Retaking control of your life after hitting rock bottom may look impossible, especially when you have suffered tons of physical, emotional, and mental wounds. But for Meghan Pearson, she managed to jump back even after facing bankruptcy, alcoholism, infertility, and sexual assault. She sits down with Tanya Memme to share how she overcame such a depressing life and defeated victim mentality by immersing herself in the transformative benefits of breathwork, yoga, raw food, and plant medicine. Meghan now helps other people get through their lowest points using these same approaches, reconnecting them with their intuition and spirituality in the simplest ways possible. She also talks about her two upcoming retreats: a three-month breathwork immersion in April and a plant medicine and yoga trip to Costa Rica in December.

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From Hitting Rock Bottom To Becoming A Medicine Woman With Meghan Pearson

We have a dear friend of mine. I met you at this amazing place called Rythmia. It was a summer day. I have Meg Pearson here. She’s a women’s coach and breathwork ceremonialist. She’s serving to make spirituality simpler. She’s a modern plant medicine woman and a fertility coach. She has her podcast. She’s a speaker. She’s a holistic chef, a mother, and an author. You have about four books.

I have four fruit-related books. I’ve got a children’s book. I’ve been writing my book since 2012.

I know the feeling. Believe me. I haven’t finished my book yet. I’m working on it too, so I get it. I love where I met you and how I met you. I met Meg at a place called Rythmia in Costa Rica. It’s where we go to do plant medicine. It’s a beautiful place. If you were to describe Rythmia in short few sentences, how would you describe it? You work there.

I do. It is a medically licensed clinical setting where people can go down and enjoy four-star accommodations while doing the deep, difficult, and beautiful work of diving into the truth of who they are, connecting with their soul, healing trauma, and finding their purpose in life through the support of many modalities, including plant medicine but also amazing food curated by yours, truly.

The whole menu was created by you.

We do breathwork there, which is an equally as powerful modality as ayahuasca. There’s bodywork, massage, gym, yoga, and colon cleanses. Everything for a full 360 soul car wash is what goes on at Rythmia.

I went to Rythmia with my mom and my boyfriend, OT. We went and had the most incredible experience. It’s hard to explain what a place like that does but with that being said, you’ve worked there for six years now when it first opened. You were there through it all. You have a lot of experience.

I started there in 2016, and now we’re in 2023. This coming June would be my seven-year anniversary of working there and on a personal level, more importantly, of me working with plant medicine because that has been a huge player on my path.

You have your retreats, breath circles, and healing ways in which you work with your clients. It’s incredible what you have created. I know that you have a retreat coming up in December 2023, which we’re going to talk about. It’s the most incredible retreat. If any of you can go, you have to go. It’s so beautiful. Wait until you see because I’m going to show you some pictures and information on that retreat. You have one coming up in April 2023. Tell us about the one coming up in April too.

You could call it an online virtual retreat of sorts or a breathwork immersion. I won’t call it a deep dive but it’s a three-month container that I’ve created. It’s going to be a women’s-only group where we will be gathering together once a week to practice breathwork. I’ll be teaching a lot about the hows and the whys of breathwork, why it’s so helpful, and what’s important. We will be gathering weekly for breath class. Once a month, there will be a longer workshop with me that will be on different themes. The first month will be on nourishment. There’s going to be one around conscious relationships and conscious love and then one about life mastery. It’s funny to be talking about it on the show.

It’s interesting because I’m a believer as much as you are that plant medicine, breathwork, and other modalities even meditation and sometimes yoga can bring you to the same conscious level, subconscious level, or the same level of enlightenment, learning things or answers about yourself. It’s not that one is better than the other. I would love for you to describe what breathwork is and what it can do for someone.

Breathwork is probably the most powerful self-healing modality that there is out there. Self-healing modality means that you are working to repair, heal, nurture, and nourish the self without any external force because with breathwork, oftentimes, you have a guide who’s helping support you but as a modality, it’s something you can do all by yourself on your own using your body and your connection to the breath. What breathwork allows you to do is drop into the present moment, number one, which is where none of us spend much time.

Rock Bottom: Breathwork is probably the most powerful self-healing modality out there. It allows you to repair, heal, and nurture yourself without external forces.

There’s not enough time.

Honestly, the present moment is the only place that we’re ever super happy because if we’re living in the future, we’re worrying a lot. We have anxiety. We’re planning. We’re in our heads. If we’re thinking about the past, that’s never accurate. We think we remember things better or worse than what they were but if we can be in appreciation of the present moment with our body and our breath, trusting that we are safe and perfect, it’s a game-changer.

When you start doing active breath practices with these consciously connected breaths that we use in breathwork, you benefit on three levels. There’s a physical level of benefit to beginning to use your full respiratory system in a way that most people don’t. We all, as adults, move through the world, using such a small percentage of our respiratory system. We are not filling our lungs to capacity.

