At times I felt lonely in Morocco. This is the side of nomadic life that doesn’t photograph well on social media.

I was supposed to stay two months. I’d imagined it would be like my Thailand experience, where backpackers, digital nomads and solo travellers converge, happy to share stories and friendship. But that was Thailand’s context, not Morocco’s, I slowly realised this country is where couples and groups of friends come on holiday. They arrive complete, and not in need of extras.

So when a Facebook post appeared, a place in Tuscany looking for volunteers, I noticed it, before I would have scrolled past. Morning silence, meditation, movement, dance, improvisational theatre, walking, talking circles, cooking together, woven around the work we’d be there to do. It sounded a little like the retreats I co-run in the French Alps. One video call later, I had rearranged my flights.

I could say that Morocco wasn’t working, so I left. The truth is that in my last few days in Essaouira, home had started to arrive. Perhaps it was the juxtaposition: excluded from the couples and friend groups, yet included anyway by the beautiful sound of the call to prayer, five times a day. It rolled out across the medina, from the mosque nearest my rooftop flat, then answered a moment later by another further off, and another, until the whole town was briefly held inside the same sound. It asked nothing of anyone and included everyone anyway.

I was part of a community without ever joining it, just by default of hearing it. The local yoga studio, where I was invited to attend a full moon ceremony. The coffee stall where the owner now chatted to me, knowing what I wanted without me having to say. The bread stall where the elderly man who had once tried to overcharge me now greeted me like family, whilst charging the correct price. The beginnings of exactly what I’d been missing, showing up just in time for me to leave it. There was a genuine sadness as I said farewell to Morocco. And underneath it, a small voice asking, have you just made a mistake?

Milan did its best to answer. The new passport machines creating chaos, one lone official processing most of two planeloads, my train to Florence nearly missed, my brain refusing to understand even basic Italian. Florence herself met me with hordes of tourists dragging suitcases like reluctant dogs, almost always heading in the opposite direction to me. What had possessed me to move on?

But that evening as I wandered the cobbled streets, the warm air carrying the sounds of opera, statues appearing like treasures around corners, the sensual experience of pistachio gelato, watching the golden light dance on the river Arno. I felt an ease drape across my shoulders, a feeling of being at home in the familiarity of the European architecture. I opened into la dolce vita on this one night in Florence.

Morning, back to the station to Arezzo, where my hosts would collect me. A month of community waiting, or so I thought. It’s surprising how, even when you’d swear you don’t have an expectation, one is lurking somewhere in the background, quietly taking notes.

Because the programme sounded like our retreats in France, my mind had helpfully supplied a picture of our own campsite in the Alps: tents nestled amongst the pine trees, each set apart in its own secluded space. Nobody had promised me that. I’d promised it to myself, without noticing.

What I actually got was a tent in a polytunnel full of mud. A mattress, no pillow, the tents in a line close enough to hear your neighbour thinking. Instead of a homely alpine cabin kitchen, a makeshift one in a concrete shell, its chicken wire roof draped with sheets to shade the worn out sofas, affectionately known as the chicken coop.

The main house, with its gardens, swimming pool and beautiful views of the Tuscan hills, was gorgeous. It was also the venue, rented out for weddings, hen parties and groups of friends. Our job, the ten of us volunteers, was to clean, help prepare activities and build outdoor showers for the glamping field for an upcoming wedding of forty guests.

The disappointment was felt intensely. But I’d met this moment before. In Thailand, I’d arrived at a volunteer post at a yoga retreat, wanted to leave on sight, given it a week, and by the end of that week, despite some problems (nothing is ever the perfection we seek), I had settled and loved it. So I made a decision. Stay open. Give it a week.

The community living wasn’t quite as described either. The owners were from Israel and had all been part of kibbutz life at some point, so that was the shape their community took, quite different to others I’ve been in. Then there were the talking circles, wow the talking circles, which, to me, mostly went around in circles. I’m not so good with intellectual and conceptual discussion. I can do it occasionally, but without vulnerability and empathy it doesn’t make sense to me. It stays a discussion on a theme. What does responsibility mean? For three hours, finishing at 11pm, with meditation at 6.30 the next morning. I’d go to bed with my head full of swirling words and little hope of sleep when my head hit the pillow.

But the other volunteers. They were the highlight, beautiful people with a shared passion for meeting others and being in community. One day off, we carried the ingredients for a shakshuka to a nearby little river, built a fire next to the water and shared the bubbling stew from the same pot, its smoky flavour weaving through the vegetables and eggs. Another day we wandered Arezzo, indulging in pizza, gelato and coffee crema. As the week went on we became close, like a little family, holding each other’s concerns, frustrations and worries.

The most beautiful thing I witnessed there was a friendship. One young woman, an Orthodox Jew from Israel. Another, a young Italian who had spent two years volunteering in Lebanon, supporting Palestinian refugees. At the beginning: hostility, hurt, blame. Gradually: a willingness to see from each other’s perspective. The Israeli woman admitted that although she gives money to help Palestinians, she doesn’t want to think of their plight; she wants to stay in a bubble. We gently tried to say that this wasn’t really an option anymore, that she needed to open her eyes and see. Watching those two find each other across all of that taught me more about community than any three-hour circle.

And yet. I had come for peace, nature, learning. When the weddings and parties ran, there was loud music, loud voices, loud everything. So I did the thing I apparently do now. I followed the call of the unknown and started looking for what came next.

I found a housesit not far away. A dog, a cat, and one problem: the listing said I needed a car. I messaged anyway, explaining that if I arrived with enough groceries for the week, I didn’t need to travel anywhere. That sounds like a small thing, sending that message, but the previous version of me would not have asked for fear of rejection. The people pleaser in me, used to obeying exact instructions, would never have dared.

Cue another train journey that should have been simple and became a bit epic: stairs, train doors and platform changes negotiated with one medium rucksack, one small rucksack and three large bags of groceries. And then I arrived, and felt like I’d been handed the most beautiful gift. A luxury estate nestled in the Tuscan hills, views of vineyards, a pool, and my own little stone house with green shutters and a mezzanine bedroom. My host, an English woman looking after the estate whilst planning a week’s holiday of her own, turned out to be another yoga teacher. We had so much in common it felt like meeting a friend. The main villa was a temporary home to a retired Dutch woman minding the property owner’s dog.

Three houses. Three women. A different sort of community entirely.

We each had our own space, and then we’d meet, spontaneous and unforced, for breakfast, coffee, dinner, a pre-bed chamomile tea. I got to know their stories: the corporate world, the earning, the realising they needed change, the making change happen. The Dutch woman had stepped from corporate to this caretaking job herself once. Years later, she left to embraced van life, travelling with her dog, and her lively mind ranged over everything from politics to life to her own journey.

The Englishwoman had worked through a whole catalogue of alternative and “spiritual” workshops in the effort to understand and heal herself. Women who cope. Women who can make change happen. I recognised elements of me in them. In the end my new friend took her dog with her on the road trip, so I had only her cat and the plants to care for, and when she arrived back early I was able to stay on anyway. Ten days in all. Dogs greeting me every morning, and a patio where I did my admin and wrote things like this.

But there was a reality I was sticking my head in a bucket about, this little oasis was not my home as much as I delighted in my simple stone house. My flight to the UK was already booked from Florence, built around the month in community I hadn’t stayed for. I looked at other housesits, perused Airbnbs in Naples, considered volunteer positions further north… what to do or where to go? Then one day a random message appeared on Workaway, a site I’d signed up to but never used. A musician, about ninety minutes away, who had seen my profile and thought we saw the world in a similar way. Would I help him develop an outdoor yoga space and work with him on his music for ecstatic dance?

I had no idea who he was. It would have been quite easy to say no. The old me would have. Instead, I sat with his message for a couple of days and listened inwardly, and there was a yes there. I reminded myself I was practising being in the flow and seeing where life took me. The flow had delivered the housesit. And if it felt wrong when I got there, I could always leave. So I packed my bag for the fifth time. My new Dutch friend drove me to the meeting place, forty minutes in an air-conditioned car instead of two and a half hours by public transport in thirty-eight degree heat. This is its own small portrait of community and my immense gratitude.

So. The final chapter.

I was met by a warm-hearted man who had brought a female friend with him, I think to reassure me that I would be safe. Vincenzo was a musician, reiki master and sound healer, as I found out on our drive into the mountains. His village was more a collection of houses at the end of the road, the views of the Sibillini mountains mesmerising. The house was a warren of different levels and rooms, very simple, very homemade and entirely creative. My bedroom was a makeshift corner of the sound healing room, an Aladdin’s cave of musical instruments and, to my delight, a quartet of crystal singing bowls. He had laid sprigs of lavender and rosemary on my bed as a welcome. He spoke a little English and some Swiss German; we communicated through words, smiles, gestures and, occasionally, Google Translate.

The days found a rhythm, and my nervous system revelled in it. Work early, before it got too hot: gardening, plastering, painting (read my piece on painting a mural), creating an outdoor meditation area. Then a leisurely breakfast of eggs, bread, cheese, honey and coffee, from quite an array of Italian mocha pots, piccolo to grande. Work until lunchtime, then siesta: a time for reading, snoozing or, in my case, playing with the crystal bowls and the harp. Afternoons were music time. Me dancing to sets he’d created for ecstatic dance so he could see how they worked, or adding vocals in the way of sounds and chants. Be playful, try anything, he would say. And because he was so encouraging, so without judgement, I found myself gradually becoming more confident in this place that felt so peaceful and safe. One time he got me to lie on top of the piano whilst he played, so I could experience its sound as vibration through my whole body. Quite extraordinary. The whole house and garden was a creative outlet for sound: homemade chimes, pipes you could bang to make different notes, strings to pluck like a harp, the garden an array of rosemary and lavender alive with butterflies.

And the little collection of houses was, in its own quiet way, a community. Every morning the neighbours’ cats came to say buongiorno, the dogs into the kitchen to shelter from the sun, and the hens ran about in the little garden outside my sound healing bedroom.

On my last day, the home schooling families came together to celebrate the beginning of the summer holidays, and since Vincenzo’s house was the one with the wood-fired pizza oven, the ten or so families all converged on his garden. We’d spent the day before repairing tables, now laid out with chairs. Children from young to teens arrived, parents bringing different foods for the toppings, and I was warmly folded into this larger family, the conversation switching to English now and then so I could understand. I was instructed in how to stretch dough into a round pizza shape. Massage it gently, they laughed, as my third attempt still resulted in large holes in the centre that I tried to pinch together.

