I Want to Tell You the Real Story — Not the Polished One

By Destinē the Leader · Energy of Creation

The polished version of this story is the one where everything unfolds in a straight line toward an obvious destination. A wellness practitioner discovers breathwork, gets trained, builds a community, launches a program. Intentional. Clear. Linear.

That is not what happened.

What happened is that a single breathwork session in a car in a Walmart parking lot in Round Rock, Texas set off a chain of events that I could not have predicted and would not have believed if someone had described them to me in advance. What happened is that I was searching for reiki — for something to help clear whatever was blocking me energetically — and found something I did not have language for yet. What happened is that three years, two continents, four certifications, and one 508(c)(1)(a) nonprofit later, I am sitting in Central Texas with a community I would have given anything to find when I needed it most.

Social Club exists because of that session. And because of Ibiza. And Rishikesh. And Bali. And because I spent too many Saturday nights going out and coming home feeling worse than when I left — more isolated, more confused about what I actually needed, more dysregulated in ways I did not yet have words for.

This is the story of how all of it led here — and why it matters for you.

A Parking Lot in Round Rock

Three years ago I felt stuck. Not dramatically stuck — not in crisis — but in the quieter and in some ways harder way where things are functioning on the surface and you cannot shake the feeling that something essential is missing. That something is draining out faster than it is being replenished. That the version of yourself you are living is a compressed, depleted version of what is actually available.

I was searching for reiki. I found a SOMA Breath session on Zoom instead.

I sat in my car in a Walmart parking lot in Round Rock, Texas, during a LOVE Fest Zoom event, and I breathed.

What happened in that session is difficult to describe without sounding like I am overstating it. I connected to my ancestors. Something that had been closed for a long time opened — not metaphorically but physically, in the body, in waves that moved through me and left me sitting in that parking lot afterward understanding that something had permanently changed.

I was not a breathwork person before that session. I did not have a meditation practice. I was a person who had been running on dysregulation for years, looking for reiki, and found a technology that went to the root of something I had been working around for a long time.

Within two weeks I was on a plane to Ibiza.

Ibiza — The Ancestral Healing I Did Not Know I Needed

The SOMA Breath Level 1 training in Ibiza happened on my birthday. I turned thirty-four in a room full of people from around the world who were all there for the same reason — because something in that practice had grabbed them and would not let go.

What happened in Ibiza was not a single experience. It was ten days of progressive opening — of breathwork that went deeper each session, of ancestral healing I had not arrived expecting to do, of being in community with people who understood something about human experience that most of the world does not talk about out loud.

I came home changed. Not in the way motivational weekends change people — the feeling that fades by Wednesday. Changed at a structural level. The way certain things look after your eyes have adjusted to a different quality of light.

And I started asking the question that would eventually become Energy of Creation and Social Club:

If this is what breathwork in community does — if this is what becomes possible when people breathe together with intention — why is nobody doing this for people who look like me? For people from my community? For the everyday person who is carrying a lot and has never been in a room where this kind of healing was available to them?

The isolation I had been living with — doing the high-performing solo act, holding it together, never quite finding the community that understood the full weight of it — became a design problem rather than a personal failing. The question became: what would I have needed to find? And then: can I build that?

Rishikesh — Learning What Yoga Actually Is

After Ibiza came Rishikesh. A 500-hour yoga teacher training in northern India — thirteen-hour days, six days a week, in one of the most sacred cities in the world for the practice of yoga.

I want to be honest about what this experience was like because the wellness world tends to present yoga teacher trainings in Rishikesh as idyllic transformations. It was that. It was also culture shock. It was physical and emotional and intellectual demands I had not anticipated. It was the experience of being an American in a setting organized around entirely different assumptions about how things should work and what matters most.

It was also where I learned what yoga actually is.

Most of what is sold as yoga in the United States is asana — the physical postures that constitute the third of eight limbs in Patanjali's classical yoga path. In Rishikesh I learned the other seven limbs. I learned that the postures exist to prepare the body and mind for pranayama — breath regulation — and that pranayama exists to prepare the practitioner for the inner practices of genuine stillness and expanded awareness.

