching behind me.
I designed and deliver the YTT Somatic Social-Emotional Facilitator Training through The Namaste Project. I’m also a guest teacher trainer at yoga studios around the world, with a focus on neurobiology and somatics. I’ve led women’s groups, coached individuals and teams, spoken, and guided retreats.
Before any of this, I was a corporate girl with an advanced degree in leadership — the kind of person who could project-manage anything and build curriculum out of thin air but I’ve always been an event and experience creator at heart.
I built Atlanta Social Yoga in 2019 before handing it off to local leaders. I currentlty manage Dirty South Yoga Fest. I explore the world through [Remote Asanas(link — WeTravel). Bringing people together in meaningful ways has always been my thing.
I’m a reader, a writer, and a lifelong book lover. I’ve written for Yoga Journal, ghostwritten for wellness creators, and now I’m putting out my own passion project — this — while working on my book, Performing Wellness, and building a community women can join from anywhere, with ease.
I’m an advocate for accessible wellness and connection. I currently advise and volunteer on the board of TNPF (The Namaste Project Foundation), along with several other organizations, and I sit on school boards and support the communities I actually live in — because it matters.
Out of all my jobs and experience, my favorite has been having a family. Being a mom, and having a partner who’s willing to look at systems of inequity, talk, and grow together, is something I’m always thankful for — even when they wear me out.
