Heather Greaves

Founder, Flee to Flourish

Heather Greaves is a breath re-trainer, educator, author, and founder of Free to Flourish – a movement dedicated to undoing a pathology still embedded in how we train leaders. Her work integrates functional breathing, nervous system regulation, and explicit deprogramming to help leaders reclaim their bodies and emotions as sources of wisdom.

Her insight is rooted in history: in 1851, a physician pathologized enslaved people's desire for freedom as mental illness. Today, leadership culture does something similar – it pathologizes leaders' desires for rest, boundaries, and better conditions as character flaws. Heather's work reverses this.

She began her career with the UNDP in Barbados, where she witnessed how purpose-driven professionals internalized the belief that sacrifice was noble and ambition was selfish. This observation sent her on a three-decade inquiry into what actually enables human flourishing. Through YogaToGo, she developed programs honoring the physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual dimensions of well-being.

Today, through The Regulated Executive, she works with entrepreneurs and executive parents who excel professionally yet remain chronically dysregulated. She teaches functional breathing for downregulation (crisis to baseline) and upregulation (resignation to claiming your best self). What makes her work different: she doesn't teach stress management – she teaches deprogramming. She helps leaders recognize their nervous system's signals and emotions as legitimate data, not weakness.

She is the author of Mindfulness and Ubuntu: Foundations for Inner Health and a contributing author to Practice: Wisdom from the Downward Dog.