Here’s the learning I keep returning to. The pizzas weren’t given as an individual round each. They were passed around, and you took a slice. Sometimes the pizza you’d been eyeing, with exactly the toppings you liked, ran out before it got to you. Sometimes the plate went around twice because now everyone was too full to eat any more. If you wanted a lesson in community, there it was, travelling anticlockwise around a table in the Sibillini mountains.

By late evening, as a big amber-coloured moon rose in the sky, we moved to the neighbours’ house for desserts and a table football tournament. I was partnered with a teen called Romeo. Like Shakespeare, he told me, by way of explaining his name. We laughed when I said that English speakers would pronounce it wrongly that way; perhaps an Alfa Romeo would be a better fit. He was a great teammate, patient and fun, amidst much shrieking, mine mostly, and the lovely herbalist neighbour’s as she attacked and I defended, to the amusement of the whole group. Alas, Romeo and I lost. Mainly due to the number of goals I scored against us.

So my wish for community showed itself in Italy in many forms. A kibbutz-shaped community transplanted into the Tuscan hills. Three women in three houses, drawing together for coffee, an aperitif, a chamomile tea. A village community that expanded to hold a whole celebration, which they call a festival rather than a party or get together. I think I might adopt it.

I left Italy where I’d started, back in Florence, carrying all these different felt experiences of how community forms. We humans long for connection. And yet what so many of us actually live inside, in our current world, is isolation. What I keep learning is that belonging asks something of us, whether the community holds two people or thirty-two. A letting go of control. An understanding of boundaries, ours and everyone else’s. A willingness to give towards the collective whilst balancing what we individually need. And, holding it all together, the courage to voice these things. Because unspoken, they ferment into resentment. Spoken and listened to, they become choices, compromises, adjustments. A pizza passed around the table, rather than served whole onto your own plate.

I spent a long time believing community was something you earned by being useful and agreeable, responsible for everyone else’s feelings. Italy kept offering me the other version. The one where you arrive as yourself, say what you need, take your slice as it passes, and leave when it’s time.

Here I am, back in the UK, pet sitting. Lexi and I went for a walk by a lake filled with lotus flowers, the sunlight revealing the mud beneath them. So, I took a video, thinking I could craft it into an Instagram reel. But I woke the next morning with a sudden urge to write a poem. WTF, where did this came from? since I don’t write poetry, but it’s here, none the less.

There are so many elements of this poem reflected in my own life. The first being the sheer act of putting IT out into the world at all, rather than keeping it hidden in the Notes app on my phone, never to see the light of day. The courage to climb the stem shows itself straight away.

Follow the Stem

I am tethered in the mud,
the sludge and dark gloom of it.

Occasionally a shaft of light
pierces down through the murkiness
and I can see it: a slender stem
reaching upwards, going somewhere
I have never been.

I follow, gradually, gripping tight,
courage taking me higher,
my roots falling further below
until I cannot feel them at all.

Then the surface film breaks
and I burst through, astounded.
Light. Space. Breath.
And the sight, for the first time,
of the full entirety of myself
petals unfurled, surrendered to sun,


My essence woven into the world around me
 Insects buzz, fish nudge, the breeze moves me. 
Life is around me, below me, through me.

From here, this new vantage,
I look down at the mud
and see what it always was.

Not a tether in the darkness, an anchor to the earth
The nutrients of shared humanity
feeding each flower at the surface.

The pretty version

Lotus logos are everywhere in the wellness industry, and it is a big industry. Like most things that become mainstream enough to start appearing in films and TV shows, the meaning has been watered down to something almost unrecognisable. Once a profound teaching, the lotus and the mud has become something you have on a bag, a studio wall or a journal.

Even eighteen years ago, when a graphic designer gifted me a beautiful logo with a lotus flower, I said no. Something in me refused it, before I understood why. The understandings often arrive retrospectively.

Because in the yogic understanding, the lotus is not a symbol of serenity. It is a symbol of relationship, specifically, the relationship between a flower and the mud it grows from and never leaves.

The mud is the human condition. The murk, the weight, the sticky confusion of an ordinary life. And the lotus does not transcend it, whatever the studio wall suggests. Its roots stay buried in the dark for the whole of its life. Cut the stem and you have a pretty corpse within a day. The flower at the surface and the sludge at the bottom are one organism, and the metaphor only means anything if you keep both ends.

The decorated version keeps the flower and quietly deletes the mud. It has taken eighteen years, but my mud and I have finally worked out what we are to each other.

Tethered

To begin with, I didn’t know it was murky. The muted colours and the gloom were all I knew. But here’s the thing: once you know you’re in the murk, you cannot unknow it. And after a while, knowing it, I felt stuck. It felt like being tethered. Held somewhere against my will, in the dark, seeing only a few inches in front of me.

That kind of darkness makes you self-consumed. Not selfish, that’s something else, but consumed by self, because the self is the only thing visible down there. When you cannot see out, all you can do is look in, and what you find in there at that stage is rarely comforting.

If you have lived with the long tail of early trauma, you will know this state. The heaviness. The narrow field of vision. The quiet certainty that this is simply where you live now.

The gripping

The part of the poem I find most interesting is the middle. The ascent. Because the ascent is not graceful. There is no surrender in it at all. It is gripping, effortful, white-knuckled, and it involves losing contact with your roots until you cannot feel them. I know this from a brief flirtation with rock climbing. I could scamper up happily until the moment came to leave my footing and reach beyond my comfort zone. Even on a top rope, held and perfectly safe, that moment reduced me to tears.

You can find many friends in the mud and murk, and there is a comfort in this community as you all stir up and inspect your individual plots and report back. But not everyone is able to leave this dark home; it is too frightening. And some will try to hang on to you as you ascend, out of fear for themselves, and for and of you.

The early and middle stretch of healing feels exactly like this. You climb away from the familiar dark and for a long while you belong to neither place. You have left the mud but not reached the light, and your roots, your history, your people, your old ways of surviving, hang impossibly far below. Plenty of people turn back here, and I understand why. Suspended in the water, gripping a stem, is a lonely place to be.

And if you are someone who kept yourself alive through control, through doing, through holding everything very tightly indeed, then gripping is your native language. Of course you climb that way. It is the only way you know. The poem does not judge her for it. Courage and gripping can be the same gesture for a long time.

The surrender

Then the surface breaks, and the first thing she does is stop.

Petals unfurled, surrendered to sun. Not achieving the sun. Not pleasing it. Surrendered to it. After all that effort, the arrival turns out to be a letting go, which is the joke that plays on those of us who got here through effort. The gripping buys the ascent. It cannot buy the opening. The opening only happens when the gripping ends.

This is what happens in our bodies too. The armour that got us through cannot be willed off. It thaws when it is finally safe enough to thaw, and not a moment before.

Through me

My favourite lines to write were the small ones. Insects buzz. Fish nudge. The breeze moves me.

Because this is the real evidence of arrival, and it has nothing to do with radiance. Down in the murk she could see only herself. At the surface, life is around her, below her, through her. The boundary between self and world, which the darkness had made absolute, turns out to be porous after all. That is not a mystical claim. Anyone who has come out the far side of a long frozen period knows the day the world starts arriving again. Birdsong you had not been hearing. The feel of wind. The sense of being a fully feeling participant rather than a voyeur.

The anchor

The last turn is the one the poem was written for. She looks back down at the mud, the same mud, unchanged, and sees that it was never a tether. It was an anchor. The nutrients that feed every flower at the surface rise up through the dark.

I want to be careful here, because this is the point where a certain kind of writing reaches for gratitude too quickly. I am not saying the mud was a gift. I am not saying what happened to you happened for a reason, or asking you to thank the thing that hurt you. The mud does not need your gratitude. It never asked for it.

What changed in the poem is not the mud. It is the vantage point. From below, held in it, it felt like a tether. From above, rooted in it, it reveals itself as an anchor. Same mud. Different relationship.

And that is the slow work, in the end. Not erasing the dark ground we grew from, but gradually changing how we relate to it. Sifting through the decayed stories and finding, alongside the sticky sludge, the rich nutrients that gave us our unique strengths. Until the thing that once kept us down becomes the thing that keeps us steady.

If you are somewhere in the water right now, gripping the stem and unable to feel your roots, that is not a wrong turn. It is the middle. Keep going.

The paint was on the floor in small curled flakes when I came back in the morning. Like the tree had shed in the night.

I stood there and felt something move through me. Not shock, not quite disappointment, more of an oh that came out as a sigh. And then I looked closer and found that I liked it. It was funky, creative, and if I had set out to do this on purpose, there’s no way I’d have been able to create this.

Let me go back a few days.

He had found my profile on a platform for volunteers, taken the time to read what I’d written, and sent me a message so careful and considered it called to me. We may never meet in person, he had written, but it’s wonderful to know that one isn’t alone in wanting a community of beings living in peace. The easy option would have been to find another rental and continue to work online crafting my courses. Keep to the familiar road even in the middle of an adventure. Instead I sat with the message, let it settle, I was curious. He was a musician and a poet and wanted help crafting his music through barefoot dancing, creating a yoga and meditation space and helping with his vegetable garden. He didn’t speak English, only a bit of German. I didn’t speak Italian only a bit of French. He said we could communicate through gesture, energy and smiles….and the odd google translate. I felt something move toward yes. And then I went.

His house overlooks the Sibillini mountains, 100 million years old, my mind can’t quite compute that. There exists a legend about Sibilla, a sorceress, a witch, who lived in a cave. This is a small village where the road ends. Birdsong, heat, cicadas in the trees, chickens roaming, the scent of rosemary, oregano and lavender. He can pick up almost any instrument and play it. My makeshift bedroom was in the sound healing room: an Aladin’s cave of vibrational instruments, didgeridoo, crystal bowls, the large gong. The evening I arrived, was the summer solstice, we created a little ceremony of fire, writing, letting go and song. the gong hanging near the fire, its great metal face shimmering orange and red and yellow until it glowed.

The mural was his idea. I had told him stories of my days as a stage designer, which included scene painting. A section of plaster had gone wrong and he came up with something creative rather than struggling with it. I could have done something simple: a wash of colour, trailing vine leaves. But he wanted something to contemplate. Something that could take you into a dream.

I had a photograph saved on my phone. Found it three months ago on social media: a bare tree silhouetted against a sun so perfectly round, so vivid in its orange and red, it looked generated. It wasn’t. I loved the vibrant spectacle that nature does so well. I had saved it knowing I would use it somewhere. I didn’t know it would be here, on a wall in Umbria, for someone I hadn’t yet met.