Our diaphragm isn’t doing what it can potentially do to bring so much more oxygen into our body, flushing more carbon dioxide. When we start doing that and using our breath to its full capacity, we have many physical benefits, including better sleep, improved digestion, increased heart rate variability, and our ability to adapt to stress in other words. We can start working with our nervous system instead of against it. There are so many physical benefits to it.

There’s also the emotional-mental, which I know you probably experienced when you were at Rythmia. We start to consciously use our breath instead of letting it happen. All day every day, we’re breathing. It’s what’s keeping us alive but we don’t think twice about it. We start thinking about our breath. Reflect on how many times in your life you’ve been stressed and someone has said to you, “Take a deep breath.”

It’s not a small thing.

You feel calm but we don’t apply that to our day-to-day life. When we’re afraid, what do we do? We hold our breath. When we do these things subconsciously because typically, it’s an unconscious decision to freeze or not take deep breaths, we’re not allowing whatever emotion it was that is coming up at that moment to fully process. When we take these full breaths and allow the emotion to work through, then the emotions can pass but if we don’t do that, the emotions get stuck. We repress them. We push them down.

It can have the same effect as many other modalities, including plant medicine. You can get massive downloads from the universe, God, or whatever it is for you. You can get clarity on past traumas and friendships. I had my grandmother visit me when I did it. I could see my third eye. It’s amazing what we can do with our bodies.

That’s the third component. I always talk about the physical, the emotional, the mental, and then the spiritual because the spiritual component and benefit of doing breathwork is the one that a lot of people don’t expect when they go into it. When you drop into that moment with your breath, you can tap into the spirit because I believe that breath is the spirit. We’re not choosing to breathe. Our body breathes us. I believe it’s because the spirit is constantly cycling in and out of us all day every day.

When we pay attention to it, we’re paying attention to the spirit. We’re paying attention to our higher selves or intuition. That’s when we can start to receive all of this wisdom that is constantly flowing to us and through us but we ignore it. Breathwork allows us to pay attention. That is one of the biggest things when it comes to breathwork that people are blown away by even as early as their first session.

It is amazing. Why not? Give it a shot if you’ve never done it before, and then you will see what we’re talking about. Your three-month breath workshop to me would be so immensely healing for all of us, whether you need healing or whether you want to tap into higher consciousness or your higher self, you have decisions you have to make in your life and you can’t figure it out, or if you don’t know what your purpose is. All of these things come into play. It can be answered through your three-month breathwork or doing breathwork in general. It’s true.

This circle is meant to be a safe container for people, whether they have practiced breathwork or not, to come in, learn about it, and be surrounded by a bunch of women that are also on the path to wanting to learn more about themselves and life. I plan to include in this container opportunity for the group to be working together. We will be doing partner exercises, getting a little bit uncomfortable, and being vulnerable. That’s important when you’re on this path and you’re starting to discover that there’s more to life than going through the motions to allow yourself to be open, to be held, and to be supported by like-minded people.

The first step too is living a life of curiosity and being curious, “What is out there about myself that I want to discover?” Life can get a little stagnant sometimes. We can all look at the glass half-full sometimes but ever since I’ve been going down this self-discovery path, everything that I’ve learned and everything I’ve experienced has blown my mind. You are one of those incredible people on the way who has helped me through some of that too. I know that you have a very interesting story.

This is Life Masters. On the show, I love talking about how people hit rock bottom and get out of it. I would love to hear your story. At one point in your life how many years ago, you were struggling with bankruptcy, alcoholism, infertility, and bulimia. Now, you have two children. You feel that it was stemming from a disconnection from your intuition and spirit, which brought you to plant medicine and all these healing modalities. Tell me about where you were then and how you got to where you are now because you are one of the most amazing people I’ve ever met.

You’re so beautiful and kind. Thank you. Had you met me years ago, you wouldn’t have the same things.

There are people out there that are where you were 15 or 20 years. I’ve been through my time like that as well. This is to help people through those times. Paint the picture. How did that all start? How old were you?

I’m a Canadian girl. I grew up in a small town in rural Ontario, Canada. I rode the same school bus on the same path from when I was in kindergarten until when I was in grade thirteen. We had grade thirteen back then in Ontario, Canada.

I grew up in the same province in Ontario. We had the same grade thirteen. We’re Canadian.

When I was in elementary school, there was a high school boy that I shared the bus with who took a shine to me. He molested me on the school bus. It started with him saying inappropriate things. Quickly, that morphed into him grabbing me, touching me, and being very inappropriate with me. I was very young at the time. I had no idea what to make of what was happening to me. Thinking back, I knew that I wanted to be saved.

I don’t think I ever went to any authorities about this. If I did, I didn’t communicate what was happening in the right way but I never did find support from any of the authority figures like the bus driver or anything like that. Not only did this molestation create a confused relationship with me about my body but also around men and sexuality. It started this story of men taking, and I let it happen but also a story that I wasn’t worth saving or protecting because I didn’t feel like I received that.

