BREATHE N BOUNCE

Your Sad Songs Are Keeping You Stuck , The Science of Matching Music to Your Mood (and Escaping It) Part of Breathe N Bounce’s October series, “The Octaves of October.” I have a confession: sometimes I put on a sad song because I need to feel understood. Not fixed. Not coached. Not blasted with some aggressively cheerful anthem about “choosing joy” while I’m lying on the couch wondering why answering one email feels like climbing Mount Everest. Understood. There are days when I need Bon Iver, Phoebe Bridgers, The National, or some painfully beautiful song that seems to know exactly where the bruise is. And then there are days when I realize I’ve been listening to the same emotional funeral procession for two hours, getting more depressed with every chorus. So, is the song helping me feel what I feel, or am I using it to build a little sadness apartment and refusing to move out? That’s the uncomfortable question. Sad music is not automatically bad for us We’ve all heard the w...

  I really take a hard look at myself to see why I have had people abandon me.  What is my role in all of this? What have I been doing?  When do I let my emotions take over?  I struggled to find peace because I have always been super angry and just don't know how to crack the nut.  So today's episode is trying to break things down and move on a better path.   MUSIC FROM THIS EPISODE NOOKIE - Limp Bizkit MIRROR MIRROR - Candlemass I AM HATED - Slipknot BLINDED BY THE LIGHT - Mannfred Mann Earth Band DROWNING - Excision GENERATE - Eric Prydz ANOTHER ME - Seven Lions, Excision, Wooli, Dylan Matthew

Yesterday there was a lot of stuff happening, a lot of exciting stuff, so I didn't get a chance to write the Chronicle. For that reason I will go ahead and do it now. It's a day late, but that's not a big deal, as long as I get it done, that's what matters. The last few weeks have been very trying for me regarding making some changes in my life, but yesterday I saw some fruit from the work that I've put in with my physical fitness. Back in March my weight skyrocketed to 246 pounds. My body fat was 35. It was really embarrassing for me, and to think about the fact that back in 2022 I got my weight down very low. I weighed 221 pounds. To jump up 25 pounds with my body fat numbers going up that high made me really depressed and upset. I felt like I let myself go. I was doing a lot of yoga, but the yoga was not helping me with my body. It was helping me with my mind. So I neglected my body at the same time. I made a commitment to myself to set a goal: 230 pounds with a ...

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Now lets get back on track here.  I talk about how I am going to rebuild myself from the setback last week and move forward.  I talk about the quest to find what worked for me before and getting back there, and making sure nothing or nobody stops me, MUSIC FROM THIS EPISODE LET IT ALL GO -Rhodes/Birdy EVERYONE PLAYS THE FOOL - The Main Ingredient BACK TO THE PRIMITIVE - Soulfy CLOSE THE DOOR - The Tigermen ROLLIN - Limp Bizkit BEGIN AGAIN - Purity Ring IN MY ARMS - Illenium w/ Hayla

I Tracked Every Time I Felt Like Crap for a Week , Here's What I Learned I kept telling myself I was having a “bad week.” That phrase is convenient, isn’t it? A bad week. A weird mood. A little tired. Kind of stressed. Not sleeping great. Scrolling too much. Snapping at people for breathing near me. Very scientific. But I had a suspicion that “bad week” was actually several different things piled on top of each other. Poor sleep. Too much phone time. Not enough movement. Anxiety I kept pretending was just productivity. Irritability I blamed on everybody else, because obviously the entire planet was being annoying specifically to me. So I decided to track it. Not with an expensive wellness retreat. Not with a $300 subscription that sends me inspirational notifications written by somebody named Sage. I used a notebook, a pen, and the deeply radical practice of paying attention to my own life. For seven days, I tracked my energy, anxiety, irritability, sleep, and scrolling. I...

  We make investments in life all the time. And just like in the stock market, sometimes they are bulls, and sometimes they are bears. The market goes up, the market goes down. It is the job of the stock trader to be able to speculate what it's gonna do and at what point, so they know what the next move to make with the investment is. The same is true of life investments. Sometimes we might invest five, ten, fifteen, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty years into a relationship, only to find out maybe it was not a good one. And it's very easy to say I fucked up, and harder to walk away. But the difficult thing is when love is in the picture. You see, when two people are together, the vulnerability is something else. You expose yourselves to each other. You tell each other your deepest, darkest secrets. You see each other in a way the rest of the world doesn't. Chances are you probably will be naked in front of each other, and that's intimacy in its rawest form. And then ...

The Kids Went Back to School and I Finally Cried in Peace: A Parent's Guide to the September Letdown The first morning went surprisingly well. Nobody could find a shoe, obviously. Someone forgot a water bottle. Someone else suddenly remembered a form that needed to be signed right now , as if the school district had personally been waiting for our family to get its act together. But eventually, somehow, everyone got out the door. Then the house went quiet. Not peaceful quiet. Not immediately, anyway. More like the strange, ringing quiet after a concert when your ears are still trying to figure out what happened. I stood in the kitchen with a cold cup of coffee, a backpack-shaped dent in the couch cushion, and absolutely no idea what to do with myself. So I cried. Not a graceful, cinematic tear rolling down my cheek while I stared meaningfully out the window. No. I cried the way a person cries when they have been holding everything together for months and their nervous syst...

