I Burned Out at a Wellness Retreat: What It Taught Me About Doing Less
An honest account of burning out inside the wellness industry, and the recognition that the way back was not more effort but less.
I can still feel the place in my body. Gardens running down to the sea, frangipani, the green smell of rain on warm ground. The same path walked four or five times a day, between one class and the next. An award winning sanctuary in Thailand, the kind of place people fly across the world to rest in. I lived there. And somewhere in the middle of it, I forgot how to.
When I arrived I believed in all of it. Completely, and a little naively. Here I was in what looked like paradise, doing the work I love most, helping people find their way back to themselves. I gave it everything. I have never been much good at doing things by halves.
What I could not see at first was that the giving rested on nothing. Underneath the beautiful surface there was no wellness at all. There was a business, careful with its margins, intent on drawing the most it could from the people who kept it running. I saw it eventually. And I loved the work too much to leave.
The open secret of wellness culture
So I did the only thing that let me stay. I masked. I smiled a little wider and tucked the tiredness in behind my eyes. I would guide a restorative class, soften the lights, talk a roomful of people down into their bodies, and feel myself fraying as I did it. I was teaching people to breathe and had stopped noticing my own. Because who wants a yoga teacher on her way to burning out. It is not the vibe.
This is the open secret of so much of the wellness world. The faking, the careful dressing up, the sense that you must be a certain way to be allowed in the room. Serene. Sorted. Radiant. A whole industry performing the peace it is meant to be handing out.
When the mask falls away
A mask only holds for so long. Mine did not come off so much as fall away, the way things do when there is nothing left underneath to hold them up. What I called burnout was, I think, my body stopping me, because I would not stop myself.
I would love to tell you I understood it all in that moment. I did not. But the enforced stillness opened a question I could not unhear, harder to ignore than all the noise I had been living in. What if I did not have to perform any of it. What if there was nothing to earn, and no one to be.
What I actually needed
Learning to live from that took years. Pranayama. Stillness. Freediving. A return to the philosophy I had loved as a student. Later, motherhood. In truth it is still unfolding. And what changed was not the thing I had been reaching for. It was the recognition that the thing was never beyond me in the first place. I did not become more of anything. If anything, I became less.
I will not pretend I never mask now. Sometimes I still do, and sometimes a moment asks for it. But the compulsion has gone. I no longer believe I have to be flawless to be let into the room. And I have become careful of the rooms that ask me to be. What I can do now is feel my own tiredness, even on the days I still turn up and teach, and not barge past it or pretend it is not there. For years I thought the work was to get everything right, myself included. Striving, striving, striving. What was left, once that loosened, was relief. And more honesty. And a direct experience of the thing I had spent so long chasing.
It was never another practice
I recognise that edge now in many of the people I teach. You are the capable one. The one holding it together, meeting everyone's needs, expected to be the calm presence in every room. You have tried to fix the tiredness the way we are all taught to. Another good habit. Another protocol. One more thing to optimise. And perhaps the places that promised to help only made it worse. A class where everyone already seemed to know the words and the shapes. A room that felt like a club you were not quite let into, leaving you sure the fault was yours. Not bendy enough. Not calm enough. Not spiritual enough to belong.
It was never you. You were asked to perform a flawless, sorted kind of wellness that nobody actually feels.
What I needed back then was not another practice to master. It was permission to stop. To set the mask down, even for a moment, and feel what was actually there.
So I made something simple. A short practice that offers you a chance to check in with yourself. Nothing to master, nothing to optimise, no goal and nothing to figure out. The doorway I wish someone had held open for me, back when I did not know I was allowed to rest. Somewhere to set yourself down, exactly as you are, offered by someone who lost herself in all of it too, and slowly found the way back.
Whenever you are ready: just press play.
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