Behind the Work: Ada Garza on Emotional Alchemy & Coming Home to Yourself

Sometimes the life that looks functional from the outside is being held together by distance from the self.

For Ada Garza, the interruption came during the COVID lockdowns. With the office, social calendar, and familiar demands suddenly removed, she was left with the roles, relationships, and patterns she had previously been able to outpace. Breathwork became the first opening, not because it offered another explanation, but because her body communicated something her mind had been avoiding.

That experience redirected Ada from a twenty-year career in corporate finance toward metaphysics, energy healing, nervous-system work, and somatic practice. It also gave her a different understanding of transformation. She became less interested in helping people construct improved versions of themselves and more interested in what becomes available when performance, self-override, and inherited adaptation begin to loosen.

Her practice, which she calls Emotional Alchemy, is built around the Alchemical Spiral: Feel. Transform. Embody. It places bodily experience at the center of change and treats self-trust not as an attitude to adopt, but as a relationship rebuilt through attention, regulation, and experience.

In this edition of Behind the Work, Ada reflects on the reckoning that changed her direction, why she believes healing is a return rather than a correction, and what happens when the internal negotiation between what we feel and what we think we should feel finally begins to quiet.

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What originally brought you to the work you do today, and why does it continue to matter to you?

It all started with COVID.

When the world locked down, the noise stopped. And in that sudden, enforced stillness, I was left with something I had been successfully avoiding for years – myself.

There was nowhere to go. No office to rush to, no social calendar to hide behind, no busyness to use as an excuse not to look at what wasn’t working. Lockdown stripped all of that away and left me face to face with everything in my life that was out of alignment – the relationships, the roles, the version of myself I had been performing for so long I had almost forgotten it was a performance.

It was breathwork that cracked the door open first.

I remember the moment something shifted during a session – a release I hadn’t planned, a clarity I hadn’t forced. My body communicated something my mind had been carefully avoiding. And I realized, for the first time, that I hadn’t actually been living in my body. I had been living around it.

From there I went deeper – into metaphysics, into energy healing, into somatic practice. And the more I paid attention, the more I understood something that has since become the foundation of everything I do:

The body and the spirit are not separate. They never were.

Our bodies are not just physical structures we carry around. They are intelligent, energetic, deeply responsive systems that hold everything – our history, our emotions, our unspoken truths, our greatest potential. When we learn to listen to them, we don’t just feel better. We access a level of knowing that no amount of thinking, analyzing, or external guidance can replicate.

COVID forced me inward. Breathwork gave me the door. Energy healing and somatic practice taught me the language. And the more fluent I became in that language, the clearer my path became.

That is what I now teach others. Not my path – their own. Because the body is always talking. My work simply teaches people how to finally listen.

This work continues to matter to me because I see every day what becomes possible when someone stops performing their life and starts actually living it. The clarity that returns. The

decisions that become available. The quiet, unshakeable sense of self that emerges when you stop looking outside yourself for answers that were always living in your body.

I didn’t find this work. It found me. In a locked house, in the middle of a global pandemic, through a breath that finally told me the truth.

I didn’t find this work. It found me. In a locked house, in the middle of a global pandemic, through a breath that finally told me the truth.

ada garza

How would you describe the work you do today and the deeper transformation it supports?

I describe what I do as Emotional Alchemy – the practice of transforming what is stored, stuck, or suppressed in the body into the raw material of a life lived from the inside out.

I am a Somatic Practitioner, Alchemical Breathwork Facilitator, and HeartMath certified practitioner. But titles only tell part of the story. What I actually do is teach people how to come home to themselves – through the body, through the breath, through the intelligence of the nervous system.

My work sits at the intersection of somatic science and spiritual intelligence. I work with the physical body – the fascia, the nervous system, the breath – and I work with the energetic and emotional layers that live within it. Because in my experience, and in the research that continues to validate somatic practice, these are not separate things. The tension in your shoulders is not just muscular. The tightness in your chest is not just physiological. The body is holding something. And until we address what it is holding, no amount of mindset work, strategic planning, or external guidance will create lasting change.

The transformation my work supports is not dramatic or sudden. It is deep, and it is lasting. It looks like:

A woman who has spent years making herself smaller finally trusting what her body has been telling her all along. A professional who has been functioning on stress and cortisol discovering what it feels like to lead from a regulated, grounded nervous system. Someone in the middle of a major life transition – a career change, an identity shift, the end of a relationship – moving through it not by white-knuckling their way to the other side, but by listening to the wisdom their body has been offering the entire time.

My signature framework is the Alchemical Spiral – Feel. Transform. Embody. It reflects a simple but radical truth: you cannot transform what you have not first allowed yourself to fully feel. And you cannot truly embody a new way of being until the body itself has integrated the change – not just the mind.