By the time I was leaving elementary school and going to high school, I was terrified of a little bit of weight that I had put on but that weight I was putting on is because I was developing into a woman. That scared me. I started starving myself. I started restricting my food intake thinking I could starve myself into becoming invisible. Maybe men wouldn’t notice me and the same type of things wouldn’t continue to happen.

I ended up in early high school losing my virginity in a very unsafe situation with a much older boy. In this day and age, you would probably label it as a date-rape scenario. There was alcohol and no consent because I was so young and didn’t know what was happening. Couple that with all the trauma I had already experienced and some other inappropriate sexual actions by people that I knew in my family around me that have only been starting to speak about with family members. I didn’t know what to do with all of these emotions that I felt like shame, guilt, fear, confusion, and anger.

In early high school, I started channeling these emotions into eating disorders. That restriction, namely, morphed into full-blown bulimia when I was around fifteen years old. Around that same time, I started drinking a lot. I was blackout drunk every single weekend. As high school progressed, my eating disorder got more serious. My family found out about it. I started seeing therapists. They put me on antidepressants but with my bulimia, I was never in an unsafe weight range where they could admit me anywhere.

In the ’90s, there wasn’t a lot of support. In a small town in Ontario, Canada, no one knew how to deal with eating disorders, so it went on. By the time I was in late high school, I was skipping classes to go and get drunk. Alcohol became a great way for me to numb all of the emotions that I didn’t know how to handle. At one point, I was trying to commit suicide. I didn’t know how to go on as a teenager.

As I finally was getting ready to leave high school, I convinced everyone around me that I was healthy enough to go off to school. I wanted to do something very different from everyone else. My whole family were teachers. I was the black sheep. I decided to go off to school and become a television director as one would but I ended up being good at TV. After two years in college in Ontario, I managed to land an internship at one of the greatest and biggest television networks still to this day in Canada. I managed to get hired. I was 21 years old when I got my first job in television.

I was super successful for a decade working in television. By the time I was 24, I was directing the number-one newscasts in the country. From the outside, it looked good but I was so still deep in my addictions. My life consisted of being good at my job and putting on a beautiful, strong, and brave face. I would go home, binge and purge multiple times a day, and then get blackout drunk every single night. That was my life. I had no time for family and relationships.

My relationships in my twenties meant I would go out to a bar around closing time, pick up a guy at coat check, bring him home, have sex with him, and then kick him out before he had his pants pulled up because part of me thought if I hurt them first, men can’t hurt me. I had no idea about intimacy and trust with men. Being in an actual relationship was a very foreign concept.

It was in my late twenties that I started to question my lifestyle mainly because I started to see my health being affected. I had threatened bone density issues that the doctors started noticing. I had precancerous dysplasia in my cervix for a number of years. By the time I was in my late twenties, I was seeing doctors, and they were telling me that I was in perimenopause as far as what my hormone panels were telling me. I had 30 cysts on my ovaries.

That is all stress, lifestyle, and believing stories that weren’t true.

I believe a lot of it was my sexual trauma. I had this sexual trauma that I never healed. It manifested in my sacral chakra or my reproductive organs. I started to question what I was doing. I discovered raw food around the time that this was starting to come to light. I started going to a lot of raw food restaurants and enjoying it. It was becoming a craze in Toronto at the time.

I ate raw vegan food, not just raw fruits and vegetables. I wasn’t eating big hunks of raw beef and stuff but raw vegan food. I noticed that energetically, I felt a little bit clearer but I also felt that when I ate raw vegan food, I didn’t need to purge it, which was a very foreign thing for me because I had gotten to a point where I was so uncomfortable having food in my system that I would always throw up. Raw vegan food started to shift things for me. Around that same time, I started to do more yoga, which is something I had dabbled in a little bit.

In and out of my late twenties, I discovered raw vegan food, fell in love with it, continued to drink heavily, and continued with all of my habits but when I was 29, I met an older man. He and I started dating. We both came into our relationship with our traumas and shared that from the beginning. I felt okay being with him because I knew he wasn’t perfect. I’m not perfect. Maybe we can be imperfect together. He was the first man to ever introduce me to the idea of us having an ego. He gave me a copy of Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now. I leafed through that.

The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment

Things started clicking but that relationship was not healthy either because of his trauma and my trauma. We had a very codependent relationship. He was controlling and emotionally abusive at times. He treated me like a goddess. Behind closed doors, because he did that, I owed him, which was the same energy that I had always carried with men in my life, “I owe men. They can take what they want.”

It was during my time with him that I did file for personal bankruptcy. It was through his convincing. I had accrued close to $50,000 worth of debt because of my addictions in the decade prior to our meeting. He had said he wanted to propose to me at some point but did not want me to bring the debt into our marriage. In December 2009, I was 29 at the time. I filed for personal bankruptcy.

It was only two months later when I was living with him under his support. He was like, “I’m going to help you while you’re bankrupt.” There were a lot of rules around being bankrupt in Canada at the time. I found out that my father was diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia, which is an early-onset of dementia. Two months after filing for personal bankruptcy in this codependent relationship, still bulimic and alcoholic, I found out my dad was dying. I had never repaired my relationship with my dad.

