"I didn’t come to this through aspiration. I came through necessity. Japan taught me that survival and beauty are not opposites."
— ABIGAIL MARY TAUGWALDER
The Japan chapter
There was a year I spent mostly on the floor of a small apartment in Kyoto with two young children and no script for what came next.
A marriage had ended. A life I had built from the outside in had quietly collapsed. I was forty years old in a country where I didn’t speak the language, and the only things that held me were breath, movement, and the particular quality of light through a Japanese window in November.
I didn’t come to breathwork through a training or a retreat. I came through necessity. Through a body that needed to survive something.
Ten years of building the practice
The six pillars of the Abi Method did not arrive as a system. They arrived as answers to specific, painful questions. What do I do with a nervous system that won’t settle? How do I hold grief in a body that won’t stop moving? How do I mark a threshold when there is no ritual?
I spent ten years building this practice on myself before I offered it to anyone else. That is not modesty — it is methodology.
Paris, now
I live and practise in Paris. I guide women through the Abi Method in group programmes, private sessions, and through the products and guides I create.
Partners have included Guerlain, Madame Figaro × Shiseido, and Prestesse.