Ep. 10: Marina Kay | The Danger Den Podcast w/ Danger Foley @SXSW

In this special SXSW episode of The Danger Den Podcast, host Danger Foley sits down with Marina Kay—the founder of Women Who Breathe, an online women’s community with live virtual breathwork sessions, courses on nervous system and hormonal health, and quarterly health challenges for women in high stress careers. 

After navigating her own experience with burnout, Marina left a successful career in corporate consulting & startups to help other professionals rise—without sacrificing their well-being. She deeply understands the unique pressures women face in male-dominated spaces, fast-paced startups, and leadership roles. Today, she supports female executives and entrepreneurs in regulating their nervous systems, reclaiming their energy, and leading with both power and presence. Her work helps women lead from wholeness—cultivating resilience, clarity, and confidence- with the ultimate goal of achieving success without self-abandonment. You can find her @womenwhobreathe on all platforms and www.womenwhobreathe.com.

Recorded at The Danger Den during SXSW, this conversation explores the subtle but powerful shift from doing to being, and why nervous system regulation is key to unlocking clarity, creativity, and connection.

What you’ll learn in this episode:
– How Marina transitioned from burnout to soul-aligned work
– The role of the breath in nervous system health and creativity
– What it means to “hold space” without trying to fix or solve
– Somatic awareness as a path to leadership
– Trusting presence over performance

This episode is grounding, expansive, and ideal for anyone navigating transition, healing burnout, or craving deeper alignment with their body and creativity.

Learn more about Marina Kay’s work:
Website: www.womenwhobreathe.com

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/womenwhobreathe/

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/marina-kay

Watch the video episode on YouTube:
Marina Kay on The Danger Den

Connect with The Danger Den:
Website: https://www.thedangerden.com
Instagram: @dangerdenco
YouTube: @TheDangerDenCO