It was devastating for me. I was already a broken person. At that point, I was frozen. I couldn’t work anymore. I stopped working. This is when I started looking for another way of being. I quit my job in TV. I went off and did a fitness instructor certification course. I went and managed a fitness club for a while. I managed a vegan restaurant chain for a while but while this was all happening, my partner and I were having ups and downs. We planned a wedding. We ended up breaking off the engagement in an ugly breakup. He kicked me out.

On top of everything, I was also homeless, unemployed, bankrupt, bulimic, and alcoholic. The following October, I was couch surfing, living at friends’ houses, and trying to figure out my next plan. That’s when I found out that my father was given a secondary diagnosis of Lou Gehrig’s disease or ALS, which I’m sure many people know of now. It atrophies the body and the muscles.

It’s hard to come back from that.

We knew that my dad’s time was limited. That was October 2010 when we found out about ALS. I managed to get myself a job again. By Christmas that year, I had him at my little apartment. In January 2011, a year after finding out about my dad’s dementia and about over a year after my filing for personal bankruptcy, I had an uncomfortable exchange with my ex-fiancé. It led to me going home from work one night and having a big night of bulimia. I ate a whole lot of food because it was my cocaine. If I was eating, I was in euphoria. Life didn’t exist. I didn’t have to deal with my feelings. I didn’t have to face what was going on with my dad. I didn’t have to face anything. I was eating.

For me, my bulimia or my purge was about punishing myself because I didn’t think I was worthy of anything. That night, I went to purge. What I end up doing was I grabbed a twelve-inch spatula from the kitchen and put it down my throat. It ended up slipping out of my hand. I swallowed it and I ended up with a twelve-inch spatula lodged in my esophagus. On January 29th, 2011, I had to drive myself to the emergency room in downtown Toronto, go in, and tell the admitting doctor what had happened. They knew exactly what was going on.

They could see it. It was sticking out, wasn’t it? Was the handle or the end of the spatula in there as well?

The end was down my throat. The spatula part that you used to straighten the bowl had folded in on itself and gone down my throat because it was a soft silicone one. Luckily, it had lodged in a way that I could still breathe. It could have gone bad otherwise, and I wouldn’t have made it off my bathroom floor that night but I managed to drive myself to the ER.

The doctor that worked with me asked me if he could cut me open if he had to but thankfully, the next morning at 4:00 AM, I woke up coming off the morphine and all the painkillers. They had managed to pull it out via my mouth. I was swollen. I couldn’t talk. There was a lot of damage to my throat. You would think that would have been my rock bottom, Tanya.

I was thinking that it was.

A couple of days later, I was back binging, purging, and getting blackout drunk. About a month later, there was another big blow to my family. One of my nephews got sick. I watched my family navigate through that. I wasn’t very much of a support. In May of that year, about four and a half months later, my father was admitted to a hospital with pneumonia and never recovered from it.

Luckily, I was working on a reality show at the time. We were traveling across the country in Canada doing auditions. It was one of those musical audition shows. I was the associate producer. I managed to get back to Toronto on Friday in May. He died on Sunday but I managed to get there to see him and be there for him to take his last breaths.

This was rock bottom for me because I went to his funeral. We had multiple visitations. People were lined up out the door, wanting to pay respects to my father. When he was sick, I was devastated but I was terrified. I never showed up. I didn’t show up for him. I rarely went home to visit him. My mom was his primary caregiver. I ghosted. When I did get together with my family, I would get so upset, scared, terrified, and angry at myself for never having repaired my relationship with him before he got sick. I would get drunk and leave.

When he passed, that guilt and the anger at myself all rose to the surface. Being in the funeral home and seeing all these people from years ago that my dad had known or people that he had taught years ago showing up to pay their respects, it hit me that I had grown up making up this big story about how horrible my dad was. Meanwhile, he was this amazing soul that had helped so many people and touched so many lives.

People were coming to me in the line and saying, “Your dad was so proud of you.” I was thinking, “What? Me?” It was the craziest thing. The week after his funeral, I was a bit of a mess. I went to Cuba for about 4 or 5 days. The whole time I was in Cuba, I did my usual thing. I got drunk. I slept with the bartender and the security guard. All my old therapies were in full force.

One day, I was super hungover. I went and sat on the beach, looked out at the ocean, and asked the ocean. It seems crazy because back then, I didn’t have any real spiritual practice but I asked the ocean what I should do. I got this download that I need to do what I love. The only things that I loved in life were raw food and yoga. I had this realization that I needed to become a raw food chef and yoga teacher as one does.

You got that realization at that time. That’s amazing. That’s how it works.

I listened to it. I went home from that trip, walked into the executive producer’s office of the TV show I was working on, and quit. Right away, I noticed the yoga studio that was down the street from my condo. They had put a sandwich board out front announcing their inaugural yoga teacher training. I went in and chatted with the woman running the program. She offered me a discount and a payment plan, so I joined that.

