How One Entrepreneur is Working Out the Emotions of 2020
These walls will soon be painted with the collective fear, anger, sadness, and hope of the greater Denver community. The first coat of oil-based love shown in these photos is the labor of thirteen local artists.
Erica Valenzuela, 33, is the owner of E-motion, a unique art-gallery-meets-gym space, opening in Arvada, Colorado, this month. The concept has been in the making since Valenzuela turned 19 years old. That’s when she asked her biological mother to tell her the real story of her adoption.
“Everyone in the family knew, but no one talked about it,” Valenzuela says of her in-family adoption. The woman she had been told was her aunt all her life was actually her biological mother. Knowing this and not talking about it for years led Valenzuela to self-harm as a teenager.
In her 20s, while working as a personal trainer, Valenzuela worked on letting go of her anger, figuring out who she was, and learning that she wasn’t alone in not knowing herself. Now, Valenzuela is dedicated to helping others feel their emotions.
“We’ve been so conditioned to not feel,” says Valenzuela. “If you think about what we’ve been told since we were young: ‘Don’t cry, don’t let it out.’ My clients, the artists [who helped create E-motion], and I have been taught to truck through our day. ‘Get through it and you’ll be fine.’ But it’s like trash. We’re stuffing it down. But you can only put so much trash down there till the bag breaks or it overflows.”
There are a lot of broken trash bags in 2020. Many of us feel helpless, angry, sad, and alone. But we’re not alone. The pandemic and the protests over the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and many others have led to a wave of emotion and collective action unlike anything we’ve seen in our lifetimes.
“I hate how much everyone hurts,” says Valenzuela. “There are so many people who feel almost the exact same way in a different way. We’re all seeking the same things: acceptance, love, just being understood. Over the years I’ve come to realize we’re all struggling with that.”
Valenzuela is quick to point out that she is not a mental health professional, but she has learned through her own experiences and by listening to her personal training clients that we all need support, and there are many ways to find it. As a personal trainer, she learned that her clients would make progress with her only to return to square one when they stopped working with her. “They weren’t getting to the root problem: feeling worthy of their goals,” she says.
That insight led Valenzuela to create a unique experience that blends art, exercise, and raw emotion for improved mental and physical well-being. Her goal with E-motion is to create a place where everyone feels safe “to put it out there, put it against the wall, break it,” she says. “Break it” means letting yourself break down and also literally throwing a paint-filled glass bottle against the wall. In doing this, people can open up to what’s really going on with them emotionally, which is an important step toward breaking through those barriers of not feeling worthy.
Here’s how it works:
– You start in a “smash room” where you safely throw paint-filled bottles against a concrete wall under staff supervision. (Participants wear safety goggles, helmets, and paint suits for safety.) This helps you move your emotions and your energy. The splattered paint adds an element of group art, a visual representation showing that we are not alone when we express our feelings.
– Next, you go to the “workout room” for a 45-minute high-intensity interval training workout. This is intended to make constructive use of the endorphin release from the prior emotional work.
– The experience winds down in the “chill room,” where you can relax and reflect or snap some pics in the Instagrammable setting. However, Valenzuela allows groups to bring in just one phone. It’s about staying in the moment.
Valenzuela signed the lease on this space in January 2020 and built her business during the coronavirus outbreak. The work has been an outlet for her, her partner, Randie, and her 12-year-old daughter, Aaliyah.
As a parent, Valenzuela says that taking care of yourself allows you to role model how to handle stress, especially in challenging times. Aaliyah is her inspiration, she says, and she hopes this business inspires her daughter. “I have to show her I can do something with hard work, and I need help along the way. I had this idea and I could see it, but I had no idea how to get there.”
It was Aaliyah who helped Valenzuela realize how to create the unique gallery/gym space. One night, sitting outside their home in Arvada, they noticed familiar graffiti. Aaliyah scrolled through her phone and found a photo she had taken of the same artwork on display last year at an art fest in RiNo, Denver’s trendy art district. They tracked down the art curator, Lorenzo Talcott, and the next day he was at their space in Arvada working on an art plan for E-motion.