Transcript

0:05

I'm Danger Foley. This is the Danger Den podcast, and we are at South by Southwest. This is our third or fourth day. Who knows what is time? I'm here with Marina Kay. She is our breathwork facilitator for the week, and she is a legendary breathwork facilitator out in the world. Welcome to the Danger Den, Marina. Thank you. So you have been very busy this week at South By. You've been doing a lot of different activations. What's been what's been the highlight so far at South by? this is, I think, the week that breathwork is reaching some sort of a tipping point where everybody around town is wanting more breathwork experiences, more breathwork breaks, kind of what we did right out of the house. I call it like a breathwork stack. Yup, that was about perfect description. Yeah. And yeah, I think what's exciting is here in Austin everyone is obviously part of the conscious movement. There's a lot of energy around different healing modalities and different ways to connect with people like, you know, so we're curious. Movement is coming up so strongly. I'm just excited to be, to be sharing the power that breathwork has and allowing people to connect in new and different ways, like no substances required. Right? Nothing is needed, just you and your breath, which is already what you're doing all day every day. Totally. The body, the signal that the body says is, this is new, this is different. This is uncertain. This is scary. Right? So to consciously choose that and head into an experience like that, it's big. It's huge. So I always want to remind everyone that, yes, as we're starting the practice, it's important to acknowledge, like this is a big practice. A lot can come up. So it's super valid, right? I like to validate and acknowledge that, yes, this is something that we're taking on that you know, for those who are in the breathwork space, I don't know, maybe it's still like 1% of the world, right? That choose this. So many people don't choose it. So if we are consciously choosing a way to connect with our body, to learn things about ourselves, connect with our emotions like so many people don't make that choice. So why do you think that it's what do you think the hold up is for so many people? I don't think we have any education or knowledge around what emotions are, where they come from, what to do with them. Right? And we're never taught any of this stuff in school, like how to just be a good human, self-regulate, self-regulate, connect with others. Right? Again, in the absence of substances or anything like that, how to just be in connection with others and be in connection with ourselves? I think that is what I find to be one of the biggest barriers is just being connected to yourself and noticing everything that's been going on below the surface, right? So many of us are in a constant go, go, go pattern instead of slow down and notice. Again, it can be really confronting. There's a lot that could come up there. And yeah, the topic of emotions or breathwork, not something that any of us ever get any knowledge on. Our parents didn't know anything about this, right? And like now, sure, conscious parenting is coming up. But like emotions were not expressed when I was growing up. Right, not honored, not encouraged. And so we go about our life in that pattern of I just push things down below the surface. When I live in New York, something that really resonated with me. My yoga teacher shared this with me at the time when I was in corporate and in that go, go, go pattern and a burnout and anxiety stress pattern pretty much every day, he said. Most of us are living life from the neck up, so there's this complete disconnection. There's all these signals and cues that the body is sending. it might have been Preston who’s the chemist, one of the chemist behind Brez, but he was saying that we all of ourselves listen to us every day, listens to the brain as if it is God, and that they obey the messaging from the brain. And so if the brain is in the headspace of feeling scared or unworthy or, just like fragmented in some way, it actually does have physical repercussions on the body completely. So I want to talk about your background, because you're in a very different place than you were probably even a year ago. And by the way, today's Marina's birthday, and it feels so awesome to be celebrating with you. I feel like this is a really cool thing to be sharing your gifts with the world on your birthday. Yeah, I hope that that feels cool to you. This is so special. No, I love this. I love being here. I love connecting with you all. It’s been so great to have you. It's such a moment of reflection, right? And as it's my birthday, all my friends are asking all of these reflection questions like how do you feel? How old do you feel? How what would, Marina ten years ago think about the Marina today. Which is an important marker. You have great friends. Awesome friends. Who're asking these cool questions. Yeah, but yeah, my journey into finding breath is kind of my primary healing modality that I work with now is through my own journey with burnout, with anxiety. I did big projects, implementations. I worked with fortune 500 clients in my early 20s, however, my body was responding in the state of stress and anxiety all the time, like I was flared up, inflamed, not sleeping well, waking up with anxiety first thing in the morning. I know it well. And I just had no context for why that was happening. Right? I was like, did you look different, by the way? You can tell when someone is in a cortisol. Yes. The moon face. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Right. Yes. I'm glad you touched on that because yes, I actually feel like I look younger now than I did back then. Same. Yeah. And just not knowing what was going on, but knowing that my body was like really off. And there were multiple moments in that journey from like 2015 to 2020 where, my body was sending these cues like alarm signals. So heart palpitations was my main thing, where if I'm out of like, not in my purpose, not doing what I care about, my heart will start to palpitate like I'll notice it skipping a beat multiple times a day and just noticing the difference to now. Like that's pretty much absent, you know what I mean? And just the healing journey that I went on first and foremost was me recognizing my own anxiety, how I was running on empty, the burnout constant caffeine, all of that was definitely not serving me to leaving the corporate world. Started my coaching business. And you were a consultant? I was, yeah, I was a consultant Just me in a boardroom with, like, a team of executives of a large company and that's what my body was responding to is like, oh, my God, what is this? This is so crazy and so cerebrally. I'm like, no, I got this. I have the knowledge, I have the tools, I have my master's degree. But my body was so flared up and through my healing journey, kind of undoing all of that, traveling, learning different healing modalities. I’ve studied with indigenous teachers across Latin America and found my way through the field of psychedelics. I've spent a number of years there working in psychedelic integration, so really helping people make sense of transformational experience. Thank God for that role. There's not enough of those people out in the world totally so eye opening and helpful and just realizing that one we can heal from truly anything. Like we can complete any event, any memory, we can alchemize it. We can learn from it. I've seen some incredible transformations of people, and through that journey with psychedelic medicine, I found my way into breathwork. And it was this lightbulb moment that the transformational experiences, my clients started to have with breathwork were really similar to what they were having with psychedelic experiences. And the magic thing about breathwork is it's free, legal, available everywhere. You can't overdose on it. Yeah, exactly. For real. It's. Yeah, it's with us all day, every day already. It can't be laced with anything. Yeah. All of these terrifying things that are now real risks. Yeah. And the other piece too, is what we were talking about, with the psychedelics being the, the bridge to the brain state. And something that we were talking about is how live music is such an overlooked place where these chemical components that are found in these recreational drugs can open you up subconsciously to bigger things that aren't necessarily intended. And with breathwork, it's the ability to not only release the control of the stress, but to strengthen your brain totally. Yeah. And the way I think about breathwork now, I guide both modalities. So there's the first step is breathwork. That's somatic. So a little bit like what we did today. Right. Where you're releasing and connecting with different emotions in the body. A lot of times people will express that through sound, through changes in temperature. Some people sweat, some people run really cold, some people shiver. I've had some people go into panic attacks with purpose, actually, with some resolution. I've had colleagues who have had people go into various transcendental states, like going into the dark tunnel with the expectation that you're going to find what you need and come out the other side. And it's so helpful in healing. And there's also breathwork that we can practice at any moment of the day. And I call that functional breathwork. So it's this difference between releasing password that at this point in time practice that's super helpful for things like burnout, anxiety, grief, anger, super helpful to release that. And what I also love is then training the body back to optimal breathing throughout the day. And that's what was missing for me, is, you know, when I was burnt out, I didn't have access to either. I had movement as part of my practice. Right? I had exercise and yoga and that was super helpful in healing, but really a way to connect with the nervous system and strengthen it. And this highway, right. When you talk about the brain and how it kind of processes all the information, I think of it as a two lane highway. There's messages going from the brain down to the body, and then there's messages traveling from the body back up to the brain. So we want to be doing things that once in a while help you move through any accumulation of stress and tension. And then we also want to learn how to breathe in a way that doesn't create more stress throughout the day. So it's just clearing and then maintenance. Yeah. Keeping the road clear. Yeah. Totally. That’s a good way to think of it. Yeah. Awesome. Do you is the functional breathing techniques something that you could share? Totally. Tell me. So I practice it all the time like even right now. So something I'll share is when we're speaking like we are right now, this is kind of inherently a stressful activity on the body because we're not breathing in a regular kind of regulated way. Right. And as you hear me say this you take a deep breath which usually happens. Drawing attention, of course. Yeah. So for everyone listening, like, just take a nice deep breath and reset. Right. And we take five up to five sighs every hour. It's a way that the body, like unconsciously has a reset mechanism. When the stress rises. So whenever I'm talking a lot, whenever I'm connecting like here at South by Southwest, there's so much going on, so many people to connect with. Every once in a while, just step away and reset with a deep round of breath and a sigh. So our body already does that. Naturally. We reset about that five times an hour, but it's also really healing to consciously do that. Like every once in a while, step away, take a breath, exhale with some sound. And you can do that with your team, right? You can do that with the people that you're talking to. Big sigh, exactly. Especially here in Austin. I think people are ready for it. It's like, hey, would it be okay if we just, like, took a breath together. Breathed a little bit together? Totally. Yeah, totally. So