How an architect who hit rock bottom learned to come home to her body
“The time you dedicate to what makes you feel a better person is never enough.”
Veronica always knew she needed to take better care of herself. But life, work, and stress had other plans - until her body finally said enough. This is the story of how she picked herself back up, rediscovered movement, and started feeling like herself again.
I am an architect as education and I have been working as a cultural producer and curator in the field of architecture, design and media arts.
It is a job I like, but it’s demanding, often competitive and frustrating, a job which, regularly, I question when I recognize it leads me to sacrifice self- care, private life (love and friendships), free time activities, and a wilder primal part which I have and to which I never gave enough expression in my adolescence and youth.
I sit a lot in front of a screen and most of the work is mental and conceptual, with ups and down according to the project I am following. This led me in the past year to try also other experiences, more manual and in connection with nature such as agricultural work and working in a rural artistic community where I could combine my job with a more simple and active life (taking care of a guesthouse, cooking and cleaning, no exposure to mass production, advertisement, …).
Beyond that, I like dancing, doing yoga, hiking, swimming and cooking. I wake up and drink a lot of water, If I am motivated I try to stretch and move at home, then I have breakfast (it’s my favorite meal, so it’s long and rich when I have time), then I work, have lunch break, work, I try to move before dinner with a longer session, sometimes I skip dinner and just drink a detox infusion or a soup …. if necessary I work again, but I prefer to read or watch a movie.
I give space to extra activities, unfortunately, only during weekends, even if I dream about a job or life organization where I could take time off regardless a more conventional societal organization of working days and bank holidays / summer and winter
I think it is important to say that I am getting back to a more "normal" routine and also back to my working and social life after a long period of depression caused by a burnout which reached the apex in September 2024.
Prior to that, I had 3 years in which, I only see it now, I was fully in flight mode and it was almost impossible for my mind and body to stop, to recharge, to listen to myself or to follow rationally what my intuition was telling me, finding me basically crashing against a wall and realizing it only afterwards. I felt that something was going on and it was "wrong" and invalidating me, but it was impossible to stop it. I also couldn’t recognized the symptoms because it was a very new experience to me in that proportion.
I really touched the bottom, I risked to be taken to a clinic and I risked my life because most of the biological functions slowly stopped. It was impossible for me to see a way out or find the strength or motivation to react. I was a ghost and in full trauma going from full apathy to hysteric crisis.
During my university years I started to experience the first psychosomatic symptoms (such as rigid neck, light vertigos, panic attacks while driving, …). Already since high school I had given priority to study and I had completely forgotten my body….
After that first experience, I started to gradually reconnect my pieces thanks to conscious movement (Feldenkrais, yoga, pilates) and osteopathy. I understood that my type of body (I'm quite slender, and the natural curves of my back are fairly straight) couldn’t support all that stress and static life and I was not offering to my body any way to unload the pressure and the fatigue or improving strength. I had no clue I had a core, I had no clue that I was not breathing and that my diaphragm was blocked, as well as my pelvis. I had no clue of chakras or energetic fields …. I was not aware of how my body and my nervous system worked.
Before I signed up to Kaya, and before my depression, I was already moving regularly and trying to find tools to work on some issues, such as anxiety and the feeling of being overwhelmed by taking decisions… I was not a morning person, so, I was very lazy and with low energy in the morning if I couldn’t sleep long, it was difficult for me to do a movement session in the morning except for weekends or holidays. When I was fully on "working-mode" I was often forgetting to drink or to eat properly at lunch, craving for food at dinner. I was often working after dinner and watching a screen even at night. Let’s say I knew what I had to do to take care of me, but often it was difficult to do that, have the discipline in doing that and combing it with the dynamics of daily life, work, travels… But overall, I didn’t have a bad quality and my body was able to recharge easily until a certain moment.
The body has very deep and rooted programs and despite I was doing yoga, emdr, reflexology, my collapse was somehow inevitable.
What was the final straw that made you decide things had to change?
Last year was the worst. I always knew that movement was one of the way to react, but my body was fully blocked. As soon as I had the energies to react, I started to move again, with frustration, not feeling my body, fully ashamed of my body and of my outlook. I started swimming again with an instructor and I went back to the gym with a trainer in a very small group.
I started to do functional training and yoga even if I was rigid as a stick and the joy of flowing was a distant memory. At the same time I have started a somatic therapy working on trauma and pre-natal trauma where I found out I am an "alone-born twin", so my body had experienced loss and trauma in a phase where the cortex was not present (the traumatic experiences in life go back to that matrix and reactivate ancient memories). This discovery would need more words to be properly explained, and maybe this small questions are not the right frame where to speak about that…
Anyways, I already knew the amazing research and practice of Manu, which I found out on instagram in 2023 I think … and I had already the 2 programs (Hips Like Honey and Heart Wide Open). I started to do them again, and when the app went online I was really curious to try it because I needed a place where different types of practices were present. It is like a companion who is always with me, even If I go somewhere’s, and if one day I just want to do 1 short session is ok, and if 1 day I want to go bold for 2 hours it is also possible and I can tailor the practice exactly on what I need and desire in that moment of the day.
I am still working on finding a routine again on many aspects of life …. but I am very sure that moving is the key and the body is the key.
The idea of waking up in the morning, opening a beautiful app and doing my session is a small gift I do to myself and I don’t feel alone in that, especially now that I still need a lot of motivation overall.
Same when I want to close my day, either with a relaxing journey or a more energizing one to sweat off a bad day or simply because I want to push a bit the limits and I feel I can do that. It is helping me in this big process I am undergoing of getting back to my "essence".
It’s helping me in feeling more centered, stronger, especially in my upper back, in my core; It’s helping me with feeling more at ease with my body because I feel more fluid, and to reset a good energetic frequency. It’s helping me in not feeling ashamed if I want to dedicate time to myself and to do that for me and to not please others, so I think it’s a very empowering tool. It’s helping me in knowing more and more how my body works and to have simple accessible tools to cope with situations that maybe, in the past, were just bringing me down for days….. I see I want more and more! Sometimes I would like just to move all day!!!
The more I know how my system works, the more I can also accept and respect when I feel I don’t want to move or when I simply want a soft practice.
The time you dedicate to what makes you feel a better person is never enough.
Trust what your body tells you and if you think that what it tells you is preventing you in following what you desire, ask for help, ask for support, don’t stay stuck in mental loops, don’t simply "keep up", because this leads to keep unexpressed what you need. The first interrupted movement it’s within us, then towards the others.
In the symptoms there is already the answer, we just have to find our own way to it.
At the moment, I enjoy a lot, "I Am Strong" and "Back Armor" for the upper back, as well as all hips-hamstrings journeys and "The Purge". Very curious about "Jaw Unlock" but I still have to explore it.