Once I started, I kept going. When I paint I get lost in it, always have. Time has no meaning. I worked through late morning, missed the siesta, didn’t want to lose the flow. And when I finally stepped back, I saw that the sun I had painted had become, without my planning it, the gong. That swirling mass of energy I had been sitting with for days. The great face reflecting firelight. The weight of it, the resonance. When I painted the sun I was painting all of that too: the sound healings we had exchanged, the music he makes for people to dance to, the fire and the solstice and the particular quality of time in that house.

The mural began as a solution to a damaged wall. It became a gift of gratitude to that rare sort of person who gives without looking for any sort of return. One of the things he gave me was permission to play with music the way a child does. Despite his talent, he is so non-judgemental and encourages play. He wanted to record me chanting, exploring indigenous medicine song sounds, to weave into his ecstatic dance tracks. I felt trepidation. Had never sung into a microphone, let alone been recorded. But it became a fun, experimental afternoon. When he saw the mural, he was astounded. Wow, he kept saying. I feel emotional that you have created this for me. I felt the particular rush of joy you get when you give something from the heart and know it is exactly right.

The next morning I went back wanting to see it again, to feel into whether it needed anything more. There was a section of background I hadn’t been happy with.

I turned on the light. A brief pang. And then: curiosity.

Because what the wall had done to the tree was extraordinary. The branches, bare lines I had placed carefully, were letting themselves go. The paint lifting in small dry curls, gathering on the floor below like something had actually fallen. If I had tried to create that effect deliberately, I wouldn’t have known how. Whatever was happening inside the plaster: the heat, some particular dryness in that section, chemistry I couldn’t name, had made something I hadn’t intended and couldn’t have.

I kept painting. We talked through options: Spray lacquer to stabilise it in some way. Meanwhile I worked on the background, adding texture and colour. As the hours went on, the background gradually became something I liked, while the tree kept letting go, little by little. Every so often we would laugh as another metaphorical parallel surfaced. Eventually I put the brushes down. The tree was beginning to look like an old fresco. I liked the effect, I was reminded how often we look for perfection in life, people, what we create. But often it’s the imperfections that create the interest and beauty.

I thought of the Tibetan monks I once watched at the British Museum. They had come from Tibet and spent a week creating a sand mandala in the entrance hall. Fine coloured powder laid down with extraordinary patience and precision: the kind of thing people would come and stand near, just to watch it being made. And then, at the end of the week, a ceremony. They blew it all away. The dissolution was not the ending. It was the completion. The cycle running its full course, on purpose.

We are good at celebrating beginnings. Births, new years, fresh starts, the first shoot after winter. What we resist, and perhaps especially now when the world feels less and less predictable, is the other half of the same cycle. The letting go. The ending. The shedding. The more uncertain things feel outside us, the harder we tend to grip, as if holding on tightly enough might be the thing that keeps everything in place.

The mural didn’t ask my permission. It just started shedding. And what I found, when I stopped trying to work out how to save it, was that I was curious. Not devastated. Curious about what would remain.

I left before the wall had finished. I gave him some ideas: spray varnish, adding three-dimensional leaves, layering a large photograph of the original over what remained. Ideas spilling out, because there was suddenly so much possibility. Or he might leave it exactly as it is. The ending is his now. What he’ll have is a different picture entirely to the one I painted. One that neither of us made. As I left, he referenced the great swirling energy I had put into it. I joked it was all coming away with me.

We move through cycles all the time. Most of us just don’t see them clearly. We’ve lost the reference points that used to make them legible: the moon pulling from dark to full and back into darkness, the solstice as midpoint, the year already tipping back toward the long nights. The tree that drops its leaves and waits, and doesn’t call it loss.

I painted a tree caught somewhere in its year. No leaves, a great sun behind it. Something between endings and beginnings.

Rising or setting.

I still don’t know

Rugs in Morocco tell a story.

Not in the way a book does, beginning, middle, end, all very neat. More like the way life does, all at once and slightly overwhelming. With a pattern that keeps shifting depending on where you’re standing, how long you observe it and the way the light falls.

I’ve been musing about this since I arrived. Not just the actual rugs — though there are those too, stacked and draped in the souks in colours that make you wonder how something can be both inanimate and completely alive at the same time. I mean the rug of being here, standing in the multi strands and colours of a country so different from mine, of being a visitor with all the questions that come with that, most of which I hadn’t expected to be asking.

Here’s the thing about a rug though. Turn it over.

The underside is beautiful in its own way, but it’s also where you see the imperfections, the knots, the loose ends. The bits that make the pattern on the other side possible but that nobody really wants to look at directly. And you know what? That’s also where the dirt collects, the stuff that gets swept underneath until it becomes too noticeably bumpy. It’s interesting what you discover when you lift the rug and peer underneath, or at least I have grown to find it interesting.

Since you don’t begin to weave with just one thread, they crossover and loop around each other, let’s see where a thread leads….

The orange thread — about what to wear

Morocco is a Muslim country. Conservative in its dress, particularly for women. Local women are covered, legs, shoulders, arms and head. There’s no law saying I have to do the same as a visitor. Nobody pulls me aside, nobody says a word. But there’s an unspoken thing, a social contract you can feel even when it’s not written anywhere — that some covering is a respectful thing to do. Especially out here, away from the tourist polished streets of Marrakesh and Fes, the villages in the Atlas mountains are like stepping back in time.

I watch how other tourists navigate this over my mint tea, which is one of my favourite pastimes. (The watching, I mean, though also the tea.) Some people honour the code instinctively — flowing skirts to ankles or trousers, long sleeves, a scarf draped just so around them. Others don’t buy into it at all, shorts, strappy tops, skin on show. And then there’s the category I find most interesting: the ones who find the loophole. A short above the knee dress, but a scarf over the shoulders. Or a long dress and covered shoulders but the dress is so clingy, they could be dressed in opaque, coloured clingfilm.

The art of appearing to comply while changing absolutely nothing of substance. Humans are endlessly creative when it comes to bending rules just enough to feel like they’re not. I’m doing my own version of this, if I’m honest. I have plenty of flowy dresses and trousers, so the bottom half is not a problem. It’s the top half where I come unstuck. I usually pair them with strappy tops…and I rarely wear a bra — my boobs are small, I find bras constrictive, apart from a brief phase flirting with matching lingerie, I quietly decided that particular discomfort was not worth it. Europe has no strong opinions about this. Morocco has very strong opinions about this.

So I’ve been layering a yoga vest top underneath a strappy top, layered with a pashmina around my shoulders in thirty-degree heat, darting from one shady alley to the next while trying to look elegant.

The word that keeps coming up is constraint.

And here’s where the rug gets interesting. Because when I follow that thread — which is what rugs invite you to do, run your fingers along them, see where they go — I end up somewhere that has absolutely nothing to do with what I’m wearing.

The blue thread — about what things are worth

You can’t just ask what the price of something is in the souk. You are immediately asked what you want to pay, which is disconcerting to say the least. All sorts of questions come up — how do I know what it’s worth to even begin a negotiation, what if I get ripped off? But it’s a game of sorts, the asking price is not to be taken literally. It’s supposed to be playful and fun, there’s lots of eye rolling and laughter when you give your amount.

To begin with I found this deeply uncomfortable. I want a price tag. I want to look at something, see the number, decide whether it’s worth it — or whether I’m worth it — and either buy it or walk away. Clean. Transactional. Done. What I don’t want is to stand in a small shop drinking mint tea while a man with beautiful manners tells me what I’d like to pay and I tell him something lower and we meet somewhere in the middle and I leave not knowing whether I’ve been generous or ridiculous or both.

I bought a necklace, a pendant on a beaded cord, it’s a compass, small, silver and embossed with symbols. The blue turbaned shopkeeper told me how his ancestors, Tuareg people, use it in the desert. Not just for direction but also for calculation. The position of the sun, the arc of the stars, your place in relation to both. It represents the four tribes of the desert, he said. I was gone immediately. Camels, nighttime trekking, navigation by starlight. I was negotiating for an object but I was buying a story, and I didn’t fully realise that until later.

I got him down to half the asking price and felt rather pleased with myself. Found out afterwards it was probably worth less than a quarter.

But here’s the thing I keep turning over: did I overpay? I paid for the compass, yes. But I also paid for the mint tea, the story of the desert, the image of his family, the moment of being transported somewhere ancient and vast and starlit in the middle of a sun-baked afternoon. None of that has a price tag and all of it had value. The transaction was two different things at once depending on which side of the rug you were looking at.

And then I follow that thread and find something older and less comfortable.

I grew up in a house where love was transactional. Not cruelly, it was just the way it was. Be a version that I want you to be and you receive love. The price was never written down but it was always real, and I learnt what parts of me caused withdrawal and what brought warmth.

The people pleaser was born in that economy. The one who gives everything and asks for very little, because asking feels dangerous. Because conditional love teaches you that you might lose it at any moment, so you keep paying in advance, just to be safe. At some point the balance sheet becomes visible. You notice the giving has been mostly one way and that quiet injustice button, the one wired to the six-year-old, starts blinking.

The bartering in the souk made me uncomfortable because I didn’t know the rules. But I’ve been bartering my whole life. I just didn’t call it that.

The red thread — about the much older constraint

I have spent most of my life in boxes I built myself.

The good girl. The responsible one. The capable one who holds it and everyone together. The people pleaser. Smaller and smaller boxes, all self-constructed, all given very reasonable sounding names. The fabric over my shoulders in the Moroccan heat is just the most recent version of a feeling I’ve been living inside for decades. The location is new. The feeling isn’t.

And then there’s the gender thing, which I keep picking up and putting down like something hot. The men here wear jeans and t-shirts, not all but some. And there’s no unspoken code for male tourists to not wear shorts and tees. As I notice this it brings something up in me. Not quite anger, something that lives near it but is quieter and older. Something I knew as a child before I had words for it, this particular flavour of that’s not fair. I won’t even go down the road of you never see local women in cafes, just the men.

I grew up with a very finely tuned sense of injustice. Hair-trigger, if we’re being accurate, and it’s come up a lot in my life. So what I notice now, sitting here with my tea and my pashmina and my slightly sweaty yoga top, is that Morocco didn’t create that feeling. It just reached into the rug and pulled the thread.

The trigger is never really about what triggered it.

Follow it back far enough and you find the original knot. The place where the pattern started. That six-year-old who noticed unfairness before she had a language for it and tucked the feeling somewhere small and tight and internal, where it has been waiting, patient as a rug in a souk, for someone to come along and tug.

