My Story
This is the story of how chronic illness unraveled my life and how healing revealed a new one.
Raised to Perform
I was raised in a world of bright lights and high expectations, the competitive dance world, where my worth was measured in trophies, perfect scores, and glowing praise. By twelve, I was performing on national television. By fifteen, I was legally emancipated and living alone across the country. And by eighteen, I was one of only twenty-four dancers selected worldwide for The Juilliard School, proof to everyone, including me, that I was “fulfilling my purpose.”
After graduating, I started my own dance company, creating films and performances that traveled to international festivals, living the career I had always imagined. On paper, I was “making it,” but beneath the surface were signs that my life was deeply unbalanced. I didn’t have close friends outside of work, I didn’t prioritize my relationships, and I didn’t know how to rest. My life was a seven-day-a-week, seventeen-hour workday stitched together by ambition and adrenaline, and beneath it all was a loneliness so deep I didn’t have language for it.
When Ambition Turned on Me
My body couldn’t keep up: a cold every month, strange fatigue, a heaviness in my limbs. I brushed it off, did more breathwork and yoga, took more supplements, tried to transcend it, tried to overcome it. But this wasn’t something I could work my way out of. Ambition was the disease, and no matter how hard I tried to sweep it under the rug, the reality was unavoidable: the harder I pushed, the sicker I became.
Eventually everything collapsed. I spent nearly three years bedbound, sick, and alone. My life as I knew it deteriorated: my purpose was gone, my body was exhausted, I couldn’t work, I lost friends, and everything came to a halting stop. Imagine being in your early twenties and having the identity that had defined your purpose for as long as you could remember suddenly ripped from under you. The grief was overwhelming, and I became deeply and chronically suicidal.
The Moment I Didn’t Leave
In that desperation, I began searching for meaning and picked up a Buddhist book, Dharma Art by Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. I had read Buddhist teachings before, but never in the state I was in then, desperate for answers to suffering and humbled by the fragility of my body. I read something I had seen before, but this time it struck me with a new and startling clarity: a teaching called Basic Goodness. It said that there is something essentially good in me, not because of what I have achieved, but innate to who I am.
I didn’t believe it at first, but the assertion felt so bold, so revolutionary that I thought, What if it was true? Wouldn’t that be incredible? Is it really possible to be free of suffering even while sick and in pain? That small possibility piqued my interest just enough not to drive off the cliff, just enough to stay and find out.
A Life Rebuilt From the Inside
As that seed took root, I began dedicating my life to understanding what it meant. I spent the next year living on and off at a Buddhist monastery, studying with masters and receiving teachings and empowerments. I meditated through retreat-like days and began repairing old relationships. The idea of basic goodness was profound, but living it was an entirely different kind of training.
It meant admitting I didn’t know everything, letting people’s care into places I had once fiercely guarded, and learning to be relational and collaborative after a lifetime focused on myself. It was terrifying, exhilarating, and a completely new way of living.
The Work I Give My Life To
Slowly, my physical health improved. I learned that connection, belonging, humanity, and service healed me far more than bio-hacks, isolation, perfection, or control ever had. My illness wasn’t random, it reflected the way I had been taught to push, perform, and disconnect from my own humanity.
That realization became the ground of my mission: to help people return to their inherent worth and dismantle the internal and external systems of oppression that keep us sick and disconnected.
Today I live and teach at Shambhala Ranch, our home and retreat center, where my partner Sah and I practice and share spiritual and somatic teachings exploring, day by day, what a culture where all beings can flourish looks like.
Thank you to all the teachers, healers, friends, family, and support who continue to be the foundation of my humanity. This journey has not and could not have happened alone.
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Learn MoreAbout Nathan
I am a spiritual and somatic teacher guiding people back to their indigenous, unconditioned body. The body that remembers how to feel, create, and belong, and knows itself as part of the earth...Read More
