An Energetic Reflection From a Wellness CEO on How the World Feels Too Loud
- Mar 9
- 6 min read
Written by Laura McCann, Founder & CEO of Auratherapy
Laura McCann is the Founder & CEO of Auratherapy, a luxury wellness brand helping people reclaim their breath and remember they are vibrational beings. A 30-year CPG + tech founder, she’s building a modern movement at the intersection of scent, energy, and self-mastery, turning daily rituals into transformation.
I stepped away from work for a few days to go to Washington, D.C., to visit my son, my daughter-in-law, and my two grandsons, one just three months old, the other two and a half.
For a few days, my world narrowed in the best possible way. Bottles. Naps. Tiny hands gripping my finger. The quiet intensity of caregiving. The kind of presence that doesn’t require language or headlines, just attunement.
And then, on my last morning, I sat alone at breakfast in my hotel. That’s when it hit me. A wave of sadness. Concern. A surprising sense of helplessness.
It caught me off guard, not because the world is easy right now, but because I hadn’t been consciously thinking about it. Yet there it was, unmistakably alive in my body. As someone who has spent decades working in wellness, energy, and emotional regulation, I’ve learned to pause when a feeling arrives unannounced and ask a different question, "Where is this living in me?"
How I read the world energetically
Over the years, I’ve learned to correlate emotional states with physical sensation and energetic holding. When something feels off, I don’t immediately try to “fix” it. I locate it.
This particular heaviness showed up clearly:
A tightening in my lower body
A subtle clenching in my abdomen
A heaviness across my chest
A pressure in my throat, as if words were stuck halfway between thought and voice
That told me everything I needed to know. This wasn’t just one feeling. It was a multi-chakra response.
The perfect storm: Information overload meets the nervous system
The day before had been long. A four-hour flight delay due to extreme weather. Too much time to scroll. Too many news cycles are competing for attention.
Climate instability. Immigration fear. Government dysfunction. High-profile scandals. Some stories are factual, some exaggerated, some speculative, some bordering on conspiratorial. All of it delivered at the same volume, the same urgency, the same emotional pitch.
When the nervous system can’t distinguish between immediate threat and abstract chaos, it treats everything as danger.
The result isn’t clarity, it’s dysregulation. And for empaths, leaders, and caregivers, the impact compounds.
What I was feeling, chakra by chakra
Root chakra (safety & stability): I felt ungrounded. Concerned about the basic structures my children and grandchildren are building their lives within. When the world feels unpredictable, the root chakra responds with anxiety, vigilance, and a search for footing.
Sacral chakra (emotion & continuity): There was a deep emotional undertow, grief mixed with fear, not tied to a single event but to a sense of continuity: What kind of world are we handing forward?
Heart chakra (care & compassion): Being in “grandma mode” had my heart wide open. Love was flowing freely, but an open heart also feels collective pain more acutely. Innocent babies, wired only to survive, thrive, and bond, contrasted sharply with the world I was re-entering.
Throat chakra (truth & expression): I felt the urge to speak, and the weight of not knowing how. When discourse feels polarized or distorted, the throat chakra often tightens. Truth wants space, not noise.
Energy doesn’t lie (even in hotel rooms)
That night, I returned to my hotel room after hours of caregiving. The toilet was running. Constantly. No pause. No stop. Anyone who understands energy and environment knows: that’s not nothing.
Water endlessly draining is classic bad Feng Shui, a symbol of depleted energy, leakage, and exhaustion. I changed rooms. Then I noticed the courtyard: an unconventional round building with a four-story American flag hanging down its center. Powerful. Heavy. Symbolic. Not comforting, just imposing.
The external world was mirroring the internal one.
The CEO inner voice: When leadership meets energetic collapse
Friday was one of those days. The kind of day where leadership doesn’t feel strategic, it feels existential.
There was the option, quietly circulating, to shut down in solidarity. To pause business in recognition of what our brothers and sisters in Minneapolis were facing, something dystopian, surreal, and unfolding all at once. And alongside that devastation, there were people showing up with extraordinary humanity, continuing to do so at real risk and peril.
I felt torn. As a CEO in the wellness space, the questions came fast and relentless:
Should I shut down my business?