This is not coaching. I am not here to tell you what to do or to become the external authority you check in with every month before trusting yourself. I am here to teach you a language – the language of your own nervous system, your own body’s intelligence, your own inner knowing. Once you speak that language fluently, you don’t need me anymore.

And that – that moment of graduation into your own authority – is the deepest transformation this work supports.

Not dependency. Sovereignty. Not performance. Presence. Not a life that looks good from the outside. A life that feels true from the inside.

That is what Emotional Alchemy makes possible. And it begins, always, in the body.

Not dependency. Sovereignty. Not performance. Presence.

ada garza

What has your work taught you about healing, human nature, and potential?

Healing is not what most people think it is.

We have been conditioned to think of healing as the removal of something – the elimination of pain, the erasure of trauma, the fixing of what is broken. We approach it as a problem to be solved. A deficit to be corrected. A wound to be closed so we can finally get on with living.

But what my work has taught me – through my own healing and through the privilege of witnessing others in theirs – is that healing is not subtraction. It is return.

It is the gradual, courageous, sometimes uncomfortable process of coming back to what was always true about you beneath the adaptations, the armor, the roles you adopted in order to survive. Beneath the performance.

What I have learned about healing:

The body heals toward safety. Always. This is not a philosophy – it is a biological reality. The nervous system will not release what it is holding until it feels safe enough to do so. Which means the most important thing a practitioner can offer is not a technique, a framework, or a methodology. It is a regulated presence. A container of genuine safety within which the body can finally begin to let go.

I have learned that healing is not linear. It moves in spirals – which is why I named my framework the Alchemical Spiral. You will return to the same material again and again, but each time from a slightly different level of awareness, a slightly deeper capacity to be with what is there. What felt overwhelming in the first encounter becomes workable in the second. What was once a wound becomes, eventually, a source of wisdom and compassion.

I have learned that most people are not broken. They are adapted. Every pattern of behavior that looks like self-sabotage, every emotional response that seems disproportionate, every way of relating that creates pain – these are not character flaws. They are intelligent adaptations to environments that were once genuinely unsafe. The nervous system learned to protect. And it did its job extraordinarily well. Healing is simply the process of teaching the nervous system that the original threat has passed – and that it is now safe to respond differently.

What I have learned about human nature:

People are far more resilient than they believe themselves to be. I have witnessed transformations that the person in question would have told me were impossible six months earlier. Not because I did something extraordinary – but because the capacity for change was always there, waiting for the right conditions.

I have also learned that people are not fundamentally afraid of pain. They are afraid of being alone in it. The presence of another regulated nervous system – someone who can sit with them in the hardest places without flinching, without rushing to fix, without needing the discomfort to stop – is itself profoundly healing. We are wired for co-regulation. We heal in relationship. We have always known this, even when we pretend we can do it alone.

And I have learned that beneath every layer of protection, every adaptation, every performance – there is an intact self. Waiting. Often exhausted from waiting, but intact. The work of healing is not the construction of something new. It is the excavation of something that was never actually lost.

What I have learned about potential:

Human potential is not a ceiling to be reached. It is a depth to be inhabited.

We spend most of our lives trying to become more – more successful, more productive, more evolved, more spiritual. But the people I have witnessed step into their truest potential did not do so by adding more. They did so by releasing what was never theirs to carry.

The potential that lives on the other side of genuine healing is not louder or more ambitious than what came before. It is quieter. More grounded. More certain. It moves differently – not from urgency or fear or the need to prove something, but from a deep, embodied sense of alignment with who you actually are and what you are actually here to do.

I have learned that potential is not reserved for the exceptional. It is the natural state of a human being who has learned to stop performing and start living.

Every person I have ever worked with has shown me that.

Without exception.

Human potential is not a ceiling to be reached. It is a depth to be inhabited.

ada garza

What changes when people begin trusting themselves more deeply?

Everything changes.

And I mean that not as hyperbole but as a precise, observable, somatic reality. When someone moves from chronic self-doubt into genuine self-trust – not the performed confidence the world rewards, but the quiet, embodied certainty that comes from actually knowing and listening to yourself – the change is total. It touches everything.

But let me be specific about what that actually looks like. Because self-trust is one of those concepts that gets discussed endlessly in personal development spaces without anyone really describing what it feels like in the body, or how you know when it has genuinely arrived.

The first thing that changes is the quality of the silence.

People who do not trust themselves are rarely truly quiet inside. There is a constant negotiation happening – between what they feel and what they think they should feel, between what they want and what they believe they are allowed to want, between the signal the body is sending and the story the mind is constructing to override it. It is exhausting. And most people have lived inside that noise for so long they have stopped noticing it.

