Chapter One: The True Secret to Transformation CHAPTER ONE The True Secret to Transformation Two large coffees, skim milk, three Splendas, two dollars--it was the same every day. The guy behind the street cart outside my downtown New York City office knew my order without having to ask. This was 2003. I had just turned twenty-one years old and was freshly out of college. In those days, I lived off this coffee concoction loaded with artificial sweetener, caffeine, and the hope it would somehow make my day go by faster. As I sipped the coffee on a bench steps away from the subway entrance, the Financial District in downtown Manhattan in the month of September felt like a movie set to me: the smell of roasted nuts mixed with the taxi exhaust, people in suits no matter how sweltering the outside air, and the feeling that things were always beginning. I should have felt like I had the whole world in front of me, but instead I was lost. Graduating summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from an Ivy League university with a degree in international relations meant that I was really, really good at school--and not good at much else.

I had learned to use my intellect as armor, always having the right answer, always making the right choice, justifying the wrong choices as right ones, and living perpetually in my head. Armed with this "I must have all the answers" outlook, I subsisted on a rinse-and-repeat combination of caffeine, red wine, and calorie restriction (in the body-dysmorphic way, not the biohacker way) that cycled me through days in the office and nights out partying. I was very far away from becoming the doctor, mom, and CEO I am today--in fact, I could never have imagined this kind of future then. My first job out of college was as a paralegal in New York, where I prosecuted securities fraud for the US Attorney''s Office. The job was a gift, and not just because it was a relatively distinguished opportunity for a recent college grad and came with the highest security clearance I will certainly ever have in my lifetime. It was a gift, because in a mere six months it showed me exactly what I didn''t want to do with the rest of my life. While someone very smart should absolutely prosecute securities fraud on behalf of all Americans, I remember telling my best friend over drinks one night that I didn''t think it should be me. The "this is not working" feeling I had about my career was compounded by my romantic relationship at the time.

I had been with the same boyfriend for almost three years, but we''d long cruised past the territory of "healthy relationship" into what I would describe as a wildly immature, dysfunctional, and competitive relationship. I regularly spent lunch breaks outside the office, tracing the paths of City Hall Park, sipping my fake-sugar-sweet street-cart coffee while crying and arguing with him on the phone. In my early twenties, I survived on coffee, green apples from the farmers'' market outside my apartment building, protein bars, and grilled chicken from the sandwich counter at my local bodega--no exaggeration. I unknowingly subscribed to the cult of orthorexia before the obsession with "healthy" eating became a thing. At the time, I had no pretenses around being "healthy." Instead, I just thought healthy equaled skinny. To accomplish that end, I also ran on the treadmill at the YMCA three to four times a week, Z100 blasting in my headphones as I thought about which flavor of Tasti D-Lite I would reward myself with after my run. Being "healthy" to me simply meant fitting into a size Small while simultaneously subsisting on sugar in alcohol, protein bars, and fake sweeteners.

I was doing well at work, and despite my crazy gone-on-too-long relationship with my boyfriend, I had a great social life, lots of friends, and endless evening plans. The lack of sleep, perma-hangover, daily brain fog, and mood swings didn''t seem to me to be an issue. It''s what we all did. The only problem was that I didn''t feel good. I was anxious, stressed, and lost, and without realizing it, I started to try to find a way out--of everything. On some visceral level I knew that I wasn''t on the right path--I certainly wasn''t on the path to become who I am today. But I had absolutely no idea where that path was or how to find it. Like a mouse in a maze, I started walking, a lot.

Initially, it was just around the neighborhood where I worked. My paralegal duties most days were manageable, so unless one of the cases I was responsible for was at trial, I had extra time on my hands, and walking took the place of sitting at my desk reading the New York Times online for the fifth time. A few months into my wanderings, I happened upon a flyer pasted to a streetlight on Warren Street. It was for $5 classes at a yoga studio in a fourth-floor walk-up above one of those jam-packed ground-floor shops in New York City that has a little of everything--staplers, screwdrivers, Halloween costumes. The neighborhood was slowly coming back to life after 9/11, and my first three classes were going to be only $15. This was attractive because I was broke (my government paralegal salary barely paid the rent), and I signed up because I needed something to do when I didn''t feel like window shopping or crying on the phone. I knew nothing about yoga--the practice was hardly standard curriculum for college students in those days, and my upbringing in Baltimore had emphasized team sports like soccer and lacrosse instead. I was skeptical of yoga at first.

The studio was only one room, and you changed behind a curtain. The windows had been retrofitted with stained glass. Was this a church? The people in class, mostly women, were older than me for the most part and appeared to be very fit, but not in the skinny Splenda-wine-and-coffee way. They actually looked strong. I wasn''t sure that I was supposed to be there, because it felt like they all knew one another. But I had nothing better to do. Yoga was immediately different from running on the treadmill at the Y. My breathing slowed.

My focus stayed in the room. I discovered that holding still was more difficult than moving quickly. After the thoughts stopped racing through my head, I became acutely aware of my body in space for the first time. My sweat felt like it was coming from a deeper place than just below the surface of my skin. It wasn''t just energizing--it was also frustrating. I realized that I had no core strength whatsoever. I learned that while I was great at moving forward through time and space, I was terrible at balancing in the here and now, as I fell over simply trying to stand on one foot for several seconds. The "Om"-ing was weird and awkward, and the corpse pose, which meant lying around on the ground doing nothing, felt like a waste of time for a workout class.

I had no idea what the Sanskrit words meant, just that I felt a little too woo-woo for even being in a room where they were said out loud. After my first class, I threw my drenched clothes in a bag. It wasn''t hot yoga; the class had just been that hard. As I walked back down the four flights of stairs, I noticed a strange feeling. First, my legs were shaking like I''d just run ten miles. Second, I was calm, possibly for the first time ever. My head wasn''t spinning through that cycle of external blame and internal shame that I''d been stuck in for years--the same one I had used to rationalize my reality. Instead, I felt suddenly in the present, without worrying about what was going to happen next or reexamining everything that had already happened in the hopes of reaching a different outcome.

That feeling of constant tension, like my body was attached to a live wire, was gone. I felt free. While I didn''t appreciate it at the time, I had just used my body to change my mind--I had used my physiology to overhaul my psychology. This wasn''t just a quick fix, feel-good moment: This was the beginning of a transformation of my baseline emotional state leveraged by a shift in my physical state. This metamorphosis of your emotional and mental health triggered by a change in your physical health is what I call a State Change . A State Change is when you establish a new normal, or a new set point for how you feel on a daily basis. At baseline, you feel happier, have an easier time discovering what you want, are able to tap into your passions, feel more confident in your decisions, and are able to unlock a new level of consciousness that you may have never realized even existed. State Changes don''t happen after one yoga class.

But for me, one yoga class was the unexpected first step toward rethinking my daily behaviors, or core actions, as I call them throughout this book: the things we do every day with or to our bodies that can have a huge impact on our physical and mental health. After my first yoga class, I found myself going back for a second and a third. After ten classes or so--and a similar experience following each one--I became fascinated by the connection between my mind and my body. I hadn''t ever known I could feel so clear, present, calm, and connected. The feeling lasted far beyond the hour-long class, influencing the way I saw my life and myself. Yoga was still weird to me, and I routinely made fun of it to my friends, but I found myself going back again and again, searching for that feeling and the consequential confidence that seemed to magically result. My first State Change led to a major shift that ultimately changed my life. This started, though, with a physical, mental, and emotional wake-up call.

Suddenly, I realized just how many of my waking hours were spent in a continual state of distraction and anxiety, as I began to discover through.