My tendency has always been to juggle many things at once. My mind is often busy, jumping from one idea, task, or new interest to another (except for those blissful moments in meditation). Whatever I do, I give my all. I have always taken my responsibilities as a daughter, mother, therapist, and teacher seriously. At times, those responsibilities have felt heavy in my body as well as my mind. Perhaps you recognise yourself in these words.

At the end of last summer, I was feeling worn out. I noticed I was becoming irritable and overwhelmed. My motivation had gone and my sleep was short and disturbed.  It had been a full and demanding season, ending with our residential retreat in Italy with my dear friend and colleague, Nina. I pushed through those final weeks of August, knowing I had some time off scheduled in September. I assumed that a few quiet days in nature would restore me, as they often do.

I spent several days in the Peak District, where I began to recognise the extent of my fatigue. I remember saying to my partner that I could do with two full weeks of doing absolutely nothing. At the time, it felt like an impossible luxury — something I could not afford financially or practically. It soon became clear that this was not simply wishful thinking; it was a genuine need.

The following week, I developed acute pain in my lower back, which led to nearly three months of deep rest and recovery.

As much as I disliked cancelling classes and treatments, I recognised that I was exhausted mentally, emotionally, and physically. I gave myself permission to take that week off and rest. I have witnessed too many times the consequences of ignoring the early warning signs of pain. I knew that if I did not listen, I could only make things worse.

What Recovery Asked of Me

My forced stillness gave me the opportunity to listen more deeply. To notice not just the pain in my back, but the accumulated tension of always doing, always holding, always being available to others. Rest was no longer a luxury; it became part of the healing.

I began by addressing the physical symptoms. I visited the GP and an osteopath to discern whether the problem was structural. The GP gave me an anti-inflammatory cream and signed me off for two weeks.

The osteopath, however, offered something very different. He was incredibly knowledgeable, kind, and intuitive. He listened carefully to how I felt and to my own sense of what might be happening in my body. That in itself felt deeply supportive and highlighted something very important for me: validation.

Initially, his treatment was very subtle. He worked gently, placing his hands at my head and sacrum with light, sustained contact. Over time, this soft approach seemed to influence my fascial network, inviting a sense of reconnection between my upper and lower body.

I cannot fully explain the mechanics of what happened, only the felt experience. Something that had seemed disconnected began to reorganise. There was a gradual sense of integration, as though my body was remembering how to communicate with itself again.

This process became a powerful companion to the psychotherapy I also began.

Looking back, I could see that my body had been living in a state of subtle survival for longer than I realised. Not in any dramatic sense, but in the quiet, socially acceptable way many of us do: managing responsibilities, pushing through tiredness, staying productive, and ignoring the whispers that ask us to slow down.

Adverse childhood experiences, poverty, and trauma had certainly underpinned this prolonged state of stress, but I reached a point where I decided I did not have to live the rest of my life in this way.

This inner exploration taught me a lesson in receiving. Healing was not asking me to do more, but to soften enough to allow support in.

Learning to Receive

Being unable to push through changed something fundamental in me. For perhaps the first time in my adult life, I could not rely on my usual coping strategies of staying busy, being productive, or carrying on regardless. My body had made the decision for me: I had to stop.

From a young age, my unconscious survival strategy had been fierce independence. To manage life, I learned to rely on myself, to keep going, and to meet challenges by doing more. It was a pattern that served me in many ways, but it also made it difficult to recognise when I needed support.

During those months of recovery, I had little choice but to allow others to help me. I could not teach. I could not offer treatments. I had very little capacity for reading, studying, or even maintaining much communication. My mind, usually so active, felt as though it had entered a kind of shutdown. At first, this was unsettling. I felt stripped of the familiar ways I defined myself.

In that stillness, I was held by love that had always been present, but which I was now finally able to soften into and receive more fully. The steady, unconditional care of my mother, the loving presence of my partner, the kindness of friends and family from a distance, and the quiet support of my yoga community all became anchors during this time.

What changed was not the love itself, but my capacity to receive it — without distraction, without striving, and without feeling I needed to give back or be anything other than what I was in that moment.

There was something profoundly healing about being met in this way. Not being asked to recover quickly. Not being asked to explain or perform wellbeing. Just being allowed to be as I was.

The space and stillness I had resisted for so long created the conditions for something deeper to emerge. Without the constant movement of doing, giving, and striving, I began to hear what lay underneath. There was grief, fatigue, and a need for deep restoration, but there was also a quiet wisdom that only became visible when everything else fell away.

Learning to receive was not only about accepting help from others, though that was part of it. It was also about allowing rest without guilt, allowing silence without filling it, and allowing myself to be supported by life rather than believing I had to hold everything alone.

