I started becoming aware I was suffering from anxiety when I was a teenager. That was my first experience of it, I think. Realising I probably needed to get some help, I sought out the school counsellor, but it wasn’t actually advertised in any way. So if I hadn’t been someone with an instinct to look for help, it might have been quite a different story. I was a teenager in a difficult first relationship and I was suffering. That counselling experience helped to find my way out of it and to realise that it was not healthy.

The depth and texture of my lived experience is my creative fuel. I’m a songwriter, and that’s so cathartic for me. I seek out and create spaces where I can feel safe and expressive and everything goes. As yoga teacher, I say all the things I need to hear, over and over again. You teach what you need.

After university I fell into a job, and it was an interesting creative job, but I didn’t have boundaries so I came in as a yes person and never stopped for breath. I was working all the time, and I had a relationship where my needs were not being met. So I’d do all this work, come home do more work, and turn up to a social thing as well. I was very high functioning, but disconnected from myself and on the verge of tears – no one could tell.

My body tried to tell me. I’d get rashes, foggy brain, but I couldn’t see it for myself. If it’s me, it wasn’t relevant. I finally got to a point and a light switched on: “I have a choice, I have agency.”

I slowly started to rebuild and create a stronger connection with myself, and that’s what I want to share with people: we all deserve to feel a deep sense of our own possibility and freedom in mind and body, heart and soul – you have to dig deep, continually nurture and nourish. I still have times that I feel incredibly stormy, all over the place, I am empowered by the knowing that we can always start again, begin anew.