The Day I Realised I'd Been
Living Above My Shoulders

I'm a yoga and awareness teacher, and the founder of Verisage — a coaching practice for women rebuilding their lives after identity-shifting change. This piece opens a four-part May series called The Body Knows, exploring emotional disconnection, the nervous system, and what it means to come home to yourself. This one is personal.

For a long time — longer than I want to admit — I lived entirely in my head. Not because I'd chosen it, but because my body had become a place I didn't feel safe. So I left. Quietly, gradually, without realising it was happening. I relocated myself to somewhere above my shoulders, where the feelings couldn't reach me, and I stayed there for years.

I had been love bombed. If you know that term, you know what I mean. If you don't — it's the experience of someone turning the full force of their attention onto you before you've had a chance to know who they really are. It feels, in every possible way, like love.

It isn't.

The emotional and physical wear of living inside that does something to a body. I stopped feeling things — not dramatically, just quietly, steadily, like a volume dial turned down so slowly you don't notice the room getting quieter.

The moment I couldn't unsee

I wasn't grieving. I wasn't even sad. I was just gone. And I hadn't noticed until someone said it out loud.

A friend — someone who had been watching from a distance, waiting for the right moment — was simply clear with me.

"You're not here," she said. "You haven't been here for a long time. You're managing everything perfectly and you're completely gone."

I remember the specific feeling of hearing that. Not the emotion — I wasn't ready for emotion yet. Just a recognition in my chest, like something had been named that had been nameless for years. Like a window opening in a room that had forgotten it had windows.

The long way back

What followed wasn't a transformation. It was a decision, made quietly on an ordinary day, to put myself first — not as selfishness, but as survival. And then another decision. The slow, unglamorous process of choosing yourself after years of having learned not to.

I left. I moved back to Denver — back to the air I recognised, back toward the version of myself I'd left behind before all of it began. I rebuilt relationships I'd let go of. I came back to yoga — not to be flexible or calm, but because standing on a mat and being asked to feel was the one place the dissociation couldn't follow me all the way in.

This month's theme — The Body Knows — is not abstract for me. It is the most personal thing I teach.

You don't have to have been through what I've been through for this to be true for you. Any sustained period of grief, of stress, of performing okayness — it puts you in your head and out of your body. That's not a flaw. It's a protection. But at some point, protection becomes distance. And distance from your body is distance from yourself.

So this month, we come back. Gently. On purpose.

Your body has been waiting for you. I'm glad you're here.