By Greg Bicknell | Smoke-N-Focus Media
Kerry Steuart did not set out to build a nonprofit. He set out to survive.
After eight years in the United States Air Force — serving with the 38th Reconnaissance, 303rd Intelligence, and 16th Test Squadrons, with deployments across Korea and Saudi Arabia — he received a medical discharge in 1999. What followed was nearly two decades of chronic pain, PTSD, and a slow unraveling that touched every corner of his life. He sought help from the VA. He chased answers from doctors. He pushed through the way veterans are trained to push through — until pushing through stopped working.
Then a clinician at the War Related Illness and Injury Study Center in New Jersey suggested yoga, tai chi, and biofeedback. His oldest daughter nudged him onto a mat. And everything changed.
“If you don’t make time for wellness, you’ll be forced to make time for illness.”
Kerry Steuart
That line is not a slogan for Kerry. It is autobiography. And it is the foundation of everything he has built since.
From the Mat to the Mission
In 2016, Kerry launched MYKC — Midtown Yoga KC — as a mentoring and coaching vehicle for veterans and first responders. It has since grown and rebranded as Live Bliss, operating out of a wellness center in Neosho, Missouri, with a studio presence in Grove, Oklahoma.
Kerry is a 500-hour Registered Yoga Teacher (E-RYT 500) with Yoga Alliance, a Certified International Health Coach, a VFW Life Member, and a #StillServing campaign advocate. He is also, by any honest measure, one of the most effective grassroots veteran wellness operators in the region — running a nonprofit almost entirely on volunteer time and a sliding-scale membership model that funds free retreat access for veterans and first responders who could not otherwise afford it.
What Live Bliss Actually Does
Live Bliss’s mission is to help people live intentionally — to find purpose, restore connection, and build a life that does not require them to override their own pain to keep functioning. The curriculum is built around mindfulness, breathwork, movement, quality sleep, community, and nutrition. But the real work happens in the retreats.
Programs include multi-day immersions like Find Your Bliss, Warrior Weekend, From Burnout to Bliss, and the OKC Veterans Intentional Living Retreat — each designed to move participants through guided meditation, breathwork, movement, personal mission-statement work, and workshops on emotional regulation and what Kerry calls “turning conflict into intimacy.” A free Sunday evening veteran support group on Zoom, monthly community luncheons at Northeast Tech in Grove, and a free text-based daily mindfulness practice keep the door open between retreats.
The funding model is direct and honest: a $45-a-month membership tier is explicitly pitched as sponsoring one veteran or first responder through a Live Bliss retreat. Higher tiers include private coaching sessions with Kerry. He co-authored the MYKC Self Care Journal to give graduates a tool to take home.
“Our work isn’t about fixing people. It’s about helping them reconnect with the parts of themselves they had to abandon to survive.”
Kerry Steuart
The People Behind the Numbers
Statistics tell part of the story. The people tell the rest.
Live Bliss claims over 5,300 lives impacted and more than 10,700 volunteer hours across its programs, with participants self-reporting a 55% reduction in stress and 61% improvement in conflict resolution. But the number Kerry returns to most is simpler than any of that: the number of veterans who came through a retreat with no options left and walked out with a practice, a purpose, and in some cases, a reason to stay.
He has heard variations of the same sentence more times than he can count: If you had not followed your path, I would be in a coffin. He keeps showing up because of it.
“Working with veterans and essential personnel has allowed me an opportunity to have a purpose and serve a greater good — just like serving our country in the military.”
Kerry Steuart
A Personal Note
Kerry and I met at Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska in the early 1990s. We have stayed in each other’s lives across every chapter since — different cities, different careers, the same underlying mission. In 2021, Kerry reached out and told me I needed to come to one of his retreats. I did not want to go. I went. It pulled me out of a place I never want to revisit.
I am not telling that story to make this about me. I am telling it because Kerry Steuart has been doing this quietly — for veterans, for first responders, for people who have run out of options — for more than a decade. The VFW has written about him. The American Institute of Stress has written about him. And the work he built before anyone was watching is now being validated by peer-reviewed research.
Smoke-N-Focus Media exists to tell the stories that nobody else is telling. This one has been waiting long enough.
“Healing isn’t a one-time event. It’s a lifestyle. And if we’re lucky, we get to help others find their way back to themselves while we’re on that same journey.”
Kerry Steuart
Learn More
Visit livebliss.org to learn about retreats, membership, and how to support Live Bliss’s work with veterans and first responders. If you know someone who needs what Kerry is offering, send them there.
Story by Greg Bicknell, Founder of Smoke-N-Focus Media. “Real People. Real Stories. Real Good.”