It's Time to Breathe and Think Better

And it all starts here

Hello, my friends 😊

I want to take a moment and officially welcome everyone to the Breathe and Think Better Substack!

Whether you’ve been with us since 2019 when we first launched Blue Door Media, or you just found us on social media last week, I want to personally thank you for being here. 

My name is Danny and I am one half of the project we call Breathe and Think Better. The other half is my good friend Jake; you’ll be hearing from him soon 😉.

Almost 5 years ago, Jake and I took a leap. We left our jobs, I moved across the country, and we started something called Blue Door Media. At the time, we didn’t exactly know what it was going to be, but that was ok. 

One thing we knew for sure was that the world we were living in felt a little off. 

It was as if everyone I knew at the time was overwhelmed, stressed, anxious, or just plain unhappy. Myself included. Jake felt the same way, almost as if something critical was just…missing. 

Together we decided the world needed more positivity and Blue Door Media became a positive news outlet. We searched out inspiring stories from around the world, mixed in our own little flavor, and sent them out to a rapidly growing email list of folks who wanted to be just a bit happier. 

The Pandemic hit shortly after, but to be quite honest, it didn’t change much for us. We were already isolated, working in a small basement with no one else around. If anything, it made us dive in deeper. I couldn’t think of a time in my entire life when the world needed positivity more. 

I began to notice the effects of isolation and constant fear taking its toll on my friends and family. I wanted to help and it seemed to me that there must be something more I could do besides amplifying positive news. 

Jake and I began to look into different types of self-care and personal wellness routines that people could do at home. We wrote about nutrition, exercise, supplementation, journaling, ways to get out into nature, the importance of sunlight; if it’s beneficial and easily accessible we probably have an article out there on it.

It was during this time that we discovered meditation. 

I had of course heard the term before and had a rough understanding of what it was. But that was really the extent of my experience at the time. I found an article published by Harvard about the physical changes that meditation has on the brain. It was absolutely fascinating to me. The idea that someone could shrink or grow parts of their brain by just…sitting and thinking? What a wild concept. 

So, naturally, I condensed the scientific paper into a quick little article. I published it on our site, sent it out in a newsletter, and tossed it up on a popular online publication called Reddit. 

It went viral, as the kids say, and got over 50,000 hits in the first 24 hours. 

That day two things became clear to us:

1. People wanted to feel better.

2. There was something to this whole meditation thing. 

For the next few months, Jake and I learned as much as we could about meditation. We read books, listened to lectures, dug up old wisdom texts, downloaded apps, and practiced. Every. Single. Day. 

After about 3 weeks of this, I began to notice subtle changes in the way I was going about life. The first was that I was spending less time being frustrated. It wasn’t necessarily that things were frustrating me less, but when I did become frustrated at something it just didn’t last as long. Instead of a spilled coffee ruining my whole morning, it became a 5-minute inconvenience.

The second thing I noticed was how much of my life I was spending almost completely lost in thought. 

When I was walking my dog, I wasn’t just walking my dog. I was planning my day, ruminating on the conversation I had yesterday that was less than stellar, and fretting about how I was going to pay rent at the end of the month. 

After a few weeks of meditation practice, I gained what felt like a mini-superpower. The ability to notice when I was lost in thought and then pop out into the present moment. It was quite simply, a game-changer. 

We quickly discovered breathwork during our meditation crash course and that became an addition to our everyday exercise. We learned, practiced, and shared our experiences for weeks. 

Weeks turned to months, months turned to years. 

We continue to learn, practice, and share. The only thing that’s changed is that you all are now a part of it. 

Whether you are one of our 380,000 followers on social media 🤯, a listener of our Podcast, or a reader of our newsletter; you are an integral part of this project. 

It’s taken us almost 5 years to get where we are now, and we’re just getting started. 

In the coming months, we are going to slowly roll out all of the exciting things we’ve been working on. Podcast episodes, guided exercises, courses, live classes, articles, newsletters, and more. 

The best way to stay in the know is to be right here. Every time we release something, our Substack community will be the first to know. 

Like so many folks before us, we have discovered what it means to Breathe and Think Better. 

Now, our job is to share it with you.

So thanks for being here, and get ready to hear from us a whole lot more. 

With Gratitude,

Danny