Every once in a while, you come across someone with the energy that just fills you with inspirational positive aura. Melissa McGee is not just passionate about yoga, she is also a firm believer in holistic healing of the mind, body and soul and how there cannot be any healing of one without the other. She genuinely wants to reach out and help others through yoga and Reiki who have gone through similar pains and trauma she has experienced.
Although there cannot be much more worse that McGee has survived the last decade: from being a comfortable housewife, to motherhood and going through a terrible divorce, to alcohol addiction, jail time, and the death of Jonathan, the love of her life, McGee is no stranger to suffering. Yet despite her troubled past, McGee has risen above the turmoil and found a way to heal herself, and now finally others through her yoga studio. This is her story:
“A few years ago, I went through the most difficult struggle of my life. Some health issues I was having and issues with my marriage started to trigger some deep-rooted addictions that stem from generations of alcoholism within my family. Whereas before, I was able to have a couple of glasses of wine with dinner and be done, my alcohol intake quickly started to spiral out of control.
When it became clear that my marriage was ending, I went from drinking excessively in the evenings to drinking in the mornings to calm my nerves about my fear of losing everything: my ability to provide for my children and for them to feel safe and loved by me, my ability to maintain a decent sized home with enough space for us all to be comfortable, my ability to care for our dogs (we had two beautiful King Charles Cavaliers).
I didn’t know how to process all that was happening, and I was so torn between having the freedom to pursue my own life’s purpose and losing everything, that not even professional counselors knew the answer to my problems, and the only thing that would calm my nerves and my fears was alcohol so I really didn’t want to let that go until I was literally forced to.
In March 2015 I started attending my second 200 hour yoga teacher training in Boca Raton. My teacher had this amazing knack of inspiring people to start living on purpose rather than just going through the motions on auto-pilot, and halfway through my training with her, I knew that I wanted to inspire others to do the same but I also noticed that a lot of the philosophy we learned in yoga teacher training from the yoga sutras to the yamas and niyamas, which are ethical codes we follow, many of these principles I was learning in the 12 steps of AA.
I started to make plans to start a non-profit to raise money for people who suffer from addictions to go to yoga teacher training, because I really and truly believed and still do believe that this is transformational work. The only problem was that I was still struggling with my recovery. I still had a lot of my own work to do before I could make this happen. I stayed relatively sober throughout most of my teacher training but once it was over it spiraled out of control again, and I had to go to inpatient treatment for 3 whole months.
Throughout that year spanning from September of 2014 until August of 2015 I had been kicked out of two bars in Renaissance Commons. I just couldn’t understand, in my drunken state of mind why they didn’t feel blessed with my presence. Let’s just say that I didn’t go peacefully. I went kicking and screaming. I was charged with felonies for kicking and screaming and resisting arrest. I was angry. I had repressed anger about all the threats that my ex-husband had made. I had blamed myself for everything at the beginning because I felt so much guilt for not being able to love him and keep our family together. These repressed emotions were so bottled up inside. This is where the deep work comes in, and why yoga is such an amazing tool because it helps bring union to every thought, action, and emotion; body, mind, and spirit.
During my time in treatment, I kept having to go to court to settle my legal issues, and each time I went the judge threw me in jail to make me realize the severity of the situation. I had so much fear and anxiety of being in jail, that I actually fainted in the court room when the judge forced me to spend the weekend in a cell. I had to pay thousands in dollars in bail to get out each time or I would have had to stay until the next court hearing. While I was only there for 3 days at the most each time, I met so many women that were stuck there for weeks, months or even years, and 99% of their charges were drug or alcohol related. Witnessing this further instilled my motivation for my project with the nonprofit. Imagine how many people’s lives could be saved if the tools that I had were made available to them.
While I was in treatment my personality started to shift dramatically as my brain started to heal itself from the constant intake of alcohol. I started to revert back to my true self. I started to retreat back to my room, and I started reading books again. Not that I am an introvert but I’ve always been on this mission to do something and it was starting to become very clear to me what that was. One book in particular that I read, ‘The Seven Laws of Spiritual Success’, talked about how to find your Dharma or purpose in life. It said that when searching for your Dharma, don’t ask what you want. Ask how you can serve, and so once I fully started to make this shift, everything in my life started to change.
