06/15/2026
I lived with monks.
My husband was active duty and we were stationed in Europe.
I burned out in 2010.
Badly.
And I spent the years after that trying to understand what had happened to me.
I dove deep into studying nervous system science, human behavior, meditation, somatics, anything that helped me make sense of how someone as capable and driven as I believed myself to be could just…collapse.
So when the opportunity came to train as a yoga instructor at an ashram in Austria, I took it.
We woke at 4:30am.
Silent walk.
Study, practice, meditation.
At 10 o'clock, the morning ended and breakfast began.
Everyone else had breakfast first.
I was the only one with a task before I could eat. Clean the boutique.
Then come to the table.
I didn't fully understand why they had chosen me for this particular assignment.
But I have thought about it many times since.
Monks are perceptive in a way that's hard to explain until you've been around them.
They notice things.
They saw something in how I moved, how I waited, how I related to hunger and urgency and stillness.
And they gave me the floor.
I had owned a company.
Built teams, run operations.
And I was scrubbing tile at 10am while everyone else ate.
I was more upset than the situation warranted.
I knew that. I couldn't stop it.
One morning a monk came in while I was working. He looked around the room. He looked at me.
He said: "This is the perfect job for you."
I didn't respond. I wasn't sure if I'd been seen or mocked. I went back to the floor.
I've thought about that moment more than almost anything else from that time.
He wasn't wrong.
But I wasn't ready to know why yet.
Have you ever been given exactly what you needed, at the moment you were least able to recognize it?
