04/03/2026
India has a way of reflecting you back to yourself.
I first came here 13 years ago to complete my yoga teacher training. At the time I was deeply devoted to the practice. I was committed, disciplined, and genuinely in love with what yoga was opening in me.
And yet, looking back now, I can see that much of what I was learning, and eventually passing on, centred around refining shapes, deepening poses, holding stillness, and building tolerance.
From the outside it often looked like wholesome self-care.
And in many ways, it genuinely was.
But sometimes it was also overpowering what the body was trying to communicate.
Over the last two decades of practice, and especially through the past 13 years studying the nervous system and the impact trauma can have on the body, my understanding has slowly shifted.
I’ve come to recognise how many of us were taught, often without realising it, to override sensation, to push through discomfort, and to interpret certain bodily responses in ways that perhaps were not quite what they seemed.
This can be especially easy to miss when those patterns show up inside practices we consider self-care.
What I once thought of as surrender might, at times, have been collapse.
What looked like calm might occasionally have been numbness.
When I first trained, I didn’t yet have the language for any of this.
Over time, through trauma-sensitive study, somatic therapy, attachment work, polyvagal theory, and years of working alongside women navigating their own nervous systems, that language slowly began to form.
And what I keep coming back to, again and again, is something that feels almost deceptively simple.
Safety changes things.
When a body genuinely feels safe, it often doesn’t need to perform flexibility or prove tolerance. When the nervous system is resourced, stillness can begin to feel supportive rather than threatening. When choice is present, growth tends to unfold in its own time.
I think this is why my facilitation has softened over the years.
Less emphasis on pushing or achieving, and more curiosity about what the body might be communicating beneath the surface.
These days I’m less interested in asking a body to override its signals, and more interested in creating conditions where listening becomes possible.
Coming back to India this time didn’t feel like learning something entirely new.
If anything, it felt more like sensing the arc of that evolution in my own body, noticing how my relationship with practice, with rest, and with the nervous system has quietly changed.
The work I offer now, whether in therapy, retreats, or group spaces, feels rooted in that shift.
Not so much performance or perfection, but a gradual building of capacity.
And in subtle ways, that seems to change the way we move, the way we rest, and perhaps even the way we begin to heal.
An invitation, if you like for a small moment of reflection…
Where in your life might you be overriding what your body is trying to communicate?
Where might you be pushing through self-care, instead of listening for what feels most nourishing?