I probably shouldn't have went forward with this but this is exact what my depression sounds like, and how difficult it is for me to continue on with everything.  I think its important to demonstrate since people out there think its not real and its an act.  Frankly,  I don't even know if I am going to continue doing this anymore.  No one listens.  No one gives a shit.  Why should I?  I guess stay tuned. MUSIC FROM THIS EPISODE I JUST WANT YOU - Ozzy Osbourne LOW - Testament A CRY FROM THE CRYPT- Candlemass ST PATRICKS - Savatage

Some people say they've experienced loneliness here and there, but what's it like to experience loneliness all the time? See, maybe you don't experience loneliness like someone like me does. Loneliness for me is an emptiness that really cannot be filled, because I feel alone all the time. I even feel alone when I am with people. I feel alone when I'm by myself. It's just a feeling that I have, because there's a hole inside of me of abandonment. I feel that so many people have abandoned me in my life because I'm different. Because I don't process well. Because I feel too deeply and I can be outspoken. I can be excitable. I could be weird. And people might say to my face that they like these qualities, but I feel that if I'm not around, they're happier for it. I feel that this loneliness has brought out a rage inside of me towards people, because I just want to be seen and I want to be held and I want to be loved. Then I start saying to mysel...

Want to see what goes on behind the scenes during Breathe n Bounce?  Now is your chance as you can see how I pick music, line up topics, clean up mistakes, even dance a little; all fun stuff.  Check out the Michael Show premiering tomorrow on Substack .  Subscribe now for a small amount and join the fun.

I Tracked Every Time I Felt Like Crap for a Week , Here's What I Learned I kept telling myself I was having a “bad week.” That phrase is convenient, isn’t it? A bad week. A weird mood. A little tired. Kind of stressed. Not sleeping great. Scrolling too much. Snapping at people for breathing near me. Very scientific. But I had a suspicion that “bad week” was actually several different things piled on top of each other. Poor sleep. Too much phone time. Not enough movement. Anxiety I kept pretending was just productivity. Irritability I blamed on everybody else, because obviously the entire planet was being annoying specifically to me. So I decided to track it. Not with an expensive wellness retreat. Not with a $300 subscription that sends me inspirational notifications written by somebody named Sage. I used a notebook, a pen, and the deeply radical practice of paying attention to my own life. For seven days, I tracked my energy, anxiety, irritability, sleep, and scrolling. I...

 I am back teaching yoga again.  Come and see me  STILLNESS WEDNESDAYS @ 1PM RANDALL OAKS RECREATION CENTER 500 N Randall Rd West Dundee, IL FREEFORM YOGA WEDNESDAYS @ 5PM RAKOW CENTER 665 Barrington Av Carpentersville ALSO A COUPLE OF SPECIAL EVENTS COMING UP EXPERIENCE IV: YOGA DREAM 9/23 7P RAKOW CENTER DARK FLOW 10/10 1P RANDALL OAKS RECREATION CENTER SUPER SAVASANA 12/1 8PM RANDALL OAKS RECREATION CENTER You can get more information at the Dundee Township website

 This is a picture from 2016 and I look happy, but I am really not.  I talk about how I screwed so much stuff up that year and it was the beginning of a slippery slope of doom with people who knew me, loved me, and the vomit of lots of anger, sadness, and guilt I was carrying for so long.  I think we all have years like this when we were at our worst.  How can we recover?  Did I make everything better? Was I able to grow and learn from it? Can you? Can anyone?  Time heals, but we must help move that process along. MUSIC FROM THIS EPISODE IT WAS A VERY GOOD YEAR - Frank Sinatra ALL THE THINGS SHE SAID - Poppy SACRIFCE - Kx5(Kaskade, Deadmau5)/Sofi Tukker WORST DAY - Illenium REPLICA - Fear Factory WILL I - Music from the Broadway Musical Rent WHEN LIFE IS GOOD AGAIN - Dolly Parton

There are moments in time where things come up for us that we don't know how to deal with. There are times when depression hits us like a ton of bricks. We don't know where it came from. We don't know how it happened. So, we find ourselves not knowing what to do, and we try to run away from it. Panic attacks happen out of nowhere, and we don't have a plan for how to deal with it. So obviously, the best thing we can do is create plans for bullshit. By creating plans, we learn not to run away from this, but to face it. Sometimes we can explore and see where it came from, and some people might say, "I don't give a shit where it came from because I just don't like what I'm experiencing, and I want it to be over with." I have always been of that mindset. However, these days I am someone who will sit with the feeling. I will let it consume me, and then I will let it pass by. There are unfortunately days where depression can take a long time for me to...

  Finding My Footing After Everything Fell Apart: A Guide to Resetting Mid-Year Let's be completely honest for a second: this last stretch of the year has been a total mess for me. Who comes up with these arbitrary checkpoints anyway? Sometime around July or August, right in the suffocating heat of summer, you look up and realize the grand plans you made back in January didn't just stall out: they completely derailed. It’s such a shitty place to be. You're standing amidst the wreckage of half-finished goals, mounting burnout, and a brain that feels like it’s running on dial-up internet while everyone else on social media seems to be thriving on a perpetual yacht vacation. Panic attacks crept in uninvited. The deep holes we create for ourselves through self-doubt and over-hustling got a little too comfortable. If you’re sitting there right now feeling like your life recently fell apart: whether it was a relationship ending, a career hiccup, a health scare, or just a ...