I learned nervous system science through direct experience — not through a textbook but through the lived reality of what happens to a body that practices for thirteen hours a day for months. I experienced dysregulation and came through it. I learned what genuine regulation feels like from the inside. I developed the body knowledge that no amount of reading can substitute for — the knowledge of what health actually feels like rather than what the absence of crisis feels like.

Victoria — my co-founder, my Minister ASii, my person — was there. She had her own path through this training. What we both carried out of Rishikesh became the foundation of Energy of Creation.

Bali — The Music, The Movement, The Last Piece

The story of Eat Pray Love ends in Bali. My own journey moved through the same geography in a similar arc — spiritual transformation, rigorous training, and then Bali, where the embodiment and the joy and the coming home happened.

In Bali I completed my 5Elements Dance Activation DJ certification. If Ibiza was about the breath and Rishikesh was about the structure, Bali was about the music and the body and the aliveness of being human in a way that does not require justification.

I learned to mix music in service of transformation — not as performance, not for entertainment in the ordinary sense, but as facilitation. Music as a co-guide. Music as a tool that changes what the nervous system does and what becomes accessible in that changed state. Music as the thing that carries people through the emotional arc of a breathwork session in a way that words alone cannot.

And I had been looking, for years, for a place to dance without alcohol. Without the bar scene. Without the particular hollowness of coming home emptier than I left. In Bali I found the technology to create that place.

That technology is what you hear when you put on your headset at a Social Club gathering and the music begins.

The Question That Became Energy of Creation

I came home from Bali holding a specific question I had been carrying since Ibiza and that Rishikesh and Bali had clarified rather than answered.

The wellness world — the breathwork world, the yoga world, the sound healing world — is powerful and real. It is also predominantly white, predominantly affluent, and predominantly organized around the comfort and accessibility of people who already have access to it. The communities that carry the most physiological and psychological load — BIPOC communities, working-class communities, military communities, queer communities — are the least served by the spaces designed to address that load.

This is not anyone's intentional failure. It is a structural reality that produces a gap.

Energy of Creation is the attempt to build something better. A 508(c)(1)(a) nonprofit because the mission is access and impact, not profit. A community built for high performers, founders, entrepreneurs, visionaries, creatives, and leaders who want to integrate this work across their life, relationships, and career — and who have found that conventional wellness does not go deep enough to match the depth of what they are carrying and what they are building.

The nonprofit structure also allows Energy of Creation to extend this work into underserved communities — BIPOC communities, working-class professionals, military and veteran community members — through programming, access initiatives, and community investment. The mission of Breaking Cycles, Building Futures operates at both levels: serving those doing the high-level building, and ensuring that the tools for genuine wellbeing are not confined to those who can already afford them.

Social Club is the front door.

It is a gathering where founders, creatives, leaders, and high performers come to breathe, to be moved, and to find the kind of connection that high-demand living consistently denies them. The headset experience — each person in their own immersive sonic space, guided through a precisely designed music arc — is what allows the practice to go deep enough to be real rather than recreational. The social hour is what allows the connection that the breathwork opens to actually form.

It was built for the person who is building something significant and doing it in a state of chronic dysregulation. For the founder making decisions from a depleted nervous system. For the creative whose output has become mechanical because the inner life that used to feed it has gone quiet. For the leader whose relational capacity — the ability to be genuinely present with their team, their family, their vision — has been eroded by years of running on empty. For the visionary who carries tremendous clarity about what they want to build but cannot access that clarity consistently because the system underneath it is exhausted.

It was also built with an explicit commitment to being genuinely welcoming across race, identity, and economic background — because the work of nervous system regulation and genuine community belongs to everyone, not only to those who have always had access to it.

The Full Circle

On March 24, 2026 — exactly three years after my first SOMA Breath training in Ibiza, and three days after my thirty-seventh birthday — I received my SOMA Breath Transformational Coach certification.