that's one way to kind of continuously regulate that invitation. So nice too, when someone brings it up and you realize that you haven't in a while. Oh thank you. Yeah. And when you start to practice this, you'll notice as you start to regulate your nervous system, you first notice when others are in that stress state. So you start to notice how others are breathing and without even saying anything. If you bring some of that breathing, some of that sighing, if you start to breathe lower in the body with your belly. That's contagious. The other person might come into resonance with you. It's kind of like body language, right, we know we start to mirror people when we're in conversation. So that always happens. The same thing happens with the breath. And just in case they don't, if you're noticing something in someone, it's like, hey again, would it be okay to just take a breath together? I notice this a lot in people's posture. That's why we start breathwork with noticing posture first, the stress state is where our shoulders are up here, up close towards our ears, you always notice that, in a round and forward posture that people hold. And so just being that invitation again, even before saying anything, what you model in your body, how your breathing is going to allow someone else to start a match that. Mirror. Exactly. Or actually inviting them into that. Right. Like, hey, would it be okay to just like take a stretch, take a breath reset? One of the things that you're really focusing in on right now is grief. Why grief? First of all, I love the emotion of grief and what's possible on the other side of it. So when I talk about grief using breathwork, both the releasing and the functional breathwork, we can really alchemize and transform grief into growth. I think there's no other more potent emotion that we have other than grief to learn from. We learn from all emotions, right? All of them are valid. We wouldn't have them. We wouldn't be able to feel them if there wasn't some sort of a specific purpose for them. There's like no coincidences in the body and how we evolved. It's so perfect and amazing the way it is. Grief is. I've just seen it to be the most potent way for someone to meet themselves, learn new things about themselves, learn about the world around them. So when we look at grief and start to really ask questions like deeper questions, of what is this teaching me, right? What can I learn from this? How can I grow through this? What's the meaning and the experience that I'm grieving? Because there's so many different, beautiful flavors of grief? I was going to say, how would you define grief? Is it just the profound loss that a human being faces? Yeah, a loss of any kind. An absence of some sort. Right. I know earlier we were, I was actually talking with Don about this of there's a flavor of grief, of grieving something that didn't come to pass. So it's not even that we're missing something, but something didn’t happen. It was there and it's gone. But. Right. The expectation grieving the, hypothetical. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And all of them can offer something to us. And I know that in my personal journey, the most potent times where I've transformed have been the times where I've been grieving. For me, it has been past partners in relationships. I haven’t experienced like a major loss yet in my family. But I always know it's almost like me and my friends have this job. Like, don't ever waste a good breakup. Don’t let a good breakup go to waste. Like if you're in it, go fully in it and head straight in it. And so, there's so much that opens up on the other side of it. That's brave. It is. Sit in the ship and it is a skill. Totally. Right. So when it comes to emotions, grief or others, the skill is when I notice that emotion, I instead of turning away from it, I actually head straight into it. And I love to practice breathwork when something like that is moving through me. So I'll actually through breathing, through that kind of rapid, we can say hyperventilation, but the changes that are happening in the body through the breath, I consciously bring that emotion more and more to the surface, actually amplify it so that it can be fully felt and seen. And that's actually how we move through it. That's that skill that we're not taught, where we usually just suppress it and push it down. Right. We rationalize it up here. We don't feel the feelings that are going on below the neck. So heading straight into it, brave choice. It's learn, right? It's a practice of continuing to do that and give yourself that gift. And when we can do that, that's really when the emotion can start to lift, right? I think a lot of people are afraid of grief and even talking about grief because it is so heavy, it's so strenuous. It takes so much energy, so hard to focus on work on other or other things when we're grieving. But that's just because we don't allow ourselves the chance of having that emotion fully move through us. Right? So that it's only really bigger and bigger and amplifying. Whereas if we could just do some of that work consciously bringing it in and learning from it, journaling, fixing the block right? Right. Then it actually counterintuitively, like when we head straight into it, it can lessen the impact that it has on us. I have a very close friend who lost her husband, and she was talking about how the only way that you can actually fully process grief, especially in a human, like a interpersonal relationship, especially when it's something as profound as the loss through death. you need other human beings to heal through an interpersonal wound with. And so if you are grieving privately and if you are not able to actually process the really fucked up stuff that you think about through the process of grief and all of the things that you feel truly like, like, I can't say that out loud. That's funny. And I shouldn't be laughing at a time like this. And I can't say that I feel responsible for parts