It started with a breathwork class. Hoda Kotb, veteran co-host of the Today show, was skeptical but willing to try it. Her teacher, Christine, came highly recommended from Jenna Bush Hager, and the appointment was on Zoom so it felt low stakes. “I didn’t know what the hell was going on,” Kotb says. But eight minutes in, “I explode in tears.”
Afterwards, she felt lighter. Something shifted. She was calmer, slept better than usual, felt more present with her kids. “That was my first toe in the water,” she says. Then came meditation. (“All of a sudden I’m meditating and I feel chills all over my body. I’m like, what is this crazy thing?”) She met Maria Shriver for lunch, who brought up something called the Hoffman Institute. Kotb recalls Shriver saying: “I’ve done all the things. I’ve lived with nuns. I walked with the Dalai Lama….This one retreat, I would trade my Georgetown degree for.” So Kotb goes to Hoffman, a week-long program that focuses on “healing negative patterns of feeling, thinking, and behaving,” according to its website. And then, in her words: “I was a different person.”
It was the doorway into a new chapter of Kotb’s life. It was 2024, and she had been on Today since 2007, at NBC since 1998, and working the grueling hours of a broadcast reporter since 1986. In 2017, she adopted her first child, Haley Joy, followed by her second, Hope Catherine, in 2019. She was doing it all, but met with the reality that, in her words, “You cannot have it all.” Something had to give.
Kotb never expected to find balance in work and family. “I just thought to be really good at something, you’re probably out of whack,” she says. “I interviewed so many athletes—Olympic athletes, like Simone Biles, and she had no life because she was doing one thing.” Kotb sees the value in this—identifies with it, even—but realized work didn’t need to be her “one thing” forever. Was there a world in which she could devote a little more of the “pie,” as she calls it, to being a mom?
“My career did ride sidecar most of my life, and I think I had an epiphany about it,” she says. “I remember just thinking to myself, ‘is this how I want it to go?’ David Brooks says there’s the resume-you and the eulogy-you. The resume-you is all the stuff that people say about you when you’re alive. But what’s the eulogy-you? What are they saying when they’re in the pews? ‘She was at work a lot and she got some awards?’ Is that really what we want?”
Meanwhile, her appetite for feeling better was insatiable. Kotb had long been an avid runner and mindful eater, but yearned for the sense of peace she had only found in practices she describes as more “woo-woo.” She hosted a Today show retreat in October 2024, bringing happiness experts, business thought leaders, and wellness practitioners together at Miraval Spa in Austin—complete with a live taping of Today with Hoda & Jenna, of course. The weekend felt like a lightbulb moment. “Retreats have got to be the cornerstone of it,” Kotb realized at the time, unsure of what “it” exactly was, loosely conjuring up her next endeavor. She also wanted to curate virtual events and courses—“I felt like we needed the retreat in your pocket.”
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