There's a specific memory I keep returning to. I'm sitting in a meeting room somewhere in the middle of a campaign debrief, and someone is asking how I'm doing, and I say, without missing a beat, without even a flicker of hesitation: "Great, really good, a lot on but good." And I meant it. Or at least, I had no information that suggested otherwise.
That was the thing. I wasn't lying. I just had no idea what was actually happening inside me.
I was good at my job in the way that a certain kind of person gets good at things: by being relentlessly capable, by turning every problem into a project, by knowing exactly what to say and how to say it. Marketing, specifically, which means I spent years learning how to make the intangible feel real, the complicated feel simple, the messy feel clean. I could write copy about grief, joy, transformation, belonging, and feel nothing while I typed it, because the point was that they would feel something, not me. I was the one behind the glass.
I moved to Hong Kong with my husband and two boys when my youngest was small. A new city, a new version of life. And somewhere in that disruption (the ferry rides, the unfamiliar streets, the strange luxury of not quite knowing who I was outside of my career) something started asking to be heard. I didn't have language for it then. I still resist language for it now, actually, because every time I try to name it cleanly it turns into something that sounds like a blog post about burnout, and it wasn't that. It was quieter. More like: a persistent sense that I was managing everything beautifully and something was still missing.
I found biodynamic craniosacral therapy the way you find most things that matter. Sideways, by accident, because someone mentioned it in passing and something in me went that.
I want to be careful here, because what happened next is the part that's hardest to write without either overselling it or flattening it into a testimonial. So I'll just say: I lay on a table, and someone held my head with almost no pressure, and my body started doing something my mind had no control over. Not dramatic, not shaking or crying or anything you'd notice from the outside. Just a slow, cellular renegotiation. A conversation happening underneath all my carefully maintained competence.
I didn't know bodies could do that. I didn't know there were things living in my tissue that hadn't made it up to the level of thought. That there were patterns, whole ways of bracing and holding and compensating, that I had been carrying so long they'd become invisible to me. I thought I knew myself pretty well. I had, after all, been thinking about myself for decades. I had insight. I had done the work, the talking kind, the journaling kind, the breathwork weekend kind.
It turned out there's a whole register below that.
The thing I find almost impossible to explain, and also the thing I most want to say, is the difference between managing something and its actually shifting. I was expert-level at managing. I could identify a pattern, understand its origins, give it a name, even talk about it articulately to a therapist, and still take it home with me, completely intact, and keep living inside it. Management is real. It helps. But it's not the same as something actually moving.
That's the distinction that changed everything for me. Not intellectually. I felt the difference in my body. The same way you know the difference between holding your breath and actually exhaling.
I trained. I became a practitioner. And now I work with people in Central. Many of them remind me, not in a comfortable way, of myself. High-functioning. Articulate. Usually doing fine by every external measure. Quietly at war with something they can't quite name or get ahead of. Some of them have been to therapy for years. Some of them are sceptical and come anyway because nothing else has touched a particular thing. Some of them lie on the table and feel almost nothing for the first few sessions and then something loosens and they're not quite sure what happened and neither, honestly, am I. Not in a way I can put in a report.
I'm not a healer in the way the word usually gets used. I didn't heal myself. I found something real and it helped me, and now I share it with people as honestly as I can. That's actually all this is. I spent a long time being the person behind the glass, crafting the feeling I wanted other people to have. What I do now is almost the opposite: I sit with someone in a room and I have no agenda for what they should feel. Whatever is actually there is what we work with.
I couldn't have written that copy before. I wouldn't have known what it meant.
If any of this is landing somewhere in you (not in your head, lower than that) I think you probably know what I'm talking about.