Once I got out of treatment I started going to meetings, and in those rooms I met a man, my son’s father who died last November on the 29th. When I met him he was sober, he had a job and a nice car, and he also had a sponsor who was helping him with his step work. His parents were helping him rebuild his life down here after he lost his business. His big passion had been MMA or mixed martial arts. He’d suffered serious injuries from fighting, and the doctors told him he could never fight again after that, and from that point on he just couldn’t find his way.
When we met, we were crazy about each other but it took a lot of time to figure each other out. He thought I was a fruit loop with all my yoga mantra and vegetarian stuff, and I resented him for his power lifting and eating 10 protein meals a day but the deep chemistry we felt for one another resulted in our little love child, Cameron, and so we were forced to try and make it work.
We both understood the value of a family unit, and so we wanted to get married when the time was right, and he did buy me a ring. However, when I was only 6 months pregnant he relapsed, and after that he couldn’t stay sober for more than a couple months at a time. Things got so bad, and there was not much I could do because he didn’t have the right insurance to get into treatment, and so I finally had to take the baby and leave until he decided that he really wanted to get clean.
Once I did this, it motivated him to get himself into treatment, and then he got out and relapsed again and again. Not only did I love him but I understood what he was going through because I had been through it myself. I really wanted him to get better so that we could be a family because being a single mom of a small baby was my worst nightmare come true.
I decided at that point that I was going to go back to school with Florida Technical Institute to finish my bachelor’s degree in computer science so that I could learn a valuable trade and have job security regardless of my charges. This was kind of an outlandish idea but I was trying to think of what was safe because I knew that my son’s father, Jonathan was going to die. His parents continued to enable him.
Thankfully, I was able to get a scholarship to help me pay for some of my son’s daycare, so during this time I started going to yoga which I hadn’t been doing since I had gotten pregnant. Once this happened all of my feelings for yoga started to flood back in, and I started to question if I was on the right path. I was at a fork in the road, and I had to decide if I was going to go one way or the other way, and I didn’t know what to do but the feeling I got through yoga was so good that I was really leaning toward that direction.
I started to look online, and I found this tiny little yoga studio for sale in Jupiter Farm’s. I took a strong leap of faith, put my house on the market, and invested in the yoga studio so I could start my work as a light worker!
Managing my addictive behavior will always be a life-long effort. But yoga has helped me answer some really important questions about what is healthy and acceptable and what is not. Through a deep understanding of the chakra system, it’s helped me find balance between opening my heart in relationships and creating boundaries. It’s helped me realize when I am clinging too tightly to someone or something or when I need to ease up a bit. Even yoga and my attachment to helping people and healing the planet can sometimes become an addiction for me, and I have to make sure that I stay balanced, and connected to my roots and providing that foundation for my children. Most importantly it helps me see the truth.
Every day, I set my intention without clinging to the results, and so far the progress is taking place little by little. It was through the process of learning to let go, learning to have faith during times of uncertainty, and asking the question: ‘how can I use my strengths and struggles to serve humanity’ that I became more sensitive to the intuitive nature of the universe, and become one with the collective consciousness that is emerging today in which we realize that we are all connected in some way shape or form, and we cannot harm or neglect one another or even ourselves in one way without paying the price or becoming out of balance. These imbalances always come back around just like a boomerang.”
Jupiter Farms Yoga is a studio located in Jupiter, Florida and has been around since 2009 offering yoga classes for fitness and the ancient teachings of yoga, however, ever since McGee bought the studio in October of 2017, she is adding even more value through other venues such as reiki, meditation and chakra classes and also the Yoga of 12 Step Recovery, a program designed for recovering addicts and based on the 12 steps to heal addiction. Many of the instructors at Jupiter Farms Yoga that McGee has hired are also recovering addicts to help clients receive true empathy and a common understanding from everyone at the studio.
In addition to all the support she is giving to her instructors and clients, she is also raising money for her ifundwomen.com campaign to help give back to the community and help other women dealing with addiction and trauma. She is hoping to reflect the changes she is making to the studio by renaming to Jupiter Farms Yoga Center for Healing. For more information on Jupiter Farms Yoga, please visit www.jupiterfarmsyoga.net.
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