You can be doing everything right, and still feel like something's wrong.

From the outside, my life looked fine. Capable, reliable, the one everyone leaned on. Underneath it, I was worn thin and couldn't have told you why.

If any part of that sounds familiar, know that I'm not describing you from the outside. I lived in it for years.

I'm Aimee, founder of Return to Soul and a certified Spinal Energetics practitioner in Melbourne's inner south-east. I came to this work the long way, through my own body.

I started out hands-on, in hair, then beauty, then massage. Helping someone feel better in their own skin was the first work that ever felt like mine. Massage became my home, and reiki followed.

Then an injury took daily bodywork away from me, and I drifted: into admin, then a corporate career designing training and learning programs. I was good at it. I didn't love it. I stayed too long, and my body let me know: migraines, sickness after sickness, a tiredness that sleep couldn't touch.

It took my marriage ending to wake me up. I spent the next few years finding my way back to myself, and slowly I started to feel more like me again. But something was still missing. Just a gap, a quiet space I didn't have words for.

Then I found it by accident.

I sat down at a wellness festival to watch a woman talk about something called Spinal Energetics, and within seconds she'd drawn me in. While she demonstrated on a stranger, I felt it in my own body. My arm began to lift on its own.

"I couldn't explain it, and I couldn't forget it."

I'd later learn what my nervous system was likely doing in that moment. Right then, I just knew I couldn't look away. I watched her work for who knows how long, until my friend begged me to leave.

I went home needing to know more. When I saw a group session running in the hills near where I grew up, I felt that same pull. I still didn't book until the last minute, nervous about what I might find. I went anyway.

That first session changed something in me. I felt it first as a sharp ache in my solar plexus, and then I moved, and cried, and let go of things I'd been holding for years. I was hooked, and I haven't looked back since.