Fifteen years from shutdown to full feeling

For years, I optimised everything — performance, productivity, control. On paper, everything was working. In my body, I was running on adrenaline and willpower.

 

Corporate life, chronic stress, repeated hearing loss. My system was sending signals I didn't know how to read. I kept overriding them. That's what high-performers do. We push through.

 

Until the system decides it's had enough.

 

Fifteen years ago, mine shut down. The numbness that followed wasn't dramatic. It was quiet. A slow withdrawal of feeling — from my body, from my relationships, from the life I'd built. I was functional. And I was completely disconnected from the experience of being alive.

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The path back wasn't linear. I left corporate life. I trained as a coach. I started exploring every modality I could find — breathwork, somatic practices, movement, yoga, coaching frameworks. I earned an MBA in leadership and education design. I completed ICF coaching credentials. I trained in respiratory physiology.

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And I walked. Nine times, I walked the Camino de Santiago across Spain — 820 kilometers of sustained physical rhythm, silence, and the kind of extended discomfort that surfaces what shorter interventions cannot reach.

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Growing up gay in Australia in the 1990s, I was imprinted with fear about what it was to be gay. The shame wasn't something I chose. It was something my nervous system absorbed before I had language for it. Decades later, when I started working with regulation, I realised that much of what I'd attributed to personality — the hypervigilance, the need to perform, the difficulty settling — was my system still running a threat response from adolescence.

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The partial deafness compounded it. Losing hearing in one ear, then the other, in my twenties and thirties — each time, the medical system offered management. No one asked what the stress was doing to my body. No one connected the nervous system load to the physical symptoms. I had to make those connections myself.

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What I found, across all the modalities and all the miles: breath was present in every practice that actually shifted something. It was hiding in plain sight. In the yoga. In the walking. In the coaching. In the moments of genuine connection.

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Breath wasn't a philosophy. It was a lever. A way to read the system's state and a way to change it. That understanding — breath as sensor, breath as tool — became the foundation of how I work.

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Now I work with people who recognise something in this story. The ones who've built capacity in one domain and can sense that something underneath isn't settling. The ones whose practices help, and have started to plateau. The ones who are ready for something more structural than relief.

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The practices I teach are grounded in research.

 

The way I apply them comes from experience.