I didn't expect this on my return to work

After 15 months away from teaching, returning to the yoga studio was equal parts terrifying and clarifying. In this episode, the journey back to the mat begins, not as a triumphant comeback, but as an honest reckoning with what 14 years of teaching, a cancer diagnosis, and a long recovery actually adds up to. Yoga, healing, cancer recovery, teaching, and returning to purpose.

Something has shifted in the collective. There's a quiet anxiety in people right now that's hard to name but easy to feel, and time spent in illness has made that sensitivity sharper. This episode explores what it means to truly sense what people are carrying beneath the surface, and how that informed the creation of Energy Alchemy, a new program bridging yoga philosophy and energy work for people who need something that goes deeper than surface-level wellness.

There's also something in here about the wellness culture habit of forcing positivity. The idea that struggles are only valid if they're serious enough, or that gratitude and reframing are always the answer. They're not. Acknowledging the full emotional spectrum, the numbness, the stuckness, the life that looks fine on paper but feels hollow, is where real healing begins. 

This episode marks the opening of a new chapter. The descent is done. What's being built now, in the studio, in the programs, and in this conversation, is something more honest and more useful than what came before it. 

LINKS:

• Work with Monica: https://cultivatecalmyoga.com.au/energy-alchemy/ 
• Curious about Yoga Alchemy?: https://cultivatecalmyoga.com.au/yoga-alchemy/
• Website:https://cultivatecalmyoga.com.au/

Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/cultivatecalmyogabrisbane/

Transcript

1:00

Welcome back. Today's episode is all about my return to work. It had been 15 months. That's how long I was away from teaching But before we dive in, let's take a long, slow exhale together Just a reminder that the information I share here is just my own personal experience. None of it is medical advice. Please always speak with your doctor or health professional

So my first class back was a 10: 1:30

00 AM weekday class, and I was nervous on the drive over, which is funny because I've been teaching yoga for about 14 years, but this felt different It's like a new beginning. And I don't particularly like being the centre of attention, and I knew that my return to work was going to be noticed. But I walked in and I just started teaching. I was pretty rusty. I still get my lefts and rights mixed up at the best of times, and that day I fumbled my words more than usual. But it didn't matter. I didn't need to be perfect. I just needed to show up and let the yoga do the work And the yoga does work Teaching felt effortless. I felt light, and there was something in the room that felt alive And I had something to give, a quality of presence that hasn't always been there before Now, I'd been really open with my community throughout. I'd sent regular email updates and social media about what was going on and why I was away from work for so long. So when I walked back in, I didn't really need to explain myself. People knew. They already knew. And there was just a knowing smile or a moment of eye contact when you know someone really sees you. That was enough Now, some of these people I've known for over a decade. Some of them I've known since even before the studio days when I was teaching at the hall in Norman Park. For some of them it's been 14 years, and seeing familiar faces like that was like a long, slow exhale Now, I have to be honest with you here. There's been times in my life where teaching yoga felt like hard work. Small business isn't for the fainthearted, and there were times when my own life was falling apart and I was still showing up to lead other people through theirs. That was hard. This wasn't. This didn't feel like work at all People often ask, "What would you do if you won the lottery? After you've traveled and done all the things, what then?" And my answer