Around the same time, I was going to one of my favorite raw food restaurants in Toronto all the time. I went in and told one of the chefs what was going on. She took me under her wing and started teaching me everything she knew about raw food, how to run a business, and how to teach classes. Everything started falling into place.

I wanted to say one thing there. It is so amazing and powerful because the same thing has happened to me before. When you become clear on what it is you want to do, and sometimes you’re not even clear, go to nature, the universe, or God for answers, there’s this hunch or this little spark of inspiration within you. You can make decisions. It’s amazing how when you’re walking down the right path, it starts to happen. Things come into your life that makes that intention become reality.

I’m becoming a somatic and spiritual coach like you. I hadn’t seen a course that I had resonated with until two days after I made that decision. You have all these things that happen in life. Everything is moving so smoothly because I know I’m in the flow. It’s incredible. I love hearing that it happened to you because yet again, it’s one more testament to saying, “Trust in nature. Trust in the universe. Trust in God.” Those are true. Listen to those little hunches that you get. What happened after that?

I ended up being on a bit of an acceleration program with learning all of this stuff. I was a sponge. Everyone thought I was crazy.

You left Hollywood to become a vegan chef.

Right after my dad’s funeral when I quit that job, an executive producer that I had worked with almost a decade prior on my very first TV show Breakfast Television in Toronto, Canada when I was 22 had announced that he was launching a new show in 2011. I ended up getting a floor-producing job. It’s a super chill low-stress position in this program. It was in the mornings. It gave me a great salary to support me as I continued to do all of these certifications and training.

What show was it?

It was called The Morning Show. It no longer exists.

I was on Breakfast TV. It’s so funny. I’m not sure if I was on that one. It’s so great. Our paths may have crossed before.

Breakfast Television still exists. That was my first TV show. I worked there for years. I go back and go on that show. I go on Breakfast Television to do cooking demos and stuff as a guest.

Your life started to fall into place. Things were happening, moving, and shaking. You even got away to make money while you’re taking all these courses and paying for these courses too. It’s amazing if you trust in that flow how things will start to come to you. I also believe that when you’re trying to force your life, and you’re constantly coming up against barriers, issues, this, and that, life is gently nudging you to go in a different direction.

That’s another thing that I’ve learned to listen to but I didn’t want to listen to it before. I have a question for you. At that moment that you’re at your rock bottom because there are some people out there that are going through a hard time, what would you say to them that is a step or something that they can do to get out of their rock bottom? What’s the first big step, little step, or whatever comes to you?

One of the important things about being at rock bottom is acknowledging that you’re there. It’s funny. If you would ask me back then, my answer would be very different. I automatically want to say, “When you’re in those moments, it’s taking a step back and seeing what’s there for you and what’s rich in that darkness because it’s in those moments that we get to begin to examine our lives and what brought us there.” If we can’t acknowledge our participation in bringing us to these rock bottom moments, then we can’t begin to dig ourselves out. We have to acknowledge, “I’m the only one that brought me here.”

We can blame everyone else, “It’s not my job. It’s because I grew up in this neighborhood. It’s because I was molested. It was because of this.” You made the choices on how you responded to all of life’s circumstances. This is coming from me. I’m quite privileged as a White woman sitting here and speaking. Other people are less so. They might be living a lifelong rock bottom. If you weren’t always in that place, how did you get there? If you were a part of getting you there, how can you start to get yourself out?

At least, how can you see a lesson in your current circumstance? There always is. I already said at some point that I knew as I was sleeping with men and treating them like crap, it was a protection mechanism that I had because of the little hurt girl deep inside of me. I brought that on. It was a tool that I had used to protect myself but I know that I created it. No one else made me that way. No one else made me abuse my body that way. That’s an important part.

It’s getting out of the victim mentality, which is a step that I write about in my book too. It’s big time but it is hard to admit that you are in your victim mentality. It’s hard to get out of rock bottom if you’re still in a victim mentality. It won’t happen. That is a massive step in the right direction. If there was something that someone could have done for you in those moments, what do you wish someone could have said or done? I don’t mean anything like, “Take me out of it and do magic.” Realistically, in those moments, what is a small thing that somebody could have done to nudge you?

I would have appreciated having someone that understood where I was, especially with my eating disorder. Eating disorders weren’t talked about much then. I have known and noticed that when I find other people that have carried that burden the way that I have, we can relate. The validation that I’m not the only one is so helpful. A lot of my coaching clients come to me because they hear me talk so candidly about my eating disorder.

A lot of people that are sick don’t want to admit, “I used to vomit in a five-gallon pail and hide it in my closet for a week at a time.” I sure did. I’ve said that to people and then I’ve had them say, “I used to do that too.” As a teenager, I thought, “I’m the only gross and disgusting person that would be vomiting in a pail and hiding it in my closet,” but there are other people out there too. Instead, most people that knew that I was in trouble treated me like there was something wrong with me. There was something wrong with me but they look at me as if there was something wrong with me.

