Ten Years in Colorado: A Love Letter to the Last Decade
- Courtney Greth
- 41 minutes ago
- 11 min read
In May 2016, I graduated college in Massachusetts, shared tearful “see you laters” with my people, and loaded up my two wheel drive 2013 Hyundai Elantra to the brim…and my mom’s Santa Fe…also to the brim.
We got back to my childhood home in Saugerties, NY, and I played a week-long game of Tetris with all my belongings. A few days later, my parents and I caravanned down to North Carolina for my sister’s wedding. I sang my maid-of-honor speech and over indulged on champagne and belly laughs with my family. Happy ten years of marriage, Lauren and Ross! The next morning, I was dehydrated and started the way out west with my dad, taking turns in the driver’s seat during our 24-hour commute.
During my years as an athletic training student at Springfield College, I realized the khaki and polo life wasn’t for me. I ate up the anatomy. I loved taping ankles and wrapping hips. But my most favorite part about being an athletic trainer was being in the rehab room, getting my hands on the athletes when they needed soft tissue work, and them saying “that feels good.” Welp, massage therapy school was the easiest answer to the classic “What are you doing after college?” question ever.
I didn't know exactly what I was moving toward then. I just knew Colorado was calling, and I had to go. Bless John Muir, rest his soul.
This week marks a decade since I arrived in Mountain Standard Time. I find myself sitting with more gratitude than I have words for. So here are some words!
What follows is an honest look at a decade of becoming - the education, the heartbreaks, the wonders, the wanderings, and what it has all taught me about how I move through the world and the work I get to share with clients and my community.
It Started with Touch
I wanted a massage school in a place that was the complete opposite of where I went to college. I remember thinking, Give me a wide open sky. Give me hippies. Give me aura readings. Give me a laid-back attitude. Give me aerial yoga. Give me cannabis. Give me Celestial Seasonings Tea. What better place than Boulder, Colorado.
So that was the plan, the reasonable reason to uproot my east coast life. What I didn't anticipate was how deeply that training would crack me open. Learning to work with the body as a language, since touch is our first language. To listen through the hands. To recognize stories held in muscle and fascia. That changed the way I understood everything. I also had a boatload of anxiety and intermittent depression that I was pumped to get a hold on by receiving a lot of massage. But more on that later.
That first training lit a fire I'm still tending. One doorway opened into another: Reiki. DeepFeet ashiatsu massage. Prenatal massage. Random spiritual workshops. Yomassage. Birth doula work led naturally to death doula work. Grief support. I began to understand that I was being called to accompany people at the thresholds of transition.
And now I'm nearing the completion of a biodynamic craniosacral therapy and polarity therapy program (also in Boulder). Hello, full circle moment. It’s been the deepest dive yet into the body's own intelligence and capacity to reorient towards health.
Some training has been directly related to massage therapy. Others took me to places I never could have predicted. But every one has expanded what I can offer to the world and more importantly, how I can fully show up with loving presence and understanding.
The Breakup That Became a Doorway
I’ve been wanting to share publicly about a super meaningful time in 2016 because it is so woven into why I do this work the way I do.
A couple months after I moved to Colorado, I got engaged to my high school sweetheart. The wedding was planned for October 2017. The deposits were down on the venue, the dress was bought, the guests were invited. The vision of a life I thought I was supposed to have was a part of my identity. I was hanging onto the story that I needed to be married to be okay. If we broke up, I thought that meant that I would be letting our hometown down. So. Much. Pressure. I was sprinting in the mental game of the race to the altar with my peers.
But it was clear over the years that we weren't compatible. What we wanted out of life wasn’t aligned. And I got real with myself. Three months before the wedding, we sent letters to our wedding guests that had just received invitations letting them know that a wedding wouldn’t be happening. And somewhere beneath the grief and the relief and the total bewildering freefall of it all, I knew I had made the right choice.
What followed was one of the most formative periods of my life. I dove into my own healing - therapy, medication, time in nature, long phone calls with old college friends scattered across the country, and the gift of new friendships being built right here in Denver. I got to live with one of my new closest friends as I regained my footing. I worked at wellness centers around the city, learning what I loved and what I didn't. I started working at a health care tech startup to balance out my massage work. And slowly, steadily, I got closer to my own dream: Recenter Therapeutic Massage.