There’s no men-bashing here, by the way. It’s more complicated than that and also more personal. The Tuareg — the Blue Men of the Sahara, who live out in the deep desert — it’s the men who cover their heads and faces. Not the women. Every culture is sitting with its own version of this negotiation. I just happened to land in one that poked an old bruise. Which, when you think about it, is one of the better reasons to travel.

The green thread — about culture being both the thing and its opposite

Here’s the paradox woven into every tradition, every custom, every way of doing things that gets handed down through generations: the same thread that constrains can also be the one that connects.

Five times a day the call to prayer echoes through the streets and over the rooftops. Every single time, without fail, something in me stops. Comes back. What am I feeling? What can I actually see and hear and smell right now? What, in this specific moment, am I grateful for? I am reminded, embodiment practices can be found anywhere, even in the middle of a souk in Morocco. Perhaps, especially in the middle of a souk in Morocco.

And breakfast, OMG, we need to talk about Moroccan breakfast!

Breakfast here is a ceremony. A small daily act of joy that takes up the time it deserves rather than being bolted down over a phone or whilst watching the morning news. A collection of colourful little ceramic bowls of olives, honey, jam, olive oil, cheese AND amlou — crushed almonds, argan oil and honey combined in a way that feels almost unfair to every other food. Msmen, the flaky square pancake that you tear rather than cut because tearing is the right way. Warm khobz, a round golden bread that somehow carries within it the entire Moroccan concept of hospitality and community.

And then the mint tea, poured from a height so the bubbles form in the glass. I asked about the pouring. One person told me it infuses the flavour. Another told me it creates oxygen, life and vitality in a glass. I kept the second explanation. Some truths work better when they’re a bit poetic.

The thing is, these rituals are also the other side of the very same thread that constrains. Culture keeps alive the knowledge of how to slow down, how to be together, how to mark a moment as worth marking. We’ve stripped most of that out in the West and called it efficiency. Moroccan families, three generations, eat together, conversations happening at full volume.

I feel the loss of something I can’t quite name. Perhaps it’s the hunger for community that we are all feeling. Something we traded away without quite meaning to with our nuclear families, fences and polite masks. Here it’s normal to ask quite personal questions, there’s a curiosity about other people rather than just talking about oneself.

I don’t know where the line is between tradition that holds and tradition that boxes you in. I’m not sure the line is a line, exactly. More of a constant negotiation. The rug changes depending on who’s weaving and what year it is and what they’ve been through. But the knots underneath stay.

What the rug knows

There’s a version of travel that sits on top of things. You see the beautiful pattern, you take the photo, you move on. There’s nothing wrong with that. Sometimes a rug is just a rug.

But if you let it — if you’re willing to sit with the discomfort of the heat and the constraint of the pashmina and the tug of the old unfairness and the unexpected ceremony of breakfast — a different country can become a mirror. Not a flattering one. The kind that shows you what’s actually there.

The discomfort is the thread. The difference is the thread. The thing that seems to be about where you are is almost always also about who you are and where you came from and which knots you never quite finished untying.

Follow the thread. That’s where the good stuff is. Even when — especially when — it leads somewhere messier than you were expecting. The rug on the floor looks like a finished thing. Turn it over and you see everything it took to make it.

I think we’re all far more like the underside, even as we pretend to ourselves and the world around us that we are the top side.

Postcards from the Path is written from wherever the road goes. If this found you at the right moment, pass it on to someone who might need it.

Two weeks of something around loneliness moving through me. Something that was triggered in the mountains, but had substrata that was far, far older. So I have given space for this wave to move to fullness and cascade through me, bringing in its wake sadness, grief, tears. But this is another post waiting in the sidelines.

I am now used to the rhythm and cadence of these frozen parts of my past. The ones that reside in my body, waiting. Until something brings them close enough to the surface to thaw and release

Today, something lifted. I walked out into the medina and felt — lighter, more present, actually here. Which meant I could notice the details of life around me, rather than being stuck in my emotional turbulence or my head.

It’s Eid al-Adha. I had to look it up, although I had heard the name, I didn’t know the meaning and significance.

It has that Christmas Eve feeling. Children off school. Last minute everything. My favourite coffee stall was closed today because they’ve travelled home to be with family. There’s a festive, anticipatory hum running through the medina.

And then there are the rams. I was used to hearing them in the mountains and was perplexed hearing them close by, this town of art and music has a sophisticated air. Then I started to notice them being delivered to houses in carts. The children feed them, look after them, pet them - and then will watch in the morning as they’re sacrificed.

They know exactly where food comes from. Not a film wrapped package from a supermarket shelf. Actual life.

The town has grown a whole set of side hustles in two days. The goat delivery man. The boy selling lumps of charcoal. Men sharpening knives on rotating stone wheels at the roadside. Stalls that have appeared from nowhere selling new clothes, shoes, belts — because you dress in new clothes for Eid, platters of biscuits and sweet treats wrapped in cellophane and tied with ribbons. I was curious why clear bags were being sold, from little tables, erected for a few hours - it’s for distributing a share of the meat to neighbours and those less fortunate. Reminds me of the original meaning of Boxing Day in the UK, when boxes of food were distributed in the village after Christmas.

I bumped into the gnawa instrument shop owner I stop to chat with — he was just leaving his house and invited me in to see the two rams in his inner courtyard. They were being fed, happy , entirely ignorant of their centre stage tomorrow.

The part of me that doesn’t eat meat felt an internal tightening at the thought, but I’d feel the same around a turkey or goose in someone’s back garden on Christmas Eve.

What moved me today wasn’t the difference, it was the sameness. When you observe from a place of neutrality, not needing it to look like something you recognise, not needing to have an opinion, you see the humanness underneath.

The need to gather, to prepare, to mark something together. To feed the people you love, to make it special. That is not culture-specific.

This is what I notice in my work too. Beneath the different stories, the different wounds, the different ways we have all learned to survive, there’s the same longing.

To belong. To be seen. To be real, without a mask. To connect

Culture is the surface, underneath, as human’s on this planet, we are the same, same emotions, same thoughts, same stories - just packaged with different ribbons.

Today, I got to witness all of this with something close to joy.

Grief moves and our bodies find their way back. Trauma keeps us in tunnel vision, it has to, that’s safe. But, on the other side, the world becomes so much bigger than the wound.

There is a particular privilege in being a witness. Whether to your own process or to someone else's sacred ritual. Not a participant, not a judge — just entirely present to see.

But let me start with my arrival.

My first morning in the mountains I decided to walk down to the little town of Imlil which looked a lovely place to explore. Simple enough plan, follow the road the taxi brought me up on and I won’t get lost.

Within ten minutes of walking, I was lost. How does one even manage to lose a road? Somehow I found myself in a huddle of traditional mud and straw houses, no road in sight, asking some workmen which way to go. They pointed down a track that led through a tiny village of very small alleyways and higgledy-piggledy steps with chickens, goats and women chatting outside their doorways, the air filled with woodsmoke and earthy animal smells. Life here I imagine is both simple and harsh — baking hot summers, deep snow in winter, everything close to the bone and close to each other.

I kept stopping to ask. Imlil? This way? And they would point and nod, this way, and I would follow and then ask again, clearly not trusting. Most people walk around here with a guide or as part of a trekking group. I was solo. Then all of a sudden I noticed them — orange dots or arrows on the sides of buildings or trees. A trail. I had absolutely no idea where it was going, but it was heading downhill and downhill was where the town was, so I followed. The trail took me through scrubland and past isolated houses with rugs hanging outside to air, deep reds and saffron in geometric patterns that hold the stories of those that wove them. Keeping faith and trust that I would pop out on the road somewhere. Suddenly a rather gorgeous Riad appeared, and then another, looking a bit incongruous on the dusty track, which soon became a paved walkway running alongside a rill (water channel) and street lighting. This fancy tourist accommodation appearing like a different world, the juxtaposition of the village ten minutes back not lost on me. I found myself on the road above Imlil, walking with other tourists, feeling a familiarity. But then the orange markers pointed off the road again. I had a choice. Walk the known path — the road with everyone else — or follow the arrows. I think in life, if we are observant, there are choices that appear pointing to different paths.

How could I resist the mini orange adventure, so I took the dusty path that led who knows where. My life has not really followed a conventional path, only when I had my children did I try to live within the confines of a box. But, in retrospect, I so wish I hadn’t tried to mould myself into middle class, market town life. Back to dust and goats and donkeys. A dry riverbed, looking around for the next orange marker nestled amongst the stones. Hopping over small streams, skirting small buildings with chickens and goats, scrubland. Trusting, trusting, trusting and then I emerged next to a tumbling river with the snowcapped peaks of the Atlas mountains framing it and I just stopped and breathed, elated with this gift at the end of my walk.

I found a rock and sat. Took off my shoes and put my feet in the ice cold snowmelt, the cold was shocking, the kind that makes you catch your breath. I watched the water tumble and swirl around my feet as I thought how I could have missed this entirely. This river was ten minutes walk below the town, I would never have known it was there. But because I got lost, because I followed the orange dots without knowing where they were going, I’d landed right here. As I gazed at the white mountain peaks, a realisation — that sometimes in life you have to trust that you will end up where you need to be even though the path is not clear. The markers might not be an obvious trail, just small guidances along the path — just enough to know you’re still on it. And yes, sometimes you have to get a little lost before you notice them.

As I was walking back through town I ran into a man I’d met the evening before. He was sitting with his jewellery laid out on the side of the road. Sit, sit, I’ll get you coffee — so I sat. He comes from the desert, he tells me. Not mountain Berber but desert Berber, a nomadic people. He travels between the Sahara and the tourist towns, collecting pieces made by artisans across the desert, selling them wherever people stop long enough to look. Three weeks out here, then back to the desert for a couple of months. I miss the desert he said, the way you say something that is simply a fact of your life. I bought something from him. I’m fairly sure I paid over the odds even with the haggling. I didn’t mind, I’d enjoyed the interaction. If I’d popped out higher up on the road I wouldn’t have had the coffee, or the conversation, or the small window into a life lived in a very different way to mine.

Someone mentions there are famous waterfalls nearby — a big tourist trail with a lot of people going up and down. I found them eventually. They weren’t nearly as spectacular as my tumbling river with the mountains behind it. They never are, the famous ones. On the circular route back to the village I fall into conversation with a European woman. A stranger, the way you meet strangers on trails, easily, without preamble, her story comes out (I seem to have that effect on people) — for her, burnout. Her body sending signals she’d been overriding for years. The moment I mentioned the links between body, emotions and the past, her eyes brimmed and she felt goosebumps. She felt seen and understood in a way that told me she’d been waiting for someone to name it. By the time we parted she was asking about my summer retreat in France. If I’d stayed on the road.

