As Black women, we navigate a world where oppressive systems constantly test our mental and emotional resilience. These experiences—from microaggressions at work to the stress of systemic racism—can take a toll on our health. But what if we had a space specifically designed to help us cope, breathe, and heal? Enter the Exhale app, founded by Katara McCarty, a groundbreaking tool for emotional well-being made by and for Black women.
Exhale is not just another wellness app. It’s a revolutionary space that centers Black women, providing culturally relevant resources to help us destress, ground ourselves, and find moments of peace. The practices within the app are lovingly referred to as “soul medicine”—healing tools that reach the deepest parts of our being.
Exhale offers a range of guided practices, breathing exercises, meditations, calming sounds, and more. These practices are curated by Black, Indigenous, and Women of Color (BIWOC), ensuring that every element of the app is designed with authenticity and cultural specificity.
Black Love: What is the purpose of Exhale? Can you tell us the story behind the app.
Katara McCarty: Exhale is a wellbeing app designed to support Black women in their mental health and emotional wellbeing journey. We have specific meditations, breathwork techniques, calming sounds that center us and our experiences. I created Exhale because, in 2020, I was reaching for mental health resources that I normally would go to meditate and breathe with. It was really frustrating when those apps were not offering up culturally relevant content to the Black community at that time, in lieu of what was happening. The killings of Ahmaud [Arbery] Breonna [Taylor], George [Floyd], the Black Lives Matter movement, the marches that were happening — just the oppressive systems that exist that were being exasperated at that time really brought a level of stress and anxiety to the Black community. That was on top of Covid disproportionately impacting us; that brought its own level of stress and anxiety.
Watching those killings play out in our newsfeeds, the news cycle, people commenting, having commentary about it was just so stressful. I started reaching for apps to manage my own stress, and I was just really frustrated. There was a part of me that was not surprised, but then there was a part of me that was kind of shocked. Like, you say that you’re a mental health and wellness app, how could you not be speaking directly to my community and to me? I was frustrated, I was angry, I was mad. Really out of that anger, frustration, and rage, I thought, ‘if there’s nothing that centers a Black woman, why don’t I create it? What’s stopping me from creating what I’m looking for?’ The idea came from a need or a gap that I saw for my own self.
BL: How did you take that idea and create this business?
KM: I started talking to my sister, my cousins, other Black women in my life, aunties, and [ask them] would you use something like this? And the answer was an overwhelming ‘yes.’ So I remember running upstairs, I was down in the basement in my office, and I remember running upstairs. It was April 2020, when I was kind of chewing on the idea, and I ran upstairs and told my husband. He was like, ‘That’s a great idea. It’s a great idea.’ And then things kind of started unfolding from there. I’d never thought I would have an app. A tech company was not on my vision board. It was never a goal. I’m a life coach and I coach. I was coaching organizations and companies around their company culture. I was doing public speaking about those topics.
This kind of came about because I saw something that was missing in the market that I wanted. We were able to launch in August of 2020 with the help of my daughters, who are amazing adult women now. They were like, ‘Mom, you need our help.’ So they jumped on board and helped me with the design, starting our social media page, and really helping me to bring my idea to life. My husband jumped on board and we were able to launch our minimum viable product in August of 2020. We see ourselves in this app. We hear ourselves in this app. It’s not just meditations and breathwork techniques and affirmations that are written by Black women, but it’s for Black women. We talk about microaggressions and racism and systems of oppression and how that weathers us. The content is really curated to speak directly to us where other mental health and wellness apps just don’t talk or speak to those.
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BL: What has been the response from Black women who have used the app?
KM: What we’re hearing most of all is, when they open the app, there’s a reflection, a mirror, that they can see themselves in. So through the images of our models — who we took pictures of that we have attached to each meditation — to the content, the way I record all the meditations. I’m the practitioner. And so, they can see and hear themselves reflected back to them. That’s been the common theme and common thread that Black women are saying. That as soon as I open the app, I can see me; I can hear me. And that, in and of itself, creates an exhale. Black women are saying, ‘I can already sense my shoulders drop. My chest kind of open up. I can trust this space.’
What we’ve been hearing around that, with users, is how — we’ve had some focus groups and some panel discussions — is how guarded Black women are. Just when we leave our front door, we put on our armor. We also do that in wellness spaces. The wellness spaces that we physically move into, or even digitally through apps and things, we have a bit of guardedness because those spaces can also be harmful to us. What we’re hearing is, ‘this is safe. I feel safe here. I can actually breathe. I can actually exhale.’
