The scientist and the patient. The performer and the person who learned the cost.

My story

For twenty years, I helped bring life-saving medicines to the patients who needed them most. But quietly, I was one of those patients too.

Eczema has been my life teacher since childhood — sleepless nights, doctors saying “it's genetic”. At nineteen, an integrative doctor told me food is medicine, and my inflammation dropped drastically. It wasn't restriction. It was regulation — my first lesson, decades before I had the word for it.

Then came corporate life. Twenty years in pharmaceutical drug development taught me to treat stillness as lost time — and my body eventually sent the invoice: shallow sleep, flat mornings, patience running out by Wednesday. A dermatologist ran full labs, treated the root cause, and prescribed something unexpected — yoga, like medicine. It took me ten classes just to learn to slow down.

The real turning point came on a call with over five thousand people. Someone asked a question we'd already covered three times — and I snapped. That was not me. That's when I realised: I wasn't managing my work. My work was managing me.

In February 2022, COVID found me in Egypt — and my body collapsed. Full-body inflammation; getting to the bathroom felt like climbing Everest. The virus was the trigger, but how hard I went down — and how long I stayed there — was years of unprocessed load finally calling it in.

So I treated my body like a living lab. Patience, testing, listening. Functional medicine, yoga nidra, fifteen-minute pauses that taught my body how to recover again — learning to regulate before I optimise. To heal myself, I became the medicine: yoga and meditation teacher, breathwork and functional-movement facilitator, functional-medicine coach.

Years earlier I had climbed Annapurna to prove I was enough — and paid for it with two nights of a racing heart and years of not being able to train. Last September I stood on the Salkantay pass in Peru: higher, five thousand metres, same me — zero symptoms. On the first climb, my body paid the price of proving. On the second, it was my partner.

My energy still isn't perfect — it rises and falls. But I know what my body needs now, and I know this: the body can rebuild when we work together with it. That's what Thrive Hub is — everything I learned, finally in one place, for people who are done surviving.

“Your next level doesn't come from pushing harder. It comes from regulating smarter.”