Before my first breath

Emma Taylor built a life on strength. As a powerlifter, a mother, and a strength and conditioning coach, she understood discipline, hard work, and how to push a body to its limits. From the outside, her life looked complete. But beneath the armour of achievement, a quiet question kept surfacing: Is this all there is? That question led her to an Ayahuasca ceremony — and to a vision unlike anything she expected: arriving in the womb, being born, and choosing, long before she understood why, to become a mother to a boy named Beau. Woven from poems written years apart, reflections from her work as a healer and bodyworker, and the ceremony that changed how she understood love, Before My First Breath traces one woman's descent beneath the identity she'd spent a lifetime building — and what she found waiting patiently underneath it. This is not a book of certainty. It's a book about remembering: that healing is rarely dramatic, that safety lives in the body, and that coming home to yourself is always possible, no matter how far you've travelled from it. For anyone who has ever wondered if there's something more beneath the life they've built.