About Robin Giacomo

At 17, I experienced an event so large it literally took my breath away. For the next 19 years, I floundered and flourished as I attempted to find ground and freedom again. I relied on anger, alcohol, and limiting beliefs to survive and cope.

In 1999, our first daughter, Olivia, was born. Stella, our second, was born two years later. The momentous thrust of parenting demanded so much of me. I sensed intuitively those vital coping mechanisms were no longer healthy for me or our lineage. I just didn’t have all the tools to transmute them yet.

Fortunately, in 2003 I discovered Bikram yoga. Yoga satiated my love of movement and intensity. Not only did I become more aware of my body, but I started to catch my breath. I didn’t realize I’d been holding it for so long.

Four years later, my mom died, and what I now know to be an awakening force woke me up even more. It led me to deepen my yogic practices and studies, and in 2008, I completed my first yoga certification from a month-long live-in training at Kripalu Center For Yoga & Health.

Initially, as a member of Westchester Medical Center’s integrative team, I offered yoga to children with cancer and their caregivers. I then went on to create Yoga for Mamas and Grow Yoga – themed adult yoga classes curated to accelerate our embodiment and nobility off the mat.

By 2011, I was basically behaving as a mother and yoga teacher. Some of my top-down parenting, ‘unexplained’ rage, and alcohol use caused shameful internal rumblings about how I was showing up as a mother, sister, and teacher.

For the next six years, I worked with a life coach. I learned to consciously create my life, take accountability for my actions, and examine and reframe old destructive thoughts and behaviors. I constructively transmuted my anger, crafted apologies and delivered them to those I harmed, and got sober.

I became certified as a practitioner life coach in just under two years – quite a feat as only three out of twenty trainees completed the program. The rigors of ‘cleaning up’ many of my life areas positively changed the way I related to myself and the world. I became more of a leader in my life.

In 2017, I was introduced to holotropic breathwork as part of my teacher’s emotional intelligence curricula. Suddenly, the breaths I merely caught in yoga became real – open, flowing, and full.  I felt years of suppressed grief, residual trauma, transgressions, domination, and submissiveness release from my body. Space opened for more love, kindness, inspiration, and creativity. I began to radically yield to my life and live in dynamic peace, even as my outer life changed completely.

Four years later, I completed a 400-hour trauma-informed breathwork training from Alchemy of Breath, an internationally accredited breathwork school. I knew I had to share conscious breathing with others, either independently or combined with yoga or coaching work. As I did, they, too, developed the inner resources  to make adaptive choices. Their renewed self-trust, confidence, and relational skills enlivened them in even more fresh and beautiful ways. Witnessing these transformations, remains a pinnacle of this work.

Now, in the autumn of my life and flowering, I’ve come to understand that my years of hardship were vital for my self-cultivation and life’s calling. I see it all as service to the whole. Best of all, I feel the wonder around me again. My free-spiritedness from childhood is making a magical reappearance.

I’d love to see yours bloom, too.