From Claustrophobia to Healing: Releasing 39 Years of Trapped Emotions

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I almost left before it even started.

Last week, I was deep in the Costa Rica jungle at a retreat hosted by Maryn Azoff — one that promised to teach me how to REALLY use my voice. Not just say the words “use your voice” like I’ve been doing for years, but to actually, truly use it.

I thought I knew what that meant. I’ve built my entire mission around it. Wrote a book about it. Talk about it on my podcast. The words are literally in neon lights in my podcast studio. I teach it in OVARA. But this experience? It changed everything I thought I understood.

The drive from San Jose to the retreat center was four hours on winding roads, taking us deeper and deeper into the jungle. With every mile, something rose in my chest. Panic. Anxiety. My breath getting shorter and shorter — a feeling I recognized immediately. One I’ve had so many times in my life.

Claustrophobia.

By the time we arrived, I was already planning my escape.

Here’s the wild part: the retreat center was absolutely breathtaking. Like heaven brought down to earth just for us. No photo could ever really capture it, but here are a couple so you can get a sense:

The people who were there were so lovely. Kind, warm, safe. I should have felt at ease. But the uneasy feeling remained. Actually, it got worse. The tightness in my chest got heavier with each passing hour. I felt my body rejecting this piece of heaven with every breath I took.

All I kept thinking was: I’ve got to get out of here. I’ve got to get out of here.

So I did what any rational person in the middle of paradise would do – I started Googling other places to stay. Maybe somewhere by the ocean instead. Somewhere I could see for miles and miles and…breathe. Somewhere the trees weren’t closing in on me. Somewhere I didn’t feel so trapped.

Then I found out some DEVASTATING news. I was told there was no coffee.

I mean, none. Zero. Nada. That about did me in.

I hadn’t prepared my body for no caffeine, so the migraine headache started almost immediately on the first full day there. And it was intense. Like, curl-up-in-a-ball-and-pray-for-death intense. Oh, and I also developed a bad cough and chest cold, because apparently my body decided to fully revolt against this whole experience.

So there I was: claustrophobic, migraine, sick, no coffee, and trapped in what everyone else kept calling paradise. I was miserable with a capital M.

I asked Nikki, the retreat organizer, if I could leave. She and Maryn came to my cabin and sat with me. They listened. They held space. But they didn’t let me run. Instead, they brought me tea, a meal and…their hearts to hold space for me.

The next day I woke up with the same feelings…but even more intense.

I asked again. “Please, I just need to get out of here.” They came back to my cabin. Sat with me again.

It was this second visit that changed everything.

“I feel trapped,” I told them through tears. “Claustrophobic. I just need to get out of here. Please. Please get me out of here.”

But these weren’t normal tears. They were guttural. The kind that come from somewhere so deep you didn’t even know it existed. The kind that your body has been holding onto for decades, waiting for permission to finally release.

Nikki and Maryn didn’t try to talk me out of my feelings. They didn’t try to convince me the jungle was beautiful or that I should just relax and enjoy it. Instead, they held this beautiful, sacred space for me and guided me through some somatic work to find the source of this trapped feeling.

And then, it was shown to me.

The moment I wrote about in my book Dancing in the Rain. The one where my older brother Cory badly beat me up in our farm kitchen when I was 12 years old.

Sitting in that jungle cabin, 39 years later, I felt it all over again. Not being able to escape his anger. His fists. Not being able to leave. The suffocating feeling of being cornered with nowhere to go. The absolute terror of being trapped.

That’s what the jungle was triggering in me. Not the trees. Not the isolation. But the memory – the cellular memory – of being trapped in that kitchen with no way out.

Maryn held me while I sobbed. Deep, heaving sobs that came from that 12-year-old girl who couldn’t escape. I cried for Cory. I cried for me. I cried for all the years I’d spent trying to make sense of that moment and all the ways it had shaped how I moved through the world.

And when all the sobbing finally stopped, I felt something shift in my body. My whole body relaxed in a way I don’t think it ever had before. And then I felt it – a deep breath leaving my body. A breath I didn’t even know I was holding.

It was an old breath. One that had been trapped in there since I was 12 years old. Thirty-nine years of holding my breath, waiting to escape, waiting to be safe. That breath was full of pain. Sadness. Confusion. Fear.

And now? It was out.

After that happened, everything felt different. Where the trees once felt suffocating, now they felt like a big giant hug. The jungle wasn’t trapping me anymore. It was holding me. Protecting me. Giving me exactly what I needed to finally release what I’d been carrying all these years.

I stayed. Obviously, I stayed.

And what happened after that? Well, that’s a story for next week. But here’s a little teaser: I sang. A full song. In front of living, breathing human beings. And I didn’t die.

Actually, something in me came alive in a way I’ve never experienced before.

(More on that next week. Trust me, you’re going to want to hear this one.)

Here’s what I know now: I thought I understood what it meant to use my voice. I’ve been saying it for years. I’ve written about it. Talked about it. Built an entire community around it.

But this experience showed me something I’d been missing. At 51 years old, I finally understand the power my voice holds. The healing my voice holds – for myself and for others.

When we use our voice, we don’t just speak words. We release what’s been trapped. We exhale what we’ve been holding. We free ourselves from the corners we’ve been backed into, sometimes for decades.

That’s the real work. And I can’t wait to tell you more about it in part two.