I became a physiotherapist for two reasons. I loved sport - had grown up in it, understood the body through it - and I'd seen what good physio could do firsthand. Someone had treated me and it had worked. I wanted to be that person for someone else.

Then, at 26, I found myself working in Sierra Leone when Ebola happened. In the middle of it, I met the only physiotherapist in the entire country. That encounter did something to my understanding of what this profession actually is. I'd come in thinking physio meant sport and performance. I left understanding it had a scope I'd barely touched - that it sat at the intersection of physical suffering, access, and something deeply human about wanting to move without pain.

I left for a while. I worked in climate education, which was important and exhausting in different ways. But I missed the body. I missed what happens in a room when you have the time to connect with another human being properly.

In that time I had also started exploring different modalities myself - breathwork, meditation, plant medicine, time spent working in the environmental space. Each of them pointing at the same thing: that the body holds more than we give it credit for.

I came back and kept practising, but something had shifted. When I later moved into sports massage, I found something I hadn't expected - a quieter, longer contact with people. People would arrive needing pain relief through massage and somewhere in that contact, something else would surface. A holding pattern that predated the injury. It got me thinking - what is the body trying to say, and do we know how to listen?

That curiosity led me to Natural Shamanism. The oldest healing tradition on earth. Not mystical for the sake of it - grounded, nature-led, and centred entirely on the idea that real healing comes from reconnecting with what we've always known. I'm currently in training, learning to work with these tools honestly and carefully alongside my physiotherapy practice.

I'm not further along than I am. But if something in this resonates with you, that's probably worth paying attention to.