Learning to Let Go: A Non-Linear Wellbeing Journey

A conversation with Chrissy Schmidt

There are moments in life when the surface story no longer holds. From the outside, everything appears intact — work, success, momentum — yet something quieter is fraying underneath. This is often where a non-linear wellbeing journey begins: not with a plan, but with a pause that arrives uninvited.

For Chrissy Schmidt, that pause came abruptly. A sudden medical episode — frightening, disorienting, and unexplained — left her briefly unable to speak or recognise familiar names. Doctors ruled out stroke and aneurysm, but certainty never fully arrived. What did arrive was fear, followed by an unsettling awareness that something in her life needed attention beyond logic or effort.

At the time, Chrissy was thriving in the corporate world. A senior leader in sales and operations within the software and fintech space, she was known for building high-performing teams and navigating growth with precision. On paper, everything worked. Inside, however, there was a growing sense of constriction — as though life had narrowed to a single, rigid lane.

When the Body Interrupts the Plan

The episode in hospital became a threshold moment. “I remember thinking I would rather die than live trapped in my body,” she recalls, describing the terror of being conscious yet disconnected. Years later, the experience would be diagnosed as a rare form of migraine, but in the absence of answers, she was left with a deeper question: What if the way I was living wasn’t sustainable?

Her first steps were tentative — yoga classes, an experimental studio that combined breath, movement and chanting. It felt strange, unfamiliar, even uncomfortable. Yet something shifted. “I didn’t understand why it worked,” she says, “but I felt better. And that was enough.”

This openness — not certainty — became the doorway.

Cracking Open, Slowly

Teacher training in Kundalini Yoga followed, not because she was seeking a new identity, but because she was curious. Surrounded by people fluent in emotional language and spiritual inquiry, Chrissy noticed how unfamiliar it all felt. She didn’t arrive with a story of trauma neatly articulated. She arrived with stress, restlessness, and a sense that she had been living on the surface of her own life.

An invitation to India came next — unexpected, unplanned. Visiting ashrams, sitting in spaces once occupied by spiritual teachers, she found herself overwhelmed by emotion. In one room, she began sobbing without knowing why. “It felt like bricks were being taken off my back,” she says. “I didn’t have language for it. I just knew something was opening.”

These experiences didn’t deliver answers so much as soften the edges. They loosened long-held assumptions about control, productivity, and what it meant to live well.

Leaving Without Knowing Where

Approaching forty, the restlessness returned — stronger this time. Despite professional success, Chrissy felt as though she was living someone else’s life. A corporate acquisition amplified the misalignment, and a question began to surface repeatedly: Am I going to do this forever?

She didn’t have an alternative mapped out. What she did have was a sense that staying would require a kind of numbness she could no longer sustain.

So she left.

A one-way ticket to India marked the beginning of two years of travel across Southeast Asia — Thailand, Bali, Italy — moving between retreat centres, meditation monasteries, group travel, silence, and community. Some moments were expansive; others were deeply uncomfortable. There were periods of illness, anxiety, loneliness, and doubt. There were also unexpected friendships, shared meals with strangers, and moments of profound gratitude born not from abundance, but from simplicity.

One four-day silent retreat with Buddhist monks in rural Thailand stands out. Cold nights, minimal bedding, unfamiliar sounds — everything about it disrupted her nervous system. Yet within that discomfort, something settled. “I wasn’t trying to practise gratitude,” she says. “It just arrived. I felt lucky to be alive.”

Faith Without a Formula

As the journey unfolded, another layer surfaced — her relationship with the divine. Having rejected organised religion earlier in life, the language of God felt fraught. It wasn’t until a teacher gently reframed the idea — allowing for a personal, non-punitive understanding of the sacred — that something shifted. “That permission changed everything,” she says. “It allowed faith back in, without conditions.”

This wasn’t blind faith or spiritual bypassing. It was tentative, grounded, often challenged. In fact, one return to India delivered not the clarity she hoped for, but illness and exhaustion. Sitting by the Ganges, unwell and overwhelmed, she questioned everything. “India didn’t give me what I wanted,” she reflects. “It gave me what I needed.”

Coming Full Circle

Alongside her travels, Chrissy undertook extensive breathwork training — a practice that had initially helped her access parts of herself unreachable through cognition alone. Over time, breath became both a personal anchor and a professional thread that gently wove her worlds together.

Today, she serves as Managing Director of Alchemy of Breath, working behind the scenes to support the growth of a global breathwork school while also facilitating sessions herself. The role feels familiar yet transformed — strategic thinking and leadership, now rooted in environments that value presence as much as performance.

“I thought I needed to do a complete 180,” she says. “But I realised it wasn’t the work that was wrong. It was the environment. The pace. The values.”

Her life now moves between countries, communities and rhythms — not fixed, but no longer frightening. What once would have triggered panic now feels spacious. “It’s like taking off a tight shoe,” she says. “There’s a lightness.”

Orientation, Not Arrival

Chrissy is careful not to frame her story as a template. Not everyone needs to travel across continents or sit in silence for days. What matters, she suggests, is responsiveness — noticing when life asks for something different, and being willing to listen.

“Wellbeing isn’t linear,” she reflects. “Some people start with the body, some with food, some with spirituality. We all enter the spiral at different points.”

What she offers now — through breath, through leadership, through quiet conversations — is not a promise of optimisation or constant calm. It’s an invitation to soften the grip, to trust the unfolding, and to remember that peace doesn’t always arrive through effort.

Sometimes, it arrives when we finally let go.

DISCOVER: alchemyofbreath.com & asha.global