A house built on softness

I thought I needed to be stronger. More organised, more disciplined, more confident. I believed that if I could just manage my life slightly better than I was managing it, everything would loosen.

Underneath all that effort my body was tired. Tired of holding things together, tired of being the version of me that everyone else appeared to need, tired in a way that sleep did not touch. I did not have language for it then, but I was living almost entirely in survival braced for expectations, braced for responsibility, braced for the possibility of disappointing someone I loved. So when I finally did sit down to rest, my body had no idea what to do with the opportunity. It only knew how to keep going.

The turning point came when I found somatic work, and it came sideways. Not as another practice to master, which is how I had approached every single thing before it, but as a way of listening.

For the first time I understood that the patterns I had spent years fighting were not personal failings. They were nervous system responses. My body had learned how to survive beautifully. Nobody had ever shown it how to feel safe.

Once I began working with my body rather than against it, the tension I had carried for years started to loosen without being told to. My reactions slowed. Boundaries began appearing on their own instead of having to be manufactured and defended. I stopped trying to control what was around me and started trusting what was inside me, which turned out to be the same skill I had been trying to buy in courses.

Eventually I trained in all it, because I wanted to understand what had happened to me well enough to hand it to somebody else. The trainings included Somatic training: Brett Larkin, Embodied Yoga Life Coaching,700hr, 2025. Yoga teacher training: Be Yoga, 200hr, 2019, Yoga teacher training: Be Yoga, 300hr, 2020, Ayurveda training: Shakti School, Ayurvedic coach,300hr, 2021, Ayurveda training: Shakti School, Ayurvedic counsellor,300hr, 2022. There is a master's degree in consumer science behind all of it as well, which sounds entirely unrelated until you notice it was years spent studying why people reliably do the things that do not serve them.

I have been teaching since 2020, and have worked with somewhere near 200 women in that time. Almost all of them arrived able to explain their own patterns perfectly.