Three years. From a parking lot in Round Rock to a certification that formally recognizes what the practice has built in me and what I am equipped to build in others.

I sat with that for a while. Not in a triumphant way but in a quiet, full-circle way. The synchronicities were almost too precise — three years to the date, on the week of my birthday, at the moment when Social Club was ready to launch and Energy of Creation was built and the first gathering was weeks away.

This is what the practice has shown me over and over: the timing is never accidental. The next step is always available when you are ready for it. And the thing that broke you open in a parking lot — if you are willing to follow it — will lead you somewhere you could not have imagined.

Come find your people.

→ View the next Social Club session and book your spot

What We Are Building

Social Club is not the destination. It is the beginning.

The community Energy of Creation is building is for the founder who has been running on empty and does not yet know there is another way. For the entrepreneur whose creative capacity has been suppressed so long they have stopped noticing it is gone. For the leader whose business decisions are being made from a depleted nervous system and whose strategic clarity has become intermittent rather than consistent. For the visionary whose relational capacity — the ability to be genuinely present with the people they love and lead — has been eroded by years of chronic dysregulation. For the creative who came here to build something meaningful and is discovering that the infrastructure of that building needs to include the builder's own system.

The in-person Social Club gathering is the entry point. The ongoing EOC membership communities are the container that sustains the work. The retreats are the deep immersion. The one-to-one programs are the personalized support.

And because Energy of Creation operates as a 508(c)(1)(a) nonprofit, the mission extends beyond those who are already resourced — ensuring that the tools for genuine wellbeing reach the communities who need them most, not only the ones who can most easily access them.

All of it exists because a breathwork session in a Walmart parking lot in Round Rock told the truth about what becomes possible when a human being breathes with intention.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who founded Social Club and Energy of Creation? Social Club is a community program of Energy of Creation, founded by Destinē the Leader — SOMA Breath Certified Transformational Coach, 500-hour yoga teacher, Ayurvedic practitioner, sound therapist, and ecstatic dance DJ — and co-founded with Victoria, Minister ASii and co-facilitator. Energy of Creation is a 508(c)(1)(a) nonprofit wellness community based in Central Texas.

Why was Social Club created? Social Club was created to bring accessible, community-based conscious breathwork to high performers, founders, entrepreneurs, creatives, visionaries, and leaders who want to integrate this work across their life, relationships, and career. As a program of Energy of Creation — a 508(c)(1)(a) nonprofit — it also carries a commitment to making this work accessible beyond those who are already resourced.

What is the headset experience at Social Club? Each participant uses a premium wireless headset with individual sound control and noise cancellation. The breathwork journey is set to a precisely designed music arc heard with complete sonic immersion — private, personal, and fully controlled. Because headsets are limited per session, advance booking is required.

What is Energy of Creation? Energy of Creation is a 508(c)(1)(a) nonprofit wellness community based in Central Texas, co-founded by Destinē the Leader and Victoria. Its mission is Breaking Cycles, Building Futures — providing sustainable wellness education and practices to high performers, founders, creatives, and leaders, while extending access to underserved communities through its nonprofit structure and community initiatives.

Is Social Club part of a nonprofit? Yes. Social Club is a community program of Energy of Creation, which operates as a 508(c)(1)(a) nonprofit organization. Every dollar invested in the experience supports EOC's mission of bringing sustainable wellness practices to underserved communities.

How do I join Social Club? Visit energyofcreation.com/social-club to view the next session date and book your spot. Headsets are limited and spots must be secured in advance — walk-in attendance is not available.

Destinē the Leader is a SOMA Breath Certified Transformational Coach, 500-hour yoga teacher, Ayurvedic practitioner, sound therapist, and ecstatic dance DJ. She is the founder and Minister of Love at Energy of Creation — a 508(c)(1)(a) nonprofit wellness community whose mission is Breaking Cycles, Building Futures.

→ energyofcreation.com · energyofcreation.com/social-club