This week James speaks to Ryan Willms who James first met back in 2008 in their previous careers in mens fashion. Having not kept in touch since then, it was a post written by Ryan in 2019 sharing his new direction and perspective for what was important - purpose and health that created an opportunity for reconnection.
Ryan’s journey to date will resonate with many of you. Developing a successful career, working relentlessly and overlooking the vehicle that created the success, his body and mind. From creating a successful publishing/media company titled Inventory, Ryan moved from Vancouver to New York, the logical step for career success. My experience of New York is one of hyperdrive, the pace is relentless and combined with with ever quickening world of fashion losing sight or even abandoning our health and sanity easily happens.
Ryan got to the end of his road on a photoshoot in Alaska, and it was a serendipitous meeting of one of the team that gave Ryan the opportunity to begin to assess his situation and begin to navigate back to himself. From New York the move to California beckoned, a return to a pace of life more in keeping with our bodies whilst still connected to his career as Creative Director, Ryan embarked on his return to wellness, studying under the Master Teacher Paul Chek, becoming a health coach in his own right and utilising his career experience to create a new platform combining his refined aesthetic with his experiences and discoveries of movement, healing and purpose with readintothewell.com alongside his column for Mr Porter.
We cover a fair bit of ground from the end of his old life in fashion, to working with health coaches, talk therapy, the power of Ayahuasca and plant medicine and how we can redirect the course of our lives by switching from making decisions with our ego to making decisions from a place of love and compassion to ourselves and others.
This conversation which would have been done in Los Angeles had the global lockdown not surfaced. So this one is done on Skype and occasionally the quality drops in and out.