has always been the same: 3:43

"I'd open a yoga studio on the beach and teach yoga." Now, my studio is in suburbia, but it's pretty close to the dream. I left a really well-paying job in IT project management to build it. I had a really cushy salary with 17% super and all this, like, generous leave, the kind of stability that looks very sensible from the outside. When I told my boss I was leaving, he said, "You'd never make this kind of money teaching yoga, and you'll never get another loan." And I love it when people tell me I can't do something. It's the kind of motivation I need to prove them wrong. I think my parents also thought I was silly, uh, turning down such a comfortable, well-paying job to take the risk on of working for myself. But they supported me anyway. Now, at this point, it's, uh, 13-something years. I'm probably completely unemployable by now, and I genuinely don't care. This work satisfies me in a way that no corporate salary ever could. It's that twin desire to keep learning and to help people. And for a while, it really was the dream. And then slowly it got harder and harder. There's so much more to running a yoga studio than teaching yoga, and the behind-the-scenes work is relentless. And there were stretches where the joy was hard to find, especially in those COVID years. But I've come full circle. Walking back into the studio after 15 months reminded me of exactly what I built and why, and I'm deeply grateful to my community for still being there for me Now, something else shifted while I was away. It wasn't one person or one class, it was everywhere. This low-grade unease sitting just beneath the surface. It's like a, a collective tension, kinda like in the early days of COVID where we were all on edge and uncertain. That particular flavor of collective anxiety, the kind that lives in the body before it becomes a thought, I could sense it really clearly. 15 months away of navigating my own shit storm had given me that And I wanna be honest about something else. I have a degree in behavioral science. I'm all about the science of yoga, the nervous system, the brain, the research. That's one part of me. But the other part is that I'm clairsentient and claircognizant, and I know that sounds woo-woo, but hear me out. Energy is real. We don't see Wi-Fi, but it connects us. We don't see gravity, yet it holds us. And our energy body works the same way. It's not something you have to believe in for it to be affecting you. I can feel it when someone walks into a room. I can sense exhaustion, overwhelm, the bracing and the clenching in the body that's been holding itself together just through sheer force of will I can sense the particular heaviness of someone who hasn't been seen in a long time. The reason I can feel these things is because I've had all of them, every single one of them. Spending so much time at rock bottom means that these states are really familiar to me. I know exactly how they feel. But here's the thing, you don't have to be sensitive to detect this. We're already doing it, and there's a word for it, congruence. When what's happening on the inside matches what's being expressed on the outside, there's congruence. When it doesn't, when someone's wearing a happy face over something that's not very happy at all, we feel that mismatch. We feel that incongruence, and it doesn't feel right, even if we can't name it. We've all walked into a room and known something was off before a single word was spoken. We've all been with someone who said they were fine while every cell in their body registered that they weren't. That's not a special ability. That's human beings reading energy. And the people in my classes were doing it, smiling, showing up, going through the motions, and underneath there was this mismatch. And in practice, what this looks like is I'd often approach someone after class, someone who didn't quite seem like their usual self, and just check in and ask if they were okay And it felt like a relief to be seen. They might finally exhale and take the mask off. They might shed a tear just for someone to notice that they're not okay and have permission to unload some of that. Sometimes that's all it takes Now something's also softened in me. I'm much more attuned, less defended. That hardness that builds up when you're trying to control everything, that's mostly gone, and what's underneath is much more useful. It's a genuine compassion and desire for the people in my lives to be happy, free have ease and feel safe People ask me how I had the energy to come back the way I did, how I had the energy to do what I currently do, and the honest answer is that I conserved it I know how to work with my energy. I didn't waste what precious energy I had by fighting my diagnosis or resisting reality. I just surrendered to it. I consciously let myself fall, and in doing that, I arrived at the other side without the additional weight of a battle that I've been fighting against myself Think of it like sailing. If you know the winds are going to change, and they always do, the time to prepare is while you're waiting. You fix your sail, you tend to your boat. You don't force the wind, you make yourself ready And when the favorable winds blow your way, you're ready to take advantage of them rather than being caught out with a broken sail or a leaky boat. And I was determined to make sure that the winds of change, when they blew my way, I was ready I surrendered into my cancer experience because I didn't want to get to the other side still carrying undealt with trauma, anxiety, and depression. I wanted to be ready when the wind came. And I read somewhere, I can't remember exactly where I read it, that five years after a mastectomy, 80% of women have depression, and I didn't wanna be in that statistic when the favorable winds blew my way, when the tide finally turned for me, I had energy in reserve So I started adding energy work into my classes, dynamic breathwork, movement sequences that work directly with the energy body rather than just physical, and people responded immediately. There was a hunger for it. I could sense it in the room, in the bodies in front of me, that this is what people were seeking. Not more of the same, but something that really addressed what was going on for them at the time And let me explain what I mean by energy work, 'cause it's less mysterious than it sounds. Yoga philosophy describes the spine as housing our central energy channel, the Sushumna nadi. And along this channel sit the main chakras or energy centers that correspond to our psychoemotional state. From the base of the spine upward, we have our sense of safety and belonging, our creativity and pleasure, confidence and personal power, connection and compassion, self-expression and truth, intuition, and at the crown, our connection to something much larger than ourselves And chakras or energy centers are as real as love. Whether we believe in them or not, they influence how we feel in the moment. And we all know the feeling of a busy racing mind that just won't settle. That's not just psychological, it's energetic. We also know the feeling of a deep, quiet calm that's not just mental, that has an energy to it So here's what I was seeing The certainty and stability that many of us grew up with is gone. Multiple wars are being waged simultaneously. The cracks in society are visible everywhere, and in Australia, the lucky country, there are more people homeless than have ever been Contrast that with the rise of AI that's asking questions that no one has answers to yet. What's gonna happen to jobs? What's gonna happen to post-labor economy? What is the universal basic income, and who decides? These aren't hypothetical questions anymore. This is upon us in the next five years. And then there's this, there's UAPs, what used to be called UFOs. The government's finally admitting that they're real. The world is getting stranger and stranger, and the ground is less certain, and the onslaught on our nervous system is relentless. People are feeling it, and they don't know what to do with these feelings. The tools that most of us have for managing stress aren't cutting it anymore. Just taking a few deep breaths or going for a walk, these are good, but our energy body is carrying far more than it ever has, and we need different tools to shift it. Our nervous systems are saturated. They're at capacity. We need to sharpen our tools So at the end of 2023, I put my program on hold. I'd just delivered my fourth round of Yoga Alchemy, and I had a wait list of people ready to join the next one. I had a really strong track record of clients who'd had this amazing transformation, but I had this really strong intuition to stop. something big was gonna happen in 2024 that I needed to create space in my life for. Now, I was hoping it was gonna be a pregnancy. Instead, I got cancer. But the knowing was there, and I've learned to trust that. So the new program is called Energy Alchemy. It has the same philosophical roots, but a different entry point, one built around the missing link, the energy body, and how to work with it directly. What I saw in those first few weeks back wasn't a problem to solve, it was an invitation. People are ready. They're hungry for something that meets them where they're at. And a lot of people dive into meditation thinking that's gonna solve their problems. But if our energy body is chaotic, no amount of meditation is going to reach that spot of stillness. People need different tools for different times, and my direct experience makes me the right person to guide this. I've been in the heaviness. I've been in the darkness. I've been lost in the fog. I know those states, and I know how to move through them. So if you've been feeling the weight of the world, too, the collective unease, the nervous system overload, the sense that something big is happening and you're not quite sure how to approach things, that your usual tools aren't cutting it anymore, then Energy Alchemy's for you. It's currently open for enrollment, and this will be the only round that I'm running in 2026. The link's in the show notes Several episodes of this season are live now while I'm still recording, which means that I'm getting feedback in real time, and there's something I keep hearing from people. They're reaching out to me, telling me they're struggling, maybe their career's falling apart, or a relationship breakdown, or they're having a health challenge, or a general sense that life isn't working out the way they hoped.

