It may not have been a choice, exactly. Some people choose caregiving consciously and with love. Others find themselves in it — a parent who needs looking after, a child who arrived and reorganised everything, a partner whose needs gradually became the centre of gravity. The role accumulated, and somewhere inside it, the person who had a life before the role became harder to find.

The physical exhaustion is real but it's not the deepest thing. The deeper thing is the not-knowing. Not knowing what you want when no one is asking anything of you. Not knowing how to rest without guilt. Not knowing who you are when you're not defined by what you do for others — whether that's raising children, caring for a parent, sustaining a relationship, or holding a career together while everything else also gets held.

Sometimes there is a fantasy of a day at the spa — a day that belongs entirely to you, where no one needs anything. The fantasy is real. But underneath it is usually something the spa doesn't quite reach: the desire to find a quality of stillness and presence that doesn't depend on the circumstances being right, the children being quiet, the phone being silent. Something internal that holds regardless of what's happening around it.

This is what the practice offers. Not an escape from the situation — the situation will still be there — but a different relationship with it. A thread back to yourself that doesn't require the external conditions to change first.

Many women come to this work having merged so completely into a role — a relationship, a family, a career — that their own interiority has become unfamiliar territory. The practice doesn't tell you who you are. It creates the conditions in which you can begin to find out.

What tends to be most relevant: meditation as the practice of returning to yourself — again and again, without drama. Yoga as a way of reinhabiting a body that has been managed and depleted rather than inhabited. The combination of both for those ready to begin reclaiming interior space.