There comes a moment in every woman’s life when she realises… this version of success was never really hers.

This is the story of my moment .

From the outside, everything appeared to be in place. I had the perfect career as a high school teacher, a calendar full of commitments, and a list of accomplishments that made me seem like the kind of woman who had it all together. I was the one they came to when they needed the perfect example of something last minute, because they knew I'd bend myself backwards trying to provide it. I always exceeded expectations.

And yet, beneath the surface, there was an emptiness I couldn’t explain. A hollow ache that no new goal or gold star was filling because I felt like I was never enough...

So I tried harder. Gave more. Smiled through the exhaustion. I pushed myself to perform, produce, and prove, telling myself that if I just kept going, if I could just hold it all a little longer, then maybe the sense of ease and freedom I longed for would finally arrive at the weekend, or the holidays, or after a promotion, but it never did. And deep down, I knew why; because I wasn’t actually present for any of it.

I was hovering somewhere between the version of me I thought I had to be, and the woman I hadn’t yet given myself permission to become.

I didn’t know how to rest without feeling guilty, or lazy. Emotions were a weakness, exhaustion just meant I was doing something wrong, and that little voice telling me I wanted more was just ungrateful and possibly even delusional. I had learned to survive by holding my breath and I’d become so good at it, that I forgot what it felt like to truly exhale.

This pattern continued throughout my twenties... until my little brother suddenly passed away.

In the next few days, weeks, months... the scaffolding of my carefully constructed life collapsed. The timelines, the rules, the silent agreements I had made with society about what mattered and what didn’t. All of it turned to dust.

And in the stillness that followed, something stirred inside me that I hadn’t heard in years. A question. An intuitive feeling deep in my heart that asked: What if this isn’t it?

Because even though I had checked all the boxes that should have made me perfectly happy, what I was left holding onto no longer felt like a life. It felt like a performance. I felt like I was waiting for somebody else to swoop in and validate this life of mine with their applause, their accolades, and their permission.

And in the silence of grief, when I was forced to stop, to rest, and to heal, I finally found space to hear what had always been there: the truth that I didn’t need to try harder, or be stronger. Trying harder clearly wasn't working.

I just needed to learn how to come back home to myself.

But coming home didn’t look like I expected it to. It wasn’t a single moment of clarity, a clean break. It was a slow, messy, deeply human return that began with me

learning how to feel safe listening to myself again.

I packed up my house, bought a van, and drove 50,000 kms on long dusty roads and beach highways around Australia, chasing something I couldn’t name. I told myself I was searching for peace, for clarity, maybe even for a place to belong, but the truth was that I was

quietly hoping the open road would deliver me back to myself.

And in many ways, it did.

For the first time, I stopped trying to fix or figure it all out. I just allowed myself to feel.

The grief. The shame. The weariness. The rage. The parts of me that I had silenced

for years, trying to prove that I was strong and independent and capable.

I stopped trying to suppress the ache. I let it rise, move, and change me.

I traced the lines of tension in my body and the random symptoms from stress (the ones no doctor had never explained or fixed) and found decades of unspoken emotion trapped beneath my skin, not because I was broken but because I was a woman, and I had never felt safe enough to feel.

Young girls are taught that the qualities that make us different, our emotions, our compassion, our creativity and our love, are the very qualities that make us weak. So we feel like have no choice but to hide them.
But when I finally understood how freeing it was to finally feel without shame, something shifted.

I didn’t need to hold it all, I just needed to feel safe enough to feel it.

I slowed my workouts to yoga and pilates so I could really feel them, instead of just rushing mindlessly through another HIIT workout.

I started eating more intentionally when I actually felt like it (no restriction or uncomfortable bloating just before bed!)

I started to meditate and learned how to create calm in my thoughts, even when there was a to-do list a mile-long or a burning need to help somebody.

I completed my coaching accreditation and kept studying the impact of feminine energy and the ancient philosophies that have been around for 3000 years and are so much more attuned to our energetic needs than this world of productivity, advancement, science and logic could ever be.

I breathed a sigh of relief as everything I’d ever felt was validated, and celebrated.

And I started relaxing as I followed the seasons, the cycles and the rhythms of feminine energy, restoring balance to my mind, body, and soul after so many years of ignoring it.

And in that journey, I found myself again, not as someone to be improved, but as someone who was finally safe to just be.

This alignment of my external life with my internal world, the regulation of my nervous system, the reconnection to the feminine energy that lived inside of me, wasn’t just healing for me. It felt ancient. Sacred. Like an inheritance that had just been waiting for me to claim it.

Because I realised I wasn’t the only woman who had been holding her breath.

Our culture glorifies burnout and celebrates self-abandonment as ambition. We are taught to fear our own knowledge when it doesn't make 'logical' sense. To trade our sensitivity for productivity. To measure our worth by how much we can do, give, and achieve... while quietly starving the parts of us that most need tending.

Now, I guide other women home to themselves with my own unique methodology blending mindset, energetic healing, somatic and feminine embodiment.