And they say this: 15:42

" But I don't have it as bad as you, so I shouldn't complain. I should just be grateful." And I wanna talk about this because it's doing real damage, and I see it in the room week after week.

The person who's awake at 3: 15:56

00 AM for no specific reason, just that low hum of dread, and the moment that the lights go off and there's nothing left to distract them, it surfaces. To the person who holds it together all day, they're calm, capable, present, and then completely lose their shit because someone left a dish in the sink, and it was never about the dishes. The person who hasn't cried in years, they want to. They watch sad films hoping something will crack them open, but nothing comes. They've been suppressing for so long, the channel's closed. Or there's the person who can't sit still, always busy, always filling the space. Two minutes of silence is genuinely intolerable because silence means feeling. Or the person whose life looks good on paper, good job, good relationship, everything they'd worked towards, and they feel flat just going through the motions in life And then there's this one that we can all relate to. You reach a certain age and realize you haven't got it all figured out the way you thought you would. You still don't know what you wanna be when you grow up, and you don't understand why you're not happier It's like climbing a ladder. When you finally get to the top of the ladder, you realise you were climbing the wrong wall, and now you have to come back down and start again. That's hard And when I talk to these people, almost every one of them says the same thing,"But I don't have it as bad as you, so I shouldn't complain." Here's the thing, suffering isn't a competition. We do ourselves a massive disservice when we compare our pain to someone who has it worse than us and use that to dismiss what we're feeling. Your pain doesn't need to pass an audition And I know this from the inside. When I was going through my divorce, people would say things like, "Well, at least there aren't any kids involved." When I had breast cancer the first time, someone said, "Well, at least you don't get to lose your hair." Like these were consolation prizes. People mean well, but telling someone it could be worse doesn't make them feel better. It just adds shame to whatever they were already carrying And have you noticed that the more we strive for happiness, the more miserable we are? That when we try to only think positive thoughts, we become acutely aware of all the negative ones Dr. Russ Harris calls this the happiness trap. The effort to pursue happiness makes happiness more elusive Toxic positivity is the new diet culture."Just think positive. Look on the bright side. It's not that bad. Other people have it worse." These phrases are well-meaning, but they perpetuate the idea that difficult feelings are wrong, that they need to be fixed or managed or bypassed. And I see it in yoga all the time. People walk in with their happy face while underneath I can feel something else entirely, and that incongruence between the two is exhausting, and it takes an enormous amount of energy to maintain. We're meant to feel the full spectrum of emotions, not just the bright end. And the emotions that don't-- that we don't express get stored in the body as muscle tension, as anxiety, as fatigue, as exhaustion. It's like holding your breath and forgetting to exhale. And here's the thing, when we numb or block one emotion, we dull all of them. Just like an artist can't just choose to only paint the bright colors and not paint the browns and the blacks and the creams, we need all of the colors, we need all of the flavors to give feeling to life. We can't just focus on the positive feelings and block out the negative. It doesn't work like that And the way through is not positive thinking, it's feeling. And my favorite ways to move those emotions through my body is shaking, stomping my feet, doing powerful breathwork, powerful movement to get the energy flowing so it can come up and out, so I don't have to store it anymore, so I don't have to hold onto it, so I don't have to let it affect my mood and my state of mind So if you've been listening and thinking,"Well, I don't have it that, that bad. My life's okay on paper, yet I still feel a bit numb or stuck," I see you. Your pain is valid. Your suffering is valid. Just because other people have it worse doesn't invalidate your experience. The way out is through. Acknowledge where you're at, have some compassion for yourself, and learn how to move those feelings through your body So thank you for listening. Thank you for being here. In the next episode, I'm gonna talk about the people who shared my experience with me, the ones who had to watch, the ones who held things together for me while I fell apart. And in my experience, that's actually the hardest position to be in. I'll see you there