It’s night here, and the jungle has that strange alive darkness to it. Frogs, river sounds, insects, leaves moving around in the black. It’s a full moon too. Sagittarius, apparently, which feels fitting. The seeker. The wanderer. The philosopher. The archer aiming somewhere beyond what can be seen.

And here I am, in the humidity of the night, thinking about one of the most misunderstood spiritual concepts I’ve ever come across.

Non-attachment.

Or, in the yogic tradition: Aparigraha.

Aparigraha is one of the Yamas, one of the ethical foundations of yoga. It is often translated as non-possessiveness, non-grasping, non-hoarding, non-clinging. A way of living that asks us to loosen our grip, not because life is not worth loving, but because nothing alive was ever meant to be held still.

Nature doesn’t cling

Nature does not teach us how to hold on. Nature teaches us how to belong to change.

The moon empties and fills. Trees release leaves. Snakes shed skin. Tides retreat. Flowers bloom without trying to keep themselves in bloom. Fruit ripens, falls, ferments, and feeds the soil. The forest does not confuse decay with failure.

Nothing in nature is trying to remain at its peak forever. Only humans seem to do that.

We build entire identities around trying to prevent the inevitable. We cling to youth, relationships, careers, aesthetics, relevance, plans, bodies, versions of ourselves that have already expired. We grip tightly to what once made us feel safe, even when it has started to cost us our aliveness.

Maybe this is why Aparigraha feels so refreshing to me. It is not asking me to care less. It is asking me to cling less. And I cannot tell you how much of a relief that has been for me to understand.

The hat that belonged to someone else

For a lot of my adult life, I have allowed myself to believe the idea that I might be an avoidant person. With men. With love. Mostly. I simply don’t feel as attached as others around me seem to feel- and apparently that’s unusual. To be clear- this hasn’t always been the case. I spent my entire 20’s in two back-to-back 5 year relationships. At year 3 I knew it wasn’t going to work and I was unhappy- but I stayed an extra 2 years in both. I was clinging. The time cost fallacy. Classic. These words gets thrown around a lot now: Avoidant. Anxious. Secure. Disorganised. We have built whole little psychological moodboards around the way people respond to love, and some of it is useful, of course. But sometimes I think we over-label things that might actually be more nuanced, more ancient, more instinctive than that.

Because no matter how often I have tried to wear the avoidant label, it has never really fit. It has always felt like a hat that belonged to someone else.

I am an open book with the people in my life. I like to get deep. I like to be vulnerable. I like to really get under the skin of things. I’m not afraid of being seen, and I’m not afraid of seeing. Being hurt doesn’t scare me in the way it once did. Being unfulfilled, however, terrifies me.

I’ve often found myself in very deep, intense, romantic, almost cinematic situations throughout my life. The kind that feel like portals. The kind that crack something open. The kind where time bends a little and suddenly you’re having a conversation with someone that feels like it has been going on for lifetimes.

When those moments arrive, I sink into them. I let myself feel the electricity, the softness, the intimacy, the mystery, the mirror, the medicine. I am not standing at a distance, arms crossed, pretending not to care. I am usually right there in the middle of it, fully alive, fully awake, fully in the room.

But I don’t always need more.

I don’t always need to capture it, define it, secure it, name it, or turn it into a future. Sometimes I can feel something deeply, honour it fully, and still understand that it may not be here to stay.

This is where people have often misunderstood me. This is where I have been called avoidant.

But I am starting to understand that perhaps it was not avoidance at all. Perhaps it was something much closer to non-attachment.

I have never fully understood the way people attach to the concept of more. Yes, someone might be wonderful. You might have a beautiful time. A feeling of being cracked open by another person for a night, a week, a month, a season.

But why does that automatically have to become a claim?

Why does a beautiful thing immediately need to become a permanent thing?

If you eat an incredible pizza one night, must you eat that same pizza every night forever? If you see a beautiful pair of shoes in a store, are you able to appreciate them without needing to buy them?

Can something be beautiful without becoming yours?

I think about this after sex sometimes.

There is a strange assumption that intimacy must always create attachment, or that if it does not, something must be missing. But I do not know if that is always true. Intimacy does not equate to ownership. Sometimes the body meets another body and there is warmth, pleasure, curiosity, aliveness, tenderness even. Sometimes it is beautiful because it is temporary. Sometimes the lack of future does not cheapen the moment. Sometimes it allows the moment to be exactly what it is, without all the heaviness of expectation arriving in the room afterwards.

I am not saying this casually or flippantly. I am not talking about using people, bypassing feelings, or pretending we are above consequence. I care about honesty. I care about tenderness. I care about consent and clarity and not making someone else bleed because I wanted to feel free.

But I also care about the truth that not every intimate thing is asking to become a structure.

Not every kiss is asking to become a contract. Not every night is asking to become a life. Not every person who moves something in you is asking to become your home.

Maybe some people are not homes. Maybe some people are weather. Some are mirrors. Some are rivers you meet for a while and then part from.

And that does not make the meeting less sacred.

If you love something, set it free

This is where non-attachment is so often mistaken for emotional distance, when in many wisdom traditions it is actually closer to loving reality without trying to imprison it.

There is that age-old saying we have all heard, probably too many times: if you love something, set it free. I think I believe that to my core. What could be more loving, more respectful, more honest, than allowing others to exercise their own free will?

Sometimes they will choose you. Sometimes they won’t. Often, none of it has anything to do with you.

That, too, is a kind of liberation.

Attachment says, “I need this person, identity, outcome, phase, body, status, or certainty to stay the same so I can feel safe.” Non-attachment says, “I will meet this fully while it is here, and I will not make my peace dependent on its permanence.”

This distinction matters, because so much of what we call love is actually fear in a more romantic outfit. We think caring means holding tightly. We think desire means ownership. We think commitment means control. We think that if something changes, leaves, or does not become what we wanted it to become, then it must have been meaningless.

But I don’t think that’s true.

Temporary does not mean meaningless. Some things are not here to become permanent fixtures in your life. Some things are here to wake you up, soften you, show you another version of yourself, teach you something about desire, grief, projection, truth, beauty, freedom.

I think this is also the thread running through the way I have lived in places.

I have built homes and then left them. I have created little nests in different cities, different rooms, different countries, and then felt the strange ache of leaving the very thing I had made beautiful. I have craved rootedness and then felt restless inside it. I have wanted a home, and then wanted the road.

For a long time, I thought this meant I was inconsistent. Flighty, maybe. Hard to satisfy. Always searching.

And maybe there is some truth in that. I think we can be honest about our patterns without shaming them.

But maybe there is also something else happening. Maybe some of us are not here to belong to one fixed shape forever. Maybe some of us learn ourselves through movement. Maybe the point is not to finally find the one place that ends the longing, but to become intimate with the longing itself. To understand what it is really asking for.

Because I don’t think I am only looking for a location. I think I am looking for a way of living that does not betray my nature.

A life with more sky in it. More health. More body. More slowness. More truth. More time outside. More space to create. More freedom to follow the quiet pull of what is alive.

And this brings me to the other place I feel myself practising Aparigraha, even when it feels uncomfortable: my career.

For ten years, design has been my identity. Designer. Creative. Brand person. Visual person. The one who can make things look good, make things feel desirable, make an idea become a world.

And I do still love parts of it. I love beauty. I love composition. I love atmosphere. I love the way a piece of design can make you feel something before you even understand why.

But something in me has been loosening its grip on the identity.

Design has started to feel less like the whole cathedral and more like one room inside it.

For a while, this scared me. It still does, if I’m honest. Because if I am not clinging to the old identity, then what am I? If I am not building my life around being a designer, what am I allowed to become? If the thing that has paid me, shaped me, validated me, frustrated me, and given me a place in the world is no longer the thing I want to worship, where do I put my devotion now?

Sometimes the thing we are clinging to is not even making us happy. It is just familiar.

I can feel the old designer self still asking to be protected. She wants a plan. She wants income. She wants security. She wants proof that changing direction will not be reckless or humiliating or financially stupid. I have compassion for her, because she got me here.

But I can also feel something else beginning to grow.

Rewild.

A word, a concept, a movement, a question, a body of research, a way of living. Something about nature, autonomy, slowness, health, ritual, freedom, creativity, sensuality, devotion, non-attachment, and remembering that we were never designed to live as endlessly productive machines.

I do not know exactly what it is yet. That is the uncomfortable part. It is not fully formed. It does not have a neat business model. It does not slide easily into a LinkedIn headline. It is still more seed than structure.

And yet, I feel more alive when I move towards it.

So maybe Aparigraha, for me, is not only about men, sex, homes, or beautiful temporary things. Maybe it is also about loosening my grip on an identity that once kept me safe, so something more honest can come through.

In Sanskrit, anitya means impermanence. In Pali, the Buddhist term is anicca. Both point toward the same truth: life is in constant flux.

Think of water. Fluid, formless, untethered. Water does not resist the shape it is poured into. It adapts. It moves. It softens rock. It becomes mist, rain, river, ocean, tear. It knows how to change state without losing its essence.

