Neuroscientist Combat Veteran Founder & CEO of Willful Warrior thewillfulwarrior.org/ Specializes in Breathwork and Mediation Studying to earn double doctorate in Neuroscience and Psychology

Leland Holgate, a man who is very blessed to be alive today after all of his trials and tribulations. He served in the military with 3 deployments overseas, he has been paralyzed twice from horrific accidents, and he’s a survivor of stage 2 colon cancer.

BIO

My name is Leland Holgate Sr., and what you're about to read is the story of how I turned devastation into devotion, trauma into transformation, and survival into sacred service.

I was born on June 1st, 1979, in Vicenza, Italy, to a U.S. Army Airborne Ranger father and a military nurse mother. Our home was filled with the energy of service and sacrifice, but also tension, pain, and fear. My earliest memories aren’t soft. They’re filled with volatility and pressure. My father was a soldier to the world, but at home, he waged a war that left its mark on my body, mind, and spirit. I learned how to take the pain to protect others. I became the emotional buffer for my family.

By age 7, I was also carrying the weight of sexual abuse—an experience that left invisible scars. I was told that if I spoke up, it would destroy the family. So, I became silent. Stoic. I carried shame that did not belong to me.

At 17, I enlisted in the United States Air Force. I wanted structure. I wanted purpose. I wanted to become the kind of man I did not see growing up. I trained as a C-130 Loadmaster, completed helicopter rescue training, and graduated from S.E.R.E.—Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape—some of the most intense preparation you can undergo.

I deployed three times—to the Middle East, Africa, and Eastern Europe—including during Operation Anvil in Yugoslavia. One mission I will never forget: I was strapped into the rear-facing window of a C-130, scanning the sky for missile trails. My hands gripped the flare and chaff launch controls as alarms sounded and we dove into evasive maneuvers. I was fully aware that any moment could be my last—but I was not afraid. I was focused. Present. Alive.

In that moment, I understood what it meant to serve something greater than myself. I was not just an airman—I was a protector. I had finally become the man I had once needed. And for the first time, I felt like I belonged.

But fate had another initiation waiting.

After returning stateside, I was out on a lake—riding an inner tube behind a jet ski at dangerously high speeds. The water looked calm, but the moment was not. The jet ski whipped a hard turn, and I was launched off the towable like a slingshot. I hit the surface like a missile—neck first.

Everything went black. My body went limp.

I had suffered a severe contusion to my upper spinal cord—C1/C2—the very area responsible for sending signals to every limb in my body. It shut down everything. I floated in the water, unconscious, no heartbeat and no breathing…completely paralyzed from the neck down.

After reviving me on the lakeshore, they rushed me to the hospital, where doctors gave me the kind of news no warrior ever wants to hear: “You may never walk again.”

I stared at the ceiling and made a choice. I refused to accept it.

I asked the nurses to physically move my arms and legs every day. I needed my body to remember. I needed my brain to believe. I visualized each limb moving, even though I could not feel them. I imagined walking, running, hugging my kids. I trained my nervous system through sheer willpower and neuroplastic faith.

Day after day. Week after week. Month after month.

And then… something shifted. A flicker of sensation. A muscle twitch. A miracle.

Almost two years later, I walked away after being told it might not happen. Not perfectly. Not pain-free. But walking—with a fire in my soul that no injury could ever touch.

But my external recovery masked an internal collapse.

I had no mission anymore. No team. No uniform. No identity. I had spent years pushing through pain, but now that the structure was gone, all that pain came flooding in. And I did not know what to do with it.

I started to spiral—fast.

At first, I tried to hide it. I told myself I was just blowing off steam. But what started as occasional partying turned into daily numbing. I buried myself in alcohol, hard drugs, and anything that would silence the noise. I was not trying to get high—I was trying to disappear. I was trying to kill a pain that had no language.

I lost myself.

I became a man I did not recognize—short-tempered, cold, disconnected. I abandoned the people who loved me. Burned bridges I would later pray to rebuild. There were nights I slept in my car because I had no other option. There were mornings I woke up not knowing how I had made it through the night.

I was not living. I was floating through a fog of trauma, addiction, and self-hatred.

I knew I could not go on like I had been. Something had to change.
I found my way to a yoga mat—desperate, broken, and skeptical.
But as I moved, I started to feel.
And as I breathed… I started to return.

And yet, some small part of me—the part that had survived everything else—refused to fully die.

In 2016, I got the kind of call that stops time.

It was my birthday. Instead of celebration, I got a message that shattered what little was left of me. My father—the man I had feared, fought, loved, and tried to forgive—was gone. He had taken his own life.

And the part that gutted me most? He had sent one last message:
“I can’t do this anymore.”

He did not respond no matter how many calls or text messages I sent.

I collapsed to my knees. I screamed like an animal. I hit the floor so hard it bruised my bones. Because no matter what he had done—he was my father. And despite the pain, I still wanted his approval. I still wanted to save him.

But he was gone. Just like that.
And now all I had left were echoes and scars.

I had already lost brothers in combat. I had already survived death twice. But this? This was the war I could not fight. The enemy I could not see. It cracked me open in a way nothing else had.

