When the Path Stops Nourishing You: Self-Love, Breathwork, and Choosing Yourself
There's a version of success that looks exactly like what you worked for, and yet it still doesn't feel like enough. The one where the life you built starts to feel like it belongs to someone else. Maybe it's a career, a role, a version of yourself you've outgrown. The question is: what do you do with that?
For Kelli Cook, the answer was to follow what she had always known mattered most: taking care of the whole person. Mind, body, and spirit.
Kelli is a nurse practitioner, an RYT 200 yoga instructor, and the founder of The Yoga Plant in Chippewa Falls, a studio rooted in presence, peace, and joy. She also practices functional medicine through Revitalizing Health and Hormones, where she works with patients from teens through seniors on everything from hormones and gut health to nutrition and inflammation. But before any of that, there was a 14-year transformation that required her to walk away from a path that looked good on paper and trust that the right one was waiting.
The Career That Started to Feel Like a Cage
Kelli's career started in conventional Western medicine, and from the outside, it made sense. She was a nurse practitioner. She was helping people. But the experience felt, in her own words, "operational and factory-like," disconnected from the whole-person approach she had always been drawn to. The longer she stayed, the more educated she became about what holistic wellness could actually look like, and the harder it got to keep practicing in a way that only addressed part of the picture.
What finally made staying impossible wasn't just the philosophy. It was the isolation. Kelli describes reaching a point where she couldn't look her colleagues in the eye and feel confident sending her patients to them, and if she couldn't do that, she knew she couldn't stay. That realization made the decision clear.
The Sign She Had Been Waiting For
As Kelli was navigating the tension between two worlds, she got laid off. And instead of panic, what she felt was closer to relief. It was the sign she had been waiting for. When her nursing license came up for renewal, she sat with that decision for a couple of months before letting it go, stepping fully into functional medicine alongside The Yoga Plant, and finally landing in a space where she could speak her truth and help people the way she always knew was possible.
She also talks about the patience that transition required. She remembers her banker asking where she was going to find 13 or 14 yoga teachers for the studio. Her answer: they'll just come. She knew they were out there, and she knew that if she built a space that aligned with them, they would find her. She hadn't even opened the doors yet when the messages started rolling in.
Self-Love as a Decision, Not a Feeling
Kelli describes self-love as the hook she hangs every decision on, and she means that literally. Choosing a role that wasn't nourishing her wasn't self-love. Once she started filtering her choices through that lens, the path forward became clear, even when people around her questioned it. The response she kept hearing was some version of why would you leave the security of being a nurse practitioner? And her answer was simple: what good is security if you're not taking care of yourself in the process?
What Self-Care Looks Like Even When You're Busy
As a mom of four running both a studio and a functional medicine practice, Kelli is not someone with a lot of margin in her days. So when she talks about self-care, she keeps it grounded in what actually works. Her biggest power move is underscheduling, setting a day that's genuinely attainable and then finishing it without guilt. She also talks about going to bed earlier so she can protect her quiet mornings before everyone wakes up, meal prepping so she can feed her family well without scrambling every night, and getting more help when finances allow. And she's clear that self-care doesn't have to look like a retreat or an hour at the gym. Even 15 minutes, done consistently and without guilt, counts.
What Breathwork Is Doing in Your Body
Before yoga had any physical movement, it was breathwork. Kelli traces it back to that foundation and then breaks down what is actually happening physiologically when you breathe with intention. A deeper inhale paired with a longer exhale activates the parasympathetic nervous system, which sets off a whole cascade of good things: better immunity, improved circulation, more blood flow to your organs. Your body literally takes itself down a notch. And when you layer in intention, a specific word or thought like "I am grounded" or "I am healed," that vibration gets carried into every cell. The words you bring into your breath, she explains, matter more than most people realize.
A Simple Technique You Can Start Tonight
For anyone who is feeling overwhelmed or stressed, Kelli walks through the box breath: inhale for four counts, pause at the top for two to four counts, exhale for four to five counts, pause at the bottom for two to four counts. A few minutes of that is enough to quiet a chaotic mind and bring you back into the present moment. She also shares two easy ways to start building breath awareness into your day without overhauling anything. Ten big breaths before you fall asleep to quiet the mental chatter, or a few intentional breaths before you open your email so you're not walking straight into the onslaught. Small entry points that cost nothing and shift more than you'd expect.
This episode is a reminder that choosing yourself rarely happens in one big dramatic moment. It's the small decisions made over and over again. The role you stop accepting. The morning you protect. The breath you take before the chaos starts. And the belief that nourishing yourself isn't selfish — it's the foundation everything else gets built on.
Whether you're a practitioner navigating your own version of this transition, a busy parent trying to carve out five minutes, or someone who has been putting yourself last for a while, this one is worth your time.
What You'll Hear in This Episode:
00:14:31 — Feeling called to a holistic approach from the start, and what conventional medicine actually felt like from the inside
00:17:00 — Getting laid off and taking it as the sign she needed to fully commit
00:20:31 — The isolation that made staying impossible
00:22:43 — Self-love as the foundation for every decision, including the hard ones
00:24:49 — Why patience and momentum matter, and the story of telling her banker the teachers would just come
00:27:17 — Letting go of what self-care is supposed to look like
00:28:25 — Her biggest power move: underscheduling
00:29:38 — The practical habits that actually work: sleep, meal prepping, and getting more help
00:33:33 — What breathwork is, where it came from, and what it does in the body
00:38:45 — The box breath technique and how a few minutes can quiet a chaotic mind
00:41:04 — Simple ways to build breath awareness into your daily routine
00:47:14 — How functional medicine and the yoga studio work together
00:49:42 — Who Kelli works with at Revitalizing Health and Hormones, and what they address.
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