In the space of two weeks, two separate practitioners said almost the same thing to me, from completely different angles.

The first was a counsellor I’d gone to see because I was navigating some big life transitions and needed someone objective to think out loud with. I told her my life story. When I finished, she looked at me and said, “Anyone who had survived just one of the things you’ve been through would be considered to be doing incredibly well. The weight your body is holding on to isn’t because of weakness. It’s because your nervous system has been in fight, flight, or freeze for over twenty years. Your body is holding on because it has to go somewhere. The body holds so that the mind doesn’t snap.”

The second was an Ayurvedic doctor I’d gone to see out of curiosity, having done yoga teacher training. I wanted to know my dosha. He took one look at me and said, before even feeling my pulse, “You do everything right. You eat well. You move. You exercise. And nothing shifts.” I said yes, that’s correct. He said, “It is because you are a very stressed lady.”

Two people. Two different traditions. The same truth.

And in that moment, everything that I’d been doing for years, the shadow work, the yoga, the cyclical awareness, all the layers I’d been carefully peeling back, clicked into place. Because for the first time, I understood something I’d never been able to fully grasp before:

I was never broken.

Let me go back a little

In 2000, when I was 21, my mother took her own life. Two years before that, her mother, my grandmother, had done the same. Our family was thrown into complete disarray. It was the early 2000s, and there was enormous stigma around depression and suicide. Talking about it, grieving it, was complicated.

Personally, I don’t think I grieved properly - but who teaches a person to do that? I went straight into patch mode - trying to make sure everyone else was okay, holding myself together, not acknowledging what I was feeling. What became my coping mechanism was emotional eating and not acknowledging my own pain.

And because trauma rarely arrives alone, the years that followed brought more: further suicide attempts in the family, addiction in different forms across different people, and eventually, my own full-blown panic disorder. At one point, I couldn’t drive twenty minutes without six panic attacks.

I went in and out of therapy. On and off antidepressants. I gained a significant amount of weight, which I believed was purely because I was undisciplined, lazy, and broken. I carried this deeply unconscious belief that I wasn’t enough - that I wasn’t enough to live for, considering what had happened in my family.

And yet. Within all of that chaos, I built a successful career as a writer and producer. I kept going. There was always a part of me drawn to the spiritual. I started studying Reiki in 2009, then mediumship, then various courses over the years. I was simultaneously falling apart and building something.

The unravelling - and the rebuilding

In 2022, I had a pulmonary embolism. I ended up in the hospital for two weeks with fifty percent lung capacity, on oxygen. It was a pivotal moment. Lying there, I realised I’d been carrying grief for over twenty years without fully letting it in. Grief, as it happens, sits in the lungs.

I came out of the hospital on blood thinners, which meant I couldn’t drink. What I discovered in the absence of alcohol was startling: the anxiety I’d been drinking to soothe was being caused by the alcohol. A completely unconscious loop I hadn’t seen. As I stopped drinking, the anxiety began - slowly, because neural pathways don’t shift overnight - to clear.

That’s when I began to really go deep. I started a shadow work course based on Jungian shadow work, which looks at the hidden unconscious patterns we carry, the parts of ourselves we’ve buried in order to survive. Personal shadow first. Then relational shadow: how we show up in romantic relationships, family dynamics, work, and society. Over a year, those deep-seated beliefs that had kept me so stuck started to unravel.

I trained as a shadow facilitator. I came across sacred feminine yoga - yoga designed specifically for women, accessible in the body in a way I hadn’t experienced before. It was the first time in years I genuinely reconnected with my physical self. And through that, I found and started studying what’s called SHE Facilitation - womb wisdom, cyclical wisdom, the work of the red tent tradition. The understanding that as women in a patriarchal society, we’ve been systematically disconnected from the inherent power of our cyclical nature, our womb space, our bodies as portals for wisdom and creativity.

Each of these things peeled back another layer. And still - still - the weight wouldn’t shift. And I still thought: I must be doing something wrong. I must still be the broken one.

The piece that pulled it all together

Shortly after those two sessions - the counsellor, the Ayurvedic doctor - I read an article as part of my SHE Facilitation training. It was by a researcher called Kristin Neff, on self-compassion versus self-esteem.

Neff’s argument is that most of what we call personal development is built on the model of self-esteem, which is contingent, comparative, and unstable. You feel good about yourself when you’re succeeding, when you’re above average, when you’re measuring up. And the moment you’re not, it collapses. Self-esteem cannot hold you when life is hard.

Self-compassion is different. It has three components: self-kindness - meeting every part of yourself, including the parts you’ve been hiding, with grace; common humanity - the recognition that every person on this planet is flawed, struggling, human, and that you are not uniquely broken; and mindfulness - which I’d describe as presence, being fully in your body and your life as it actually is.

Reading that article, I realised: everything I’d been doing - the shadow work, the somatic practice, the cyclical wisdom, the yoga, the Reiki - all of it had been building, layer by layer, toward self-compassion. Not fixing me. Not improving me. Bringing me into right relationship with myself exactly as I am.

Why I’m here, and why I’m writing to you

We are taught, explicitly and implicitly, that our coping mechanisms are failures. That our bodies are failures. That if we were stronger, smarter, more disciplined, more healed, we’d be different. We’d be fixed.

But so much of what we carry - body weight, patterns, the ways we protect ourselves, was and is never weakness. It’s survival. The body keeps the score, it always does. The nervous system does what nervous systems do. We were never broken.

This is what Kindred Collective is built on. And this, Musings from the Circle, is where I write about it. Not from a place of having arrived, or having it figured out. But from the middle of it, as a woman who has done a lot of the work and is still doing it, who has trained extensively in the modalities that have changed her life, and who wants to create space for other women to find their way back to themselves.

You’ll find essays, reflections, book recommendations, interviews with others doing this work, others with stories to share, and eventually a podcast. All of it in service of the same thing: helping us all remember who we were before the world told us who to be.

I’m glad you’re here.

Dominique