What initially felt like helplessness gradually became a different kind of strength: the ability to soften, to trust, and to let stillness teach me what constant effort never could.

The Psoas, Survival, and Holding Tension

As I rested, I began reflecting on what my body might have been trying to tell me. My lower back pain had arrived suddenly, but when I looked more closely, I could see that my body had been signalling for some time. The fatigue, the irritability, the sense of being overwhelmed — these were all messages. The pain was simply the one I could no longer ignore.

In my work, I often speak about the body holding the stories we do not yet have words for. Stress is not only something we think about; it is something we live through physically. When we are under prolonged pressure, the nervous system adapts to help us cope. Muscles tighten, breath changes, sleep becomes lighter, and we may find ourselves existing in a subtle but persistent state of alertness.

One area deeply connected to this survival response is the psoas muscle. The psoas is a deep core muscle that links the spine to the legs, and because of its relationship with posture, breath, and the nervous system, it is often associated with our instinctive responses to stress and threat.

While it can be tempting to view the psoas as the source of tension or emotional holding, I believe the body is far more interconnected than that. No single muscle tells the whole story. Yet the psoas can become one place where we begin to notice the effects of long-term bracing — physically, emotionally, and energetically.

This period of stillness changed not only how I cared for myself, but also the way I began teaching. My own experience led me to explore the psoas muscle more deeply, and from that, my psoas workshops were born — a space to gently explore how the body holds stress and how we might begin to soften, listen, and restore.

Menopause, Transition, and the Invitation to Change

I had been experiencing perimenopausal symptoms for about 4 years.  Initially I assumed that hormonal shifts were impacting my joints and my energy levels, then I began to wonder about the transitional nature of my experience.

As women, we often move through the changes of midlife while continuing to meet the needs of everyone around us. We carry responsibilities, maintain routines, and keep going, sometimes without recognising how profoundly our internal landscape is shifting.

For me, this season felt like more than a hormonal transition. It felt like an invitation to re-evaluate the way I was living. My energy was changing. My capacity for constant doing was changing. The strategies that had carried me through earlier stages of life no longer felt sustainable.

What I first experienced as frustration gradually revealed itself as something deeper: a call to slow down, to listen more carefully, and to honour the changing needs of my body.

In many ways, my burnout and recovery arrived alongside this threshold into a new phase of life. It was as though my body was asking me to release old patterns of striving and over-giving, and to begin relating to myself with greater compassion.

I do not see this transition as something to be feared or fixed. Instead, I am learning to meet it as a powerful time of change — one that asks for honesty, rest, and the courage to live differently.

Two weeks became two months. Mostly I did nothing. I allowed the process to unfold. From the stillness, confusion became clarity. I could not return to the world in the same way as before. I made a scary decision to stop offering my mobile massage service. I was sad to let go of long-term clients who I had seen regularly for many years; who I had witnessed moving into parenthood and even begun massaging their children. This also was a substantial source of my income. My body was pleading me to stop burdening it with the heavy lifting and late nights that this work asked of me. I continued to listen, whilst acknowledging the fear that these decisions were triggering. I reduced my massaging days to twice a week and learnt not to immediately fill all the spaces between.

What Burnout Taught Me

Looking back, burnout taught me lessons that were not entirely new, yet I had never understood them in quite the same way.

Space. Time. Support. Permission. Allowing. Stillness.

These are all qualities at the heart of Yin Yoga — and of the Taoist philosophy that has underpinned and inspired the practice. They had resonated with me for many years. I understood them intellectually, and I had experienced glimpses of them in my own practice and in teaching others.

But this was different.

This experience invited me into a deeper, embodied understanding. I could no longer approach stillness as an idea, or rest as something to fit around productivity. My body required me to stop. To listen. To receive. To trust that healing could emerge not through effort, but through allowing.

For much of my life, I had valued doing — being capable, helpful, productive, and available. Burnout showed me the cost of living too far from balance. It reminded me that there are seasons when strength is not found in pushing forward, but in pausing long enough to hear what the body has been asking for all along.

In many ways, this period is changing how I live, how I care for myself, and how I teach. It has deepened my trust in the wisdom of the body and in practices that create space for us to soften, feel, and reconnect.

Sometimes the greatest transformation does not come from learning something new, but from unlearning; from truly living what we thought we already knew.

This is an ongoing process, and I am still learning to fully embody this way of being with myself and in the world. My understanding of healing is that there is no destination, no final completion. It is an ever-changing landscape that asks for presence, patience, and acceptance — of where we are, and of all that has shaped us.