The second day I decided to go up.

I follow the road again, deliberately this time, toward a point I’d spotted on the map, un vue panoramique, with what looked like extraordinary views of the mountains. It’s a super windy day that resembles more of a shack but has the most spectacular view I’ve ever seen from a shack.

I didn’t have water with me so I order freshly squeezed orange juice and Moroccan mint tea and a big bottle of water to take away, and I sit and gaze at the mountains. Another lone traveller arrives, nods, sits, gazes. We don’t need to speak.

Then two young German hikers with their guide, heading further up. Then a whole convoy of donkeys arriving, various backpacks and food items being unloaded from their backs. They look, honestly, visibly relieved to be free of their burdens for a moment. And then an invasion. A large group of hikers doing an acclimatising walk in preparation for the summit attempt the following day. Then an even larger group arriving for lunch after their hike up, platters of fruit and cheese and bread being laid out. The peace of the mountains too disturbed for me — time to go.

On the way down I’m feeling more adventurous with trusting the markers, so when they point off the road I follow them down through forests, filling the air with that delicious scent of sun-baked pine, and alongside tumbling streams snaking their way through lush grassland, the sunlight creating momentary jewels. I emerge just above my home in a fraction of the time the road would have taken. The route cut across all the zigzags.

I muse on this for a while. The road up had been steady and known, every turn visible before I got to it. The trail down was more uneven, less predictable, asked more trust — but it was shorter, and it gave me pine forests and streams. There are times in life when we need the known path. The stability. The small visible steps. There are other times when we need to approach from a completely different angle and trust that the ground will be steady. I love how life provides the workshop, if you open your eyes. Life lessons have a way of intensifying when you give them a nod of agreement.

My mood here seems to have matched the peaks and valleys of the mountains. There’s a particular quality of aloneness that comes from being by yourself somewhere where everyone else belongs to each other. In Marrakech I could sit alone in a restaurant and watch the world — the comings and goings, the interactions, the lovers who couldn’t take their eyes off each other and the couples who had somehow stopped knowing how to talk. I’d been that person too, in different chapters, making polite conversation and giving up and turning to people-watching instead. But in the restaurant I had life to watch. In the village the view was mountains, which was beautiful, and also quiet in a way that has nowhere to put itself.

The Riad that was my home for a week was comfortable and very rustic. I was very aware the accommodation I was in was very different to the other parts of the house. Village life here is very simple and very synchronised with the mountains and weather. The strong smell of goats permeates the air, the backdrop sound of chickens punctuated by the call to prayer that echoes across the valley. The family were very kind and caring of me, the older women pinching my cheeks and jesting with me, but they only spoke Berber so communication was limited. I had thought there would be other travellers to trade stories with over breakfast and dinner, but there was only me. As I sat on the terrace eating my dinner, gazing at the mountains, I could hear their lively chatter underneath. It created in me a feeling of separation. I need people I thought, I feel lonely here in the mountains. I decided to leave early and began to research where to go next, book accommodation and pack. But somehow time slipped away, it got dark and I hadn’t done anything. Watching the stars emerge from my little balcony, I felt tired and lazy. One more day, I’ll pack tomorrow I said to myself, as the mountains tugged and whispered in my ear to stay.

I had been watching, since I arrived, a track that the villagers used — donkeys loaded with firewood, goats led to grazing, a late afternoon stroll. I was curious to know where it went. I filled my water bottle and set off. The track ran alongside a small built waterway bringing snowmelt down to the village. I walked past women who looked like they had stepped out of another century, carrying huge bundles of herbs on their hips, unhurried yet purposeful. The further I walked the more the mountains opened up around me, but then the trail simply ended. I felt disappointment — I’d only been walking for half an hour. No markers, no obvious direction, just rocks and scrubland and mountains in every direction. I sat down on a rock and decided to just be for a while. Watch, wait, see what revealed itself.

Before long I spotted a whole line of hikers on the side of the mountain. If I watched long enough I would see where they emerged. Then a guide appeared, leading a family of three from San Francisco, walking in the same direction I needed to go. I asked whether I could tag along until the trail became clearer. What followed wasn’t a trail exactly — it was scrambling over rocks, picking a way through, the guide knowing the invisible line we were following. Then eventually an obvious path appeared, I thanked them and fell back and let them go ahead. The connection I was looking for only comes when I’m walking alone. In conversation, especially the social kind, I’m in my head. In silence I’m in my body. That’s where the mountains can get to you.

I started to muse on guides — how they appear sometimes, exactly when you need them, because they’ve walked this stretch before and they know where the ground is solid. They lead you through the part that isn’t obvious. And then they move on, and you’re walking alone again, and you’re glad — for both. For some people the guide is needed for most of the journey and for others, occasionally, at the crossings where the path disappears. There’s no better or worse in that, but I think it helps to know in this moment whether you are looking for a guide or not — or perhaps you are the guide.

The couple of hours exploring had became a full day hiking. The trail marked well in places, the landscape sometimes open and easy underfoot and other times suddenly demanding — scree sliding away beneath each step, drops down the mountainside that required me to stop, breathe, look carefully before committing my weight to the next move. At times using my hands on the rocks, scrabbling close to the ground. But here’s the thing. My body was ready, my nervous system was ready. Both of them had been prepared — by other walks before, by ten years of work before those. I knew it not because I felt fearless but because I felt capable. The ground felt manageable even when it was difficult.

The lessons arrived the way they usually do for me, not in the moment but somewhere on the walk back, settling in quietly like sediment.

The first walk had been about trust. The markers are there even when the path isn’t obvious. You find them by moving, not by standing still waiting for certainty.

The second had shown me that the known path is sometimes exactly right — and sometimes you follow it just far enough to know where to leave it.

The third had told me something I needed to hear. You are more prepared than you think. The walks you’ve already taken were getting you ready for this one.

I nearly left early.

All of this embodied realisation would have stayed unwalked. That’s what I keep coming back to, the thing the uncomfortable holds that it doesn’t announce. The river you’d never have found. The conversation on the path. The clarity that only comes when you stay long enough for the noise to settle.

You only find out what’s there if you don’t leave before it arrives.

There’s a paradox I’ve been sitting with.

You do the work to get comfortable with the uncomfortable. And then one day you realise — the uncomfortable has now become comfortable.

I’m writing this from Morocco, day two. Last night I sat in a small local café eating the most aromatic tagine, watching the comings and goings of the street outside, and mused on the kaleidoscope of emotions of the last 48 hours.

Let me back up.

I spent ten weeks housesitting in the UK this spring.

Luxurious houses, adorable animals to cuddle, friends staying over, seeing family, the familiarity of a supermarket where I could find everything I needed without thinking. Travelling with my own car — which also meant a mini yoga studio of equipment including my singing bowl, shamanic drum and paint brushes!

When I first arrived back from Thailand via the mountains of France, England felt heavy. The people looked like they were carrying the weight of the world on their shoulders, they looked so glum. I’m sure the endless winter of rain had something to do with it. The lightness and gentleness of the Thai people felt very far away and I could feel the bubbly, bright energy I came back with start to drain away. I started to muse on where to go next.

But here’s the thing about the familiar — the longer you stay in it, the more it holds you. Comfort arrives so quietly, so reasonably.

So, I watched the procession of English spring — crocuses giving way to daffodils, daffodils to bluebells, bluebells to the unfurling of beech leaves in that electrifying lime green only found in Northern Europe, hedgerows finally frothing white with hawthorn with Beltane (May Day)

And somewhere in all of that, it didn’t seem so urgent to leave again. By the time I was packing for Morocco I was dragging my feet. My mind making it complicated. All that fuss of working out what to take.

On the way to the airport I felt flat and slightly disembodied. As the plane took off, something unexpected moved through me — apprehension, confusion, nostalgia…. a tear slid down my cheek. I sat with it all, giving it space to expand and reveal itself.

And it did, yes, there was a slight apprehension being in a very different culture, similar feelings departing for Thailand. But I marvelled at how quickly the unfamiliar becomes familiar. How fast the body decides something is home and starts to put down roots, even when it’s a home and pet you are borrowing. The familiar gradually folds around you like a warm coat, and you forget you were ever looking for the door.

By the time I landed in Morocco, I felt settled and at peace.

The bus from the airport wound through a red landscape I hadn’t expected. A boy herding goats with a stick right alongside a road full of cycles, mopeds, donkey’s, trucks, coaches, cars - all of it competing for the same strip of tarmac. The locals taking an evening stroll and the absurdity of seeing camels wandering into this picture of total, magnificent mayhem.

My body felt alive and curious. I was so enthralled I didn’t notice any thoughts at all, this is the thing about aliveness — it doesn’t leave much room for the mind’s usual commentary, you’re too busy feeling it with all your senses.

What replaced the apprehension is hard to name precisely. The particular quality of attention that arrives when you don’t know what’s coming next. I got on a local bus. Got lost at 9pm. Found the whole thing an adventure rather than a catastrophe.

That didn’t used to be possible for me, not by myself.

I think about the first few times I sat alone eating in Thailand. I used my phone for company, the default reach, the small anaesthetic. But I caught myself doing it and put it away.

What followed was uncomfortable in a specific way. A mix of things — society’s quiet message that you should always be somewhere with someone, so the feeling of being the person with no friends. Something more visceral underneath that, probably as old as the child at school who didn’t want to be the one without anyone to sit with. A tangle of shame, loneliness, and not knowing what to do with the stillness.

But I stayed with it and slowly, something shifted.

I started actually watching the life in front of me, the interplay of strangers, the texture of ordinary moments in an extraordinary place. The more comfortable I became in my own company, the more I noticed others sitting alone too. I felt brave enough to catch someone’s eye, start a conversation.

Twelve years of somatic work has changed my relationship with sensation. My nervous system used to be so braced, so over-protective, that anything unfamiliar triggered a shutdown, my body’s way of keeping me small and safe. It wasn’t dramatic, probably not that noticeable to the trained eye, but a smiling mask, an efficiency covering anxiety, a sense of self competency acting as armour.

Now I can feel the anxiety of stepping into a different culture and keep moving. Feel disoriented and stay curious. Sit in the fullness of my own presence without needing to fill it. This is what healing means to me. Not the absence of hard feelings. The capacity to expand into them rather than disappear.

