“The stick's long gone. My feet can actually carry me now.”

Deborah came to Bali after losing her father. By any outside measure, her life was full — a lovely home, a beloved dog, close friends, family. That was exactly what confused her.

“Although I had a lovely life, I was, I’d say, deeply unhappy — and angry too.” Angry with her father, with her stepmother, with herself. And the grief had moved into her body. Her health was suffering, her mobility most of all — at times she could barely walk, and she used a stick.

She was no beginner at inner work. Therapy had helped her over the years, and it had gone as far as talking could take her. What she wanted now, in her words, was “an immersive experience” — and a way to carry on working once the retreat ended.

We began in November 2024, after her retreat immersion in Bali. Our private sessions are somatic before anything else: breath, movement, learning to feel into the body rather than think about it from a distance. Alongside that, something almost plain — lists. Good things. Things to look forward to. Things she wanted to do.

By spring, she noticed the sessions had changed shape for her: “I started to look forward to our sessions, and would think — oh, I must tell Dijan about that — when there were good things happening as well as bad.” Her own words for it: “a different response to therapy.”

“I understand myself a lot better — from an academic as well as an emotional point of view. I realized the power of breathing and movement — not to stop the emotions, because they’re not always negative, but to regulate myself.”

The body followed the work. “I’m moving a thousand times better than I was. The stick’s long gone. I don’t keep tripping over, because my feet can actually carry me now.”

What surprised her was how far the tools she thought she knew could actually go: “I always knew that breathing calmed you down, and I used to do box breathing things — but the power of that, and the power of the movement, moving gently, and feeling into the body, not just focusing on the body. My understanding of that is completely different now.”

Who would she say this is for? “Anybody wanting to understand why they react certain ways to things they might not necessarily like about themselves. Understanding it helps you like it, and accept it — and then it’s not such a problem. That’s just a part of you. And it’s any age as well.”