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I was happy.
That's the part of this story I want you to hear first. Because if you're reading this and you're nodding along thinking "well, I'm not burnt out, I love my life," I want you to know that I did too.
I had what I thought was the dream. A 12-year career in the environmental industry that I genuinely loved. Sales meetings I was good at. High-level government proposals that lit me up. Two beautiful little kiddos at home. A husband. A house in a town I adored. The kind of full, vibrant life that, on paper and in my own heart, looked like winning.
So when my body started whispering, I didn't push through out of misery. I pushed through out of joy. I had so much I wanted to do. So many people I loved. So many opportunities I was grateful for. There wasn't a single thing on my plate I wanted to take off.
I just couldn't hear it over everything else.
That's the part I want women to know. You don't have to hate your life for your body to start asking for something different. You can be deeply, genuinely happy, and still be quietly depleting yourself in ways you can't yet see.
For me, the whisper became a scream in the form of a strep throat that turned into a blood infection. By the time I got to my doctor's office, my iron level was 3.
For context, anything under 30 is considered low for women. Three is the number where your doctor pauses, looks at you very carefully, and says, "I don't know how you're still standing."
That number stopped me cold. Not because I'd been suffering, but because I genuinely hadn't noticed. My body had been speaking to me for a long time, and I had been so busy loving my life that I'd missed it entirely.
The cultural script we hand women is this. Be ambitious. Be soft. Be available. Be capable. Carry everything beautifully, gratefully, without complaint. And the most dangerous version of that script is the one we hand to women who are already happy, because there's no obvious villain. There's no clear thing to take off the plate. There's just the slow, invisible depletion of a woman who never thought to listen.
I had been so grateful for my life that I'd forgotten my body was the thing carrying it.
When I first came to yoga, I came the way most Type A women do. I wanted to fix the racing thoughts. I wanted to add one more good thing to my already very good life. I thought yoga would be another tool in my toolkit, like a really nice planner or a green juice habit.
That's not what yoga is.
What yoga gave me, slowly, painfully, beautifully, was something I didn't even know I'd lost. It gave me the ability to listen. To notice. To pause long enough to hear what my body had been trying to tell me for years. Not because anything was wrong, but because that's how the feminine body is designed to communicate. In whispers. In subtle cues. In rhythms most of us have stopped paying attention to.
In my Yoga Teacher Training, we meditated every morning for two weeks straight. It was hard. Really, really hard. There is nothing soft about sitting with your own mind for that long. But somewhere in those two weeks, something cracked open. Not in a dramatic way. In a quiet way.
I had stopped being in conversation with my own body.
Not in a war with it, like I used to think. In a silence with it. I'd been so busy living a beautiful life that I'd forgotten my body had a voice of its own. And the moment I started listening again, everything began to shift.
Here's what I've come to understand, after years of study and practice and teaching, after building Grace & Flow and the Yoga Science School:
We are the first generation of women in human history to have been quietly disconnected from cyclical living, and most of us don't even know it happened.
For thousands of years, women lived in rhythm with the moon. With the seasons. With their own bodies. The ancient feminine sages, the goddess traditions, the lineages of Mary Magdalene and Green Tara, the lunar wisdom carried by grandmothers across every continent, all of them understood something we've collectively misplaced.
Women are not designed to operate at peak intensity for 30 days a month. We are designed to cycle. To rise and fall. To gather and release. To bloom and rest. Our biology is lunar. Our energy is tidal. And when we live in opposition to that, even happily, even gratefully, we still pay a price.
Look at the data. Burnout in women has more than doubled in the last decade. Autoimmune diseases (which disproportionately affect women) are climbing. Anxiety, insomnia, hormonal dysregulation. These are not just signs that we are unhappy. They are signs that our bodies are out of conversation with the rhythms we were born to live by.
The ancient feminine wasn't trying to tell me I was doing it wrong. She was trying to remind me of something I'd forgotten.
She is, I think, trying to remind all of us.
If you're reading this and you love your life, and something quiet in you is starting to stir, I want you to know three things.
One. You don't have to be unhappy for your body to need something different. Some of the most depleted women I know are also the most grateful. Joy is not a substitute for rest. Gratitude is not a substitute for listening.
Two. The ancient feminine is not asking you to leave your life. She is asking you to come back into rhythm with it. To stop overriding the cues. To honour the cycles. To remember that you are not a machine designed for linear output, you are a woman, designed for tides.
Three. You don't have to wait until your body finds a way to make you stop. I did. A lot of women I love did. But you don't have to. You can start now, with one breath, one slower morning, one cycle of the moon spent listening instead of producing.
If you are the woman who has already broken down and is rebuilding, or the woman who hasn't broken down but has started to feel the whisper, please know this. Your body is not betraying you. Your ambition is not the enemy. Your life is not the problem.
You are simply being asked to remember something very old. Something the women who came before you knew in their bones.
You are allowed to slow down. You are allowed to listen. You are allowed to come home to yourself.
That is the work of Grace & Flow. That is the work of the Yoga Science School. That is the work of every outdoor class, every retreat, every breath taken under the Okanagan sky.
The ancient feminine has been trying to tell us something for a very long time.
I'm finally listening.
I hope you will too.
xx Love, Jess
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(Even if You Don't Want to Teach It)
Yoga Teacher Training has a form of transformative power, and not just for those who wish to become a yoga teacher. Consider it an experience of a lifetime that will change how you see yourself, and the world around you through your Yoga Training.