Bruce Lee’s famous line comes to mind: “Be water, my friend.”

In Buddhist philosophy, anicca is one of the core marks of existence. Everything conditioned changes. Bodies age, emotions pass, relationships shift, desire moves, identities dissolve. The self we defend so fiercely is not as fixed or permanent as we like to imagine.

Buddhism identifies clinging to the transient nature of life as one of the root causes of suffering. It is not love itself that creates suffering. It is the grasping.

Pain is part of being alive. Suffering is what happens when we demand that the alive thing never changes.

This is where non-attachment starts to feel less like loss and more like devotion.

Because you can be devoted without being controlling. You can be devoted to writing without demanding that every piece performs. You can be devoted to love without demanding that every connection becomes a relationship. You can be devoted to your body without punishing it into obedience.

This does not mean we stop wanting things. I think desire is sacred. Desire is information. Desire is life moving through us.

But there is a moment where desire can become a cage. Where the thing we want starts to own us. Where our peace becomes dependent on getting it, our self-worth becomes dependent on keeping it, and our nervous system cannot rest unless the outcome is guaranteed.

I think this is where a lot of modern spirituality gets a bit murky. Especially manifestation culture.

We say we are manifesting, but sometimes we are gripping. We say we are aligned, but sometimes we are afraid. We say we are calling something in, but sometimes we are trying to negotiate with life because uncertainty makes us feel unsafe.

Act fully, release the fruit

The Bhagavad Gita speaks to this through the teaching of karma yoga: act fully, but release attachment to the fruits of action.

Do the work. Show up. Offer the devotion. But do not hand your soul to the result.

I think about this constantly with creativity.

How many beautiful things never get made because we are already attached to how they will be received?

How many ideas die because we are refreshing the imaginary likes before we have even begun?

To create without attachment is to return to the altar of the work itself. To write because something in you needs to be written. Not because applause is guaranteed, but because the practice itself has become devotional.

Love the cup knowing it may break

Stoicism offers a more severe, but deeply clarifying, version of this. Epictetus taught that when we love something, we should remember its nature. If you love a cup, remember it is breakable. If you love a person, remember they are mortal.

At first, this can sound cold. Almost brutal. But I think it can also be read as a practice of tender realism. Love the cup knowing it may break. Love the body knowing it will age. Love the moment knowing it will pass.

To remember impermanence is not morbid. It is intimacy training.

When we know something will pass, we may actually touch it more gently. We may stop postponing affection. We may stop wasting the moment trying to secure the next one.

Maybe impermanence does not make life meaningless. Maybe impermanence is what makes life holy.

The difference between tending and yanking

Taoism brings a softer, more nature-based language to the same teaching. The Taoist concept of wu wei is often translated as non-action or effortless action, but it does not mean doing nothing. It means not forcing. It means acting in accordance with the way things are moving, rather than constantly imposing our will onto life.

Modern life tells us to optimize, force, manifest, strategize, track, improve, perform, and extract. Taoism asks what might happen if some of our suffering comes from pushing against the current of our own lives.

But there is a difference between action that comes from harmony and action that comes from panic. There is a difference between tending the garden and yanking at the roots.

Non-attachment asks us to learn that difference.

Maybe this is why the concept feels so connected to rewilding. Because non-attachment is also an ecological practice.

Robin Wall Kimmerer, botanist and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, writes about The Honorable Harvest, an ethic of reciprocity between humans and the living world. Take only what is given. Take only what you need. Never waste what you take. Share. Give thanks. Give back.

This is non-attachment in relationship with the Earth.

The berry is not just a resource. The plant is not just an object. The land is not just property. You can receive, but you must not possess with entitlement.

Attachment turns the world into property. Non-attachment returns the world to relationship.

Capitalism teaches attachment through ownership. My body. My brand. My house. My audience. My partner. My time. My productivity. My aesthetic. My future. Everything becomes something to claim, manage, improve, protect, monetize, optimize, and secure.

Earth-based wisdom teaches a different grammar. Gift. Gratitude. Enoughness. Reciprocity. Return.

Maybe this is where non-attachment becomes truly radical. To practise it in a culture built on possession feels kinda rebellious.

To rest without earning it. To love without owning. To create without performing. To age without apologising. To desire without becoming desperate. To let something be beautiful without needing to consume it. To let something end without deciding it was a failure.

To let a version of yourself die without trying to resurrect her out of fear.

This is not easy work, because attachment often disguises itself as love. It tells us that if we care, we must hold on. If we love, we must secure. If we lose something, we must have failed. If something changes, something must have gone wrong.

But nature tells another story.

The leaf does not fail when it falls. The moon is not broken when it wanes. The flower is not less sacred because it wilts. The snake is not betraying itself when it sheds its skin.

Maybe we are allowed to change form too.

Maybe we are allowed to stop gripping the version of life we thought we wanted. Maybe we are allowed to let old identities expire. Maybe we are allowed to outgrow people, places, habits, ambitions, aesthetics, coping mechanisms, and timelines.

Maybe we are allowed to meet life more honestly when we stop trying to possess every beautiful thing that visits us.

So how do we integrate this into everyday life?

I don’t think it needs to become a grand spiritual performance. I think it starts in small, ordinary moments.

Creating something and not immediately checking how it was received. Loving someone without monitoring them for signs of abandonment. Resting without needing to justify it. Moving your body without punishing it. Letting a conversation remain unresolved. Letting money matter without making it your god. Letting beauty change without treating ageing as a personal failure. Letting desire exist without obeying it instantly. Letting grief move through you without building a permanent home inside it.

Letting someone choose freely, even if their choice is not you.

Letting a season end without needing to immediately know what comes next.

Letting the body soften. Letting the plan change. Letting the mystery remain mysterious.

And when you feel yourself grasping, maybe the question becomes:

Am I trying to love this, or own this?

Am I acting from devotion, or from fear?

Can I want this deeply and still remain free?

Can I let this matter without making it my master?

Non-attachment is not about caring less. It is about suffering less from the illusion that anything was ever ours to control.

It is the practice of meeting life intimately, gratefully, and fully, while remembering that everything we love is alive, and everything alive is changing.

The moon empties and fills. The fruit falls. The river keeps moving. The forest lets go and grows anyway.

Maybe the invitation is not to become numb.

Maybe the invitation is to become more alive.

To love what is here. To bless what leaves. To stop gripping so tightly. To let life breathe.

What are you clinging to at the moment?

Where are you grasping?

What are you trying to own that only ever asked to be loved?

Soften.

Release.

Let it breathe.

Lately I’ve been talking about burnout, modern workplace dynamics, relationships, the hedonic treadmill, freedom. I do genuinely believe we need to return to factory settings. Ctrl, alt, delete. Start the whole thing over. Become more human again. Disconnect to reconnect. I believe the modern capitalist system profits from our burnout and disconnection, unless you become wise to it.

But today I want to talk about the relationship between burnout and trauma. How our own experiences, beliefs and mindset make us more, or less, predisposed to burn out. Over and over again. And to do that, I’m going to tell you about one of the worst periods of my life.

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Twenty-six

Let me take you back. I was 26. I’d been with my first real love for five years. We went to university together, lived together, travelled together. I thought the world of him. But the relationship was turbulent.

I worked as a waitress at the time, something he liked to mock me for. You’re embarrassing. You’re going to amount to nothing, just like your [insert friend or family name, depending on his mood]. Is this what you’re going to do with your life? And then, always: Did any men speak to you today? Were you leading them on? Were you flirting?

I’d come home from a shift at 3am to find him stoned, takeout boxes scattered around him, screaming at sixteen year olds over Fortnite. Looking back, I can see so clearly how I spent years inside an emotionally abusive relationship. Then one day, it went further than that.

I woke at 4am to banging on the front door. When I opened it, he stood there, rage plastered across his face. He believed I’d locked him out. The key was under the mat. I’d been fast asleep. He’d been drinking.

What followed was the person I’d loved for five years turning into someone I didn’t recognise. He beat me. Not a single punch, though that’s how it started. He knocked me out. Sat on both of my arms while trying to break them. Told me he wanted to kill me. Spat on me. Bit me. Filmed it. I don’t think I need to go into the rest.

I came to on the floor, hours later- with what felt like a heartbeat in my head. My eye was bulging. Bruised. Swollen. Bitten. I left the apartment in a thong and the very startled doorman called the police.

Needless to say, I left. In that instant, I left. What came after was what I like to call my own blue period. I may have walked out of that apartment, but a piece of my heart stayed on the floor of it. I was fearful, yes. But I was also heartbroken. Confused. My ego was shattered. Until then I’d carried so much bravado, so much sass, and suddenly I felt hollow. I was supposed to be strong. So how had I been so weak?

How had I let this happen?

How I missed it

These situations are rarely isolated, so how had I missed the signs? I was smart. Independent. Take-no-shit. Wasn’t I?

At that point in my life, those things were a front. When I was younger I had painfully low self worth, largely from a string of things that happened through my teens, including a competitive sports background that taught me that no matter how good I was, no matter if I came first, I had to be better than I’d ever been before or it counted as a loss. I envied people who could say it’s the taking part that counts. I never believed that for a second. I remember, on the way to a school athletics event, telling a friend I was nervous.

