Meet Steven Washington
Steven is a certified Qigong instructor, Pilates teacher, neuromuscular massage therapist, meditation teacher, and mind/body coach through The Embody Lab. He is the author of Recovering You: Soul Care and Mindful Movement for Overcoming Addiction (New World Library). His work has found its way to students, seekers, and healing communities around the world.
Everything about my life said I'd made it. Nothing about it felt true.
I spent years dancing in Disney's The Lion King on Broadway. To everyone watching, I'd made it. What they couldn't see was the anxiety, the self-doubt, the substance use I was quietly battling underneath.
I'd learned how to look completely fine, but I hadn't learned how to actually feel that way.
Getting sober in 2002 felt like the answer, like once I'd beaten addiction, everything would finally be okay. It didn't take long to find out how much more there actually was.
Early in my sobriety, I turned down the chance of a lifetime, a tour with The Lion King, because I wasn't ready to leave the community keeping me steady. A quiet voice told me my moment would come. It did, a few months later, and that time, I said yes.
I was learning to trust myself again. But the learning kept unfolding, in stages, over years.
Eventually, I noticed something deeper: trauma my body had been holding, quietly, all along. Fear, hypervigilance, old survival strategies the substances had once numbed but never actually healed.
I was sober. I understood myself completely. And I still didn't feel free.
Like most people, I assumed that enough understanding would eventually add up to freedom. It doesn't.
Freedom was never going to come from my mind. My body had been holding it all along.
Qigong was the first spark of freedom, the beginning of feeling at home in my skin.
I remember the moment clearly. Moving through a form I'd only just learned, arms rising, breath slow, nothing dramatic happening on the outside. And somewhere in my chest, something let go that I didn't know I'd been holding.
I knew almost immediately: this was medicine.
Not just for me, for anyone who'd done all the right things and still felt disconnected from themselves.
That discovery was just the beginning. What followed was years of building, testing what worked, refining it in real time with the people I taught…
I watched people who'd done all the work, therapy, understanding, insight, tell me the same thing I'd felt myself: that something was finally different, not in their heads, but in their bodies. The same thing that had happened to me, happening to strangers, over and over.
That's when I knew this wasn't just my story anymore.
JingCovery is what I needed all those years ago. Now it's here for anyone still carrying what recovery alone couldn't heal- the part of you that got so good at surviving, it forgot how to actually live.
Because recovery looks different for everyone. Sometimes it's an addiction. Sometimes it’s grief or life knocking you sideways. Whatever brought you here, if some part of you is still waiting to feel at home in your own life, I know that place. And I know the way back.
Come home to yourself.
Our mission is to redefine recovery