There’s a shape I want to talk about. The grey life isn’t a life in crisis. It’s a life that quietly stopped expanding — until you’re moving around inside a shape you didn’t consciously choose.

Fine. Manageable. Comfortable.

You don’t know you’ve been holding your breath until something makes you exhale. Like I didn’t know I had a fear of abandonment, until it went. Transitions can do that and thresholds can do that. Not because they’re dramatic, but because they make the grey visible. You step outside the familiar shape and suddenly you can see it from the outside, how small it had become, how much air you’d stopped asking for.

The colours here in Morocco are so vibrant they’re almost brazen. The layered noise of traffic, calls to prayer echoing across the city, different languages folding into each other. The smell of spice and exhaust and something sweet underneath. The open-heartedness of strangers. My nervous system is still processing, but I can feel my shape expanding again and the bubbly aliveness building.

I’m rooting for you to take one step outside your comfortable shape this week. You don’t necessarily have to book a trip to Morocco.

Just this — the next time you feel an uncomfortable feeling rise, don’t reach for the phone, the task, the distraction. Give it a few seconds. Let it be there without shutting it down.

That’s it.

That’s the beginning. The moment you stop bracing against yourself is the moment something starts to thaw.

The grey life is seductive precisely because it doesn’t feel grey from the inside. It just feels like not rocking the boat. Like being sensible. Like staying put until something is more certain. But fine doesn’t have enough air in it.

And you won’t know what colours you’ve been missing until stop painting in grey.

Tomorrow I still don’t have accommodation booked. Mountains or sea, I’m still undecided and this feels totally OK. When we let go of the comfort of control, we can step into the flow of the moment.

If something in this landed — if you recognised your own comfortable shape in these words — I work with people who are ready to stop bracing and start expanding. One to one, at their own pace, in their own way.

If you’re curious, you know where to find me.

I want to tell you about a Monday morning when I sat in my car driving to a class and cried over my hair.

Not a metaphor. Actual hair. Unwashed. Greasy — at home weekend hair. Which, if you know me, this is not something that would register on most people’s radar. I wear barely any makeup. I live in a forest, sometimes off-grid up a mountain and occasionally on a wooden sailboat.

And yet.

My partner had set me a challenge. A self-development exercise, at my own request — don’t wear makeup for a day. Oh, my worst fear, even though I wore so little most people didn’t even realise I was wearing it. But it was my security mask at the time. Without it I felt naked and vulnerable — silly, I know. If I didn’t have it on I literally found it hard to look people in the eye. I had the whole evening to psyche myself up. I’ve got this, I thought. But the following morning he added the second condition.

No washing my hair either.

One I could cope with. Two was too much.

I went to pieces, literally — real wracking sobs, complete overwhelm and meltdown. I feel embarrassed saying this about hair and makeup. It sounds ridiculous now.

My partner was upset over me having such an adverse reaction. You don’t have to do it, he said gently. Yet something in me — the stubborn part that doesn’t like to give up — said no. I’m doing it.

So I drove to my first class. A full day of classes, no time to get home for lunch, supermarket shop, a whole day visible in an upmarket town that is quite sleek. I sat in the car feeling exposed and vulnerable, now adding blotchy face and red eyes into the mix.

But here’s what struck me on that drive. Internally, I felt exactly the same. With or without the shiny hair. The same woman. The same groundedness underneath the fear. I was still me — just without the presentation.

I walked in. And instead of hiding it, I shared my morning story to a room full of women — put together, presented, holding it all in the way we learn to hold it. I told them about the process, the unwashed hair, the going to pieces. I built the whole class around it — facing our fear, stepping outside the edges of what feels safe, the difference between how we present and who we actually are. I felt entirely me, doing what I do, and forgot about my hair and makeup mask.

Afterwards, my lovely students came to thank me for the class, for sharing, for being vulnerable.

I have that exact same fear. I wouldn’t leave the house. I do that every single morning.

These were capable, intelligent, dynamic women. Some of them had been coming to classes with me for a while. None of them had ever said this out loud before.

My falling apart had opened something that my strength never could.

I’ve thought about why that is. I think it’s because my strength — however real — can feel like a barrier or a distance. She’s over there, sorted, grounded, she’s done the work. But my falling apart? That’s a known feeling, even if it’s not acknowledged. There’s a bonding that happens in vulnerability that doesn’t happen in strength. We might admire the person who is strong, find them inspiring — but it’s the courage of revealing our own fear that opens hearts. Everyone has their own car they’ve been sitting in for years. When I walked in with greasy hair and blotchy eyes and told the truth about it, I didn’t just share a story. I gave them permission to stop performing. Just for ninety minutes. Just in that room.

I’ve thought about that Monday a lot since. Because I think it contains something true about the work I do — and maybe about the work you’re being asked to do right now.

We spend so much energy on the presentation. The capable face. The held-together exterior. And underneath it, this quiet exhausting hum of what if they saw the actual me.

The fear isn’t irrational. It was useful once. It kept you safe in rooms where being seen wasn’t safe. But you’re not in those rooms anymore — or if you are, you are now an adult. Your nervous system just hasn’t caught up yet. The protection parts of you still think you’re a child.

And the thing about fear — real fear, the kind that lives in the body not just the mind — is that you can’t think your way through it. You can’t logic it into quiet. You have to feel the edges of it. Just enough. Just a piercing, not a flood.

That’s what those women felt in the room that Monday. Not overwhelmed. Just — pierced. Recognised. Less alone in their carefully maintained presentation than they’d felt in years.

And here’s what I’ve noticed happens after the piercing. Things start to move. Not dramatically. Not all at once. But something that has been held very still for a very long time begins, quietly, to thaw.

That’s what I’m interested in. That thawing.

Not fixing. Not performing healing. Just — finding the back door. The one that opens, slowly, when you stop trying to make it pretty.

If something in this landed — even just a small piercing — The Threshold is where I’ve built a metaphorical cabin in a clearing in the chaotic forest of midlife. A free community for women standing at exactly this moment. Come and put the bag down for a while, sit down and take a breath. We’ve got you.

Join my first online Women’s Circle — Monday 28th April, 7pm UK. [link]

Would also love to hear your “car” moments

A 17th century English cottage nestled in an ancient forest, my own little yoga studio inside, with a real life soundtrack of birds, owls, foxes….I ran daily bespoke yoga classes, small, intimate groups of six, where the same people showed up each week, the sessions felt more like friends meeting in movement to discover our patterns, thoughts, ideas that have shaped us and our lives. Monthly workshops of nurturing, restorative yoga with tea and cake, soundbath’s or kirtan— sold out well in advance. I was starting to build my trauma sensitive yoga practice, with 1:1 clients coming to the forest and my reputation growing. Fifty people a week moving through my world.

On paper — and in reality — it was beautiful. Simple. Purposeful. Everything I had built pointed toward a life of meaning.

Yet, something deep inside me kept whispering you’re in the wrong place.

Not the wrong life. Not the wrong work. Just — the wrong place.

I ignored it for a long time. That’s what we do, isn’t it? When everything looks right from the outside, we learn to turn the volume down on the thing inside that says but wait. I’d spent years getting good at that particular skill.

Thirteen years ago, when I first arrived, the forest felt healing. The ancient trees, in summer it was like living inside a treehouse, cocooned, safe, held. In the winter the view opened as the leaves fell, a reminder of the cycles of nature and of ourselves. And I needed that then. I was only just beginning to understand that my childhood and early adulthood hadn’t been quite the story I’d told myself. A new partner asking quietly perceptive questions had revealed disparities in my stories, and so my trauma journey began. The therapies that spoke to me were somatic, embodied, slow, layered. The forest held me through that.

But as I expanded, it started to feel claustrophobic. Like I needed to push the trees back to find room to breathe. To spread my wings — if I even knew what that meant yet.

Menopause arrived somewhere in the middle of all of this, and I didn’t understand then what I understand now, that menopause and unhealed trauma arrive together like two tides meeting. The hormonal shift cracks open what we’ve been carefully containing. Suddenly the coping strategies that kept everything manageable stop working. The body says enough. And if you’re brave enough to look at what gets exposed in that moment — really look — everything changes. I was brave enough. Eventually.

The decision to leave took a couple of years to ripen. My partner also had to arrive at it himself, but one day we said let’s do it, let’s try it for a year and see what happens. So we started painting the house for new tenants, clearing things out putting the remainder into storage in the garage. But, interestingly for me, the hardest part wasn’t the packing, It was telling people I was going.

I cared deeply about the community I had built. People for whom the classes were, I knew, an anchor in their week. I carried an enormous weight of guilt about that — I see now it was part of a much older pattern, this sense of being responsible for everyone else’s feelings, everyone else’s lives. Putting myself last so quietly and so consistently that I’d almost forgotten I was doing it. My children are local. My elderly aunt, in her early nineties, was angry with me as she felt abandoned. And I absorbed all of it, as I always had.

That was the first learning. I didn’t recognise it as a learning yet. But it was.

To begin with, it didn’t feel like an adventure as we were going straight to the French Alps to run our summer retreats, the difference hit home when we returned to the UK to sort out a year long French visa. Suddenly we didn’t have a home, just our small wooden sailboat on a swinging mooring in a river in Sussex with zero wifi or phone connection. Dreamy in theory, complicated in practice, involving dinghy’s, cafe’s with wifi, print shops, trains to London for the visa application. Feeling grounded without a passport and Autumn on the boat, with not much in the way of heating. Finally, passports returned we headed to Portugal to stay on a friends boat (this time in a marina) exploring whether this could be a future destination. South America beckoned for late Autumn. Arriving in Ecuador, slightly apprehensive with reports of violence and blackouts, to be met with such friendly people, incredible creativity in Quito. The image of the rainforest and the chocolate brown Amazon snaking through the landscape is seared into my heart. Peru beckoned, but Mike was struggling with the altitude, so we landed on a beautiful beach in Costa Rica for surfing and got slightly bored, which felt like the most absurd problem in the world. And then, over Christmas and New Year, a silent retreat in the jungle. Profound in so many ways with many realisations.

Then three months off-grid in the French Alps in winter — deep snow, mindful of electricity, with just solar panels and diminished light, WOOD, chopping, stacking, collecting - rinse and repeat. That’s a whole story on its own. Easter in Portugal with sun, warmth and working on the boat, painting, mechanics….. brief sojourn back in the Alps, just managing to catch the blankets of alpine flowers carpeting the mountains instead of snow. Then back to the UK on the other boat, taking her out of the water to work on this one, painting, sanding, varnishing - getting her ready for sale. In the midst of all this, a quiet seed was sprouting - of creating another community, this time, online, for women in midlife. Women with a childhood history, woman who cope, brilliant women who are capable of doing everything - but shut down to themselves. Women like me! A journey of discovery and embodiment with each other.