“So am I,” she said. “But you can’t be. You always come first.”

“That’s why I’m nervous.”

It sounds trivial written down, but I carried that pressure everywhere. I felt like I needed to excel, or I’d disappoint someone.

On top of that, I grew up with body dysmorphia, like so many young women do. People around me pointed out my flaws, noticed every shift on the scales, commented on my nose, my skin, how “bulky” or “stocky” I was, which is ridiculous in hindsight, but I was a sensitive girl and I absorbed all of it as fact.

I grew up in a council town where money and struggle were always the backdrop of conversation. I absorbed the belief that if I ever wanted ease in my life, or to catch up to some perceived standard of living, I had to work harder than everyone else. So I did. Factory work at fifteen, hard hat and steel toe boots, shift work. Then waitressing, banking, bartending, a few semi-successful and several unsuccessful eBay businesses. I wanted to travel. I wanted to catch up. So I ran.

I’m telling you all of this so you have a clear picture of the person this happened to. I believe we settle for what we think we deserve. I settled into a relationship that made me feel worthless, because I already believed I was worthless. I believed the things he said, because they confirmed everything I already felt. I felt seen, because that’s how I saw myself too. I didn’t realise I’d been spending my days with a narcissist. I thought he’d lowered his standards for me.

The ashes

I moved into the spare attic room of my sisters kind friend. I graduated university with four layers of make-up covering an eye that had gone dark purple. This stretch of my life is a bit of a blur. I was a shell, introverted, withdrawn. I developed a version of body dysmorphia where I no longer recognised the woman in the mirror. I hated her. All I saw was a victim.

For a few years after this, I felt as though I was living on a different planet. Like somebody had picked me up and put me down on an alternative Earth, where everything had been stripped of colour. I don’t think anyone who met me in that timeline would recognise the person I am today.

My health began to decline in various ways too. Precancerous ovarian cysts. Subclinical hypothyroidism. All of these “nearlys” and “almosts” that weren’t quite serious enough to be taken seriously, but were serious enough that I never really felt well.

A few weeks later I started my first design job, at Steven Bartlett’s social media agency. One of those fun, Google-style offices with a slide and a ball pit and nobody over the age of 35. I was paid criminally little, and still paying for the flat my ex was living in, because it was contractually in my name, on top of my new place. I took a second job waitressing. I got into debt. I was a shell of a human being, and I downplayed all of it.

About a year later, after a breakdown at work, I was given a few free talking therapy sessions with a woman I’ll never be able to thank properly. She diagnosed me with PTSD. That diagnosis gave me a project. Something to look into, something to fix, something with edges. I read. A lot. I listened to podcasts. I moved somewhere surrounded by nature instead of the busyness of the city. And I found my old therapy again: running. Except this time I wasn’t monitoring myself, or competing. The early pandemic hit soon after. Unlike a lot of people, I kept working full time, but for the first time from home. Every day, as soon as I closed my laptop, I ran. Over time, I felt clear again. I loved myself again. I stopped believing any of it had been my fault. I thought I’d healed.

So I moved on. I started to travel and do the things I actually wanted with my life. But I worked constantly, sometimes two full-time jobs at once. I felt avoidant and detached with men, genuinely uninterested. When anything became emotionally difficult, my instinct was to shut down and give up. I would meet wonderful people and, instead of seeing who they were in front of me, find myself questioning who they might become in five years’ time. I was always searching the present for evidence of a future threat. I didn’t clock it at the time, but somewhere in me, something still remained.

Around that time, I remember feeling a strange envy towards friends with clean breakups. The ones who got ghosted. The ones who got cheated on. Those felt almost enviable to me, a single, nameable wound, something you could point to and say, that’s what happened, that’s why it hurts.

I had heartbreak, confusion and trauma all tangled into one, and I didn’t know how to hold all three at once. I wanted answers. I just didn’t want to be the one asking for them. At some point- I realised I didn’t need to know ‘why’ anymore.

I blocked him everywhere, of course. And still he found ways to wriggle through. For years. Different numbers, different accounts, trying to explain, to beg, to be heard. Part of me understands now that the violence itself, as devastating as it was, became the one thing my mind couldn’t argue its way around. A punch is very hard to reframe as love. I was devastated. But I was gone. My self worth had been low for a long time by that point, but everyone has a line somewhere. That was so far beyond mine.

Years later, I was at a dinner party, playing one of those question card games, and I pulled:

What’s the worst breakup you’ve ever had?

Classic. I could have told a story about a cheating ex, or something that just fizzled out, or pretended I’d never had any drama at all. Instead I decided to be honest. I told the story, simply, directly. And I noticed my leg had started to shake. Small, uncontrollable jitters, the kind other people could see too. It wasn’t within my control. My body was trembling.

Huh?

What my body knew

That’s when my second deep dive began. Mentally, I was long over it. I genuinely didn’t think about it any more. But somewhere in me, my body was still holding something. Clenching.

I believed I had moved on because my mind had created a coherent story. My body showed me that understanding something and feeling safe again are not always the same thing.

Carl Jung said it best: Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.

Your body holds on to what happens to you. It does this to protect you, to keep you from it happening again. You can’t outthink this. You can’t outrun it either.

Animals, when chased in the wild, physically shake as soon as the threat has passed, discharging the stress from their bodies before moving on. Humans mostly don’t do this. We hold it. We carry on, communicate, live, from a body that’s still storing every experience it’s ever had, and we operate from that place without realising it. Burnout tends to come from current overwhelm. But when it’s layered on top of complex trauma, where your nervous system is fighting old battles as well as today’s stress, it makes you cling harder to whatever feels safe.

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For me, that was work. I felt safe when I earned a lot of money. I needed it, even at the expense of my health.

I told another friend the story a few days later. The same thing happened. Shaking. Trembling. So I decided to actually do something about it, which is when I found somatics and TRE.

What trauma actually means

I want to pause here, because the word trauma gets thrown around so loosely online that it can start to feel meaningless, or like something that only belongs to other people, worse off than you.

Trauma isn’t only the dramatic, single-night version. Clinically, it’s any experience that overwhelms your nervous system’s capacity to process it in the moment, so instead of the experience moving through you and completing, it gets stored. That can absolutely be a night like the one I’ve described. But it can just as easily be a childhood spent feeling like your worth was conditional on performance. It can be growing up around scarcity, or around adults who were dysregulated even if they never laid a hand on you. It can be a single sentence, said at the wrong age, by the wrong person, that your body decided to file as dangerous.

There’s also what some practitioners call “good” trauma, or attachment trauma, the kind that comes from otherwise loving, well-meaning relationships. A parent who was anxious and passed that anxiety into your body before you had language for it. A sport, a school, a family culture that taught you love was earned rather than given. None of that requires a villain. Your nervous system doesn’t grade experiences on whether anyone meant harm. It only registers whether you felt safe, seen and able to respond, or whether you had to freeze, please or perform your way through it.

That’s why healing isn’t only for people who can point to one clear, catastrophic event. Most of us are carrying something. The question isn’t whether you have trauma. It’s whether you’ve ever been given the chance to let your body finish what it started.

The work itself

Somatics simply means working with the body, rather than only the mind, to process and release what’s been stored. Where talk therapy works largely through language and insight, somatic practice works through sensation, movement and the nervous system itself.

TRE, Tension and Trauma Releasing Exercises, was developed by Dr David Berceli, who spent years working in conflict zones and noticed something that fascinated him: people who’d lived through the same violence and displacement recovered at wildly different rates, and the ones who fared better were often the ones who’d trembled or shaken naturally after the danger passed, the way animals do. TRE is a set of exercises designed to gently trigger that same involuntary tremor response in a safe setting, letting the nervous system discharge stress it’s been holding, sometimes for decades.

I remember doing TRE on my bedroom floor for the first time and feeling something crack open. I started to tremble, then cry, this huge release moving through me.

Something left my body that I hadn’t even known I was carrying. From that point, things felt lighter. I started to see all the ways I’d been living with a nervous system that simply couldn’t cope, all the ways I’d been overriding my own body, letting my mind run the show while it ignored every signal being sent up from below.

I also started practising yin, much to the confusion of some yogi friends. Yin is boring. Why don’t you come to vinyasa. Yin is a Taoist practice that works directly with the fascia, the connective tissue running through your muscles, which is where a lot of stored tension and trauma is thought to live, particularly in the hips, especially for women. Yin’s long, held poses lengthen and compress that fascia, a bit like stretching an elastic band, and in doing so it can help release blockages that have been sitting there for years. This isn’t pseudoscience. It’s slow, unglamorous, and it works.