That you’re different. With all that, what would you say saved you? What was that pinnacle moment or thing that saved you? You’re sitting on the beach, and you got that download. That would be a massive moment. What are some other things that you think saved you and kept you on the trajectory going upwards?

It’s having a purpose because I realized that my life on television wasn’t helping anyone. I was working in the news industry for the most part. What was I doing? I was spreading scary and fear-filled messages all day every day. Seeing my father and the purpose that he had in the world and the impact that he had, something lit up inside of me knowing, “I am of him. I am my dad. That must exist in me too.” I didn’t feel like I got the help that I needed, so I wanted to be the one to help others.

That has changed your entire life. That is what you do. Moving forward, let’s talk about what you do now.

I live in Costa Rica before it was cool to move to Costa Rica. Everyone is moving to Costa Rica now. Less than two years after I started doing all of this raw food and yoga stuff in Toronto, I came on vacation here in Costa Rica to a retreat center and hit it off with the owners. They ended up offering me a job because they were looking to hire someone to teach raw food and yoga retreats. I moved down here in 2013, sold off everything, moved down here with a backpack as a single woman at 32, and made that my life’s work.

I ended up marrying a Costa Rican man. We fell in love. We were both alcoholics because I was still an alcoholic. He and I created a catering and wellness business. We were catering yoga retreats. We had a bakery. I started hearing about plant medicine and discovered breathwork. It was down here in late 2016 that I discovered breathwork and went on to become a breathwork facilitator because it was a powerful modality that helped me heal a lot of the anger that I felt toward men.

I heard about this place called Rythmia. In June 2016, I signed on there as the chef. I was still running my catering business, traveling to Canada, the US, and all over the place, cooking for people, going into Rythmia once a month, and training staff on recipes and things like that but it was late 2016 after joining them that I started sitting with plant medicine. It has changed my life.

There are still people that think I’m nuts. People think you’re nuts but if you don’t give something a try or you don’t try something, then you can’t judge it. Try something before judging it. What was it like the first time you did plant medicine?

My very first time, it was not much of anything. It was me and six people. I lay there the whole night going in and out of sleep, “What’s the big deal? People pay a lot of money for this?” I didn’t have much of an experience but then in the following days, I started to notice that I was feeling a little bit different. I was responding to the world a little bit differently. I kept going back. I realize now that early on, my ceremonies were all chipping away at my wounds, the reasons why I was bulimic, and the reasons why I drank because I was still fully in those addictions when I started in the plant medicine path.

It was at the end of 2017 that I went into one super powerful plant medicine ceremony with a medicine called iboga. I went in there with the intention of finally cutting my addiction to alcohol because I was physically addicted. With my work with ayahuasca, I was starting to heal the wounds and the reason why I drank. It was a numbing agent but I was physically addicted. I couldn’t go a day without having alcohol in my system. I sat with iboga on October 28th, 2017. After a 30-hour treacherous, terrifying, and painful physical detoxification, I came out sober. I have not had a drop of alcohol since.

It’s incredible. You’re not the first person I’ve heard that story happen to. The power of this medicine is incredible, and what a gift it is and how we have been so disillusioned. We have been told to make it the enemy and that it’s evil. It’s not. It’s a gift.

It’s such a gift. I have no maintenance plan other than my daily practice. I’m not in meetings. I don’t have to do anything. My partner can have a beer in the house. I have no desire to drink because the reasons why I drink no longer exist. I don’t fear myself. I don’t hate myself. I don’t want to numb my feelings. It’s crazy because I didn’t realize that all of those years when I was numbing myself with alcohol, I was numbing my ability to be sad.

I was numbing my sadness and my grief but I was also numbing my ability to feel joy, be exhilarated, and all of that stuff. Getting sober was this whole new phase of getting to know me. In 2018, after I finally got sober, the medicine ayahuasca was like, “We’re ready to do the work.” I started having surgeries on the medicine, aliens visiting me, and a lot of focus on my womb. I had a lot of energy healing around my womb sitting in the ceremony.

In late 2018, I declared it on social media because if you don’t declare it on social media, it’s not real. I had declared that I was never going to be a mother. I was 37 and a half. People are always asking me when am I going to settle down and have kids. I was like, “I don’t want kids. I’m a mother through what I do through nourishing people and teaching breathwork and yoga. I hold my mother archetype through the work that I do.”

You were struggling with infertility for many years. There’s that. You didn’t even know if you could get pregnant.

That was a big part of it because I had come to believe that I couldn’t have kids because of what the medical field had told me. It was much easier for me to say, “I don’t want them anyway.” I don’t want someone to tell me what I can and can’t do, so I’m going to tell myself that I don’t want them but then I ended up having a pretty powerful ceremony. I went into a local tattoo shop to get a tattoo as a memory of a plant medicine ceremony that I had.

