Breathwork and Trauma Release: Dan de Luis on Choosing Peace and Starting Over

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For two years, the only things keeping Dan de Luis upright were a cane, a stack of pain medication, and whatever was left of a body that had given out on him. He was thirteen years into a stable career at 3M, security and stock options included, and none of it was keeping him well. He walked away from all of it. The turning point came from an unlikely place, a three dollar breathing DVD picked up almost as an afterthought at a pharmacy counter, that gave him the first real relief two years of physical therapy hadn't. Not long after, he decided to go live at an ashram. He arrived leaning on that same cane. Two weeks later, he was playing volleyball with the yogis, cane nowhere in sight.

In this episode of Fountain of Vitality, host LaMont Leavitt sits down with Dan de Luis, Founder and CEO of Dan de Luis Wellness, to trace that reset all the way to where it led: a breathwork and trauma release practice built for professional athletes, Special Forces units, and corporate executives who all discover, eventually, the same thing Dan did on that cane.

Leaving security for the unknown  

Everyone around Dan thought he was making a mistake. Thirteen years at a major company, a title, the benefits, gone, for a yoga mat and a back injury that traditional medicine hadn't been able to fix. What tipped the balance wasn't a plan. It was noticing that his physical, mental, and emotional health had quietly become the price of the stability.

The DVD was the spark. What followed was the fire.

Two weeks to a different life  

Dan describes arriving at the ashram still leaning on his cane, and standing on a volleyball court two weeks later without it. He stayed almost six months instead of the one he had planned, and came home with a conviction that has run through every year since: the guru, the authority on his own body, was never anywhere else but inside him.

Building a practice for elite performers  

Yoga at home in Canada was a slow start. Then came Wim Hof training, an Instagram account that unexpectedly went viral, and a widening circle of professional athletes and executives who wanted what Dan had found. Today his client list includes NHL players, NCAA athletes, Canadian Special Forces operators, and leadership teams at companies including the Royal Bank of Canada. NHL forward Gabe Vilardi, who has publicly credited Dan's breathwork training with extending his career, is one of them.

Dan's home base is Nature's Elements Wellness Centre, his retreat and training headquarters in Mallorytown, Ontario, built around contrast therapy, breathwork, and the kind of quiet most of his clients haven't experienced since childhood.

Capabilities versus capacity  

Dan's clearest framework for high performers is deceptively simple. You can have the capabilities, the talent, the résumé, the title, and still lack the capacity to carry them. He describes one executive client, extremely successful by every external measure, who had built an exhaustive to-do list and never once built a to-be list alongside it. The pressure built for years before anything cracked.

The fix wasn't more discipline. It was truth, delivered directly, followed by a specific breathing protocol Dan designed to produce what he calls a genuine emotional release, work he says he has never seen fail to move something loose in a person who commits to it fully.

A season inside a football program  

One relationship changed how Dan thinks about his work entirely. A coach, working through his own stress, brought Dan in for a season. What followed was a string of quiet interventions: a manifesto written the night before an undefeated run, a locker room panic attack talked down at halftime before the player scored the touchdowns that won the game, and one athlete in a genuine crisis, carrying a childhood trauma that had fueled his performance for years before it nearly ended everything. Dan worked with him for two days. His coaching staff later told Dan they didn't know exactly what had happened between those sessions, only that it had saved a life.

Dan has been part of that program for two years now, work he takes no fee for, calling it simply an experience he gets to have.

What the brain does under pressure  

Dan's explanation of choking under pressure leans on real physiology. The cerebellum makes up roughly ten percent of the brain's mass but holds about half its neurons, and a single negative thought after a missed play is enough to slow it down mid-game. He calls the opposite effect adrenaline momentum, the visible lift a team gets after a good sequence, and the collapse that follows when a team lets a bad one compound instead of releasing it.

Learning to sit still  

Dan traces his own meditation practice back to a line he heard from an old French thinker: that most of humanity's problems come from an inability to sit alone in a room. His answer became the Stillness Code, a breathwork-first approach to meditation he built after watching most people quit traditional stillness practice within days. Roughly twenty-five hundred people now sit with him most weekday mornings, including several who came to the practice with PTSD and severe anxiety and no longer carry either.

Choosing peace on purpose  

Dan closes with the line that has followed him further than any client success story: protect your peace. Not as something you stumble into, but as a choice you make and then defend. It's the same instinct that pulled him off a cane and onto a yoga mat two decades ago, dressed now in a philosophy he teaches to CEOs, athletes, and anyone willing to sit still long enough to hear it.

Key takeaways:

• Capabilities and capacity are not the same thing, and only one of them can be built through effort alone.

• A to-do list that never shrinks is a warning sign, not a badge of productivity.

• The cerebellum holds roughly half the brain's neurons on about ten percent of its mass, which is why one negative thought can derail a play.

• Self-awareness leads to self-control, and self-control leads to success, in that order, not the reverse.

• Technology should be a tool a person uses on purpose, not a habit that runs unsupervised.

• Recovery from trauma often needs an experience, not just an explanation, to actually move.

• Peace is chosen and defended, not found and kept by accident.

• A support system built entirely on someone else's stability disappears the moment that person needs support too.

• Real change frequently starts with the smallest, cheapest tool available, not the most expensive one.

Guest resources: Dan de Luis Wellness, the Abundance Breath Club on Skool, Nature's Elements Wellness Centre in Mallorytown, Ontario, and the Protect Your Peace merch collection.

Ready to choose your own peace? Subscribe to Fountain of Vitality for new conversations on health, nutrition, and longevity every week.

Guest Bio  

Dan de Luis is Founder and CEO of Dan de Luis Wellness Inc., a Performance Coach and former Wim Hof Method Instructor. With over twenty years of experience, he has trained Olympians, NHL athletes, NCAA competitors, and Canadian Special Forces, and has coached executives at brands including Nike, 3M, and Royal Bank of Canada. He leads Nature's Elements Wellness Centre, his retreat and training headquarters in Mallorytown, Ontario.

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