The signs I wish I’d known

You don’t need a single, obvious event to justify checking in. Some signs I’ve come to recognise, in myself and in the people I talk to:

• A strong physical reaction, shaking, tears, a racing heart, when you talk about something you thought you were “over”

• Chronic tension in specific places, especially the jaw, hips, shoulders or chest, that doesn’t shift with stretching or massage alone

• Feeling disconnected from your own body, like you’re watching your life rather than living inside it

• Startling easily, or feeling on edge for no obvious reason

• Clinging to control, work or achievement because stillness feels unsafe rather than restful

• Avoidance or numbness around intimacy, conflict or vulnerability that you can’t fully explain

• A pattern of burnout that keeps recurring even when your circumstances change

None of this is a diagnosis. It’s simply permission to get curious about your own body instead of only your thoughts.

What it gave me

I want to say something here that might sound strange. I am grateful this happened to me.

Not for the night itself. Not for him. But for what it forced open in me. Because of that period of my life, I am more in tune with my own body than most people ever get the chance to be. I know the difference between a feeling that’s passing through and one that’s asking me to stop and listen. I fell in love with myself in a way I don’t think would have happened if my body hadn’t made it impossible to keep ignoring it.

It taught me to be my own support system. To not abandon myself. Not in life, and not in relationships either. I used to look for someone else to tell me I was safe, worthy, enough. Now I check in with myself first. I don’t think I would have learned that lesson gently. I think I needed my own body to shake until I finally listened.

I’m not saying this to wrap the story up neatly. There’s nothing neat about it. But I’d rather sit in the honest, complicated version of gratitude than pretend the whole thing was only loss.

Where to start

If any of this landed, here’s where I’d start:

• The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk, the book that first put language to a lot of what I’d felt but couldn’t explain

• Waking the Tiger and In an Unspoken Voice, both by Peter Levine, the founder of Somatic Experiencing

• TRE, look for a certified TRE provider if you want guided support the first few times, rather than going in cold- Also lots of very oldschool, but free useful videos on Youtube. This is what I used.

• A trauma-informed yin yoga class, rather than a general one, if you can find one locally

• Somatic Experiencing (SE) therapy, for a gentler, body-led alternative or companion to talk therapy

• If your story involves domestic abuse, the National Domestic Abuse Helpline (0808 2000 247, free, 24 hours) is there whether you left yesterday or, like me, eight years ago

None of this fixed me overnight. Most of it was slow, unglamorous, and done alone on a bedroom floor. But I mean it when I say I owe my life to it.

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This episode is about the timeline underneath that look. Education, career, relationship, marriage, mortgage, children, stability, roughly in that order, roughly by those ages, or apparently you've missed a train. I get into where that sequence actually came from (it's culture dressed up as biology), and the cost of staying on it that nobody ever tallies up the way they tally the cost of leaving.

I talk about settling for real. Not the obvious, dramatic kind. The small one. The thing that's fine. Fine is dangerous because it never forces your hand. And I sit inside the paradox that's been running my life lately: catastrophically behind on every timeline, and the most certain I've ever been. Both true at once.

By the end there's a new metric I'm using instead of am I on schedule: does my life feel more mine than it did last year.

Homework for this one, no journal needed, just sit with it:

Whose timeline are you actually on. The deadline you feel behind on, did you choose it, or was it handed to you so young you just started running. And if you stopped running, not forever, just for a moment, what would you actually move toward.

Share this with someone who secretly feels late to a life they're not even sure they want.

By this point I’d already become a convert to astrology, a late bloomer after spending my early to mid twenties thinking it was a load of bullsh*t. Then a string of bizarre events unfolded in my life that were so uncannily accurate it became impossible to keep ignoring. But Human Design? What the f*ck was that?

I like to think I’m an open minded person. I’ve spent most of my life agnostic, sometimes even calling myself atheist. But I’ve always been fascinated by belief. By the myths, fables and stories people weave into life to make it feel richer, or more explainable.

When I was younger I was obsessed with personality tests. Myers-Briggs. Enneagram. Numerology. The Big Five. DiSC. I found it endlessly interesting that humans can be labelled, systemised, defined. Really it was just a way to go deeper with myself and the people around me. But looking back, I think I was searching for answers I could never quite find elsewhere.

Why don’t I want the things everyone around me seems to want?

Why does this way of living work for so many people, but not for me?

Why don’t I feel attached to things the way others do? Am I avoidant?

So when I sat on a beach in Mexico learning about this new system, something in me sat up.

What Human Design actually is

Human Design was founded by Ra Uru Hu (born Alan Robert Krakower) after what he described as an eight day mystical experience in Ibiza in January 1987. The system blends astrology, the I Ching, Kabbalah, the chakra system, genetics and quantum physics into a “BodyGraph” based on your birth date, time and place.

Put simply, it’s a modern mystical self-knowledge system that maps how you’re said to exchange energy, make decisions, handle work and move through life.

Before you roll your eyes, hear me out. If you’re reading this, there’s a decent chance something about modern life isn’t quite fitting you either. Sometimes it feels like you’re wilting while everyone around you is blooming. You’re running at things full pelt, doing all the things, and somehow still not getting the same results as everyone else.

This is where Human Design gets genuinely useful.

The main practical pieces are:

• Type — how your energy is said to work

• Strategy — how you’re best meeting life and opportunities

• Authority — how you make decisions

• Profile — the character arc you’re here to live

• Centers — where you’re consistent, and where you absorb from others

My own Authority is Emotional, which means my clarity doesn’t arrive instantly. It comes in waves, and the real answer only shows up once I’ve ridden through a high and a low, not in the middle of either one. This is nightmare fuel by the way- and has been the bane of my existence. But more on that later.

There are four core types: Generators and Manifesting Generators (roughly 70% of people), Projectors (20%), Manifestors (9%) and Reflectors (about 1%).

This is where I had my moment. I am a Projector. Living in a Generator world.

More specifically, I’m a 6/2. In Human Design, the 6-line profile is said to move through three distinct phases of life. Roughly the first thirty years are trial and error- a bit of a shit show if i’m honest, experiencing a lot of intensity, testing things out, getting a lot of it wrong. Then there’s a transition, and somewhere around thirty the 6 is said to climb what’s called the roof, stepping back to observe rather than keep experimenting. I’m 34 now, which puts me right in that shift, and it’s uncannily accurate to how the last few years have actually felt. Less trial and error. More watching, more knowing what I know. Alchemising.

The Generator world problem

When I say we live in a Generator world, I don’t mean Generators are the problem. I mean the modern world is built on the assumption that a good human is a consistently productive one.

Do you ever feel surrounded by hyper-successful people? Multiple businesses, thriving social lives, always-on energy, instant replies. They tell you to “just do it,” to hustle, and something in you still feels off. What looks effortless for them feels like overkill for you.

A good worker, by this logic, wakes at the same time daily, logs on, replies fast, sits in meetings, produces on command, hits deadlines, keeps their energy steady, and does it all again tomorrow. Value gets measured in output, availability, speed and consistency. In Human Design terms, that’s a deeply Generator-coded way of understanding work.

Generators and Manifesting Generators are associated with sustainable life-force energy, especially when doing work that genuinely lights them up. They’re the builders, the movers, the ones who can keep going once the work is right for them. Since they’re the majority, it makes sense the world has been shaped around that kind of energy.

School trains us into it early. Sit still. Follow the timetable. Produce on command. Be consistent. Don’t drift off. Don’t need too much. Don’t say your best insight arrives after a walk, three hours alone and a bloody weird dream.

Then work continues the same programming.

And if you can’t keep up with it, the language available to describe you is usually brutal. Lazy. Undisciplined. Flaky. Too sensitive. Bad at structure. Needs to try harder. Have you tried having more coffee? Iron? Get your levels checked.

But what if some of us aren’t failing the system?

What if the system is measuring the wrong thing entirely?

What being a Projector actually means

Realistically, I have around three focused hours a day to grind it out on a laptop before I need to water the roots. Pour energy back into my body. Go find inspiration in the world. Move.

Projectors are often described as guides, observers, pattern-noticers. We don’t carry the same consistent sacral life-force energy as Generators, which means we aren’t built for endless doing, producing, pushing and grinding the same way.

The Projector gift isn’t stamina. It’s perception.

It’s walking into a room, a brand, a relationship, a project, and somehow seeing the invisible architecture underneath it. What’s working. What’s leaking. What’s forced. What nobody’s saying out loud but everyone’s feeling.

If you’re a Projector, you’ve probably been in situations where someone tells you they’ve never felt “this close” to anyone before, or “I don’t usually go this deep,” and to you it was just an average Wednesday afternoon. We make people feel seen because we do see them. Crystal clear.

The strange thing is, the gift only really lands when it’s recognised. In Human Design, the Projector strategy is often called “waiting for the invitation.” That phrase sounds so annoying at first, like you’re meant to sit around in silence until the universe sends a calendar invite. I don’t think that’s what it actually means.

To me, waiting for the invitation means not forcing your insight into places where it wasn’t asked for, valued or recognised. It means not becoming the unpaid strategist, therapist, brand consultant, emotional support animal and creative director for people who never actually invited you into that role. It means understanding that your insight is precious, and giving it away to everyone, all the time, is usually how bitterness starts.

