Today we’d like to introduce you to Brittany Rios

Hi Brittany, we’re thrilled to have a chance to learn your story today. So, before we get into specifics, maybe you can briefly walk us through how you got to where you are today?

I am very honored to be able to give voice to my story and my journey following my last interview with the Bold Journey. My story was about my mental and emotional health journey, my battles with depression and anxiety and what has helped me heal, move on, manage and understand myself better….aw what it takes to be a better functioning human.
How did this journey start? I don’t really know how far back to go to be honest, as this has been a life long learning and unlearning process, but I think the most profound and most transformational part of this journey happened post pandemic.
It is safe to say that that was an intense period of time for all of humanity and we all suffered on one level or another, but I was faced with myself and all the things I still didn’t want to confront on a very hardcore level during that time. I was laid off from my job three days into lockdown, lived with two roommates who were challenging to deal with, separated from my then partner, trapped in the middle of Madrid, estranged from pretty much my whole family and, well, we all know what else was happening on a global level at that time. I threw myself into doing, even though there was nothing to do, no schedule, no place I needed to be, but I was not going to let that stop me, I was going to be “productive,” as was my MO when I was faced with a difficult situation.
For the first month I still prepped my food like I was going to work, worked out the best I could in an apartment, threw online events, took all the webinars, master classes and workshops I could find, inhaled more media than anyone should, decided I would be the best roommate I could be and, for a while, it worked. At that point in my life I was well into my healing journey and had a lot more tools than when I had started, but I was still obsessed with reading, learning and knowing more about all healing-related subjects, I couldn’t get enough. I was still very much in the doing instead of integrating stage of my journey; all that learning and studying made me feel like I was doing something, but really it was just my way of avoiding what was actually inside me.
All the classes I was interested in were revolved around healing, generational trauma, meditation, breathwork, feelings, emotional intelligence, anything I could get my hands on. I thought to myself, “Let’s really dig deep. What else are we going to do right now?” Oh and did I dig deep, so deep that I threw myself into the beginnings of a depression, but didn’t really know until it was too late.
Long story short, I overdid it, but I mean, way overdid it. I dug up so much all at one time that couldn’t handle it all. I was completely overwhelmed, felt totally alone, didn’t know where to turn for help and couldn’t handle the weight of it all. I was just this giant exposed nerve, so sensitive, in so much pain, so scared and could do nothing but sit in my apartment and face it all. Why had I done this to myself? Well, there is no good answer to explain this insanity, so I guess it is just what needed to happen, even though looking back I fully recognize that I could have gone slower. Hindsight is always 20/20, right?
I remember waking up one morning and I could not get out of bed, I just laid there because I knew it didn’t matter if I got up or not. I remember thinking, “life literally makes no sense and has no meaning right now. I can try to make sense out of it, but the truth is, this situation is nuts. The global situation, your personal situation, everything….totally and completely nuts.” I felt helpless, lost, completely bogged down by the weight of it all and I lost my will for everything. I didn’t want to try, read, watch, listen to, join online anything, talk, work out, nothing anymore. It was the beginning of something bad, I could feel it, but was powerless against it. So the wave came and it took me with it.
Summer 2020 my boss called and said she needed me back to work; I had only been laid off temporarily so I was happy to have something, anything to do that was outside the house. Little did I know that this was only going to add fuel to my half lit fire. Mask on, I went back to work and tried to resume “normal” life, but all my inner turmoil was still there. I was happy at first to feel useful again, have other human contact, although at a distance, and get back to my life, but it wasn’t long after that the panic attacks started.
Life, everything about life, was hard for me. Trying to deal with people coming from abroad because I was a TEFL trainer at the time, (TEFL is a certification people get to teach English), constant travel constraint changes, teaching with a mask on, being overworked because we had less staff, trying to get back to having some normalcy with my boyfriend who I hadn’t seen in 4 months, the fear that seemed to just hang in the air everywhere you went and the list goes on. It was a lot on an already stressed out nervous system. I would white knuckle through the week, a feeling I had felt a few times before, and then have an episode as soon as Friday came, then would spend the weekends recovering, all to do it again come Monday. Almost no one knew except my then partner who saw the worst of it.
There was a day that I looked at myself in the mirror and couldn’t recognize the person staring back at me and it was then that I knew I needed help. The first time in my life that I could actually admit to myself that I was not ok and I needed to do something. All the weight from what I was trying to process in the present mixed with all the stuff from the past that I had been carrying and then dug up so abruptly was just crushing me. Nothing I knew that I would normally have used to help myself worked, nothing made me feel better. So, I went to my doctor and told her what was happening. First we tried anti-anxiety medication, the first time in my life I went on this kind of medication because I was so scared of becoming dependent, but really I was afraid of needing anything or anyone to be ok, so it was a huge step for me. After about a week or two the panic attacks stopped, but them stopping only made room for the depression that was waiting just below the surface. So, back to the doctor I went and we changed my meds to anti-depressants, also a first for me. It took about 6 months to “feel normal,” and I thought that was enough, so what did I do? I told my doctor I was fine and that I could go off my meds. Wrong! We did it gradually, but my body still freaked out and I went into an even deeper depression, which, also long story short, resulted in my quitting my trainer job and starting, what I thought would be a chiller job since I would be working from home, but then losing that job, being left by my partner and losing my apartment because I couldn’t pay rent anymore. When life wants you to stop, it will force you to do it one way or another and boy did it stop me dead in my tracks.
I am currently finishing a book on this whole story, but if I had to answer where am I today after all this? Well, I am slowly recovering, learning to treat myself with my love, kindness, patience and compassion, 2 years off medication and taking an entirely new approach to life. I have had to do it differently, do literally everything differently because my previous methods were most literally crushing my soul. Sounds dramatic, but that is exactly what it felt like.
After all that loss that I experienced, which happened in the span of a month—July 2021 was rough, I went to an ashram in Portugal and it was there that I got the first rest, real rest, I had ever had in my life. Sounds very Eat, Pray Lovish I am sure, but that place saved my life, no joke, no exaggeration. I don’t know what would have become of me without that place and the people I met there.
It was there that the real healing started, where I learned the importance and necessity of community, help, support, routine and something to lean on, where I learned how to get back into my body and out of my head and where I got to truly reset so that I could start again.
Today I can confidently say that I am doing well. I have some good friends, activities that bring me joy, my little apartment, a job I like and my relationship with myself continues to deepen and become more beautiful all the time.