of this because I don't know how to own that. And I don't know how to say that out loud. And so, another big thing that came up for me when breathwork was first introduced to me is that it feels really lonely, and it feels really scary, which is why I think a lot of people choose to do breathwork in community, to keep other people in pace with breath, and to remind you that even if you take a break, there will be another cycle of breath that you can just join right back in. And when you're doing it alone, it's really difficult to stay consistent with, especially at the beginning, because if you're just doing Wim Hof and you're the corner of your room or in your bed, the urge to give up when things get hard and when you come up on those really spiky parts in the dark, it's very easy to give up. And so especially with something as crazy as grief, I would imagine that you would suggest doing it with a coach or with someone who has the skill set to help you process it. Something we say in psychedelic integration, this is like a core tenet of a psychedelic integration is a part of it must be done alone, and a part of it must be done in a group. And those both of those have to be present because you have to make sense of it for yourself, right? You have to derive that meaning and ask yourself some of those deep questions. No one else can do that work for you. And doing it in community in part is so helpful to gain your perspectives. So it's like we have to do both. And so many people just rely on the self, right? Or even don't even go there right. They just suppress and they push it down because it feels scary to open up that, you know, potentially Pandora's box. And the other part of why what you're saying is really important. So being in community, being with someone else who can help you derive those insights and coregulate is that, you know, invitation of if someone is in a regulated state and you're not them just being there for you and witnessing you and what you're going through can allow you to come closer and to resonance to that state of safety where you can gain some of those insights. So absolutely, like community is one of the most healing parts of it. And the other unique quality of grief is that sometimes when an event happens, we all have unprocessed events and memories in our life, right? Like as long as we live, we'll probably be processing and deriving insights from things that have happened to us in the past. The nature of grief, though, is that when something happens, a big, you know, monumental loss, it opens up that reservoir of what other things might be going on below the surface. So it's kind of like if it's, you know, a lake. And now this event is happening and it's what, breaking through the ice, there's all this other grief and these memories that are below the surface. So I think a lot of times when people think about processing grief, there's a sense of like, I'm going to be overwhelmed by this, I'm going to be consumed. There's no way that I can do it, and I don't have time to deal with this right now. Like I don't have time to fall apart. That's been a big block for me at certain times in my life is what if I find something that derails me? yeah. And, you know, you probably won't be able to sift through all of it alone. That's why that support is so necessary. And to that, you know, something I would say is the overwhelm that there's not enough time, like. Yeah, that's why the suppression happens. So compartmentalization in the moments when grief happens, sometimes it's really necessary. If you're a parent and you're grieving, you can't just stop being a parent. So there have to be things that you do for yourself in the moment. And sometimes that does look like temporarily putting a lid on it. But the healing strategy there is titration. Over time, I gently pull things out of that reservoir and I look at them right. And so that way there's less chance of being consumed by the same tidal wave of the emotion. We just slowly start to move through it. And there having a plan in place, right? Having steps, knowing like what to do in different moments of the grief journey is so important. And we can do that really for any emotion, right? If someone is working with anger, with trauma, or with fear, titration is so important. Like bit by bit we start to almost like digest. Micro movements, right? Yeah. Where it's just chipping away, eating the elephant one bite at a time, for real. you know what I have also found, and I learned this from a somatic healer, is that a lot of people that have, you know, trauma response, that mine was from a car accident, but when I get stressed, I'll take my breath in, and then I'll just hold it at the top and it'll just be something that I do subconsciously. And even when I sigh I have this moment of bracing at the top where his suggestion and if this is helpful for anyone else, it's recognizing the and like that pause at the top and instead taking a moment to let it coast like a gentle crest of. having that be a micro reset where there's times throughout the day that you can not bottle it, you can not allow it to stay with you and add an additional rock in your backpack. But if you don't actually process it and allow it to move through you, it can stick around. And that's what I think of as resiliency is like, how much capacity do you have for the different things that are on your plate? How much success can you handle? How much visibility can you handle, right? How much love and connection can you handle in your life? Right. There's always and we see this in different people, right? Maybe they're super successful. So the threshold for success is really high. But their connection is really low. The relationships are shit. They have a hard time trusting people, right? Letting them into their life. Right. Those thresholds exist everywhere. And it's beautiful to bring that in and notice like that threshold, we can see it with a cold plunge, for example. Right. The first time someone does a