The owner of this tattoo shop was this handsome red-haired Canadian fellow. I was divorced from my first husband at this point. I was separating. We were working on a divorce. I ended up going on a date with this guy. His name was Levi. On our first date, we were both going through divorces. We were both like, “Do you ever want to get married again?” I was like, “No.” He said no. I said, “Do you ever want to have kids?” He’s like, “No.” I’m like, “Me neither. I can’t.” He’s like, “I can’t either.”

That’s interesting.

Two months later, we found out we were pregnant with my daughter who is now three and a half years old. I won’t go into the details about why and how but I do know that the medicine was a huge part in bringing her to us and making it possible. He had a medical reason why he didn’t think he would have kids as did I, yet there we were at 38, naturally conceiving this beautiful and perfect daughter. My sobriety and my daughter are the biggest miracles I could ever have imagined.

That all happened in a matter of a few years too when you started that medicine. You could have children. Your alcoholism was gone. It’s erased from your DNA. It’s amazing.

Right after my daughter, I started drinking and working with the medicine even more because it was after her birth that the medicine told me, “You have to work with me now.” I started helping support ceremonies. Soon after that, I started feeling the energy of another little baby that kept visiting me on the medicine. It’s a little boy. We started trying to conceive.

A year and a half later after three miscarriages and a lot of lessons and learning about why the miscarriages had to happen from a spiritual standpoint, my son would come to me and tell me that we would get pregnant with him. He would notice something that I needed to heal so that he would leave so that I could heal it before he would come in and allow me to bring him into full gestation. We got pregnant with my son in October 2021.

That’s so adorable. He is beautiful.

He’s a little medicine baby.

You have this beautiful family. You’re happier than ever. You’re vegan. You eat very healthily. You take care of your health. You’re no longer suffering from any of those things that once trapped you long ago. You now help people in many different ways. You’re a coach. You have medicine circles that you do. Tell me a little bit about what you do. I have a little special video I want to show you too of Meghan’s work. It’s pretty awesome.

I am not vegan. I was for a long time. Now, I subscribe to my body and whatever my body wants and needs. I eat what I need. I’m under the understanding that our bodies are cyclical. As we move through different phases of life, our bodies and needs shift, ebb, and flow. I help guide a lot of my clients that I work with to this understanding that we don’t have to put ourselves in a box when it comes to how we’re eating because the minute we do that, we’re setting ourselves up for disappointing ourselves.

Undieting is a big part of what I teach. While continually working with plant medicine, I have a business where I work with clients one-on-one virtually for the most part. People come to me for all different things. People come to me because they hear my story and they feel like they can relate because they have an alcohol or an eating disorder, or they’re being called to medicine.

I call it spiritual coaching or alignment coaching. I help people get into their perfect alignment so that they can move through life in the most optimal way from a physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual standpoint. We focus on nutrition. We focus on becoming a daily channel with spirits. How can I start to embody medicine, the energy of God, and the energy of spirits in my day-to-day life?

I work with people that want to want to learn how to do that. I help people that are curious about plant medicine to help them prepare if they’re like, “I’ve been called. I don’t know what medicine to do. I’ve been called to do ayahuasca. What do I need to do to prepare? How do I set an intention?” Post-medicine, I have a lot of people that want guidance on how to integrate the wisdom and information they receive after the use of psychedelics into their day-to-day life. I use breathwork as a tool across the board with all of these different clients because breathwork works to bring to the surface that which needs to be seen and healed.

If we have issues around food, it’s emotional. If we have issues with connecting to God or spirits, there are some emotional things holding us back. If we have trauma, all of this stuff can be accessed and start to be rearranged and transmuted through breathwork. I use breathwork with most of my clients. I’m offering things like these virtual breath circles. I’m going to be doing in-person retreats where I’m going to be teaching all of these things that I’ve learned on my path and all of the things that I’ve been learning from spiritual teachers, shamans, intuitive, and my guides.

I’m going to be teaching other people how to use them or apply them to their lives but in a very accessible way. I know my audience. I come from corporate and television. I know that the language that the spiritual community uses is not user-friendly to the average person, especially those coming from a corporate background. I try to make spirituality simpler.

Let’s talk a little bit about the retreat that’s coming up. Do you want to talk about the breathwork one in April and then the plant medicine one in December, or whichever one you want to tell us about? I’m so excited about both of them.

The first thing I’ve got going on is the Breathe Alchemy Circle. What we’re going to do is breathe alchemy. What is alchemy? We’re alchemizing, transmuting, and changing what needs to be brought to light. We’re bringing the shadows into the light. We’re excavating, digging deep, and tuning into the truth of who we are by using breathwork as a tool. It is a three-month container from April to June. It’s women only for this round. It’s going to be an opportunity for people that are new to breathwork or people that love breathwork and know it. They just don’t make time and space for it.

