I was sitting at the kitchen bar, weeping into my cereal when I noticed an app on my phone called the Nike Training Club. I didn’t remember downloading it and had never opened it before, but out of desperation, I tapped the icon. A welcome message informed me that because of Covid, all the training programs were free. The app suggested I try yoga so I tapped on the link and there, on my phone, grinning from ear to ear was one Mr. Branden Collinsworth, Nike Master Trainer for Yoga.   

Let’s just get this out of the way right now. 

Branden is, as we say in the South, easy on the eyes.    

So I get the “wink-wink” that a suicidal, middle-aged widow weeping into her cereal tapped an app, discovered a handsome, young yoga instructor and was suddenly, after fifty years of not giving one shit about yoga,  “inspired” to start a practice - but people, that’s kinda what happened. 

I started doing Nike’s yoga program, once a day, and at first, it was awful. Everything hurt, nothing moved and I flopped on the floor like a dying salmon. Still, I kept at it because even if my body wasn’t cooperating, my emotions were - tears were flowing, anger was boiling, love was bubbling - shit was moving in a totally new way. 

Didn’t happen overnight. Took months, actually, but I felt just enough better each day to keep going. Grief became my yoga instructor, showing me where it hurt, why it hurt and how to breathe, relax and let it go. I’d spend half an hour blubbering then I’d roll that misery up with my mat and face my day.

I also appreciated that Branden was not the typical yoga instructor. Self-described as Tupac meets Deepak, Branden’s a thickly-muscled brother from the Vegas hood. His yoga didn’t require double-jointed hyper-flexibility or the spiritual bypass of my suffering. It just required my presence and my commitment to try my best. I could do that. 

It was during one of his sessions that Branden turned to the camera and said, “Yoga is intimacy with the self” and I was a little thrown. Enough so that I pressed pause on the app and Googled the dude while still sitting in pigeon pose.

What came up was a picture of Branden, standing on a mountain in Peru, wearing a sweatshirt with a triangular spear logo on his chest. It was the logo for his leadership retreat. Seeing that logo, chills shot up my spine. I sent a text to my energy healer, with a screenshot of Branden in his sweatshirt:

“Is this the triangle you’ve been seeing on my chest during our healings?”

I held my breath, waiting for her reply.

It came back quickly.

“OMG. Yes. What is that?????”

I texted back: “I don’t know but I think I’m going to Peru.”  

The rest, as they say, is history.

A moment of profound despair turned into the discovery of an app turned into a yoga practice turned into an Instagram follow turned into a mentorship turned into visits to Hawai’i and visits to Vegas turned into a writing collaboration turned into a flight to Peru turned into me crab-walking through a dark passageway on Huyana Picchu turned into a three month overseas expedition to Thailand and Bali. 

(And that’s how we met Branden.)