When self-trust begins to arrive – genuinely, somatically, not just as an affirmation repeated until it sticks – the negotiation quiets. Not all at once. But progressively. There is less internal argument. Less second-guessing. Less need to seek external validation before acting on what is already known.

The body relaxes in a way it hasn’t in years.

The second thing that changes is the relationship with other people’s opinions.

This is perhaps the most visible shift – and the one that most surprises people when it happens. Not because they become indifferent to others or arrogant in their certainty. But because they develop what I can only describe as an internal reference point that doesn’t collapse under external pressure.

They can hear feedback without being destabilized by it. They can sit with disagreement without immediately abandoning their own perspective. They can receive someone else’s vision of who they should be – a partner’s, a parent’s, a colleague’s – and feel it land on the outside of themselves rather than penetrating and rearranging everything within.

This is what nervous system regulation makes possible. A settled, grounded internal state that can engage with the world without being overwhelmed by it.

The third thing that changes is decision-making.

Decisions that once took weeks of agonizing, list-making, consulting everyone in their circle – suddenly become clearer. Not because the choices are simpler. But because the person making them finally has access to their own knowing. They can feel the difference between a yes that is genuinely aligned and a yes that is rooted in fear, obligation, or the desire to avoid disappointing someone.

They stop making decisions from their biography – from the accumulated weight of who they were told they were, what they were taught they deserved, what felt safe because it was familiar. And they start making decisions from their body. From the quiet, unforced, undeniable signal of genuine alignment.

The fourth thing that changes – and this is the one that moves me most deeply – is how they hold themselves in their own story.

People who do not trust themselves are often the harshest narrators of their own lives. They interpret their struggles as evidence of inadequacy. Their transitions as proof that something is wrong with them. Their emotions as inconveniences to be managed rather than intelligence to be honored.

When self-trust arrives, the narrative shifts. Struggle becomes information. Transition becomes initiation. Emotion becomes the body’s attempt to communicate something important rather than a malfunction to be corrected.

They become, in the truest sense, compassionate witnesses to their own experience.

And from that place – that grounded, self-trusting, compassionate place – they become capable of genuinely witnessing others. Of holding space without projection. Of guiding without imposing. Of being present without needing the other person’s experience to look a particular way.

Self-trust does not make people more self-contained. It makes them more genuinely available – to others, to life, to the full range of what is possible when you are no longer spending most of your energy managing the gap between who you are and who you are pretending to be.

That gap closes.

And in the space that opens up – that is where real life begins

The body relaxes in a way it hasn’t in years.

ada garza

What do you hope people feel, remember, or take away after experiencing your work?

Above everything else, I hope people leave feeling like they have come home to themselves.

Not a new version of themselves that they had to construct or perform or work hard enough to deserve. The original one. The one that was always there beneath the adaptations, the armor, the roles, the years of performing a life that fit everyone else’s expectations before their own.

I hope they leave with something that cannot be taken away – not by a difficult conversation, not by a disappointing outcome, not by the inevitable uncertainty of being alive in a world that does not slow down long enough for most of us to catch our breath.

I hope they leave with a relationship with their own body.

Not a perfect relationship. Not a relationship free of challenge or confusion or the occasional overwhelming sensation that makes them want to go back to the old ways of coping. But a real one. A relationship built on genuine attention, genuine respect, and the slowly accumulated trust that comes from listening – really listening – to what the body has been trying to say all along.

I hope they remember that the tightness in their chest is not a malfunction. That the anxiety they have been medicating or managing or pushing through is not evidence that something is wrong with them. That the exhaustion they carry is not a personal failing but an intelligent signal from a nervous system that has been doing extraordinary work under impossible conditions for a very long time.

I hope they remember that healing is not the removal of difficulty. It is the return of capacity – the capacity to feel fully without being overwhelmed, to think clearly without being hijacked, to act from genuine alignment rather than accumulated fear.

And most deeply – most personally – I hope they remember this:

They were never broken.

They were adapted. Intelligently, creatively, necessarily adapted to circumstances that required them to be smaller, quieter, more contained, more palatable than they actually were.

And now – having learned the language of their own nervous system, having felt what genuine regulation feels like in their body, having experienced even one moment of the clarity and groundedness and self-trust that becomes available when the nervous system finally feels safe – they know something they cannot unknow.

They know what it feels like to be themselves.

Fully. Without apology. Without performance.

That knowing is the beginning of everything.

And once someone has truly felt it – in the body, not just understood it in the mind – they do not forget it.

They carry it forward.

Into their relationships. Into their work. Into the way they move through transition and uncertainty and the inevitable moments when life asks more of them than they feel ready to give.

They carry it forward as the one thing that was always theirs.

Themselves.

They were never broken. They were adapted.

Ada garza