It’s going to be an opportunity to gather with a small private group of women for weekly breath classes over three months of monthly workshops. We’re going to have a private community in an easy-to-use app where we will be able to stay in touch, talk, and be sounding boards for each other through the course of three months. It’s virtual. This is available to people anywhere in the world.

What I have found with a lot of my breathwork clients because I do a lot of them virtually, especially those that are new to breathwork, is doing it virtually allows a little extra bumper. There’s a security blanket to doing it through Zoom or doing it virtually because it can be scary to allow yourself to be vulnerable.

Breathwork does open you up. Doing it through a computer screen for a lot of people feels safer than having someone there in your space. I’m hoping that this is going to be a powerful tool for people to learn about breathwork and hopefully make it a more regular practice because this is a tool that you can use anytime anywhere. It doesn’t cost a thing once you learn the basics.

Rock Bottom: Doing breathwork virtually offers a security blanket to people. It can be less scary to be vulnerable when you’re doing it through a computer screen.

I do recommend always being facilitated and guided for a while before you start trying to do breathwork on your own because a lot can come up. You want to know how to support yourself. This three-month container is a way for people to start to understand what breathwork is for them. That’s what’s happening from April to June 2023. I’ll be taking reservations for that until I cap. I don’t want too many people. I don’t want a huge group but probably through March, I’ll still be taking spots for that and offering these twice a year. It’s the idea. There will probably be another one in the fall but this one is happening from April through June.

Later in 2023 from December 2nd to December 9th, I’m offering my first soul medicine retreat here in Costa Rica. It is not plant medicine. It’s going to be all the medicines outside of plant medicine. It’s going to be food medicine, yoga medicine, breathwork medicine, dance medicine, and workshopping. There are going to be sound journeys and cacao ceremonies.

Everything but plant medicine and all of the things that I have found to be so healing for myself, my clients, and the people I’ve worked with over the last decade, I’m going to be incorporating into this. It’s going to be at a place called Roca Mistica here outside of Tamarindo, Costa Rica. It’s seven acres of beautiful land. It’s brand new and renovated. They have renovated it. There are brand new rooms. They’re putting in a brand new maloca as we speak. It’s going to be ready in about a month’s time.

We’re going to be it using for all of our ceremonies. There’s a restaurant on site. We’re going to have an amazing chef there catering to a huge pool. There are tons of space for privacy so people can be with the group and go off and have time for themselves to integrate. I’m going to be bringing in a lot of amazing support to help with teaching, supporting, and facilitating.

It’s going to be life-changing. The place itself is incredible. To be able to do some healing for yourself in that atmosphere with you is incredible. This is huge. This is incredible. If there’s anyone out there that’s looking for a vacation and you want to go to Costa Rica, why not do some big-time self-healing and either go to Meg’s workshop before or after your trip? It’s beautiful.

We’re going to be five minutes from the beach. There is going to be lots of free time on the schedule for hanging out by the pool. I’m scheduling some days where we will go down to the beach in the morning and connect with nature. It will be a beautiful combination of personal development work, self-healing, rest, and rejuvenation. I’m going to be offering these hopefully a couple of times a year in various areas. I’ve already got a retreat in Canada coming in the works. I don’t know the timelines on that or anything yet but we’re going to be doing them a lot because I’m leaving Cost Rica.

You’re leaving Costa Rica. You’re going to Canada. Talk about that for a minute.

I’m about to do the scariest thing I’ve ever done. I’ve gone through a lot but the scariest thing I’ve ever done is I’m going to move my family of four and my dog. After a decade of living down here, I’m bringing them all back up to Canada. We’re moving. We have decided to at least temporarily close the chapter of life here in Costa Rica where both my children were born.

They’re both Costa Rican citizens. They’re dual citizens, Canadian-Costa Ricans. We will move to be closer to family. I’m going to be devoting a lot more time and energy to my online work, clients, and retreats in the future. I’m planning to come back to Costa Rica at least a few times a year. My kids deserve it. I’ll be making myself a lot more available for one-on-one work and group programs. I’m excited about that.

Anyone who gets to work with you is truly blessed. I stand by your teachings. Anyone who chooses you as a coach is making the right decision. You’re incredible. You have so much experience. It’s a gift. You are a gift, Meg.

You are a gift.

Thank you. I would love to come to your retreat in December 2023. I’m looking forward to that. Maybe OT, and I will show up and do it along with you. We will do all the breathwork and everything else that you said. It will be super fun. Thank you for taking the time. I know how busy you are. Thank you for coming to the show. We will catch up soon.

Thank you so much for having me. I love you. I love how we have so many similarities in our path with Canada, TV, and trying something new. I’m excited for you to be part of my life as things unfold and to watch you and your new path with somatic coaching. It’s exciting. I’m so happy for you.

Thank you. I can’t wait to see all of the retreats and how you flourish in Canada as well, which I know you will. Thanks for coming to the show. I’ll talk to you soon.

I love you.

I love you too.

 Important Links

• Rythmia
• Meg Pearson
• The Power of Now
• Breathe Alchemy Circle
• Roca Mistica

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