I spent a weekend with a ‘Today’ show star and Maria Shriver. Here’s what happened.

AUSTIN – About 20 miles from where Matthew McConaughey cheers on his beloved longhorns at The University of Texas’ football stadium, branches of towering trees rooted on both sides of the road leading to Miraval Austin Resort and Spa have grown together, mirroring arms that would catch you in a trust fall, as if to say, “You’re safe here.”
I arrive on a warm Friday in October for Making Space: A Wellness Weekend with Hoda Kotb, hosted by the departing anchor and “Today” and sponsored by Miraval. Visits to Austin, where I went to college, can make me feel wistful. I remember my freshman year in 2005, when my heart felt so full of possibility I could’ve levitated. The city also serves as the backdrop for my first real, deep relationship, when my heart loved fiercely without knowing the pain of a break.
Driving through the hill country I think of how differently my life looks at 37 than I predicted 20 years prior. I haven’t found my person. There are no kids dropping Cheerios in the back of my SUV. I wonder what the weekend will bring and what I’ll get out of it. Reflecting on it, days later, I realize it gave me what I didn’t know I needed. That’s exactly how Kotb defines wellness as “the piece that’s missing” to me in an interview prior to the event’s start. There’s “a heavy backpack and it goes everywhere with you,” Kotb says. “Little by little, it’s like you’re dropping rocks out of your backpack, and you just feel lighter.”
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I feel that shift for the first time at Saturday morning’s breathwork session led by practitioner Anthony Abbagnano. For the class, participants are paired. Kotb and her good friend Maria Shriver are in the class, too. Each exercise requires a different coupling that involves staring into a stranger’s eyes, really seeing them and (harder for me) letting yourself be seen, all while focusing on breath.
For one of the exercises, we’re asked to practice forgiveness, and I immediately think of myself. Who has wronged me more than me? In the choices I made of who was worthy of my time and love, or for all of the times I criticized my appearance. I think of how many times I’ve deemed myself unworthy. I cry for the ways I’ve failed to take care of myself.
A practitioner notices my reaction and places her hand on my heart. I cry harder.
Kotb witnesses the whole thing, she tells me on a call recapping the weekend. “When I saw you at that breathworks class, I was dying,” says Kotb. “She put her hand on you, and that was what you needed.”
When it’s time to hug our partners at the end of the exercise I let my guard down. In the previous exercises my intention was to be a soft spot for others to land and hug them. But in this instance, I allow myself to be nurtured and embrace the warmth of a stranger’s hug. After a while I begin to pull away, self-conscious that I might be lingering in a stranger’s arms too long, but my partner doesn’t let me. She takes my head in her hand and brings it to her shoulder, which I don’t think anyone has ever done before.
There are more tidbits I’ll take away from the weekend, like singer Rachel Platten encouraging attendees at Friday’s concert to not give up on their dreams because no one cared about her hit single “Fight Song” until a year after its release. But it’s the breathwork class and words IT Cosmetics co-founder Jamie Kern Lima delivers Sunday that are most transformational.
Kern Lima is vulnerable in front of the audience. She shares of being rejected by a potential investor who told her “I just don’t think women will buy makeup from someone who looks like you with your body and your weight.”
“I just felt this lifetime of body-doubt and self-doubt flood my body almost,” Kern Lima says. “It almost felt like I was staring my own fear straight in the eye.” But Kern Lima knew in that moment the investor was wrong, and she sold her company for $1.2 billion in 2016.
“When we start listening to all the noes,” Kern Lima tells the crowd, “what happens is, we end up living our lives hiding in plain sight.”
She asks us to identify ways we were hiding. I’m hiding my heart, its ambitions and softness, I decide. Kern Lima asks us to contemplate what the hiding has cost us. A more authentic life, joy, connection. And then Kern Lima instructs us to come up with one way we can stop hiding in plain sight today. I decide I’ll begin authentically communicating, being brave enough to share how I feel. And I get the chance to act on that notion shortly after Kern Lima’s talk when I’m interviewing her and Kotb walks in.
In this moment with Kotb and Kern Lima, after absorbing their wisdom, along with that of Platten, Shriver and more presenters, I give myself permission to ask for what I want most in that moment: a picture to capture the magic of this weekend with two women who stoked the fire in me.
Normally I don’t ask celebrities for pictures. Some might think it’s an unprofessional move as a journalist. I’m more plagued by the internal belief that I need to make myself as small and unimposing as possible. Who I am to take up space on their busy schedule? But that day, after an inspiring weekend, I give myself permission to ask for the photo that I have since dubbed “the dream sandwich.” I don’t know if they’ll hang it in the Louvre, but I will proudly display it in my office.