I’ve lived this. The harder I’ve worked, the worse I’ve felt. The more I’ve chased, the less I’ve caught. When I exist fully in my own energy, without forcing it, I attract far more aligned clients and opportunities than when I’m hustling for them. Which is hard to hold onto in a world that gives you five million ways to optimise your outreach or get Claude to write your next cold pitch. But the gift of being a Projector is that we’re already good. Let the worker bees do the worker bee things. We preserve our energy for what only we can see.

What this actually looks like in practice

The Projector path isn’t about doing nothing. It’s about becoming visible in the right way. Sharing the insight. Publishing the work. Refining the craft. Studying deeply, until your perspective is clear enough for the right people to recognise it. Precise, not passive.

For me, this means building a career around guidance rather than grind. Around insight rather than endless output. Around rhythm rather than urgency.

It means I’m allowed to stop measuring my value by how much I can churn out. And start asking better questions instead:

Where am I actually recognised?

Where does my insight land?

Where am I over-giving?

Where am I trying to be chosen by people, clients or platforms that don’t really see me?

Where does the work feel like success in my body, not just on paper?

That’s the real medicine of being a Projector. Not that I’m special, or exempt from work. Just that my work was never meant to be about becoming a better machine. It was meant to be about seeing clearly, and saying what I see.

My value has rarely come from endless output. It comes from noticing the thing nobody else noticed. From naming the pattern. From one conversation that saves someone six months of confusion, or one question that collapses a whole false structure. That kind of work doesn’t always look like work. It can look like reading. Resting. Walking. Watching. Digesting.

We don’t really have a clean economic model for that. So Projectors often learn to cosplay as Generators instead. We over-deliver. We over-function. We say yes too fast, stay available, become the person who can “just quickly” fix the thing, design the thing, hold the thing. Then we wonder why we’re exhausted.

Being a Projector in a Generator world can feel like trying to prove your worth in a language that was never yours. The world says: show me how much you can do. The Projector gift says: let me show you what actually needs doing.

That distinction has changed everything for me.

I’m no longer interested in building a career that rewards me for abandoning my own rhythm. I don’t want to be paid to perform stamina I don’t naturally have, or turn my body into a productivity appliance and call it success.

I want a career that values perception as much as production. Where my insight is the asset. My taste is the filter. My timing is trusted. Where needing space isn’t laziness, it’s part of the work.

This is where Human Design became genuinely useful to me. It gave me permission to stop building a life around the wrong kind of effort. To stop chasing. To stop taking advice from people running a completely different operating system to mine.

And in that, I finally started to see my own gifts for what they actually are.

How I’m actually using Human Design to build a career

The useful part of Human Design, for me, isn’t walking around telling everyone I’m a Projector like it’s a medical diagnosis. It’s using it as a filter.

When I look at the career I’m building now, I can see how many of my old choices were about trying to become more like someone else. More consistent. More energetic. More certain. Someone who could sit at a desk for eight hours, reply to every message, take every call, hit every deadline, post every day, sell every offer, and still have the will to cook dinner afterwards.

I don’t want to build a career that requires me to become that woman.

So the questions have changed. Not “how do I make myself more productive” but “what kind of work actually gives me energy back.” Not “how do I get picked” but “where am I already being recognised.” Not “how do I sell more of my time” but “what do I see clearly that other people struggle to see for themselves.”

I’m less interested in work that turns me into a pair of hands. Making the thing, fixing the thing, polishing the thing, posting the thing, then crawling into bed with my eyes twitching. I’m more interested in work where my perception is the value. Strategy. Audits. Writing. Teaching. Creative direction. Frameworks. The conversation that helps someone finally understand what they’ve been circling for months.

Visibility matters. Chasing doesn’t.

Waiting for the invitation doesn’t mean hiding. It means making my work visible enough that the right people can recognise it. For me, that looks like writing essays like this one. Sharing the thought process. Publishing the frameworks. Making the carousel. Recording the podcast. Letting people feel how I see the world before I try to sell them anything.

It also means catching myself before I make decisions from panic. As an Emotional Projector, my clarity doesn’t arrive instantly. I can talk myself into anything when I’m on a high, or scared about money. Launching a course, moving country, changing niche, becoming a Pilates teacher, starting a YouTube channel and applying for a remote job, all in the same afternoon. It’s relentless.

So I’m building in space. Letting ideas breathe before I turn them into obligations. Trying not to say yes just because someone wants something from me. Trying not to confuse being wanted with being recognised.

I’m also learning to treat bitterness as information. When I feel resentful, drained, unseen, or secretly furious that I’m doing everything again, I no longer take it as proof I’m ungrateful or bad at work. It’s a signal. Somewhere, I’ve over-given. Somewhere, I’ve tried to prove my worth to a person, client, platform or system that was never really available to receive it.

So the career I’m building now has to be different. It has to leave room for walking, reading, moving, cooking, studying, staring into space, living in my body, letting insight arrive properly. Fewer, better things. Cleaner offers. Stronger ideas. Less performing, less grasping, less “look how much I can do” and more “this is what I see.”

Sounds simple right? That’s because it kind of us. But it requires trust. Dismantling all the ideas we’ve been taught about living and working. Shunning absolutely everyone who tells you to “do more” or “hustle” and following your intuitive nudges.

Maybe that’s the most practical thing Human Design has given me. Not an escape from work. Permission to stop designing work that requires self-abandonment.

So i’ll leave you with a question. Where in your own work or life are you performing stamina you don’t actually have? Do you really want to try maintain that forever? Or would you like to join me on the beach for a spicy marg and a sunset dip and let things flow a little? Food for thought.

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Not dramatically- or in a way that makes absolutely any sense to literally anyone who’d ask. Just this buzzy, f*cking annoying persistent hum of something being a bit meh. Like wearing shoes that are almost the right size. You can walk in them. You can run in them, even. But you might get some blisters.

From the outside, I was living da vida loca. A few people told me I was living their dream life. I was travelling full time, working remotely, roaming freely between cities and coastlines and time zones. I had money coming in-more than I’d ever made, actually. I had two jobs running in parallel, because I was so afraid of losing one that I white-knuckled my way through both. I was a designer, an illustrator, an email marketer, a social strategist, an influencer manager, a content machine. I wore every hat and I wore them all at once.

I was *technically “*free”

And I have never felt more trapped in my life.

Let me show you around my cage.

The job started well. Most cages do.

In the beginning it felt genuinely flexible- I could move, I could breathe, I could shape my days in a way that the traditional career path never allowed. The roaming was real. The autonomy felt real. I remember thinking: this is it. This is the version of work I can actually sustain.

But slowly, almost imperceptibly, the walls came in.

Slack became a place I lived. Deadlines multiplied. The creative work-the part that had drawn me in-got buried under the operational, the urgent, the endless. The role had a gravitational pull toward corporate, toward structured, toward performance. I watched a life that was supposed to feel free start to feel suspiciously like the life I’d been trying to escape. Just with a better backdrop.

And people kept telling me how lucky I was.

That’s such a cool job. I’d love to do something like that. You’re literally living the dream. And it was. It is. But it doesn’t mean it was mine.

So I held on. Because when the world keeps handing you evidence that you should be grateful, it becomes very hard to trust the feeling underneath that says: this is just not it.

In retrospect, so much of my life up until this point has been ruled by fear. Financial fear, fear of not keeping up, fear of being perceived, fear of not being good enough, fear, mostly, of making the wrong decision. Fear of regret.

I held on to that job with one hand and grabbed another with the other-because leaving the first felt like financial free-fall and I needed something to grip. For a while I was running both in parallel, working double the hours, spinning the plates, trying to see how long I could keep it up for. The money was good. The anxiety was sky-high. Eventually I left one. The other left me. El classico. At the time I felt that fear rise up again in the back of my throat- for around 5 minutes. Fear is an interesting feeling. It can be all consuming, and yet you can override it easily.

This is my new motto for life actually. I feel fear? So what. I would rather feel fear and be living in my truth, than be grasping to the wrong things out of fear. Feel the god damn fear and do it anyway.

What it cost

I don’t know if I fully registered what I’d been doing to myself until the silence arrived. The body doesn’t send you a monthly analytics report. It doesn’t tell you you’re making a mistake or that you should slow down or that you’re burning through something you won’t easily get back. It just starts sharing little news bytes over time that you can either notice- or not.

My hair got dry. Rough. It started falling out in clumps each time I took a shower. Oh!

Hyperpigmentation spread across my cheeks-dark patches that sat there every morning in the mirror, something I’d have to decide whether to cover up or carry. My body was changing, but I never correlated everything together. I looked at the wilting responses of my body but never stopped to study the ecosystem causing it.

The gut issues I’d been dealing with for a millennium got even louder. The bloating, the pain, the missed periods - my body screaming in the only language it had left. LISTEN TO ME.

So I responded to it in the way I knew best- I blamed it. What’s wrong with you? Why can’t you function properly? Why are you tired?

But the worst of it was the brain fog. This thick, cotton-wool quality to my thinking that made focus feel impossible. Like trying to see through frosted glass. I was reading the same sentence four times and retaining nothing. I was in meetings I couldn’t track. I was nodding along to conversations I wasn’t fully present for. I would schedule 20 minute periods in my calender to “think”.