I share this because it was a huge moment in my early adult life of choosing myself. And because every client who comes to me carrying grief or a life that didn't go the way they planned, deserves to know that I have sat in the same chair. I know what it's like to rebuild from the inside out. That knowing lives not only in my body, but in my spirit.
The World as My Classroom
Denver, Colorado has been my home base, but the decade has taken me far beyond. I have explored this region with deep devotion. New Mexico, Utah, Arizona, and Wyoming. Ouray, Steamboat, Breck, Salida, and Crested Butte have become my favorite places that feel like extensions of my own inner landscape. Something in each of them reflects something in me. But heck, I’m also just a sucker for the classic Colorado activities - skiing in the winter, paddleboarding in the summer, and hiking and hot springing all year round.
I traveled to Mexico, Peru, Ecuador, and Colombia - places that quietly rearranged my understanding of time, community, and what it means to be held by a culture.
In Colombia, I sat my first silent retreat. It was whacky at first. I’ll never forget eating the first dinner as a group and all I heard was slurping, chewing, and the click clank of silverware on dishes while we all exchanged glances that translated roughly to “Are we really here doing this thing?” and “Why did we choose this?” and “Hey, I like your jacket.” After a couple days of practice, it felt like coming home to a place I hadn't known existed inside me.
I've returned to the silence again and again over the years, most recently through retreats in Crestone, Colorado - a place that seems to exist for exactly that kind of inner work. It’s the weirdest town in America. I highly recommend.
Then there was Europe. Two months, solo, before I opened my business. I will say this: I do not recommend draining your 401k from your corporate job and spending everything you have partying across a continent right before launching a business. I say this with full self-awareness and zero regret. Those two months were reckless and joyful and necessary, and they gave me something I can't quantify - a bone-deep sense that I could navigate the unknown alone, make mistakes and be okay, and come out the other side with stories worth telling.
A Journey That Helped Me Remember
In the middle of this decade, I did a big solo guided plant medicine journey. I won't over-explain it. You’ve probably heard of Michael Pollan, stories people have told about their experience, or you have a connection with it yourself. What I will say is that it fundamentally reorganized the way I relate to myself and to the unseen.
One of the most immediate and lasting things it revealed was how much alcohol and other substances were affecting me. Up until then, I hadn't been willing to examine that too closely. The medicine had spoken, and I listened. I changed up my lifestyle a great deal and wouldn’t you know, 95% of my anxiety disappeared as I integrated with my therapist in the following weeks. My skin looked brighter. I slept like a champ. I was able to wean off medication. I was able to be a better friend, roommate, daughter, and business owner. I could be more honest in my relationships. I was able to breathe like how I used to breathe as a kid - full and big with much less worry.
Beyond that, I learned to check in with myself. Not as a concept, but as a practice, moment to moment. I learned to trust the random goosebumps. The little whispers. The small, easy-to-dismiss signs that nudge you just slightly off the path you were walking, toward something truer. Life got more colorful.
I learned that our ancestors are never too far away. That there is so much more to life than what we see in the day-to-day. How we treat ourselves, others, and our world matters. There is more intelligence, more love, and more presence than our nervous systems are usually tuned to receive. The times I’ve spent in ceremony have helped me remember what I'd always, on some level, already known.
Making Peace with Sensitivity
This decade is also the story of fully making peace with being a highly sensitive person. For most of my life, my sensitivity felt like a liability - something to manage, apologize for, or hide. Too much, too deep, too easily overwhelmed by the world. It took years of committing to healing work and connecting with and getting support from a whole array of people who normalized depth as a strength. Over time, I got to understand that my sensitivity isn't a flaw in my design. It's the design.
It is the reason I can feel what's happening in a room before anyone speaks. It's when I notice the subtle shift in someone's breath on the table. It’s feeling the moment a person stops bracing and finally lets go. It might be why clients say they can let down their mask when they come in and just be real with themselves.