And just when I thought I could not be broken any further…

A month after my father took his life, I was diagnosed with stage 2 colon cancer.

I had barely begun to process the grief when life threw another blow. One that struck me not in the heart this time—but in the gut. Literally. My body had absorbed years of rage, repression, and unspoken trauma. And now, it was screaming for my attention in the only language it had left: disease.

Somehow, that rupture became the beginning of everything.

I made a vow right there in the doctor’s office:
“I will not die like my father. I will not die with my story still locked inside me.”

So, I did not go to war with the cancer.
I listened to it.
I honored it.
And then I transformed it.

I rejected chemo. I turned to natural means.
I changed my entire internal terrain—nutrition, emotion, breath, nervous system.
I flooded my body with life.
I used meditation and breathwork to regulate fear.
I used heart coherence to return to peace.
I treated every cell like sacred soil… and 19 months later, I was in full remission.

Yoga became my lifeline.
Breathwork became my resurrection.

I became a 500-hour E-RYT instructor. I studied trauma-informed movement, somatic processing, nervous system literacy. I built a system—not just to calm the body, but to reprogram the patterns of trauma that lived inside it.

That system became The Welcome Home Method—a breath-based path not just to survival… but to sovereignty

No knives. No poisons. Just breath, will, and relentless love for the body I once abandoned.

But just as I stood in that victory… life came calling again.
Just when I thought I had reclaimed my life…
2019 hit.

Another car. Another crash. Another fucking test.

A head-on collision left me paralyzed—again—this time from the waist down. I could not believe it. Not because it happened… but because I had already done this. I had already walked this fire.

It felt like a cosmic joke. Like I was being mocked by the universe itself.

But this time, I did not break.
This time, I did not beg.
This time… I knew who the fuck I was.

I was not the same man who woke up in that hospital after the lake accident. I was not lost. I was not drowning in shame or addiction. I was forged. Grounded. Fierce.

I turned inward. I sat in stillness. I practiced breathwork for hours. I visualized every muscle fiber reconnecting. I meditated every single day, diving into pineal gland practices I had learned from Dr. Joe Dispenza—the same man who had poured belief into me before I even believed in myself.

I spoke to my nervous system.
I reprogrammed it with breath and will.
I whispered to my spine: “I remember who I am. And we are not done.”

The doctors looked at my scans and shook their heads. But I knew.
I knew what science had not caught up to yet:
The body listens to the soul… when the soul speaks in breath.

And within a year, I walked again.

Not as a miracle.
But as proof.

Proof that I was not just surviving anymore.
I was mastering the very force that nearly ended me.
Proof that everything I teach now did not come from books—it came from the battlefield of my own broken body and the breath that rebuilt it.

This was not just a second chance.
It was the final confirmation.

The Willful Warrior was not an idea anymore.

It was born. And it was alive. Because I still was.

Dr. Joe encouraged me to start something new. Something real. Something needed.

That became The Willful Warrior.

Since that day, I haven’t stopped building.
I’ve launched Awaken the Warrior Within—a 12-week immersive transformation that takes people from survival to sovereignty.
I created Healing Breathwork Fundamentals—a foundational course to retrain the nervous system, shift neurochemistry, and reclaim the body as a healing instrument.
I birthed the Medicine Wheel Breath Ceremony—a sacred rite woven from ancient ritual and modern breath science, capable of cracking open the heart and catalyzing deep, cellular change.

I have led retreats. I have sat in sacred circles with warriors, CEOs, veterans, trauma survivors, and seekers from every path imaginable. I created The Medicine Cabinet—a library of breath protocols designed to replace the pills, the pain, and the paralysis with something primal, potent, and deeply personal.

I founded the Awaken the Warrior Within Foundation—a nonprofit that scholarships veterans into plant medicine, breathwork, and trauma-informed integration journeys. Because I refuse to watch another brother die in silence.

And I co-founded Project Lazarus—a multi-year global expedition taking combat veterans across the highest peaks on Earth and into the frozen edges of the Arctic. Not for glory. Not for adrenaline. But for something far more sacred: soul reclamation.

We are climbing mountains to remember who we are.
We are sitting with medicines to remember who we were.
We are breathing through pain to remember what we are becoming.

And now, the work is going deeper.

Today, I have been officially accepted into the graduate program for Biomedical Neuroscience at the University of Florida, where I will study under Dr. Gordon Mitchell—one of the most respected names in respiratory neuroplasticity. From there, I will pursue my Doctorate in Neurochemistry, researching how breath patterns influence gene expression, trauma recovery, and the biochemical architecture of healing.

Because I do not just want to believe in this work.
I want to prove it—in labs, journals, and history books.

And I am not done.

I have walked through hell—twice.
I have lost everything—more than once.
And still… here I stand.
Not as a survivor. But as a living, breathing testament that pain can become power, and purpose can rise from the ashes.

I am not here to play small.
I am not here to play safe.
I am here to lead a global revolution in breath, biology, and belonging.

This is not just a story.
It is a battle cry.

One breath.
One breakthrough.
One warrior at a time.                                                         

www.thewillfulwarrior.com