Last Summer seems a long time ago, the retreats in France, which were amazing, the first week almost entirely men! As always we have many return participants, who have become like our mountain family - the time is always explorative, joyful, intense, and communal, simplicity of living with others in the held embrace of the mountains. Then, an unexpected twist as we packed the retreats away for another year. A quietly revealing — Mike and I had been together twenty-four hours a day for over a year and the cracks were showing.

He wanted to separate for a while, to have alone time. I had plans of starting our sailing odyssey and now I was left with a void.

I want to be honest about that because the version where I bravely chose solo travel feels cleaner than the truth, which is that I had to put my big girl pants on and figure out how to be by myself in the world for the first time in my adult life. I’d traveled with children, with partners, with friends but always with someone. Solo was entirely new territory.

I stayed alone in our off-grid place in France first. Then five weeks in Albania, renting a flat over looking Corfu and the Ionian sea, I beavered away, sculpting my online offering. Holding free yoga classes and making some beautiful friends. Then Thailand, which was something else entirely. Not the familiarity of Europe. Genuinely different culture, different food, different everything. And all my triggers to navigate completely alone. But in this space, I think, I grew up. After Thailand, I met up with Mike in France again for almost two months of super deep snow, cabin life - and the silence of nature that I had missed. He had to fly to Turkey, so I was left to drive the car across France to UK by myself, first time ever. That sounds small. It wasn’t.

Each of these moments — Finding connection in Albania, where I expected isolation, solo dinner’s Thailand, the French motorway - was a quiet proof of something. That I could choose for myself. That I could face the fear and discover the fear was smaller than I thought. That sovereignty isn’t something someone gives you — it’s something you accumulate, one terrifying small decision at a time.

This is what happens when the trauma starts to heal. The landscape opens. You start making choices because you want to, not because you’re trying to stay safe.

Right now I am back in the UK, house-sitting, looking after other people’s homes and pets while I finish creating my online course, meet my 1:1 trauma clients in the virtual world and start to find my voice in a different way. I’ve been in the UK for six weeks now and have lived in some truly stunning homes, but the same felling, this is not where I am supposed to be. I don’t know where I’m going to land. I keep seeing Red Kites, circling and maybe that’s me, circling, wings spread. I spent so long building a beautiful, rooted life and discovering that even beauty can become a container you’ve outgrown.

I am a blank page I am colouring in for myself. Slowly. In colours I’m only just learning the names of.

I don’t want to be a bit player in my own life. I want to be centre stage. It’s the only life I have — and other people are welcome to pop into it, but I want to be the central character. Not the reliable supporting role I’d perfected for decades.

This is Postcards from the Path. I’ll be sending them to you — from wherever I am in the world and wherever I am on my journey. Honest reflections, something I read that inspired me, a practice of embodiment that is currently supporting me and dispatches from a life still very much in progress.

No wellness platitudes. No fixing. Just one woman further down the road, writing back to tell you what she found. Turns out a lifetime can fit into two years if you’re brave enough to let it.

My immediate response wasn’t “don’t be ridiculous.” It was something far more specific: I don’t have ADHD. I have CPTSD (childhood trauma)

And that thought — that small, distinction — is what this whole piece is about.

First, let me incriminate myself

I’d recently seen a post listing around twenty things that ADHD people do. Satirical, shareable, the kind that spreads because everyone’s tagging someone in the comments going this is literally you.

The hobby graveyard. The inability to have one job when seventeen slightly unrelated ones feel equally compelling. The piles — the beautiful, logical, completely-makes-sense-to-me piles — of stuff.

I read it and related to every single one.

My own hobby graveyard includes, but is not limited to: a harmonium, a ukulele, a djembe drum, a phase felting, belly dance, jewellery making, up-cycling, a running habit that came in hot and left without saying goodbye and painting (my paints go away with me, but rarely make it out into daylight) I have also signed up for more trainings than I have completed — which is saying something, given that my completed trainings include stage design, garden design, yoga teacher training (pregnancy, yoga nidra, restorative, flow, yin, and now trauma sensitive yoga), tantric massage therapy, sound healing, reiki, and kirtan leading.

I am not, it’s fair to say, someone who does one thing.

And the piles. Oh, the piles. Books currently on the go, at least three. Books waiting to be read next. Books I’ll get to after that — this despite an entire bookshelf already full of books I have every intention of returning to, and let’s not mention Audible. Paperwork in the kitchen for household things. A pile in the living room of things to deal with now. A pile in the bedroom of things dealt with that need filing, near the almost empty filing cabinet. And the miscellaneous pile — you know the one — of things to read or keep even though we both know I’ll never quite get round to them.

None of this feels chaotic to me. It feels like a system.

So yes. On paper, I tick the boxes.

But here’s what I know about myself that a diagnostic questionnaire doesn’t ask: I have spent the last thirteen years doing the deep, slow, often uncomfortable work of healing childhood trauma I didn’t even know I had. And the more I learn — about trauma, about the nervous system, about the body — the more I think we are conflating two very different things. Or possibly, not nearly different enough.

The question nobody seems to want to ask

ADHD and CPTSD share a striking number of traits. Emotional disregulation. Difficulty with focus and follow-through. A nervous system permanently set to high alert. Hypersensitivity to environment, sound, sensation. Exhaustion that lives in the bones. The relentless, restless forward motion that keeps you just ahead of something you can’t quite name.

The standard explanation goes like this: ADHD is neurological — you were wired this way from birth. CPTSD is circumstantial — something happened to you, and your nervous system reorganised itself around that experience.

But here’s where it gets complicated.

CPTSD can begin in utero. It can be shaped in the earliest weeks and months of life — before language, before conscious memory, before any brain scan is ever taken. And then there’s the growing body of research into generational trauma — the understanding that the nervous system patterns of our parents and grandparents don’t stay neatly contained within them. They travel. They arrive in us before we’ve drawn our first breath.

So I want to ask the question that I think deserves far more airtime than it currently gets: what if some of what we’re calling ADHD is unintegrated early trauma? What if a nervous system that was disregulated before it even had language learned to move fast, stay busy, and keep spinning — because stillness, at some very deep level, never felt safe?

Why are so many midlife Gen X women being diagnosed right now?

There is a wave — and I want to be clear, it is a wave — of intelligent, capable, accomplished Gen X women in midlife receiving their first ADHD diagnosis. Women who have held careers together, raised families, managed households, and kept approximately forty plates in the air simultaneously for decades. Women who, from the outside, look like they have it completely together.

And then menopause arrives.

The coping mechanisms that worked — the busyness, the productivity, the relentless doing — stop working. The plates start to drop. Suddenly there’s no bandwidth left to outrun the noise inside. A friend gently asks: have you ever thought about ADHD?

They get assessed. They tick every box. And something profound happens — their whole life suddenly makes sense. The overwhelm. The intensity. The persistent feeling of being slightly too much for the rooms they’ve been sitting in.

I don’t want to take that moment of recognition away from anyone. It’s real, and it matters.

But I want to place something gently alongside it. Because what if the nervous system disregulation that menopause is amplifying isn’t purely neurological? What if decades of high-functioning, capable women have been unconsciously managing unprocessed early trauma through relentless doing — and menopause simply removed the anaesthetic?

I’ve seen this. I’ve lived a version of it. And I’ve sat with enough women in my work to recognise the pattern: we spin plates not just because we’re capable, but because stopping feels dangerous. Not consciously. Not in a way we could easily articulate. But in the body — in the nervous system — there is often a very old, very young part of us that learned that stillness wasn’t safe. That being too much in our own experience was something to be managed, outrun, organised into piles.

What if the question isn’t how do I live better with ADHD — but what is my body trying to tell me that I have never had the stillness to hear?

We are living in a world designed to keep us activated

There’s another layer here that we can’t ignore.

We are animals. Brilliant, creative, deeply relational animals — living in an environment that is profoundly mismatched to our nervous systems. Constant artificial light. Synthetic smells. Ultra-processed food. The relentless scroll. Noise and speed and notifications and a society structured around productivity, compliance, and the ability to fit yourself into increasingly smaller boxes.

We now have special words — forest bathing, earthing, nature immersion, off-grid living — for things that used to simply be called life.The fact that returning to nature requires a lifestyle rebrand tells you everything about how far we’ve drifted from what our bodies actually need.

In this world, the nervous system barely gets a chance to down regulate. We live in a state of chronic low-level activation — which looks, remarkably, a lot like ADHD.

So when we sit someone down and assess them, we are assessing a human being who is overstimulated, under-rested, possibly carrying decades of unprocessed experience in their body, living in a culture that punishes nonconformity — and we ask: do you find it hard to focus? Do you feel restless? Do you struggle to be still?

Of course they do. We all do.

What I’ve learned from my own body

Most of what I know about this, I didn’t learn from books — though I’ve certainly read enough of them.

I’ve learnt it from thirteen years of doing my own somatic work. Of slowly, painstakingly, getting back into a body I hadn’t realised I’d left. Of discovering, through somatic experiencing, hypnotherapy, osteopathy, trauma sensitive yoga, sound healing, dance and the kind of slow, unglamorous internal work that nobody posts about, that the nervous system can change. That the body holds what the mind protected us from knowing. And that when that energy finally moves — as emotion, as trembling, as shaking, as sound — something shifts that no amount of cognitive understanding ever quite reached.

I’ve watched it happen in the people I work with too, enough times now that I’m no longer surprised by it, even when I’m still moved by it. The body, given the right conditions and enough safety, knows how to complete what it never got to finish.

That, to me, is not a management strategy for a neurological condition. That is healing.

So is ADHD real?

I’m not saying it isn’t. I’m asking us to hold more complexity than a single diagnosis allows for.

Because what I think is also true is this: we are a species of extraordinary, irreducible diversity. We are not built for uniformity. We are not computers. What we call neurodivergence might simply be the full, wild, natural spectrum of what it means to be human — a spectrum that our current world has neither the patience nor the infrastructure to accommodate.

And when you move through the world at your own frequency — thinking differently, feeling deeply, living sideways to the mainstream — society will find a category for you. A label, a protocol, a management plan. A different box to the other smaller boxes that we get squashed into, just with a better name.

Sometimes that’s genuinely helpful. Sometimes the label is the beginning of a story that we mould ourselves into.