I don’t see it as anything mystical. I think we all have the ability to tap into our unique sensitivities. It’s all about giving yourself permission to become aware of the subtleties of others and your environment without leaving your own experience.
The Practitioners Who Held Me
I'd be dishonest if I alone took full credit for my growth these past ten years. This decade has been shaped enormously by the practitioners I found - people who have supported the space for my own evolution with their skill and integrity. Yoga teachers who helped me find my way back into my body and breath after grief. Bodyworkers who did for me what I try to do for my clients. Somatic practitioners, chiropractors, acupuncturists, coaches, therapists, spiritual advisors - each of them a piece of the way.
I think about this often when I'm with clients. I know what it takes to trust someone with your body, your history, your money, and your time. I know the vulnerability of lying down on someone's table and hoping they'll treat you with the utmost respect and care. Being on that side of the table has made me a better practitioner in ways no training ever could.
Doing It Scared
I have been asked to be interviewed on podcasts over the years. I said yes every time, even though talking on record is not - and I mean this sincerely - my strongest skill. I am not always smooth when a microphone is running. My thoughts arrive in the wrong order. I lose words mid-sentence and have to reroute entirely. My brain short circuits, I blank out for several seconds, and then I say, “Uhh, you can cut this part out, right?”
But I showed up anyway. Because I've learned that the things that scare me a little are almost always pointing at something worth moving toward. The discomfort of being recorded, of being heard imperfectly, of not being able to edit yourself in real time - that's a different kind of courage. I think I needed that kind too.
I've come to believe that doing things scared - not recklessly, but honestly, with fear present and moving anyway - is one of the most important habits a person can build. It has expanded my life in every direction.
The only podcast I’ll share with you now is the one I did with one of my best friends, Grant Smith, on his podcast called Taking it for Granted.
You should scroll through his episodes and listen to ones that you feel a pull to. Grant works in radio, but he is a natural interviewer, and he has had incredible guests that I still follow and admire to this day.
You can find the other podcasts if you’re so inclined. They’re all out there. Gosh, I really feel exposed with this one. :P
Falling in Love with the Land
I did not expect Colorado to support and inspire me like it has. But the mountains have a way of grounding you that no amount of intention-setting can manufacture. They are simply too big, too old, too indifferent to your smallness - and in that indifference, you can find yourself.
I have fallen in love with this land in the most literal sense. The rivers that run fast, cold, and clear. The plants that know exactly when to bloom and when to go dormant - the real teachers of timing and rest. The animals moving through terrain that was theirs long before it was anyone else's. The mountains that hold the same shape at dawn as they do at dusk, entirely unbothered by all my thoughts and feelings that I tell them.
This relationship with the natural world has become part of my practice. The body has its own seasons, its own wisdom, and its own timetable. Presence is the most powerful thing you can offer. Deep healing is quiet and slow and rarely looks the way you imagined. The land taught me all of this first.
What Ten Years Has Made
I am not the person who drove into Colorado a decade ago. I am more myself than I have ever been.
I am endlessly grateful for my teachers. For my mentors - including the ones who don't know they are my mentors, the ones I've watched from a respectful distance, learning by witnessing how they move through the world. For my friends who have become family. For the losses and the grief and the heartbreak that have, in their own time, turned out to be gifts I didn't ask for and couldn't have done without. For every stranger I’ve gotten to share a “this is so amazing I can’t believe how lucky we are” look at Red Rocks. For every personal development book that sits on my office bookshelf. For every sunset I've seen.
Every day of the last ten years has been a teacher. Every interaction, every ending, every new beginning. All of it has been building something I now get to share with you.
If you are a client of mine, you are receiving the fullness of this decade. Every training, every hard conversation, every silent morning, every interesting adventure, every act of choosing myself when it would have been easier not to - it all comes into the room with us at Recenter Therapeutic Massage. It shapes how I listen, how I work, how we sit with what you're carrying.
Ten years in, I am committed more than ever to this work, this place, and every person who trusts me with their care. Thank you for being part of this last decade. Cheers to what the next decade will unfold. :)
