I did not come to this calm. I had to claw my way back to it.

For most of my twenties I was exhausted in a way that sleep could not touch. It started quietly. Bad digestion, broken sleep, a tiredness that sat behind my eyes all day. Then came the brain fog, the food intolerances, the anxiety, and a fatigue so heavy that getting through a normal day felt like wading through treacle.

I was working as a joiner, then studying for a degree while working full time. On paper I was getting on with it. Underneath, I was running on adrenaline and willpower, crashing every evening and every weekend just to claw back enough to start again.

The doctors found nothing. Every test came back normal. After enough of those, you start to wonder whether it is all in your head. There is no neat diagnosis for this, and no cure on offer. My world got smaller and smaller until I could barely hold a conversation without it draining me.

The first time I felt still

A friend who had been meditating for a while kept telling me to try it. I was sceptical. The idea of sitting quietly with my own busy mind for twenty minutes sounded like the opposite of rest. He explained that you are not trying to do anything, that the practice carries you. I was desperate enough to listen, and within a few days I was on a beginner's course.

From the very first session I felt a level of calm I did not think was possible, and I felt more alive too. It was not a room full of people you might expect. It was ordinary people from every walk of life. For the first time I had something useful I could do for myself, anywhere, no matter how I felt.

It did not fix everything overnight. Some of my symptoms even got worse before they got better. But I knew straight away this was the foundation I had been missing. As the practice cleared the stress out of my system, I started making better decisions. I changed my job, then where I lived, then the people around me. My health came back in step with my life.

Why I teach

I became fascinated by where this practice comes from, and how a body of knowledge thousands of years old could be this relevant now. So I trained to teach it. It took years, several deeper courses and retreats, and a long stretch of intensive training under a master teacher, meditating for many hours a day.

Now I teach this for a living, in person and online, and run retreats in the UK and Portugal, where I live with my wife and our dog. My aim is simple. To hand as many people as possible the same tool that gave me my life back, taught plainly, without the mysticism, so they can feel better in their body, their mind, and the way they move through the world.

Hopefully you will be one of them.