"we don’t always need to fix the pain. Sometimes we just need to feel it; safely, fully, and gently."

Looking back now, it’s clear how the struggle was never meant to break me, but to shape me.

I was sixteen when I quit sport. The one constant that gave my body a rhythm and my heart a sense of belonging. I didn’t understand it at the time, but that decision cracked something open inside me. Suddenly, the thing that helped me feel, release, and make sense of the world was gone. And I didn’t know how to be in my body without it. Without movement, I felt lost. Unanchored. That same year, grief came crashing in.

Loss hit me like a wave I didn’t see coming, and at seventeen, I froze in time. My body stayed upright, but everything else, my emotions, my sense of direction collapsed. I didn’t know how to hold all the pain. I didn’t know how to sit with the thoughts that swirled like smoke in my chest. So I ran. Sometimes literally.

But somehow, I also ran toward something. Movement came back into my life, not through sport, but through something deeper. I found myself using exercise to escape the ache inside me, and yet, ironically, it was also the only thing that made the ache bearable. It was confusing how something could be both numbing and healing. But it was real. I’d cry mid-run. I’d feel strong and broken all at once. I’d dance with grief. I’d sweat and sob and release. And over time, movement transformed. It became sacred. Not a tool to avoid my pain, but a way to move through it. The confusion of using movement to both escape and heal, taught me one of the deepest lessons of my life: "we don’t always need to fix the pain. Sometimes we just need to feel it; safely, fully, and gently."

I wasn’t lost, I was being rerouted. I was learning the language of my soul. The very thing that felt like it was pulling me under was also guiding me home.

This is why I do what I do now!

Because I know what it feels like to carry heaviness in your chest with no place to put it. 


I know what it’s like to want to run away and be found all at once. 


I know how lonely it feels when your story doesn’t seem to fit the mold.

But I also know the power of movement as medicine. I’ve lived it, and I now offer spaces where others can feel it too. If any part of this speaks to your heart, if you’re walking through your own version of this story, I want you to know; You don’t have to do it alone.
 There is a space for you to land.
 You are allowed to feel it all and still rise.

-Tara Newbigging