But sometimes — and this is what I keep coming back to — what’s actually needed isn’t a better way to manage the symptoms. It’s the courage to ask what the symptoms are trying to say.

What if the question itself is the medicine?

Whether you carry a diagnosis or not, I think the most radical thing any of us can do right now is get curious about our own nervous systems. Not to pathologise them. Not to fix them. But to befriend them.

To ask: when did I learn that slowing down wasn’t safe? What happens in my body when I try to be still? What am I actually running from, underneath all this magnificent busyness?

And to consider that healing might not come from managing ADHD symptoms better — but from slowly, gently, expanding the capacity to be in our own bodies. To tolerate sensation. To widen what we call the window of tolerance,until the quiet stops feeling like a threat.

That work is slower than a prescription. Less tidy than a diagnosis. You can’t summarise it in a carousel post.

But it might be the thing that actually changes the story — not just finally explains it.

I’d love to hear where you land with this. Are you diagnosed, wondering if you should be, or sitting somewhere in the question like me? Come find me in the comments — this is exactly the kind of conversation I started this for.

And if any of this resonates and you want to explore somatic work — trauma sensitive yoga or a nature led retreat— you know where I am.

At first it didn’t occur to me that menopause might be involved.

I thought the inability to hold back tears, the slight underlying anxiety that hovered just under the surface, and little fears around abandonment that had me making not such good choices were all to do with my separation, a new relationship, and the complexities of my children’s adaptation to all of this. Life was full and emotionally demanding, so of course I assumed the way I was feeling made sense.

What I didn’t realise at the time was that I was also at the beginning stages of menopause. And that hormonal shift was quietly exposing something else entirely — childhood trauma that I never even knew I had.

Like many Gen X women, I grew up becoming independent early. Practical. Hugely resourceful. Creative. Resilient. Competent. Emotional sensitivity? What’s that? It simply wasn’t something that was spoken about or encouraged.

I’ve noticed that many women describe something similar. Competent, capable women who have managed complex lives for decades, suddenly finding that emotions they once kept neatly contained are appearing much more easily.

I grew up assuming that most children had a home life similar to mine, and some of them did. This is the thing about childhood trauma: to the child living inside it, it is normal. It is simply the water you are swimming in.

It certainly wasn’t normal in the UK or Europe at that time to see a “shrink”. Families carried on. People coped. Life moved forward.

So perhaps, like me, you came to therapy later in life and discovered — a little bit like the moment in the Wizard of Oz when the curtain is pulled back — that parts of your life were not quite what they seemed. Or maybe you’ve been on the therapy path for a while now. You understand the links between your childhood and how it has shaped your present. You can see the habitual loops you fall into. You can name your triggers and recognise the patterns.

I found that part fascinating. I could see how certain threads played out in my own life. For example, I began to notice that whenever strong emotions arose, I lost my appetite. My body would simply shut that function down.

Interesting. Insightful, even.

But what puzzled me was the next step.

How do you turn the switch off?

Because it is one thing to understand something intellectually, and another thing entirely to embody that understanding so that you can override an unconscious nervous system response.

So here you are. Perhaps you recognise some of this.

Menopause has a way of loosening the lid.

Over time you may have done quite a bit of inner digging. Reading, reflecting, joining the dots between then and now. You can often see the patterns as they begin to unfold. And yet when the body reacts, the understanding does not always help.

You can see what is happening, but stopping it is another matter entirely.

You’ve been managing your life really well. You’ve built stability. You’re used to spinning many plates at once and keeping everything moving forward. You are high functioning, capable and competent. For years you have held things together, doing what needed to be done and adapting as life required.

And then perimenopause arrives and begins quietly shaking what you had carefully built.

Suddenly things feel less contained. Less manageable. Less easy to override in the way you used to. You may find yourself asking questions you never expected to ask.

Why am I suddenly more reactive than I’ve been in years?

Why do I feel more overwhelmed?

Why do I swing between numbness and emotion so quickly?

Sometimes the question that surfaces underneath all of that is a harsher one.

Why can I not keep a lid on this?

Perhaps you’ve hardly ever cried in your life and now the tears arrive without warning. Perhaps emotions that once felt manageable suddenly sit much closer to the surface.

It can feel confusing, even unsettling, especially if you’ve always been someone who coped well.

But what is happening here is not weakness.

It is physiology.

For decades your nervous system has been coping in the ways that it learned to. Through productivity. Through competence. Through staying busy and simply getting on with things. Many women of our generation became very good at this. We adapted to what life required of us and carried on.

What is less widely spoken about is that hormones — particularly oestrogen — play an important role in regulating the nervous system and moderating our stress responses. They help the system stay buffered and resilient.

As oestrogen begins to fluctuate and gradually decline during perimenopause and menopause, that buffering begins to change. The nervous system becomes a little more exposed.

What once felt tolerable may begin to feel sharper, and patterns that had been quietly contained for years can start to surface more clearly.

Menopause is not the problem.

But it can mean the system has less capacity to keep compensating in the way it once did.

Many high-functioning women have spent years overriding their bodies. Ignoring fatigue. Suppressing emotion. Moving through discomfort and carrying on regardless.

That ability to push through has often been a strength, and in many cases it was necessary.

Menopause can shift the landscape.

Sleep changes. Stress tolerance shifts. Mood regulation becomes less predictable. The nervous system becomes more sensitive.

If unresolved trauma has been stored in the body — as tension, bracing, hyper-vigilance or periods of shutdown — those patterns can begin to surface more clearly during this time.

Not because you are going backwards.

But because the body is finally asking to be listened to.

One of the things that is often misunderstood about trauma is that it does not live only in the story.

You may know what happened.

You may understand why certain things affect you.

But trauma is not only something we remember.

It is something the body remembers.

It lives quietly in breath patterns, in muscle tone, in the way the body braces or collapses under pressure. Often these responses sit beneath the surface for years, woven into how we move through life.

When hormonal changes begin to alter the nervous system’s resilience, those stored patterns can become more visible.

Menopause does not create trauma.

But it can reveal the places where the body still does not fully experience safety.

This stage of life is often simplified in unhelpful ways. Women are told that menopause explains everything, or that what they are experiencing is purely hormonal. Others are told it is purely psychological.

In reality it is often an intersection of several things happening at once: hormonal change, long-standing nervous system adaptations, and a stage of life that naturally invites reflection.

Menopause is a threshold.

And thresholds have a way of surfacing what has been quietly carried for many years.

More information alone rarely resolves this. Understanding helps, but the deeper shifts tend to happen when the body itself becomes part of the conversation. When the nervous system is supported directly. When the pace slows enough for the body to reorganise.

Body-led practices such as trauma-sensitive yoga and somatic work can help the nervous system begin to experience safety again — not just understand the idea of it intellectually.

This is not about fixing menopause.

One of the things that is often misunderstood about trauma is that it does not live only in the story.

You may know what happened.

You may understand why certain things affect you.

It is about meeting your body differently during it.

For many women, this becomes the real turning point

It was really my own journey through menopause, and the way it brought old trauma to the surface, that led me to become deeply interested in how the body carries these experiences and how it slowly learns safety again. Much of my work now sits in that space, supporting women to reconnect with their bodies through trauma-sensitive yoga, somatic practice, and quiet enquiry. Not as something to fix, but as a way of learning to listen to the body in a different way.

But trauma is not only something we remember. It is something the body remembers.

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The text that is repeated throughout the book is:

“We can’t go over it,

we can’t go under it –

oh no,

we’ve got to go through it.”

This reminds me not only of the menopause journey.

There is no way to bypass it, no matter who you are, how much money you have, how many accolades you have etc.

The same can be said of understanding, processing and healing from childhood trauma.

There is no way to bypass the whole journey.

Yet that is exactly what we think we can do.

Cherry pick the healing modalities that suit us without having to face the demons in the underworld.

Somehow we can face them without having to actually face them.

For me there was a realisation on my journey.

That not only did I have to understand the elements of my childhood and the impact that they had on me — and my subsequent coping strategies — but I also had to feel, real time, the emotions that I had spent my whole life suppressing, bypassing, hiding from, pretending that they weren’t there.

Take my sexual abuse at the age of 14yrs.

My mind at the time couldn’t make sense of it.

I was already frozen from a childhood based around a narcissist father with anger issues.

So my mind created a whole story of my abuser being my first proper boyfriend.

It took a new partner at the age of 48yrs to point out that I was sexually abused by someone 16yrs my senior — for comprehension to finally dawn — and the realisation hit me like a steam train.

But before I could even access the body impact of that, I had to face, acknowledge, feel other events that sat along the same pathway.

In my mind, I see the strands of trauma like pulling nettles out of a flower bed.

You can pull the stem out, but it will re-sprout.

You can pull a bit of root out with it (the current trauma you’re looking at).

Or you can pull the whole long strand out — that may trace across your whole flower bed!!

(The line of trauma and all its links through your life.)

Unravelling the effects of childhood trauma and how it has woven itself into the fabric of your life is like trying to unravel a big ball of knotted string.

For some of us, it’s a very big mess.

For some of us it’s not quite such a tangle.

It is not only the habits, ways of acting, but also the ways we think — the filters through which our world is coloured.

This is the realm of talk therapy / coaching.

Helping you to see through the realm of the mind how your programming is affecting your life.

It is also discovering the places in our bodies that hold the lived, emotional experience of our trauma.

As much as our mind influences our body (top down), our body massively influences our mind (bottom up).

Think how many times you have wanted to do something — felt excited in your mind, with the planning, daydreaming of doing it.

But at the point of it becoming a reality, or the need to take the next step to create the reality, fear stepped into the present moment space and paralysed you.

Then your mind capitulated by reminding you of your past and all the reasons this would be a very bad idea.

To heal from our trauma we cannot go around — we have to get into the snake pit.

Feel the emotions.

Really feel them.

By exploring the sensations, where they live, the nuances, the actual felt experience.

And then allow our body to go through its natural process of releasing them.

Sometimes through tears.

Trembling.

Anger.

Knee-buckling grief.

But however it starts to exit from you, there is a degree of courage needed to let the process run its course.

Has even the thought of this scared you shitless?

I can’t do that.

What if it annihilates me?

It won’t, I promise.

But only if you do it in small titrated amounts that leave your nervous system in full control.

Ok, so what has this got to do with the shitstorm that you are currently going through called menopause?

This, my love, is the missing link.

And this link has the ability to change your life completely — so far beyond what you could possibly imagine now.

Menopause doesn’t ask you to be stronger.

It asks you to be willin

g