plunge, maybe they can only stay in for 15 seconds. But we know that with cold acclimation, with exposure, with training, with using the breath, we can extend and push that boundary ten minutes right? And people can stay in for five, six, seven minutes. And it's beautiful to recognize the range of someone who starts out and they think that, wow, my first cold plunge was 15 seconds and now I'm able to stand for three minutes. Like, look at the growth and the capacity that my body has just created. And it's our body in all the different situations in life. So we're who we are when we plunge and we are who we are when we're speaking on stage. So the work that you're doing in cold plunging does completely translate to all the other settings and all the other spaces that you're in your life, and it has so much more to do with training your brain to sit through discomfort than it does anything else. And I have noticed in my relationships so much more patience, so much more compassion, because that instant trigger of fuck this, like I'm out of here, or the avoidance and the things that you just want to numb away or just push away. This has made an actual difference in just the mental toughness piece, but it's pretty nuts. Recognizing the pattern. It's like when we get into a plunge, our brain immediately start saying, we're absolutely going to die. We need to get out right away. And it's about noticing that and saying, no, we're okay, stay it’s fine. And then that translates in life to things like you mentioned that you were in a car accident, and I've worked with many people who have been in multiple, multiple accidents all their life, and they're in that pattern of, I’m bracing for impact all the time. And what that can look like is, the physical pain and discomfort is one layer, but this can also be a pattern that's formed, for example, for people who have been in a lot of dysfunctional relationships and now a potential partner approaches them and the body is bracing for pain or rejection and whatever it is. Right. And it's again training the mind to say, no, it's okay, this is a new person. I'll be safe here. I can learn how to stay right for this again translates to all the different places, like what's my capacity for going on stage? I can speak to ten people when there's 50 people in front of me. I shut down and it's learning no. I'm okay, I’m speaking on stage as before, I can stay and I can grow through this. Absolutely. I'll ask you a couple questions. Just for the sake of keeping up with the reflection and just this being a, you know, another star of another lap for you, what would you say? That your purpose is in what you're trying to accomplish with breathwork and with everything else, with the healing powers that you have? I thought about this question a lot, and the way I distill it now, which I'm sure will change, is just helping more people feel safe in their bodies. I think all the different modalities that I've worked with, all the different coaching skills that I've attained, is really just to help more people feel safe in their bodies, which is what I was lacking. Like, I have visceral understanding of what it looks like and feels like to not feel safe in my body, to be living with anxiety, heart palpitations, all the things that was just scratching the surface. I mean, I had hormonal issues, right? A hard time connecting with the people I was dating. So many things were going on just as a result of some of those surface level things. It's really just that, unsafety. And I see this so much in others, again, in the posture, in their breathing and just you can just look at someone and you can see that they're going through something. Right? We can feel that. We can see it in them. And so yeah, I think that everything that I do right now that's what I’m really passionate about, whether it’s artists, leaders, entrepreneurs, it really doesn't matter. It's like, how can I first learn those things within myself and constantly keep bringing back the safety in my own body so that I can share that with others? That's unbelievable. Well, should we close out with a breath and with the call to action being to find somebody else to breathe with today, like go find someone who is carrying their shoulders a little bit higher. Do it for Marina for her birthday. Go breathe with somebody. Let's take a deep breathes, yeah. Let's do it. So I love so when we straighten out the posture, let's just take the think of it as like if there's a string tied to the crown of your head and then pull up on that string. It usually just like straightens. Everything out. Check in with your shoulders. And can you create some separation between the shoulders and ears? Such an important point to think about and connect with, where are my shoulders and space? Where's my heart? Am I rounding my shoulders forward and protecting. Or can I open some of that up and just know that I can be safe and supported and loved in this moment? And the three rounds of breath? We'll take a breath in. And I want everyone to breathe from your pelvis, up through the front of the body, up through the crown of the head and release it with an exhale through the mouth. Nice. Do that two more times, and as you breathe in, think about what you want to feel more of today. In this moment. Just think about that one more time. When am I ready to feel that I want to experience? How do I want to be? What a way to spend the day. Marina. What a true delight it's been to spend the morning with you. Thank you so much for everything. Thank you for the tips as well. And thanks for being at the Danger Den on your birthday. Thanks for doing the work that you do, it’s amazing to contribute. Where can people find you? Sum of all positive on Instagram. So that's Sum Of all positive. And that's my website also sum of all positive, sum of all positive Marina Kay, the breathwork facilitator and just healer and connector of people to their own breath. Thank you goddess, thanks for watching the Danger Den, appreciate it.