Should I declare my beliefs out loud?
Should silence be interpreted as complicity?
Should speaking be interpreted as risk?
Just days earlier, a snowstorm had wiped out our weekend sales at our store in Asheville. A small thing on paper, until you run a business where every day matters. Miami, too, felt under siege in a different way. Wynwood, once a place of creative ease, now carried an undercurrent of uncertainty.
What’s safe? Who can attempt a day out anymore? Who feels secure when rights themselves feel unstable? The mental calculus was exhausting. Was I being selfish? Unreasonable? Too quiet? Not loud enough?
Each question stacked onto the next, until the weight of responsibility, the burden of the mental load, became almost unbearable.
When the solar plexus says “system failure”
That’s when I felt it unmistakably. My solar plexus chakra, the center of agency, responsibility, and will, was screaming. Shutdown imminent. Cannot cope. This is the chakra of leadership, decision-making, and personal power. When it’s overwhelmed, the body doesn’t whisper, it alarms. Tightness. Nausea. Fatigue. A visceral sense of “I cannot hold this much.”
At the same time, my third eye felt painfully clear. I could see everything. Too clearly. All at once. The implications, the consequences, the contradictions. But clarity without support doesn’t feel empowering. It feels isolating.
Surrender arrived not as peace, but as depletion, leaving me with questions and no answers. A total system failure. Which is how I found myself crying over coffee at the hotel breakfast table.
For a fleeting moment, I wondered if it was hormonal. But I know my body better than that. I’ve been through menopause. This wasn’t hormonal. This was adrenal and spiritual. It’s good to know oneself well enough to understand the difference.
Why this matters for leaders, empaths, and thinkers right now
We are living in a time of energetic saturation. Not just information overload, but emotional, moral, and existential overload. The systems we once relied on to create coherence feel strained. The narratives feel fractured. The volume is relentless.
For those of us who are sensitive, reflective, or responsible for others, this doesn’t show up as intellectual disagreement. It shows up as fatigue without a clear cause.
Sadness that arrives quietly. Concern that feels larger than personal life. Difficulty articulating what feels “off.” This doesn’t mean something is wrong with you. It means your system is responding intelligently to complexity.
So how do we cope, without shutting down?
The answer is not disengagement. And it’s not numbing. It’s regulation through reintegration.
Ground the root through the body: breath, movement, routine, physical presence.
Let the sacral flow without judgment: name emotions without catastrophizing them.
Protect the heart by balancing compassion with boundaries. You don’t need to carry everything.
Clear the throat by choosing intentional expression over reactive commentary.
And perhaps most importantly: Limit how much of the world you allow into your nervous system at once. We were not designed to metabolize global crisis in real time, all day, every day.
The quiet truth I came home with
What grounded me were not headlines. It was the babies. Tiny humans with no opinions, no narratives, no ideology, just biology, instinct, and connection. They reminded me that beneath every system, every conflict, every cycle of upheaval, life still organizes itself toward survival, attachment, and continuity.
That realization didn’t erase my concern. But it softened it. And it reminded me why inner regulation isn’t selfish, it’s foundational. Because if we want to show up clearly for the future, we have to tend to our energy now.
If you’ve been feeling unsettled, sad without a single reason, or quietly overwhelmed, especially if you identify as an empath or a leader, know this: You’re not broken. You’re not weak. You’re perceiving reality through a finely tuned system.
The work isn’t to harden. It’s to anchor. And sometimes, the first step is simply noticing where the world is living inside you, and choosing, gently, to bring yourself back home.
Read more from Laura McCann
Laura McCann, Founder & CEO of Auratherapy
Laura McCann, a former child star, France-raised creative, NY fashion alum, and tech entrepreneur, now leads Auratherapy as Founder & CEO. With 30 years as a founder across CPG and tech, she’s bringing luxury and innovation to functional fragrance through breathable, essential oil-based Aroma Perfumes and water-based aura sprays. Auratherapy pairs this with data-driven aura and chakra diagnostics that translate energy into personalized rituals. Her mission is to help people reclaim their breath, remember they are vibrational beings, and transform through the practice of adoring yourself.
