What if the life you want is one you haven't imagined yet?

Howdy! I’m Christina.

Six years ago, I had a life I loved. I was living in Brooklyn, running a successful business, traveling the world, and enjoying everything I'd worked so hard to build.

Then one afternoon, I stepped into a crosswalk and was hit by a truck. Literally.

What happened next changed everything I thought I knew about myself, happiness, and what makes a life worth living.

I wanted my old life back.

After the accident, I felt like a new person inside an old body, living a life I no longer recognized.

Most of the pieces were still there. My apartment. My friends. My business. New York. Everything looked familiar except the person living inside it.

I was the thing that had changed.

And I wanted desperately to feel like myself again. So I did what I'd always done when something wasn't working. I tried to fix it. For the better part of a year, I poured everything I had into my recovery. I wanted to get back to work. Back to my routines. Back to normal.

Back to me.

But the harder I tried to return to my old life, the more obvious it became that I couldn't. I wasn't the same person who had built it. Snd I had absolutely no idea what to do with that.

Eventually, I did something that made very little sense for a person desperately seeking answers. I packed up my car, put my dog in the passenger seat, and left.

No grand plan. No revelation about who I was going to become. Just a car, a dog, a few months, and a question:

What happens if I go?

Do a bunch of things. See what happens.

That was my grand methodology.

I spent the next few months driving across the country with my dog (Potato), sleeping in cabins, on farms, and occasionally in my car.

I rode horses, swam in glacial lakes, soaked in hot springs, tried my hand at stained glass, and made friends with strangers in dive bars.

Everyone I met seemed to be searching for something. Freedom. Connection. Purpose. A different way of living.

There was the pistachio salesman who performed magic tricks, the man riding his motorcycle across the country after his wife left, and the groundskeeper who told me her buffalo ranch was frequented by extraterrestrials.

I recognized something of myself in all of them.

Between the roadside stops, unexpected conversations, and mornings spent doing absolutely nothing productive, something started to change.

I stopped trying so hard to figure out my life.

And started actually experiencing it.

Slowly, almost imperceptibly, my world started getting bigger.

You don't have to know what comes next to find out.

Here's what I eventually realized:

We spend so much of our lives trying to figure things out. Who we are. What we want. Where we're going. What we're supposed to do when we get there.

And when life changes, we want answers. Preferably immediately.

But what if we're waiting for information that can only be collected by living?

Try something new. Change your mind. Follow an interest without knowing where it might lead. Discover something you love that you'd never even considered.

Give yourself permission to question what you've always known, what you've always wanted, and what else might be possible.

The more you experience, the more you discover about yourself — and the more possibilities you uncover for creating a full, meaningful life that is unmistakably you.

A life based more on curiosity than fear.

I believe you get one spin on this big, beautiful ball floating through space. One chance to find out what you love. What you're capable of. What makes you feel alive.

Yet many of us get so busy building, managing, and maintaining our lives that we forget to actually experience them.

We follow the rules. We do what makes sense. We stick with what we know. We tell ourselves we'll do the interesting thing later. When we have more money. More time. More certainty.

But who decided we have to keep doing things the way we’ve always done them?

You can change careers. Move across the country. Pick up an instrument. Fall in love with something you've never tried. You can reinvent yourself at 30. Or 50. Or 75.

And you don't have to blow up your entire life to do it. You just have to be willing to find out what happens when you do things differently.

You just have to be interested in living a life that's based more on curiosity than fear.

Turns out, there’s actual science behind all of this.

When I came home from my road trip, I couldn't stop thinking about how much I'd changed. I wanted to understand what had happened out there, and why those experiences had made such a difference.

So I started digging into the science of happiness, wellbeing, and human behavior. And the more I learned, the more I kept coming back to one thing:

Play.

Play is more than sports, games, and childhood memories. It's a fundamental part of being human. We have a biological drive to explore, experiment, connect, and create. It's what we experience when we follow our curiosity, become absorbed in an activity, and allow ourselves to discover where it takes us.

As I began exploring the research, I realized that so much of what I'd experienced on the road reflected what scientists were studying about play's role in learning, connection, adaptability, and flourishing.

I had stumbled into something that fundamentally changed the way I experienced my life.

I'd learned the art of play by living it.

Now I had the science to back it up.

And I had an overwhelming need to help other people experience it, too.

That's how Playstate was born.

Welcome to Playstate.

A place for people who are ready to stop going through the motions and start seeing what else is possible.

For the ones who have done everything they were supposed to do and are wondering what happens now.

For the ones in the messy middle of a big change.

For the ones who feel stuck, burned out, restless, or disconnected from the things that used to light them up.

And for the ones who aren't necessarily unhappy. They just find themselves wondering:

Could life feel better than this?

I think it's worth finding out.

Less managing your life. More living it.

COME TOGETHER

Group Coaching

For the life you're living and the one you haven’t imagined yet.

A six-week experience for people navigating change, questioning what's next, or simply wanting more from the lives they're living. Together, we'll explore what matters to you, experiment with new ways of thinking and being, and discover what happens when you make room for possibility.

A few ways we can get into this together.

GET OUT THERE

Retreats & Experiences

A summer camp for your spirit, designed to remind you how much fun discovery can be.

Thoughtfully curated adventures that bring interesting people together in beautiful places to explore, create, connect, learn, and play. A chance to step outside your usual routines, try new things, discover interests you didn't know you had, and get completely caught up in the experience of being alive.

BRING ME IN

Speaking & Workshops

A different way to think about life, change, and everything in between.

Through personal storytelling, the art & science of play, and a healthy dose of perspective, I invite audiences to rethink their relationship with uncertainty, rediscover their curiosity, and consider what becomes possible when we approach life a little differently.

A few things I believe.

  • You don't need to know who you're becoming to give yourself permission to become.

  • You can build a beautiful life and still want to experience it differently.

  • Being bad at something doesn’t mean you should stop doing it (see: my Pilates journey).

  • There's no prize for being the person who has everything figured out.

  • You can take your life seriously without taking yourself so seriously.

  • You don't need another self-improvement project. You need a life you're excited to participate in.

And perhaps most importantly:

You cannot think your way into a life you haven't lived.

You have to go find out.

So, what happens next?

Maybe you sign up for something.

Maybe you invite me to speak.

Maybe you read my story and start thinking about your own life a little differently.

Or maybe you close this tab and finally go do that thing you've been thinking about for ages.

I'd call any of those a pretty good start.

The rest? That's yours to discover.