I got blood tests done. The results were validating at least: underperforming thyroid. Sluggish liver. Burnout, depletion, chronic stress- confirmed not just in how I felt but in the actual numbers.

Everything in western medicine would give me a topical, a pill, to address each individual symptom. Use this on your hair! Use this on your skin! Apply this cream 1-2 times per day. But guys- hello? Why is this happening. What is the root. Give me, the root.

Here’s what I’ve come to understand about those results, the kind of understanding you only get when you start reading outside the conventional medical playbook and listening to the more full system approach of eastern medicine.

In Ayurveda, the thyroid sits in the territory of Vishuddha- the throat chakra, the energy centre governing authentic expression and living in alignment with your truth.

It’s the place in the body that activates when you are speaking and living as yourself. A suppressed thyroid is, in this framework, almost jokingly literal. It’s what accumulates when you spend years saying yes when your whole body is saying no. When you perform a version of yourself at work, in relationships, in the life you’ve curated for an audience-and the gap between that performance and your actual truth slowly, quietly widens.

In Traditional Chinese Medicine, the liver is the organ most affected by suppressed emotion- specifically the frustration and anger that come from feeling stuck, from pushing against resistance, from living out of alignment with your deepest values. A sluggish liver isn’t just a detox issue. It’s a map of where you’ve been storing what you couldn’t say.

It’s interesting to me that in these moments in my life, I craved yin yoga, A Taoist practice that allows your fascia to release stored trauma by contracting and lengthening. i would often sit on the floor in a childs pose, or put my legs up the wall- proven somatic exercises to provide comfort and safety. My body knew it needed soothing, but my mind just didn’t want to hear it.

I’m not telling you Western medicine is wrong. I’m telling you that sometimes (most times) our body already knows. We just need to get quiet enough to hear it.

What happened when I let go

I want to be honest about this part because the internet loves a clean transformation arc and this isn’t quite that- it’s not even close, actually.

I accepted I couldn’t do this anymore. And it was scary. The financial uncertainty is real-I still feel it, some days more than others. There are moments of doubt that arrive in the early hours and make a lot of noise. The fear didn’t disappear with the job.

But I got my bloods done again a few months after stopping. My thyroid had normalised. The liver markers had improved. The brain fog lifted -gradually, then suddenly, then completely. My body, given space to stop performing, started healing. Even my hyperpigmentation has reduced significantly. Everything feels calm.

I am more relaxed than I have been in years. I am more financially uncertain than I have been in years. Both of these things are true simultaneously and I have made my peace with that tension-because what I know for certain is that the version of security I was clinging to wasn’t actually making me safe. It was just making me numb.

The hardest skill i’ve had to learn is the ability to trust in the uncertainty of life. Nothing is guaranteed, and nothing is certain. A job, in many ways, is a false sense of safety anyway. These things come and go constantly. We stay in relationships that are wrong for us because we think that might be the best we’ll ever get and we need to be sure it’s the right decision. People get married and then feel safer than they did in a relationship- even though divorce rates are sky high. We crave certainty. We’re addicted to the stuff. But I’ve decided to surrender.

The world is a freaking mess. Lets be honest. Ai, Genocides, Oompa loompas ruling countries, 18 year old life coaches, influencer culture, we can name more Kardashians than plant species. We’ve absolutely lost our marbles as a society. It’s an incredibly strange time to be alive. And there’s a kind of solace in that. We’ve all collectively gone a bit mad. We’re all on this spinning rock that’s feeling more and more like a parody of itself, and we take it all so seriously. Maybe I can just stop for a bit. See what happens. Do bits and bobs of work when I can and when an AI Robot hasn’t done it 5 million times faster and well enough to satisfy a non critical average joe’s eye.

The roaming is still here. I still move, still find new places to call home for a while, still feel most alive when I’m somewhere unfamiliar with nothing fixed on the horizon. That part was never the problem. The craving for freedom wasn’t the issue.

The cage was.

The most convincing prisons are the ones with a view. The ones where you have to talk yourself into leaving because everything on paper says you shouldn’t. Where the cage is made of good money and an impressive title and people who tell you you’re lucky. Where you’ve confused the aesthetic of freedom - the travel, the flexibility, the lifestyle - with the actual feeling of it. Something can be great for someone else. It doesn’t need to be great for you.

I’ve come to think that most of us are living in some version of this. Not always a job. Sometimes it’s a relationship we’ve outgrown. A city we stayed in too long. An identity we built in our twenties that no longer fits. A version of success someone else designed that we’ve been diligently inhabiting because we’ve committed our time, our lives, our careers, our relationships around them.

The question I want to leave you with

The question isn’t whether your cage is comfortable. Some cages look like they belong in Architectural Digest.

The question is whether you’re actually free inside it.

I don’t know if I’m designed to build someone else’s dream. What I know is that I spent a long time trying -and my body kept the score of every single day I did.

This experiment- Rewilding my life, begins here. Not with a dramatic exit or a perfectly optimised morning routine or a five-step framework for finding your purpose.

Just with the honest admission that something wasn’t right.

And the decision to stop pretending otherwise.

If this landed somewhere in you- stay close, listen to the pod (RWLD- on Spotify), and follow along to see what happens.

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In this episode of RWLD, I’m talking about the golden cage: the job, relationship, city, lifestyle or identity that looks like freedom from the outside, but feels like constriction from the inside.

We talk about external validation, mimetic desire, staying too long, the sunk cost fallacy, and the 3 most common golden cages.

Journal prompts from the episode:

Where in my life do I look free from the outside, but feel constricted on the inside?

What am I calling “security” that might actually be fear?

What am I calling “loyalty” that might actually be self-abandonment?

What am I calling “being grateful” that might actually be ignoring my own truth?

What version of myself am I still performing because other people know or like them?

What did I once choose freely that now feels like a cage?

RWLD is a documented experiment in rewilding your life. Stripping back the noise, the performance, the things we’ve been told to want, and finding out what’s actually underneath.

Find me on Instagram:

@howtorewild_

@emmalabow

In the first episode of RWLD, I explore the question that started this project:

Have we lost the plot?

A conversation about freedom, attention, burnout, nature, pleasure, productivity and what it means to build a life that actually feels alive.

Welcome to RWLD.

—

Find me on Instagram:
@howtorewild_

@emmalabow

This isn’t new.

This is one of those recurring things that gets filed neatly under the two buzzwords every woman is handed when something feels off in her body:

sTresS. hOrmOnEs.

Or, translated more honestly:

we don’t really know what’s going on, so go home and try to relax.

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A couple of years ago, when I was deep in burnout, working two full time jobs, in a relationship that was draining the life out of me, and floating between countries trying to figure out where I belonged, my health started waving red flags.

My hair began falling out.

Hormones and stress.

My skin dulled. Then Melasma spread across my cheeks, dark patches that chipped away at my confidence every time I looked in the mirror.

Hormones and stress.

My energy levels collapsed, except for the cortisol spikes that hit every time Slack pinged or a last-minute deadline landed in my inbox.

Hormones and stress.

And then, in my late twenties, I developed cancerous ovarian cysts that had to be surgically removed.

Again.

Hormones and stress.

What’s interesting though is this time I don’t feel stressed. I’ve spent the past three months swimming in the Indian Ocean. Floating. Slowing down. I left the jobs. The relationship. I unplugged.

But last week, for the first time on this entire trip, I decided it was time to start working again. To earn.

I opened my laptop every day and stared at the screen for eight hours, trying to figure out the next iteration of my career.

And guess what.

My body hated it.

Trauma doesn’t only come from traumatic events. It’s stored.

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My body remembers how it feels to push. To lace every second with pressure. To feel constant urgency.

And it reacts to it- over and over again.

That rhythm matters.

As women, we spend an astonishing portion of our lives adapting to systems that were never designed with our biology in mind. Then when our bodies push back, loudly and viscerally, we’re handed recycled phrases instead of real investigation or meaningful support.

Let’s be honest. If these were predominantly male issues, there would be research. There would be names. Flow charts. Protocols. A tidy step-by-step guide on how to fix it.

Instead, many of us are left guessing. Self-experimenting. Enduring.

That was the moment my interest in health really began.

Not the aesthetic version of health that floods social media. Not the curated bowls of cottage cheese and boiled eggs. Not the green juice, supplement-stacked, algorithm-approved version of wellness. Health has become an aesthetic. And I sometimes wonder if it’s pushing us further into the external, and further away from the internal.

Clean girl routines. Looksmaxxing. Endless optimisation. Intermittent fasting. Keto. Ozempic. Ten-step morning routines.

Everyone is obsessed with what they’re eating- as they should be.

But in the age of the bed-rot, not enough people are asking a much bigger question:

What else are we consuming?

Because food is only one form of intake.

We work jobs we hate. We trade enormous chunks of our lives to causes we don’t believe in. We give our time, our energy, and sometimes our bodies to people who don’t deserve access to us.

