What real integration looks like

Sunday morning. Solo parenting. The house feels loud and I feel like a tightly coiled spring.

Rei wants snacks, then doesn’t want the snacks she asked for. She wants me to watch her. She wants to tell me something – “Mum – look! Mum! Look!” – then forgets what it was. Now she’s swinging on my knees. My jaw is clenched and my shoulders are up somewhere near my ears. I’m reaching for my phone for no reason other than to have somewhere to put my eyes that isn’t demanding anything from me.

This is not a wellness influencer’s Sunday morning.

And then I make a decision (not a profound, journalled, intentional, candle-lit kind of one). I just think – we need to get outside. So I convince her it’s a good idea, wrestle on her shoes, and we go.

Ten minutes later we’re walking to the playground. She’s picking up every flower she passes and narrating the world to me in the way only a four-year-old can. I feel my shoulders drop. I take a breath that actually reaches the bottom of my lungs. By the time we get home I feel like a different person.

That’s integration. Not a flawless morning routine. A walk and some flower picking.

I notice it in my parenting first. That’s always the tell.

When my capacity is low, the “Mummy! Look! Mum!” that normally I can meet with presence starts to feel like an alarm going off in a small room. The overstimulation creeps in. I reach for my phone – not because I need anything on it, but because it’s a way to not quite be here. I eat without tasting anything. My jaw is tight. My shoulders don’t drop even when I remind them to.

I know this landscape well. I lived in it for years before I understood what it was.

The stress response isn’t dramatic. It doesn’t announce itself. It just quietly narrows everything – your patience, your capacity, your ability to be present with the people you love most. And because high-achievers are so good at functioning through it, it can go unnoticed for a long time. Until it can’t.

The signs I’ve learned to watch for aren’t the big ones. They’re the small ones. The jaw. The shoulders. The phone. The mindless eating. The feeling of being a tightly coiled spring that hasn’t quite found its way to release.

That’s information. And information is useful, if you know how to read it.

For a long time, yoga on the days Rei was home was almost impossible. She’s always been what you might call a velcro child – the mat was a magnet, I was the destination, and any attempt at a practice became an obstacle course of small limbs and loud opinions.

I made peace with it. I found other windows. I stopped fighting it.

This summer, something shifted. She started asking if we could do yoga together.

So now, sometimes, we do. It is not a clean practice. She does her version of downward dog (she’s named it slippery dog 🥲), narrates everything I’m doing, occasionally lies down on top of me. It is genuinely one of the most joyful things in my week

I had spent so long trying to protect my practice from motherhood. But then motherhood became part of it.

I don’t think I could have planned that. I just had to stay consistent long enough for it to find its own shape.

Integration isn’t a destination. It’s not a perfectly executed routine you eventually achieve and then maintain with ease. It’s an ongoing, imperfect, context-dependent practice of returning to yourself.

Some weeks the anchors hold beautifully. Other weeks you’re gritting your teeth through the “Mum!” chorus and reaching for your phone at 11am and eating cereal for dinner because that’s all you have.

The difference – the thing I’ve actually built, slowly, over the past few years – is that I notice faster now. The coiled spring feeling lands and I recognise it. I don’t have to white-knuckle my way through a full week before I realise I need to get outside, slow down, move my body, put my phone down.

The nervous system education I give my clients isn’t about teaching you to be perfect. It’s about shortening the gap between dysregulation and return.

Flower picking counts. Falling asleep in your kid’s bed counts. A ten-minute practice between clients counts.

It doesn’t have to look like anything. It just has to work for you.

COACHING

You were never meant to choose between your ambition and yourself.

Nervous system coaching for high-achievers

If you’re ticking every box on paper but quietly running on empty, this is where that changes. Homecoming is a 1:1 coaching programme built around the body, not just the mind.

What we work on together: