Mary Van Alstyne is breathing from a jar when the interview begins. A very small one, the kind a message gets rolled into, with a handwritten label in soft pink and grey crystals of salt inside, something that could have come off an apothecary shelf. She made it herself, with essential oils, the day she set an intention. "This is like an anchor," she says.
It is raining where she lives, weeks before the heat is supposed to break, and she sounds pleased about it. A few days earlier she had been walking to her office to work on a project when she saw the first drops. "I decided to make a detour to the backyard and take in this beautiful moment," she wrote afterward. "I sat on the patio, put my feet up on the table, took a deep breath and just existed in the moment."
Green and red hummingbirds shook rain off their wings and settled in the tree. Sun came through the clouds while the rain kept falling. "What a beautiful sight to see sunshine and rain existing together." The pool threw small waves of light onto the sun shades until she went slack watching them, and then she noticed how much she loves the smell of rain.
The old voice spoke up once. You have a deadline, shouldn't you go get started? She answered it out loud. "I will, when I am done taking this all in, there's no rush."
Two years ago the sentence would have been impossible. She used to brag, and the word is hers, that she got more done by 8 AM than most people did in two days. A mother of four who rose through corporate sales for real estate brokerages and title companies, she coached other reps to be more efficient, which meant more like her.
The compliment came in one shape for thirty years. I don't know how you do it all. She remembers the proud smile it produced, and there is something sad in her face as she says the sentence now, a tightness in how she gets it out. "An activated nervous system," she says, naming what was underneath the smile. "This false identity, this mask, this persona that I was building my life around, which was a woman who had the capacity to handle, and do, and always be what everybody needed me to be. Think ten steps ahead on everything."
“I don't know how you do it all.”
The easy version of this story has a woman who ran too hard, broke, and found stillness. Mary's version has her finding stillness first and using it to run harder.
In 2020 the world stopped and she could not. She went deep into meditation and breathwork during the shutdown and told herself she could never go back to the old pace. The world reopened. She went back, and now she had tools.
"I wasn't doing the meditation in order to reach a space of stillness," she says, and the line seems to take her own breath for a second. "I was doing it in order to bypass." Breathwork became the thing that got her to the next level of go, go, go.
“I wasn't doing the meditation in order to reach a space of stillness. I was doing it in order to bypass.”
She had been doing a version of this since she was nineteen. A mother at seventeen, out of high school, raising her son alone, she worked third shift as a specimen processor at SonoraQuest Laboratories, tended bar, and took gig work as a roadie for a company that built concert stages.
Days were the harder shift. Two hours of sleep, the baby, the scramble for whoever could watch him during the next job. She would put on Teletubbies, lie on the floor beside him, and sleep while he watched. She tells it plainly, a mother doing what she could, with only a trace of shame in it. "And then on to the next thing."
"It was always a pushing," she says. "Oh, this hurts, I don't have time for that. And slowly, slowly, slowly, I began to move up out of, like, disembody." The skill had a method, and she can name it. "The hustle knew how to override any cues from the body. Detach from the body, and live in the mind, so that you can keep going."
“The hustle knew how to override any cues from the body.”
The method was older than her son. Her father served two tours in Vietnam with the Air Force and married her mother while stationed in Korea. Within two years her mother was in a new country with two children and no English, and her father carried the war home with him.
The house was unpredictable. "I learned very young to read a room, to sense who was walking through the door, what mood they were bringing, and how I needed to respond to feel safe," she wrote. Some nights she hid with her brother. Other nights she tried to make peace between the adults and got caught in the middle. "As a child, I only knew that I wanted everyone to be okay, and somehow felt it was my responsibility to make that happen."
Her mother worked without stopping, bagging groceries at the military commissary, doing hair, hosting makeup parties. The daughter watched. "I always thought, if I could be that, then that's how I receive love."
In 2024, two hip surgeries, back to back, took the method away. She went on medical leave for the first time in her working life. Cleaning had been her release under stress, and now she could not stand. Study had been the other, and the anesthesia had left her unable to hold a thought to its end.
She spent those weeks on a grey leather couch that was never comfortable, a CPM machine and an ice therapy unit buzzing beside her, bundled in equipment she could not get out of without help. She has never liked television, so she stared out the window at the reflections in the pool. She tried to read and lost sentences in the middle. Small decisions overwhelmed her.
The mind did not stop. "I should be doing something. Am I going to lose all my clients if I'm not being of service to them? Am I going to lose my job? Oh my God, so much needs to be done around the house. Did I make a mistake having these surgeries? Is everyone forgetting about me? Oh my God, what's wrong with me, am I falling apart?"
Her chest tightened and her heart raced while she lay still. "I had this urge to run, but I couldn't, and that made me feel even more anxious. I felt helpless." She did not want anyone waiting on her. "I couldn't manage everything I had always managed, and without that, I felt worthless, and somehow unworthy of the help that I needed."
Her partner, Ryan, wondered aloud why she was so stressed and why she tied her value to producing. "I felt lonely because I didn't want to tell him how I felt like I was having a nervous breakdown, or an identity crisis, and how afraid I was." Everything she had kept below the surface for thirty years was coming up, and for the first time she could not get off the couch and busy herself through it.
She tells all of this from her kitchen bar. Behind her a world map glows on the wall, the places she has been and the places she still means to go. In front of her stands a large circular shelf crowded with plants and crystals. "The first awareness of it was around the 2020 mark," she says. "And then the true embodiment of it was two years ago, when my body just gave up, and I went into a full burnout."
The woman who talks now does less in a day on purpose and has not finished making peace with that. On certain days a low electric hum still arrives with a thought riding on it: you are not doing enough.
"I'll feel the tightness, and then I'll notice the thoughts," she says. "And that's when I can really work with myself on that. And self-parent. And do what I need to do, if it's dance, if it's shake, if it's breathe."
"I could be crushing it and making a lot of money before, but always feeling like something was wrong, because you're always looking out for danger." Her voice softens on the next line, and something like wonder comes into it. "A sense of safety that I had never felt before."
Her history runs long: abuse, a car accident she nearly did not survive, breast implant illness and the surgery to reverse it, toxic relationships, a divorce, financial devastation. She raised three more children through it. Asked which of these the body still holds, she goes to the money.
Years earlier she had left a stable job to become a real estate agent. The market crashed and the family struggled. The fear of that season is sharper now because she has just done it again, walking away from a corporate career to bring her own work into the world. "That piece of me that still gets terrified that it's gonna happen again."
She grew up watching her mother afraid about money and resolving the fear by working harder, never resting. "When I found myself in the same hard situation of financial struggle, my body knew what to do: put your head down, work hard, and climb out of the hole. My nervous system learned very early on that rest was not safe."
“My nervous system learned very early on that rest was not safe.”
When the voice starts up, she answers it. "Now I'm the one in charge, and I still honor you, and now I give you kind of a new job in my life."
The first mask had come off five years before the surgeries. In 2018 she started noticing aches, yellow in her eyes, weight that would not move no matter how right she did everything. A coworker described her own symptoms and Mary heard her body in the list. The implants came out in 2019, after eleven years.
"I created an entire identity around a body that wasn't even me," she says. "It was just another layer of me hiding my authentic self." She decided to go through the surgery as an act of falling in love with what was hers.
The first time she hugged someone afterward, she cried. "I realized that what I could feel was their heart against mine, and that there was no longer a barrier between our hearts." "Underneath, I am just a soft ooey-gooey lover who wants everyone to feel my love. And that was something that I couldn't be with all of those layers on top of me."
There is a part of the old woman she misses, and it is the one at the gym. She trained hard and judged the people doing careful, functional movement as not working out. Now she is one of them. "Before it was very regimented workouts, now it's like, what does my body feel today?" Some mornings she misses the show. Then she chuckles.
"My confidence is my vulnerability," she says. "When I've got it laid out on the table, there's nothing that I am holding onto in shame."
The woman she is becoming has a name. MEVA: her initials, and the acronym for the method she teaches, Mindful Evolution Vibrational Ascension. She resisted the name because it seemed to put herself at the center. A later meditation answered her. "This is just a transmission of the wisdom."
MEVA is also her future self, an avatar whose personality she has written out. "MEVA's coming out," she will say when she feels her. Asked what the old persona got that MEVA does not, she gives two answers. Praise for how much she could handle. And permission to anesthetize, which in sales meant alcohol, and nobody blinked.
"I'm not a true extrovert," she wrote. "In sales, you have to be 'on' every day, so I used alcohol to anesthetize the nerves and exhaustion, which only compounded those things and played a big part in my body burning out." She still has a drink now and then, from a different state and a different relationship with it.
When she speaks as the badass there is force in it, and stress, and a pride she does not hide. When she speaks as MEVA her face changes: joy, excitement, something settled. "MEVA gets seen. Fully seen. The badass never got that."
“MEVA gets seen. Fully seen. The badass never got that.”
Pleasure came back through the eyes.
A sunrise hike on North Mountain, which she had run for years as training, a thing to do. She reached a small plateau and looked at the sunrise, and the looking undid her. "How could I have overlooked this?" she says. "It was like an orgasm of the eyes." A breeze came and her skin went to goosebumps, and there were birds, and all of it hit at once. She turned on music and danced.
Driving was the thing she hated most in the sales years. Recently she caught herself on a road feeling how good it was to breathe, how good her body felt in the seat. "I'm in ease in the car. That's a big one." During the interview she looks up at a plant stand she built, centered between two windows full of grey light, the rain still falling softly outside. Vines and standalones, all of them thriving, crystals set among them. She admits she is a little in awe of it.
At client lunches she used to be the one who had cleared her plate while everyone else was halfway through. High voltage, she calls it. Now she notices hunger. She chews. She makes the plate look pretty. Loud rooms and happy hours overstimulate her, because the voltage is no longer in her.
She is in perimenopause, and sex, she says, is its own conversation. What she will say about the old appetite is where it came from. "Is it food? Is it drinks? Is it sex? Is it whatever? Like, it was just chasing something to kind of bring me down."
For years she translated herself for professional rooms. Now she speaks the language she thinks in, nervous systems and energy and the body's memory, and her brother was the first to ask who she was, talking about all this crazy stuff.
"There's no risk when you're making everything palatable and professional and what everybody wants to hear," she says. "I'm risking comfort, I'm risking being criticized."
In an argument with Ryan she notices herself leaving her window of tolerance, says so out loud, walks into another room, and moves it through. Some days that is breath. Some days it is shaking. Some days it is screaming into a pillow.
Asked the kindest thing she can do for herself, she wrote the answer, and it starts with two words. "Give yourself grace. When old wounds or old parts of ourselves come up in our body or mind, the worst thing we can do is shame ourselves, or force or override ourselves. These parts come up to be witnessed, held, and handled with grace, and then re-integrated. Get to know your patterns and be that conscious loving parent to yourself and to the parts of you that could use some healing."
And what would a woman who loves herself do in this exact moment? "Slow down, breathe, and connect with your body and its signals and really listen to what it needs. Make space and ask what your body needs, what is coming up to be loved. And listen. Prioritize your well-being. It is more important than any daily task that feels so urgent."
The women who come to her have read the books and can name their patterns, and still find themselves rushing, bracing, or unable to rest. She does not hand them answers. "You don't need more tools. You need to bring the tools home."
“You don't need more tools. You need to bring the tools home.”
"I used to think a strong woman was a woman who could handle everything and carry everything for everyone," she says. "A strong woman is a woman who knows her boundaries. Knows her no. A woman who can move with flow versus a force. The strong woman is actually the one that lets them carry their own."
“A strong woman is a woman who knows her boundaries. Knows her no.”
The practice still slips. A recent week filled itself back to back, and she caught it and moved things. After a lifetime of reading an open hour as an invitation to produce, empty space on the calendar still asks something of her.
Four children, eight years apart, three generations of mothering. Four grandchildren. "In my 20s, I was in pure survival." Her thirties bought a home and some security and chased the next level. Her forties she describes in one word, twice. "Present. Just present."
"They used to say, mom, you never sit down," she says. "And now they say, mom, do you want to watch a movie with us? And they know I'm actually going to sit and watch it with them." What she has never told them is the depth of the regret. "I had mentioned it a little bit, but not to the depth of the pain."
One night she had client projects to finish, as she often did, a single mother with a demanding career. The kids kept asking her to come snuggle and watch a movie. She told them she would be there in a moment, the way she always did. Then they turned off the TV and walked to her desk. "You didn't even come watch with us."
She said she was coming. "The movie's already over and it's bedtime, Mom." Their faces brought back her own, a girl begging her mother for time and hearing that her mother was too busy.
“The movie's already over and it's bedtime, Mom.”
Asked what she would say to them, she says it. "It's unforgivable and I cannot recreate. My hope is to move forward showing that I am always going to be there, that they are my number one priority in my life, and the number one important reason why I'm here." She is sad saying it and not undone by it.
Her mother is in her older years. Mary is relearning Korean and the two of them are closer than they have ever been. She has said the thing she needed to say as a girl. "I always just begged for some time with you."
One afternoon her mother was visiting and watching Mary with her twins. She said she was proud of her, and happy that Mary was so present with them. Then she said the thing Mary had waited forty years to hear. "I remember you always used to ask me to spend time with you and I was so busy I couldn't, and I'm so glad you are learning from me, because I still have so much guilt about that."
"I realized I am breaking cycles in my family that heal my family," Mary wrote afterward, "not only in the future, but also in the past."
She was eight when she first knew. A speaker on television, and a picture of herself on a stage talking about world peace, which made no sense, because she was very, very shy. The picture never left. It happens now, she says, person by person. "It's waking up moment by moment to your present reality. And to being inside this body. That's where the real choice is."
Asked for the sound of the season she is in, she gives one word first. "Exhale." Then, "It's a big sigh of relief." If it had a texture, it would be silk. The years before had a sound too. "A bunch of different instruments playing different songs at the same time in a loud restaurant where everyone's talking."
She thinks about the end of her life and what her children would know. "They would know that I was like, I'm good. I can leave. I'm good." She is smiling when she says it, and she looks, at the end of two hours, like a woman who has been seen.