We scroll endlessly, consuming information at a speed no nervous system was designed to tolerate. We know what our friend Jane had for breakfast. We know why two influencers fifteen thousand miles away broke up. We absorb strangers’ opinions, outrage cycles, productivity hacks, trauma dumps, business strategies, glow-up routines, and “life-changing” frameworks. Comment ‘MLM’ to receive 100 prompts to be better.

We read self-help books. We listen to podcasts recycling the same five ideas. The same concepts packaged a little bit differently. We turn people into gurus- when actually they are ultimately all just telling us to wake up at 5am, meditate and work really hard.

We swallow motivational soundbites dressed up as revolutionary insight.

And we store it all.

In our bodies.

In our nervous systems.

In our minds.

Clutter.

Noise.

Input without integration.

We obsess over what goes into our mouths, while completely ignoring what goes into our lives.

And then we wonder why our bodies start malfunctioning.

Rewilding the body isn’t about adding more supplements or wearing lululemon and a slick back bun and drinking a $12 kombucha.

It’s about removing what is slowly poisoning you.

Not just chemically. But Energetically. Emotionally. Mentally. Because I’m starting to believe that this swelling, this pain, this missed period, isn’t random.

It’s cumulative.

Years of urgency, of pushing, of consuming far more than my body was ever meant to hold.

So maybe Rewilding my health doesn’t begin with another diet.

Maybe it begins with subtraction.

More honesty about what my body has been trying to say for years.

If your body is telling you to slow the f*ck down right now, start here.

How to Rewild your consumption.

1. Audit what you consume that isn’t food

What are you feeding your nervous system every day?

News cycles. Group chats. Slack notifications. Podcasts that leave you feeling inadequate. People who drain you.

For one day, just notice it all.

What leaves you feeling fuller?
What leaves you feeling depleted?

For a while I logged my interactions with people with either a battery drained, or battery full emoji in my notes app. Slightly toxic? Maybe. But it helped.

2. Remove a few sources of noise

Unfollow accounts that make you feel like you’re constantly behind.
Turn off notifications that spike your cortisol. Even mute friends that are making you feel some kinda way. Prioritise your mental wellbeing.
Stop listening to content that fills your brain but leaves your body tense.

Not forever, Just as an experiment.

See what changes.

3. Spend a full day (atleast) in Do Not Disturb.

Turn your notifications off, selectively decide who you respond to. I once read that notifications are an alarm clock you never set. Create a space around yourself that isn’t immediately accessible.

4. Journal & meditate on Mimetic Desires.

René Girard coined this term- and the basic is that so many of our wants, our pressures and our aspirations come from outside sources. And this was before social media was even invented, so now it’s the same thing but on steroids. Until we strip away constant input, we can’t clearly see our natural desires- the ones that come from within us. If we spend our lives being inspired by other people, we may waste countless years chasing the wrong dream and then ultimately feel lost and confused when we acheive it- it wasn’t ours to begin with.

To zone in on this, unplug from all input for a day, or a few days. A weekend is a great time for this of course.

Meditate for 5 minutes, focusing on your breath.

Bring to the forefront of your mind a goal, or an ambition you have for yourself and your life.

Now start to question it- where does this idea come from? Why do you want it? Is it for you? Is it from you? Is it to impress others? This enquiry practice often leads to unexpected answers. It may surprise you.

I’m currently conducting a year-long experiment to Rewild the different facets of my life-my body, my nervous system, my relationships, my career, my mind.

To return to something more natural and remove the bullshit.
To see what happens when I stop overriding my body.

If you’re feeling the same pull, stay close.

Emma

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How do I sustain this? How do I build a life, a little world that feels autonomous? Free? How do I rewild my life?

I’ve become a little insatiable when it comes to freedom. Once I’ve felt it fully, it’s hard to return to anything less. It’s hard to not want a second portion. And I am a sucker for dessert.

How do I prioritise my peace, pleasure, and leisure-fiercely protect my time-while also being healthy, secure, and financially abundant? How do I resist conformity, but still benefit from the systems that reward it?

In agriculture, when land is ploughed repeatedly and flooded with chemicals to rush and monetise natural processes, the soil suffers. It becomes dry, stripped of minerals, depleted of everything that once made it alive. The fruits and veggies that grow from it are less vital, less vibrant. We tear up wildflowers, pull out the weeds, flatten the natural organisms that exist for good reason, all to carve out space we can sell and use.

And then we wonder why nothing grows the way it used to.

When this happens, there are two options: continue on the same trajectory. Or begin the process of rewilding- restoring an ecosystem to its natural state so that everything within it can flourish. Forests grow back. Wildlife returns. Rivers run clear again.

I started to wonder if the same was true for us.

The modern world asks us to strive endlessly. Climb the ladder. Build a career. Find a partner. Buy a house. Have kids. Optimise your productivity, your health, your leisure time. Weekends become recovery periods. A handful of holidays each year are meant to help us briefly “unplug”-as though a long weekend in the sun can undo fifty weeks of depletion.

But is this enough? Was it ever?

In Four Thousand Weeks, Oliver Burkeman offers a number that made me feel a little wobbly: the average human life spans roughly 4,000 weeks (if we’re lucky) Of those, we spend somewhere between 80,000 and 90,000 hours working- nearly a decade of our lives, given entirely to the job. And then there’s the quieter thief: just two to four hours of daily scrolling adds up to another eight to eleven years, precious time in our lives disintegrating into dust.

Entire decades disappear while we’re waiting for life to begin.

We push and strive and then look up and ask- is this it? Whose life is this? We are so deeply embedded in expectation, so fluent in the language of productivity and performance, that very few of us ever pause long enough to ask what actually feels juicy for us. What feels good. How we would choose to live, if choosing were an option we believed we had.

And if the system is working, like a few tech bro’s have rushed to explain to me over a dinner table over the past few years- why are so many of us burned out?

Don’t get me wrong, I know this system works well for some people, I however am not one of them :)

Over 75% of workers globally report experiencing burnout in 2026.

91% of adults report high or extreme stress within a single year. Burnout increases the risk of depression by 80%, anxiety by 65%. Chronic stress is now linked to autoimmune disease, cardiovascular illness, and weakened immune function. The system isn’t breaking people occasionally. It’s wearing them down relentlessly- as a feature rather than a flaw.

The soil is depleted. And we keep ploughing. Over and over again.

For as long as I can remember, freedom has been my most deeply held value. The desire to live outside of pressure and performance, to have genuine autonomy over my days- the pursuit of Leisure. Joy. Simplicity. Nature. it has driven almost every decision I’ve made. I built a life around remote work: Sicily, Mexico, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Montenegro, Portugal, Spain, Sri Lanka. I found jobs that allowed it, and for a while, it felt like enough.

But patterns have a way of following you.

Even in the most beautiful places, I found myself tethered to multiple screens, chasing deadlines, managing endless to-do lists, burning through energy I didn’t have. One role felt like a dream job. It seemed like everything I could have wanted-and still, I was running on empty.

I stayed as long as I could, and then I remembered something I’ve always known: a golden cage is still a cage.

I genuinely believe that every human being carries within them something original to contribute to society- creativity, ideas, innovation, service. But the system doesn’t leave much room for that. It crowds out the inner life. It steals every moment of time. There is no space left to tend to what’s actually growing inside us.

When was the last time you daydreamed?

When was the last time you left the house without your phone?

So. With that being said. I’ve decided to run an experiment.

I want to Rewild my life.

To strip away the excess. To study what remains. To begin the slow, patient work of regenerating a stronger, more nourished ecosystem-so that I can actually bloom.

I’m going to focus on five areas, tending to each like a neglected patch of garden: My own inner garden, inner landscape- if you will.

So. These are the general observations and tasks i’ll be setting myself:

1. Rest & Observation: In nature, the first step of rewilding is simply to stop. To let the soil settle. To observe what’s there before deciding what it needs. I’m beginning here: learning to pause before I optimise.

2. Rewilding the Nervous System: The modern world runs on urgency. Fight or flight has become our default- how many times have you heard this phrase lately? Lets slow it right down. Remove urgency. Feel genuine ease and calm.

3. Rewilding the Body: Not fitness. Not performance or competition or aesthetics. But genuinely being in your body, feeling the sensations in it, reconnecting to your intuition and your health. Are you living in your body, or just hauling it around? Are you turned on by your life? Are you allowing yourself pleasure?

4. Rewilding the Diet: Is what we’re eating actually food? Where does it come from? What does it do to us, honestly? I want to explore nourishment at its most fundamental-longevity, food systems, and what it means to truly feed ourselves. Seasonally and cyclically.

5. Rewilding the Career: Do you feel creatively expressed? Does your work meet your values, or just pay your bills? Do you have autonomy? Do you feel free, or do you feel stuck. Are you aware you have a choice?

On top of this, I want to really sit and feel connected to the world around me. We’ve convinced ourselves that we are separate from nature. Observers of it, rather than participants in it. But this has never been true. We are nature. Subject to the same rhythms, the same needs, the same potential. But for some reason we operate closer to machines. We ignore our inner seasons and cycles. We push through in all weather, instead of taking time to regenerate. There is nothing more abundant than mama nature. And by reconnecting to our environment and world around us, we can cultivate that energy in our own lives.

