Chandra Zas

Let me get a little personal. I did not come to this work from the outside. I spent the first half of my life depressed, bloated, sick, and lost. After two decades of experimenting with anything and everything that might make life better, I became the person I once only dreamed of being — healthy, vibrant, curious, confident, and self-possessed. It was a long odyssey to get here. That is why I call it one.

I am also, still, a total work in progress — plenty of corners of my life I am learning, trying, and sometimes failing my way through. That is not a disclaimer; it is the practice. The approach that carried me through every transformation is simple: I look honestly at what is serving me and what is not. When I once caught myself living inside the thought “I have no time,” I saw that even if it was true, it was not serving me — it only generated scarcity and shrank the time I actually had. Naming that, and choosing differently, is the whole method in miniature.

Much of my own odyssey has been lived on the move — years of travel with my husband and our daughter, drawn to the sea and the mountains, reinventing routine across new places, foods, climates, and time zones. Raising a child while everything kept changing taught me, in the body, what it means to roll with life: to make the most of any situation, to meet it with curiosity and compassion, to change what I can and let go of the rest. These days we have traded living out of suitcases for putting down roots — building community here in Reno, Nevada. I am also a facilitator at the Sierra Psychedelic Society.

That is what I want to share — with anyone ready to stop fighting themselves and become the author of their own zen odyssey.

I went to Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo for nutrition — until my first class preached the food pyramid, and I knew it was built for food-company profit, not for health. I transferred to graphic design, graduated top of my class, and then skipped the cubicle to find my real education in the places that teach the body directly.

I worked at the QuietStar energy healing center in San Luis Obispo (2000–2004), my first immersion in hands-on healing. Then I lived and worked at the Esalen Institute (2005–2009) — home of Gestalt therapy and the Human Potential Movement — where I took over one hundred workshops, earned my certification in Esalen Massage, and studied Feldenkrais. My hardest, most important lesson there: unlearning how to suppress my emotions, and learning instead to feel and move through them.

During the summers of those years I lived and worked at BodyMind Restoration Retreats in Ithaca, New York, a raw-food detox center run by a Zen monk. I managed the kitchen, taught the recipe classes, trained the staff, sat in meditation, and watched around eighty people every ten days move through their detox. It is where I learned about coffee enemas, the power of nutrient-dense food to help the body heal, and — just as much — how powerful the mind is.

From there: two years of Ayurveda at the Dhyana Center in Sebastopol; Vipassana and Zen meditation, including several seven-day silent sits; teacher certifications in Bikram and in Vinyasa yoga (studied and certified in Occidental, California); and finally coaching — I trained and certified with Master Coach Brooke Castillo at The Life Coach School, the piece that brought all the lived experience together into teachable tools.

I had been doing this work for years, but when my daughter was born everything amplified: she was not just watching me, she was absorbing my nervous system. That is when “for me” became “for her.” One of my proudest milestones has been helping build her gut health from the start, so she did not inherit the allergies and inflammation I grew up with.

For a long time I was drawn to the men I called trouble. The deepest cycle-breaking I have done is the relationship I built with myself first — and from that grounded place, the healthy partnership I have now became possible. I get to share it with a man equally devoted to his own growth and inner work; we do this alongside each other.

And a lighter note, because we are whole people: I once ran a beloved little business making custom hats — Chandra Hats — and I am dreaming about bringing it back one day.