My love affair with yoga began about ten years ago, and it began, as so many of the most important things do, not with intention but with desperation.
I was sick of chiropractors cracking my back and offering temporary relief for what was clearly a longer-term problem. I wanted something that would help my neck, my back, my whole body feel better on a more sustained basis. So I found a studio and attended a class and felt deeply, completely out of place. The way you do when everyone around you seems to know something you don't, and the gap between where you are and where they are feels insurmountable.
So I stopped going. Like so many people.
The second beginning
A while later, I roped a friend in, found a different studio, and chose it for the least spiritual reason imaginable: it was close to work. So close that I had no excuse not to go at the end of a busy day. I was in the middle of a stressful stretch at work, freshly promoted into a role that was not what it had seemed. And in the middle of all of it I found myself, once a week, trying to tangle and untangle my body into shapes I had no business attempting.
And something happened in that.
It took me a while to name it. But in the hard poses, in the moments that demanded every bit of my attention just to stay upright, there was a particular quality of quiet. I wasn't thinking about anything else. I wasn't running through the email I hadn't sent or the conversation I'd handled badly. I was just in my body, trying to figure out how to be in it. And even though that sounds simple, I don't think I had ever done it before.
The thinking stopped. The doing stopped. I was just in it.
My friend eventually stopped going. I never did. There was something in the curiosity it had opened, some interest in how I felt from the inside, some pleasure in getting stronger and stiller at the same time, that kept pulling me back. I was in sales then, always around people, never alone. The mat was mine. No one asked anything of me there. It didn't matter if my yoga looked nothing like the person next to me, which it didn't, for years. I still walked out every single time with something I can only describe as easefulness.
When everything changed
In 2022 my health took a turn. The details live elsewhere in this site, [I lost the ability to speak: it took me nine months to admit why →] but the short version is that what brought me back to myself, slowly and imperfectly, was a combination of EMDR with my psychologist and yoga. What the yoga did in that period was give me the physical and nervous system space to actually process what was happening, so that when I arrived at my EMDR sessions I could go deeper, unpack more, actually reach the patterns rather than just describe them from a distance.
The body and the mind working together. I understood this in theory. I felt it become true in practice.
The twelve months away
In February 2025 I took a twelve-month sabbatical. I thought it was going to be a long glamorous slow travel adventure, beautiful accommodation, roaming the world, the whole thing. It wasn't.
What it turned out to be was an unraveling. And the thing that held me through it wasn't the photography or the beautiful places, though those were real. It was yoga. Every day, I craved it. My husband came with me on that journey, and found his own version of what it offered, in his own time and at his own pace. Watching that happen was one of the quiet gifts of the year.
Coming back and building something
When I returned to Melbourne in January 2026 I started teaching properly, picking up classes at the studio where I'd taught in 2024, adding a second studio, applying for others. In the background, through an eighty-hour pranayama training, I found my way into a breathwork and meditation role at a wellness studio that opened my mind further to what this work can be when it's offered in a full curriculum, across breath and body and stillness together. [What 80 hours of pranayama training actually changes in your body →]
And in all of this, something was clarifying about what I actually want to build.
What I'm building and why
The principle I've built the online studio on is the one I keep coming back to: yoga can offer something for everyone. Not the version of yoga that looks good on Instagram. Not the version that requires flexibility or existing fitness or the right clothes. The version that asks you to arrive in your body and see what's there.
Practice Rooms, the online studio, will eventually have four rooms: a movement room, a breath room, a stillness room, and a sound room. Each one a different entry point. Each one offering the same thing underneath: a way back to yourself.
And alongside it, the Contemplations app. [Explore the Contemplations app →] This is the thing that is ready now. I built it for the moments I most needed something: before a difficult meeting, after a complicated email, in the middle of something going wrong. Curated audio sessions based on how you're feeling in the moment. Breath practices, meditations, somatic guides, all offered through nothing more than my voice. No face. No performance. Just a guide in your headphones, in your pocket, available whenever you need it.
I couldn't have built any of this without my husband's patience and belief in me as a teacher, a space holder and someone who knows how to come back home to herself while taking others along for the ride.
But what I want to say to you, at the end of all of this, is what I wish someone had said to me ten years ago in that first studio where I felt so completely out of place:
Your practice will move beyond how it looks to how it feels. Keep coming back and be curious.
Maybe this is the start of your love affair with yoga. I hope so.
