DOM CASTILLO
Founded in 2020
I work to deliver practices and tools for high-performance lifestyles.
Rooted in holistic wellness, I aim to enlighten those seeking to go further and daring to want more in mind, body and soul.
Coach & Contributor
Dom Castillo
// my story
From the beginning, I wanted to ‘move the world’. I never knew how that would look, but I knew living in a rural town outside of Nashville was not where I belonged. That in mind, I gravitated toward a major shift in enlisting in the United States Air Force in 2011. I did not realize it then, but a decade of challenge, shifting my world continually, would ensure. My mom would say her biggest fear was my military experience breaking my empathetic sensitive outlook of the world, and I would honestly say her worst fear became my reality.
I wouldn’t change a single day of my service. I saw the world with true perspective through my own eyes. I saw the good, the bad, the boring, the exciting and the death of what a life can experience. However, after 8 years of service, I left the military with an emotion, maybe initiated in my adolescence, that would haunt me for years. A feeling of depression, sadness, loneliness and most painfully suicide.
After years of burying and fighting what my body and mind were so clearly screaming for me to heal, I finally broke. I remember lying in my Harlem apartment bath tub crying. I cried for everything to be taken away, for something to shift because I knew I kept making the wrong decisions. I couldn’t stand another day to be sad. That night I cried and slept, cried and slept, cried and slept, then prayed.
The next day, I woke up from a tear stained pillow, and followed my routine: brush teeth, listen to podcasts, 3 eggs & oatmeal. However, it was if the catalog of podcast I subscribed collectively all themed content on mental health, spiritual fitness, souls intention, spiritual awakening and your bodies performance alike. All of these topics seemed familiar, but in a ideal sense, not something I would actually partake. But the phrase, “when the students is ready, the teacher will reveal themself’ comes to mind.
Everywhere I turned, it was if I was being bombarded by thought provoking content and for 14 days I became a sponge for this new genre of information… “wellness”, literally your wellbeing. Two weeks later, I applied a plant based diet. One month, later I mediated. Six weeks later, I actually built a recovery process after my workouts. Before I knew it, I found myself investing IN myself.
Today, I reflect on that past and truly cry with gratitude to realize I finally made a right decision. I poured into myself and found a garden overflowing with abundance. I found management of feelings I once was a slave toward. Most importantly, I found a voice of empathy and sensitivity that was once so quiet in my soul. I realized for me, sadness is the minds reaction to your characters dislike, however, depression is the minds dislike of your character.
If I can ever do anything in this world, I want to aid anyone in their “bathtub moment”, and guide them toward their whispering voice that is buried so deep by the pain of avoidance.