I would just like to mention that the emotional and mental struggles that people faced during the pandemic are not as talked about as they should be. Not just after the pandemic, they aren’t talked about enough period. I hope to start more of a conversation about that and help people recognize for a moment how hard it was on so many levels and for everyone. It was an opportunity to wake up, but that doesn’t mean that it didn’t come with a lot of hardship that deserves space to be felt and released.

I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?

Smooth road? Haha! Not in any way shape or form. but that is the beauty of the road of life, right? It comes with its twists and turns, uphill climbs, downhill falls and sometimes even some calm straight stretches; every part is there to show us exactly where we are and what we are made of. Sometimes you can charge up that mountain with all your power and other times you just gotta stop and take a rest for a while. I used to get frustrated when I had to stop and do some reassessment, reflection or change course, but I now see the value of slowing down, listening to my body and trusting more.

Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?

I have worked in education since I left university, changed roles many times, but always in education. I am now working in higher education, which I really like, and manage a bachelor program at a private business school. Along with this I am a yoga, meditation and, soon to be, somatic therapist.
I think what I am most proud of is that since allowing myself to be my authentic self no matter where I am, I have been able to bring my love of well-being into the work place even though it isn’t my specific role. I have done corporate yoga and meditation classes, led breathwork workshops for staff and students and am getting ready to start a new yoga intiative at the current university I work at.
Something very valuable that I learned at the ashram from one of the founders was when he told me that people who do these kinds of practices/work, the yoguis, the dancers, the meditators, the breathwork people, the healers,the artisits, that it is great when we are all together in a forest, however what we do is needed in the big cities,too. We have a responsibility to offer it and be it wherever we go, even if it is just by being our authentic selves, because that gives people the permissions to be themselves, too. I thought that was really beautiful and I do my best to live by that.

What matters most to you?

If it isn’t evident by now, my deepest passion in life is mental and emotional health. Why is it important? Because I am a person who has struggled with both and knows the toll it can take on the human mind, heart, body and soul when you don’t know what is happening to you, why you feel the way you feel, have no help and have no tools to deal with it that are useful and effective.
We all deserve a little peace and self understanding, however the fields related to healing, really healing, not just medicating, are still very underresearched and underinvested in, which I hope changes. I do love that there is more space to talk about such things nowadays, though. I am 39 and even when I was growing up such things were not noraml topics of conversation, so just think about the older generations. So much is left to be discovered and normalized, but with courage and with speaking out, change is possible, healing is possible and maybe one day it won’t be so shameful to say, “Hey, I am not ok and I need help.” That is my wish for the world.

Contact Info:

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