What if there is so much more than what we’re settling for? What if we are free to create a life and a rhythm that works for us.

If we don’t start to cultivate our roots, plant new seeds, and build ecosystems that can actually sustain us we'll continue to wilt and question why we’re not blooming.

Follow along as I document the experiment-what I’m releasing, what I’m planting, and everything in between. Let it grow baby.

Theres a hedonist in me that wants to savour every inch of my life. Lap up each experience and moment and roll around in a succulent bubble of peace and satisfaction.

I recently took myself to the beach alone, put my phone in do not disturb for the day and read a really funny book. One that made me laugh at loud. I pulled out the ripest peach from my bag and let the peach juice drip down my thigh. I felt sticky and hot and full. Then i ran into the ocean, dunked my head and floated on the surface for a good 10 minutes. Nowhere to be, nothing to do. Just to be here. Squeezing the juice out of each moment.

I remember a few years ago, after I had a pretty rough breakup, I booked myself a solo trip to Sicily for 2 months. This seems to be my breakup pattern- and I highly recommend it. On my first night I sat in a Piazza at a beautiful restaurant filled with couples. They were playing some subtle Italian love songs. I ordered a slow cooked Ragu and a glass of red. The night felt balmy and warm. I had no plans for the rest of the night- or in fact, for the rest of the trip. My plan was to do whatever i wanted to do. I people watched for a while and then pulled out my book. I had this indescribable feeling of pure and utter freedom- i felt it in my bones. I could do whatever I want, be whoever I wanted. I felt overwhelmed with love- it wasn’t my love. It wasn’t my romance. But somehow it was. I felt like I was getting my power back. I now know- it was pure pleasure. A waiter slipped me a piece of paper with a compliment and his number. I didn’t need it. As Joy Sullivan puts it- I was busy being small and hungry and alive. I was full to the brim. I waltzed home alone listening to La Vie en Rose with a pistachio gelato.

One time, I was in Mexico, again. Swimming in the sea. Which makes me feel like theres a theme here. The sea is a seductress and the answer to all of my problems. I was alone. I knew nobody. I had no idea what was next. I saw a beautiful family on the beach- young, fit, healthy, 2 happy kids, the poster child of modern societal expectations. I felt two feelings brewing inside of me- one, was to compare. To feel lonely. To wonder if i’ll find a love like that, if i’ll settle down, if I even want to. Worry that i’m running out of time, to let loneliness engulf me. But the other feeling- was one of complete and utter contentment. To feel my body weightless in the water, sun on my skin. To feel completely satiated in my solitude. To appreciate my freedom. Feel excitement at the possibility of where my life could possibly lead. To feel proud of myself, to be strong, resilient, free.

For a while, I let life seep into my bones again. Deadlines. Worrying. Stress. The wrong relationship. And I felt the pleasures in my life slowly dwindle away. My brain became cluttered. I tried to find that electricity again- that spark that sat in my gut and made me feel whole. But I couldn’t. I did things that felt productive. I ignored things that just felt good. I added pressure. I prioritised the wrong things.

We spend our lives chasing pleasure in all the wrong places. Cheap dopamine, quick thrills, the validation of a person who wasn’t right for us to begin with. We look good when we want to be seen. We forget that life is meant to be felt. We forget to make ourselves feel good for us. In our body. In this moment. If we can’t seduce ourselves- is that why we settle for things that lack passion? That lack flavour. Do we forget how attainable it is to adorn every moment with the nectar of pure gratitude?

Lately, it’s returned to me. I’ve started adding pockets of pleasure to my daily life.

I’ve started to date myself again. Instead of ‘i’m going to paint tonight’ i set the scene- I make a playlist, wear something that makes me feel good or comfy or indulgent. I eat something delicious. I pour my lemonade into a wine glass just so I feel fancy, i dim the lights, light an incense. Revel in it. I jump in the ocean, Often. Let myself feel weightless. At my core- I feel this is all I truly need. Water on my skin.

I’ve started doing Breathwork again. At first- it was a purge of stored emotions. But now, it feels like my body just slows down. Tingles. I have overwhelming feelings of love and contentment. I usually hug myself right after.

I go to Yin. Sound baths. I stretch my body, feel into it. Step away from my thinking brain and into my feeling body. I let myself feel sensations without responding to them.

I carve out grey space. Moments in the day that are just there. They aren’t designed to be filled. They are there for whatever my body wants to do. Lying on the floor, legs up the wall. Maybe just looking around. Sometimes I lie on the grass and just stare up at the trees, wondering how many lives they’ve seen. How many encounters they’ve had. They’ve probably seen so many people fall in love, break up, crying, laughing, living. They would have the best stories.

I like physical touch. I take myself for massages every few weeks. It’s a treat I give myself and something I now consider to be a necessity. The room is dark and theres rainforest sounds playing. I feel like I slowly sink into the bed and leave feeling like my body has just had love poured into it.

Sometimes it’s as simple as switching off my phone, taking a hot shower, oiling myself afterwards, eating ice cream.

Almost every single pleasurable moment I have- is when I’ve slowed down enough to be present inside of it.

I think that’s what I’ve been learning lately — that pleasure isn’t a reward we earn after the work is done. It’s the thing that keeps us alive enough to do the work. It’s what keeps the spark lit. Without it, we dry up. We burn out. We forget why we began at all. So I’m slowing down, not because I want to escape life — but to taste it again. To let it taste me back.

From the outside, it seems like people go to work, have a bustling social life, date, consistently train, have hobbies, find time to actually dress well and look good, go to events, reply to messages quickly.

No matter how hard I try, I feel like I can never properly keep up in the same way. And it’s taken me a while to realise that a) this is why so many of us are burnt out b) not all of us are wired to work so relentlessly.

As someone who loves to analyse and dig into things, I did the classic psychological tests- Myers-Briggs (INFP) Enneagram (4w5) as well as looking into different beliefs and modalities, like Human Design (6/2 Projecter) and even my life path (1). I also went to a career astrologist recently, who confirmed basically everything I was already feeling about myself. I know so many people shun these modalities, but for me they’ve actually been a cool little gateway into understanding myself a bit more. They also add a little bit of magic to my life. I don’t live my life by them- but they’ve been a good tool for some introspection.

What’s interested me the most is that they all point towards the same thing- I am someone who really enjoys solitude. I very rarely feel lonely, and when i do, it’s usually when I’m in a crowd of loud attention seeking types who make me crave a dip in the sea or a good brew with an interesting person. Depth, passion and emotion will always light me up more than passive validation or shallow interactions. It also shows that I’m someone who can’t really stay in any situation that doesn’t light me up. I need creative outlets to alchemise my thoughts and experiences. In order to do that- i need time to sit in silence.

I feel like this is the biggest struggle of the modern world. How can I carve out grey space, to sit in silence, to ideate, to create, whilst also being pinged every 3 minutes- slack, whatsapp, voicenotes. I am always the ‘low maintenence friend’ or the slow replyer in literally any setting. My social notications are always switched off and the second it turns 6pm i’m in do not disturb mode. I read somewhere once that notifications are an alarm clock that you didn’t set. They bring you out of your own little energetic bubble- and if it feels like you have a juicy one- it’s disappointing to be brought back into the hustle and bustle of the world. It also means that I can’t ever access my flow state- something that’s so crucial to me. If I say yes to every demand and every deadline I find i’m so depleted afterwards that there is zero room for my life- trust me, I have ‘pushed through’ and gone to the gym, ran, been social, and absolutely every time I have spent the next day or two ‘recovering’ from how drained I feel after doing too much.

Something i’m noticing is that the world is designed well for people who human design call ‘Generators’ or ‘Manifestors’- these make up 75% of the worlds population. Naturally, these are the types of people the 9-5 is designed for. They have a consistent energy source day by day (the men, anyway- women are also influenced by their cycle on top of this) which means that working out, working a 9-5, having hobbies, social plans, replying to every notification with the speed and agility of jackie chan is a no brainer for them. Sure- they may sometimes feel a little frazzled if they overdo it, but in general- this is just everyday life.

For the other portion of the population, us projectors, who have about 4 hours of solid focus energy per day- we often struggle to know what to focus that on. Replying to messages feels like you’re ticking off a task, and then come the instant replies= back at square one. Usually, all of that focus time goes on your 9-5 job, which means, whats left for me? What’s left for my health? social life? hobbies?

I don’t know how much weight to put into Human Design- it’s another modality that my curious brain has stumbled upon, but it does seem to ring true for myself and others that i’ve delved into it with.

One thing i am noticing about myself- is that sometimes condensing my deep work hours, actually allows me to do the same level of output, at the same level, whilst also taking proper breaks and topping up my energy in different areas. For me- it’s regularly putting my phone in DND, walking in nature, grounding (yes- on mud), reading a book, putting my feet up on the wall, box breathing, a walk with absolutely zero stimulation- no podcast, no music and just being rather than the constant pressure to show up or do anything at all.

Can you keep up? or do you always feel a bit behind?

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