Today we’d like to introduce you to Cashmere McNeil.
Hi Cashmere, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start, maybe you can share some of your backstory with our readers.
After 25 years of youth, high school, college, and professional athletics, it seemed inevitable that I’d continue to be involved in athletics the rest of my time on this planet, too. In 2016, with a blessed professional career in the garment industry and some good fortune along the way, the opportunity to partner with F45 and continue down the path presented itself, and I took it. Not long after the commitment to this human impact project was made, ‘I’ transformed into ‘We.’
When it came time to invite in support to launch, my soul brothers John Mittelbach (also my workout station partner) and Chris Vickery and soul sister, Brenna Tinari, stepped forward to make a difference with me in a hyper-competitive fitness & wellness space in the heart of Los Angeles. Once these guides, experts, and overall wonderful beings were on board, our excitement not only came from getting to open a potentially financially successful venture together as a family, but it now included a turbo-charged passion for radically inclusive community building and celebration.
We could finally share a space with the world! F45 Training Culver City became a space where we could invite all beings to unapologetically and with the unwavering knowing that it offered the opportunity to transform their lives.
With the gifts we were given, we shared, and we shared year after year with friends and family, Jacob Gise, Caite Upton, Stephanie Reading, and Jin Namkung) solidifying the energy inside the studio’s experience.
Like all beings that accept the invitation to our community, we have transformed over and over again with new team members and new investors from China (Chenshu Rong) and Los Angeles (Jeff Huron) to our current state while continuing to feel joy in creating each iteration of this safe space for all beings.
Today, we are proud stewards of one of the world’s most eclectic fitness, nutrition, and overall wellness offerings that we could imagine, with accolades from the F45 franchise network as the top studio in the US in 2020 and runner-up for the same award in 2021 as well as the top studio in California in both 2020 and 2021. We’ve even been inducted into the F45 Hall of Fame!
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way? Looking back, would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
It may seem like it may have been sunshine, rainbows, and bliss all along the way, but our tribe has overcome myriad trials of transformation: working multiple full-time over 50-hour-per-week careers, losing loved ones through divorce, cancer, and a heart attack, birthing twins, the COVID-19 Pandemic, starting new businesses and communities, moving our home to Panamá, and internal turmoil that was all meant to be as we learned to ground and expand ourselves in movement, nutrition, recovery, music (vibration), mindfulness, breathwork, community, and service. These pillars now serve as our guide as we share our light from our counseling and lifestyle design services with the Kinetic Energy Way of Living.
Thanks – so, what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
In a pivotal time through these rites of passage during a particularly challenging period from 2018-2019, I was introduced to the gift of Revelation Breathwork by members of the F45 community, Maura Moynihan and Jason Amoroso. They found me at a time when I was working over 50 hours a week at a job that I loved very much at Topson Downs of California and F45 Culver City but had a period of loss in this life and was energetically at a point of failure, stress, and deep pain. They invited me to my first breathwork session at the Santa Monica School of Dance, and I really had no experience or context of what was going to occur. I went to the session, and as the activation started, an unfamiliar practice began to unfold. I found myself crying for 60 minutes straight after living most of my adult life with minimal experience (less than a handful or two) in this emotive form. I really started asking questions after that. Why was someone as practiced in physical health able to be so affected emotionally by just breathe? What was I releasing, and how else had that trapped emotion been affecting me? I started a regular Revelation Breathwork practice that week and the transformation to both my physical and mental health was unlike anything I had experienced in all my years in sports and fitness.
It healed me from the anger and sadness surrounding the loss of several loved ones and elevated my mental health and awareness in a way where I felt I was able to choose infinite love and happiness for the first time. As I practiced, I also learned that each Revelation Breathwork experience could vary from crying to laughing, to hallucinating, and to the healing of physical chronic back pain of over five years. I had never felt more INpowered with my body, mind, heart, and spirit.
I knew I had to share my experience and what I learned not only with the communities I’d built but with anyone who might be suffering as much as I once was. To gift this type of relief and healing to another human provides me with more joy than anything else because I know first-hand what it is to carry pain, and it’s not something we as humans need to live with. I can’t wait to continue to build this community and offer people the opportunity to feel liberation from their resistance to pain and suffering so they may experience the joy they were meant to be.
To help expand the opportunities and invitations to join the beings already living in peace in their hearts and with the world, I’ve created a new breathwork modality, Kinetic Breathwork and will be sharing this practice along with Revelation Breathwork with the ultimate mission of inspiring world peace through inner peace. On September 21st, the UN declared an International Day of Peace so we may manifest this reality together. We have the practice, we have the day, and can we now commit to support 8 billion conscious breathers to create peace in our hearts and thus peace on Earth? We all get to choose.
Where do you see things going in the next 5-10 years?
Since the COVID-19 pandemic has had a significant impact on the fitness industry, many studios had to close permanently, temporarily, or pivot to offering virtual classes due to government restrictions and concerns about the spread of the virus. However, as more people become comfortable returning to in-person activities, we’ve seen numbers return and increase with the offering of virtual fitness classes, actually increasing our opportunities to reach individuals in their own homes vs just in fitness centers or health and wellness facilities. I’m simply grateful for the opportunity to reach more individuals globally both virtually and through our growing wellness platform.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://f45training.
com/studio/culvercity/ - Instagram: https://www.
instagram.com/f45_training_ culvercity?igsh= YzZncDc1NmxhY2hq - Facebook: https://www.
facebook.com/ F45TrainingCulverCity? mibextid=LQQJ4d - Yelp: https://m.yelp.com/biz/
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