Talcott brought in a couple local artists, and then more would drop by to support their artist friends and end up painting a wall themselves. The original plan was to create just a few murals, but as more artists got involved, the entire space came to life. It’s a testament to Talcott’s relationship with a close-knit community of artists that he describes with admiration. “It’s a vulnerable place,” he says, referring to the place artists get in when they express themselves on the walls. Their vulnerability has created an inclusive, welcoming environment in E-motion that encourages vulnerability and self-expression.
The intentionality of the art complements the purpose of each area. For instance, the colorful, uplifting faces Ruben Zilla painted in the “chill room” are designed to inspire a sense of accomplishment and self-esteem after finishing a hard workout. Talcott and Valenzuela also wanted the art to capture this transformative moment. “The Tupac [Shakur] piece needed to be part of this,” says Talcott. Chelsea Lewinski incorporated the lyrics to “Changes” in her mural of Tupac, located in a “smash room,” a vivid reminder of the changes needed to end police brutality and “heal each other,” as Tupac says in the song.
And only time we chill is when we kill each other
It takes skill to be real, time to heal each other ~Tupac, Changes
Just as Valenzuela’s vision inspired Talcott and a community of artists to paint E-motion, she hopes the local community of trainers and therapists will use her space with their clients. She doesn’t want to compete with gyms (there are no memberships at E-motion), she wants to bring people together.
Times are tough for gyms and for all those who miss their gym workouts and communities. It’s frustrating when your favorite workout spot — the gym, recreational facilities, parks and trails — is closed, or you don’t feel comfortable there, or you can’t leave the house because you’re watching the kids, or you just can’t. But despite these hurdles, we still need to move.
According to research from the NeuroFit Lab at McMaster University, even a brisk 30-minute walk three times a week can improve mood and decrease symptoms of depression and anxiety. The New York Times recently reported on a small study in which people who remained physically active at home were less depressed and more mentally resilient than people whose activity levels declined during the start of the pandemic lockdowns.
“Exercise is hardly going to fix everything, but it can be one thing we have control over. We can get up and move,” says Jacob Meyer, co-author of the study cited in the Times article. Although some readers of the article questioned the merit of the not-yet-peer-reviewed study in the story’s comments, more readers offered up what has been helping their mental and physical well-being: walking, hiking, stretching, cycling, and spending time in nature.
A week before the soft launch of E-motion, Valenzuela spent the weekend at Great Sand Dunes National Park with Randie and Aaliyah. Spending time with family, sneaking off for some alone time, seeing wildlife, and being active outdoors helped her process a whirlwind of emotions.
Above all, Valenzuela is scared. I met up with her the week of her launch and we sat quietly in her “chill room,” sharing our fears. I’m starting this publication at the same time Valenzuela is starting her business. I haven’t written a profile story in years, and I’m worried I won’t do her story justice. I’m afraid Nineteen will fail, or worse, succeed. Valenzuela shares this concern — about her business succeeding, that is, not about my story sucking (I hope). She reminds me of Maryanne Williamson’s words:
“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us.”
Valenzuela is so inspiring because she is not one to bottle up her emotions; she’s one to write her emotions on a bottle and smash it against the wall.
She walks me through her current list of fears. What scares her the most is not fear of failure, nor the racism she has experienced this year — and her entire life, as a biracial woman — nor opening her business during the COVID-19 pandemic, nor her daughter returning to school, nor her or the other trainer getting sick and having to shut down.
This is scary stuff, but what scares her the most — and it’s clear this is also what excites her the most — is living out her dream and becoming more successful than she ever imagined. “I just hope I can let go and grow and evolve with the business as fast as I hope it will grow and evolve — and I’m scared it will.” Fortunately, Valenzuela has a safe place to work out her fears.
This content is meant for informational purposes only and is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of a qualified health care provider.
Related Content:
