Who Holds the Space
Four people holding a circle of twelve. Decades of combined experience across sound, breath, movement, and bodywork. No single authority. A team that sits inside the work alongside you.
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The Facilitators
Oliver Rothauser
FOUNDER
Once a finance professional, Oliver left that path when he realized the pursuit of money didn’t align with how he wanted to move through the world. His own healing journey — across therapy, somatic work, breathwork, and plant medicine — didn’t make him an expert. It made him someone who understands what it’s like to sit in the middle of your own discomfort and not look away. He doesn’t lead the retreat from above. He sits in the circle like everyone else — learning, sharing, growing from the work alongside you. Oliver designs each retreat drawing from sound ceremony, breathwork, meditation, group dynamics, somatic healing, Byron Katie’s The Work, and other modalities — whatever the moment asks for — to create the conditions where real awareness can surface.
Marie-Claude (MC) Giroux
ARTIST · SOUND FACILITATOR · WAYFINDER LIFE COACH
MC is an Artist, Sound Facilitator, and Certified Wayfinder Life Coach with over 30 years of experience guiding adults and children through creativity, ceremony, and transformative practices. Her lifelong devotion to art, sound, and spirituality has shaped an approach that blends participatory arts, sound meditation, and coaching to help people break free from limiting beliefs and step into empowered, spiritually connected lives.
Growing up in a family of artists and musicians, MC was immersed in music, sound, and spiritual exploration from an early age. Her path led her to study with herbalists, Native American elders, shamans, and healers — experiences that rooted her work in a deep reverence for the mystery of life and the healing power of sound. She creates spaces where people can integrate profound experiences, foster self-awareness, and awaken their innate wisdom.
Today, MC facilitates sound meditations, international retreats, and ceremony — weaving together sound, art, and mindful practice as pathways to transformation and collective healing. She invites others to embrace growth, even when uncomfortable, and to rediscover themselves as creative, resilient, and whole. She co-holds every Gift of Discomfort retreat alongside Oliver.
James De Los Reyes
YOGA · MOVEMENT · SOUND BOWL HEALING
James is a 300-hour certified yoga practitioner and holistic health coach specializing in vinyasa, restorative yoga, sound bowl healing, and meditative practices. Based in Jersey City, he has logged over 3,000 teaching hours across studios and gyms throughout New Jersey and New York — building a practice rooted in functional movement, breathwork, and the relationship between body, breath, and mind.
His approach is grounded in assessment — understanding each person’s strength, respiratory capacity, and conditioning to tailor the practice to their specific body. James brings foam rolling, myofascial release, functional strength training, and sound bowl therapy into his work alongside traditional yoga, creating sessions that meet people where they are physically and help them rebuild the connection between their body and their awareness.
At the retreat, James leads Saturday and Sunday morning sessions — weaving movement, breathwork, singing bowls, and voice into a practice designed to open the body so the deeper work of the weekend has somewhere to land. His goal has always been the same: to create a safe space for people who feel they’ve lost the connection to themselves, and to help them find it again.
Rex Jarrell
BODYWORK · ZERO BALANCING · SOUND MEDITATION
After 16 years with the finest construction excavation company on Martha’s Vineyard, Rex turned his path toward holistic health and the study of embodied consciousness. What followed was a decade-plus of deep, formal training across multiple traditions: work-scholar experience at Esalen Institute, 500 hours at Kripalu School of Bodywork (2005), a BS in Integrative Health from UMass Amherst (2009), certification as an Ayurvedic Health Educator (2011), Kripalu yoga teacher certification (2013), and Zero Balancing practitioner certification (2016) — alongside study with numerous graduates and innovators in lineage teachings, high science, and community health.
Since 2021, sound meditation has been a transformative addition to Rex’s bodywork practice, through formal study with Alexandre Tannous, MC Giroux, David Shemesh, and others. He brings together neuromuscular techniques spanning Ayurveda, yoga, Thai-Shiatsu, Swedish massage, five-element theory of TCM, and Zero Balancing — working toward alignment in the structures of the body with a deep reverence for the body as our most extraordinary instrument of consciousness and wellbeing.
At the retreat, Rex offers bodywork opportunities throughout the weekend — privately and in group settings — including Shirodhara treatments with sonic and Zero Balancing embellishments. His practice is Ancient Way, Hands on Health.