BL: Can you speak a bit about building your business while also having these other roles in life that you’re need to fulfill as mom and wife. How did you achieve balance?
KM: Something as an entrepreneur I’ve always tried to do is not have a work-life balance. I don’t think that that’s possible. Balance sounds stressful to me. The minute you think of a teeter totter and the minute you put an extra thing on this side, it’s out of balance. I’ve tried to live my life — my entrepreneurial life, and being a parent, and being a wife, and being a member in the community — from a place of creating rhythm in my life versus balance.
With this project, with this business, when the idea came, the first people I got excited to tell were my family. Something that my husband and I have always done with our daughters is share our entrepreneurial journey with them. We didn’t always go into the nuts, and the bolts, and all the details and all of that, but this is what mom and dad are doing. We tried to involve them. We used to run a nonprofit and they were involved in that. Building with community, building with my family is something that I’ve always done. And so it was very natural to engage them in this work and not think of it as like, ‘Oh, I have to put work over here and put my family over here, and then I have to switch up who I am over here.’
What’s really beautiful is we’ve kind of created that rhythm in our family. If we’re at the dinner table and something exciting happens with the business, I feel like they want to hear and I get to share. If it’s too much, they’ll tell me. I’ve just tried to approach it in that way. Is that the right way? I don’t know. But it’s worked for us and it’s worked for me. I think also being able to have them a part of building [the app]. My oldest helped with the media. My youngest helped with the UX design and is still on our team. She’s our brand creative. Everything that the public sees, she’s making sure it looks nice. There’s just an interesting relationship that we have that it’s both, versus, ‘I have to be like this here. When I’m with my family, I have to leave that out.’ It’s like, no, I get to be a whole person. I’m a mom and an entrepreneur. So not looking at it from a place of creating balance, but creating rhythm.
BL: What do you want the future of the Exhale app to be? What is your vision?
KM: Something that I’ve discovered in this journey, the last couple years, is that we’re more than an app. We’re a movement and a social movement that prioritizes Black women and their overall wellbeing. We want 1 million Black women to take our pledge, which is pledging to prioritize their overall mental health and wellbeing by downloading the app and committing to using the app. Even if it’s just for a few minutes every day; carving out time for yourself and sharing the app with your community. That’s the big vision that we have is really getting a million women to make this commitment and join us in saying, ‘we’re not going to keep putting ourselves on the back burner.’ These oppressive systems exist in the world. They’re weathering our mental and emotional and physical health and wellbeing. We have to prioritize ourselves. If Black women are well, the world is well.
We have to say, okay, I’m going to take a break. I’m going to take a pause. I’m going to say no to that. I’m going to say yes to me. That’s what we are hoping for — getting women to just really prioritize themselves. Last year, we did a national survey. We surveyed over a thousand Black women concerning their mental, emotional and physical health. And 77% of them said that they want a resource that prioritizes them, that really centers them, that’s catered to them. That really told us that Black women want resources. They want to prioritize their mental health and wellbeing. They just don’t want to be in spaces that could potentially be harmful. Our long-term goal is we want to do another survey. We want to continue to hear from Black women, produce that data like we did with our last report, and get a million Black women saying yes to their mental health and emotional wellbeing.
BL: What advice do you have for Black women entrepreneurs who would like to start their own business, who would like to build their own app, but they have no idea where to start?
KM: I think the first thing is — something that I’m learning is to pause first. As an entrepreneur and really as Black women, period. Women in business, women who work in the home taking care of children, really saying, ‘I deserve to take care of me.’ And weaving in practices that really support wellbeing. Don’t get lost in the vision of the business. What I mean when I say lost is it’s all about that thing, whether it’s all about your family or all about building this business as an entrepreneur. It’s like don’t lose yourself in it. Make sure that you’re taking care of yourself, that you’re resting, that you’re moving with softness, that you’re moving with ease, that you’re not being highly critical, but that you give yourself grace. That you give yourself love; that you give yourself kindness. Give yourself space because being an entrepreneur is no joke.
It is hard. It’s hard to build a business. It’s hard to keep believing in yourself. And so, creating wellbeing practices in your life to really help you as you build so that you don’t get lost. You don’t get burned out. You have to take care of yourself as you’re building, right? Instead of throwing yourself into the whole thing. I mean, some of the things that we start as entrepreneurs, they don’t make it. They don’t work. So if I throw my whole self into this thing, then somehow that becomes part of my identity. And it’s not. We’re whole people. And so, making sure that we take care of all parts of us and not just leaning into this business. We have to prioritize ourselves.
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