My Story
Andrew Ragan
We offer what we need, and I found this work because I needed it.
From the age of 13, my low back was a constant source of pain. I remember summer conditioning runs for pop Warner football—having to stop minutes in because my back would spasm.
At the time, I thought it was just physical. And part of it was. But the deeper truth was that my body was responding to an environment that didn’t feel safe.
My mom was struggling with alcoholism. Home was unpredictable—embarrassing, frightening, and chaotic. And that chaos didn’t just live in the air. It lived in me.
Without knowing it, I spent years in a state of fight-or-flight.
I clenched. I braced. I tightened my hips and carried tension along my spine like it was normal. My body learned early that vigilance was protection.
I also learned how to perform and make everyone think everything “was all good.”
At school and with friends, I wore what I now recognize as the “golden boy” mask: straight A’s, sports captain, do everything right, be liked, don’t need anything. I looked fine. I looked successful. And the cost was my vulnerability. I stopped crying. I stopped asking for help. I learned to override what I felt in order to function.
Strength training became my outlet.
I lifted ferociously. Muscle became my armor and my identity.
Training gave me structure, discipline, and a sense of control—but it also allowed me to keep avoiding the deeper pain. The stronger I became on the outside, the more disconnected I grew from my inner world. Protection slowly replaced connection, and I didn’t realize how far I’d drifted from myself.
From the outside, I looked grounded and together. Inside, I was managing, controlling, and hiding.
It was normal for me to say one thing and feel another.
To think something and say the opposite in order to be liked or to keep the peace. I had learned how to survive by minimizing myself. At the time I didn’t even realize this was how I operated - self abandonment had become my normal way of being.
Fast forward over a decade and everything shifted in my early 30s, when my son River was born.
He came into the world perfect, and I burst into tears—the first time I had cried in over a decade. I remember feeling light emanate from my heart and ripple into the room. Something cracked open in me that I didn’t know was even possible.
I felt profound love from my heart. It wasn’t a conceptual idea of love, I FELT love in my heart and it rocked me to my soul.
Within days, my body followed. My low back pain returned with a vengeance. I was at my biggest, competing in power-lifting, and I couldn’t hold my seven-pound baby without searing pain.
I was strong. I was fit on the outside. And I was falling apart.
That moment forced honesty. The strategies I had relied on—discipline, strength, control—were no longer enough. I was in physical pain and emotional overwhelm at the same time.
The tears that began flowing with my son’s birth didn’t stop, and I didn’t know how to make sense of what was happening.
The years of pent up feeling and disorganization sent my life in a tailspin. The torrent of pent up feeling and confusion led to my wife and I separating, my business partnership with my best friend dissolving, and me all of a sudden living in my friend’s basement. I began seeing a somatic therapist and it gave me language for something I had never been taught: trauma isn’t just what happens to you. It’s what happens inside you when the system doesn’t get to complete what it needed to.
That insight changed everything.
I began seeking out approaches that worked with the body, not against it.
I learned how to build strength without bracing.
How to feel emotion without collapsing.
How to lead my life from my soul centered sense of self instead of protection.
Over time, my hard wired defense mechanisms softened.
My nervous system regulated. My relationships positively shifted. And a deeper sense of alignment began to replace the constant push.
That was the beginning of coming home. As the saying goes, we often end up offering what we needed most.
This work—integrating movement, mentorship, and medicine—became the bridge between performance and wholeness.
Between striving and truth. Between who I learned to be and who I actually am. And now, it’s the path I walk alongside others.
Practices that didn’t require more willpower or self-control, but instead taught me how to listen. How to slow down. How to feel without being overwhelmed. How to let my system unwind instead of override.
Strength training shifted from creating armor to practicing yoga and how to listen to my body.
Mentorship, therapy, and coaching gave me mirrors, language, understanding, guidance, and self compassion I never had.
And later, carefully held psychedelic medicine work allowed me to access parts of myself that had been protected and buried for decades—grief, fear, tenderness, truth.
The transformation didn’t happen all at once. It happened through patience, curiosity, and integration.