Repurposing Fight-or-Flight: From Peak Performance to Inner Peace – An Interview with AL Gonzalez

Alfonso (AL) Gonzalez is an ISSA Master Trainer, Certified Wellness Coach, and Co-Founder of the Kairos Wellness Experience. Known for his multidimensional approach to wellness, AL helps individuals cultivate physical vitality, emotional resilience, and inner peace through integrative practices rooted in both science and lived experience.

A lifelong competitive athlete and wellness educator, AL has facilitated over 400 classes and workshops across the United States. His work has reached diverse audiences at institutions such as Texas A&M, UCONN, Cornell University, SUNY Morrisville, Ithaca College, and Colgate University, where he delivers powerful programming on personal transformation, change management, and meditation.

Over the past six years, AL has developed Practice Mellow, a breath-centered methodology grounded in the five dimensions of wellness: physical, mental, emotional, social, and spiritual. At its core, Practice Mellow teaches that while pain is often inevitable, suffering is optional and that breath is the bridge to transformation across all aspects of well-being.

AL Gonzalez’s wellness journey is far from linear. Rooted in the grit of competitive athletics and the discipline of bodybuilding, his personal transformation began when he realized that fitness alone couldn't answer life's deeper questions or heal its most persistent wounds. That insight led him to co-found the Kairos Wellness Experience, a program that bridges science, spirit, and breath in a way few others do. Let’s dive into this conversation with AL to explore the deeper philosophies and methods behind Kairos Wellness.

AL Gonzalez

“Wellness requires transformation. Transformation requires us to see it before we can achieve it.”

What inspired you to start Kairos Wellness Experience, and how did your personal journey shape it?

After a lifetime of competitive tennis followed by bodybuilding, with multiple certifications in strength and fitness, it became obvious to me that physical fitness is only a small part of our overall wellness. Fitness can become all-consuming, leading to overtraining, injuries, and imbalanced nutrition. Moreover, training the body at a gym does not provide much, if anything, to help us manage the tough mental, emotional, and social challenges that hijack our peace and serenity on a daily basis.

This revelation led me to pursue certifications in yoga, transformation, and wellness coaching, in addition to daily studies covering Kundalini, relaxation, and meditation. Through these studies, Kairos can provide our clients with tried-and-tested techniques to become healthy in body, mind, and spirit in our workshops across the country. I sought after this five-dimensional health for many years, and now our company can pass this knowledge on to others.

Why is “critical thinking” such an important part of your wellness approach?

Mindlessness easily hijacks our thoughts, actions, and habits away from a wellness lifestyle. It takes mindful critical thinking about our thoughts, emotions, and behaviors to identify behavior patterns that may be hiding in plain sight and making us sick.

These habits can range from using food to cope with unhealthy stress to more serious issues like using alcohol or drugs to numb the pain. All of these tendencies can lead to sleepless nights and endless days of catastrophizing or negative distortion. It is crucial for us to identify the patterns in our lives that can cause serious harm before we can transform them with mindful awareness and critical thinking.

While it may be easier to go to a medical office and ask for a pill or inhaler, like so many commercials entice us to do, it can be more astute to evaluate behaviors that may be causing the issues that affect our health either to assist medications or eliminate the need for them altogether.

This is easier said than done. Behavior transformation requires a solid understanding of holistic wellness, with a strong daily dose of critical thinking on our behavior patterns.

At the heart of AL’s work is the belief that what’s often missing in mainstream wellness is depth not just in knowledge, but in awareness. Through Kairos, AL has built a framework that encourages not only action but reflection, integration, and intentionality.

“We help participants ‘see’ the invisible and what is hiding in plain sight, so they can develop agency for their overall wellness.”

What makes Kairos’s breath-first, holistic method different from typical wellness programs?

As a trained instructional designer and master trainer, I’ve incorporated the use of graphics, videos, and animations to help participants see how intentional breath activates “invisible” muscles like the multifidus, transversus abdominis, diaphragm, and pelvic floor. These muscles enhance power, strength, and explosiveness. We need the same muscles in a slightly different way to bring us back to peaceful homeostasis and leave fight-or-flight behind, in all our physical, mental, emotional, social, and spiritual dimensions.

What sets Kairos apart is that we maximize our participants' knowledge to minimize their learning curve. To do this, we combine the latest breakthroughs in exercise science with elements from yoga, Christianity, Buddhism, and Kundalini into an easy-to-follow practice that is simple to learn and fun to do.

How do you balance physical training with emotional and mental resilience?

We call this balance Repurposing Fight or Flight. Our physical skills, emotional intelligence, and mental resilience are all connected, and our workshops focus on this interconnectedness. For example, one of my favorite poses to teach is the Eagle Pose. Initially, it takes serious balance and strength from our physical dimension to establish the pose. After a few seconds, it becomes clear that to hold this pose, we have to dig deep into our mental resilience and our ability to reframe negative emotions. We teach using the breath to stay calm, critically think about the challenge, and derive strength, balance, and power from our inner core. This allows us to sustain the pose the same way we manage challenging situations in life.

This is the principle we share with all our participants, from our youngest in their early teens to our oldest in their 80s. When we balance our physicality with our ability to manage our emotions and awaken our awareness, we can Repurpose Fight or Flight in any situation we may encounter.

How do you tailor your programs for high-stress groups like police academies?

Our first responder workshops, while similar, are quite different from the workshops we offer other populations, like competitive athletes who may need to manage stress and anxiety, but don’t face life-threatening situations on a daily basis.

Similar to our other sessions, we teach cadets, officers, and other first responders how to breathe to improve their balance while increasing power, strength, and explosiveness. However, in these workshops, the focus is to improve performance in order to survive life-threatening situations, which calls for a different level of mental and emotional demand.

After their shift is over, officers can use the same breathing technique, modified slightly, to physically relax, quiet mind chatter, and begin what we call mind and body restoration. Through peaceful nasal exhalation, participants trigger their vagus nerve into a state of homeostasis. In this state, they can reframe the negativity stemming from daily chaos into a restored sense of positivity and gratitude.

In every workshop, we teach participants how to breathe for both power and peace, but for first responders, their challenge is to return to homeostasis after a daily struggle to survive that is different.

What role does the community play in your workshops and client work?

One of the dimensions of wellness we focus on during our workshops is the social dimension, which can also be interpreted as our community. When our participants realize that they can learn more from each other than from our coaches, they tend to pay more attention to one another. Most importantly, they also increase their own participation when they realize they may be able to help others in the workshop overcome painful challenges in their lives.

We find that when people realize they have an opportunity to help others, it raises their motivation and confidence. Their energy rises together, and the workshop community elevates the experience for everyone in the session.

What’s next for Kairos? Any exciting plans or new partnerships on the horizon?

2025 has been a great year for Kairos as we have surpassed 400 sessions and significantly increased our reach in-person, online, and asynchronously to audiences from all walks of life. Our participants include young clients in their early teens, collegiate athletes, first responders, international executives, and active retirees who are “aging younger” every week.

Building on this success, we are now entering the corporate market, offering workshops on topics such as Change Management through Personal Transformation. Finally, we are also focusing on opening our first Kairos Wellness Center in Central N.Y.

AL Gonzalez is redefining what it means to be “well” in today’s fast-paced world. His approach at the Kairos Wellness Experience goes beyond surface-level fitness, offering deep, integrative practices that restore balance, build resilience, and foster community. By teaching participants how to “breathe for power and peace,” AL empowers people from all walks of life to reclaim their wellness, not just as a destination, but as a daily practice.

For more info, visit AL on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and his website.