Taking Stock, Moving Forwards

It has been interesting to take stock these past few weeks and see where my reflections have been leading my conscious mind.

What started as a quiet rebellion against the increasing prevalence of AI and lack of authenticity in the online world, especially within fitness, has led me back to reflective writing. In turn, this quiet space to write has given me a chance to piece together my own fragments of thought on various types of fitness - mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual – and how they can inform therapeutic processes.

The Inner Athletics Research Map, which I penned on a café napkin in the Summer of 2018 over a cappuccino (before I switched to flat whites), captures the essence of my life's work. It gives me a compass to follow but not a road map. If truth be told, I've been letting life lead me so far. With 2 years remaining, I’m reflecting to see where I’ve invested my energy to see if I can sense or know what needs to come next.

The list below gives me an idea of what has been achieved. It doesn't tell the backstory, however, of what it took to achieve all of this.

2018 – I became a Certified Fitness Instructor and Personal Trainer at the age of 39, just months after closing up our family home of 40 years in Dubai.

2019 – I completed a postgraduate research study titled, What motivates people to teach martial arts and/or self-defence? Alongside this, I helped to teach self-defence workshops to the public and assisted the training of a new self-defence instructor.

2019 – I graduated with an MSc in Exercise and Sport Psychology, and reached a crossroads. With no funds to keep studying to become a Chartered Exercise and Sport Psychologist, I had 3 options. Become a personal trainer, build up Inner Athletics, or help build a Positive Psychology education and membership body. I chose the latter.

2020 – I started an independent research study on fear-based responses in self-defence and performance; both were put on the backburner when Covid arrived. I also found myself in the early stages of building a Positive Psychology Academy where we launched a Courage Scholarship on Positive Psychology for Post Traumatic Growth.

2021 – I started an independent qualitative research study titled, What motivates people to practice movement, exercise, and/or sport, and how does it change over time? The aim was to brush up my research skills in preparation for a PhD. I thought it would take me a year; I was wrong, it took me about 4 years in the end.

2022 – I experienced 2 significant losses and surgery in the space of 10 days, just as I turned 43, and I literally stopped moving (I was bedbound for 2 weeks). I didn't achieve much this year beyond feeling terrified professionally and personally.

2023 – I joined an online fitness and nutrition programme and started moving again. Work also branched out to focus on Neurodiversity and my workload increased to an unprecedented level. I adapted, as I often do, but a saturation point would come. I run Education and Operations and it would become increasingly difficult to switch off.

2024 – I started a PhD in Sport and Education with a focus on decisive action in Karate. We also launched a Hope Scholarship on Positive Psychology in Communities. I wasn't aware a difficult year lay ahead of me. Like many of my students, I took on studies on top of a high workload and right before an increase in personal stress.

2025 – I completed and presentated my long-standing independent research on motivation to practice, which had meandered beyond movement, exercise, and sport into practicing Positive Psychology. It wasn't the outcome I had hoped for. I didn't publish a journal article or white paper. I also experienced more loss and grief, and almost didn't make it through the second year of my PhD.

2026 – More personal challenges unfolded with my partner's health diagnosis. We've both kept going. I am now ready to draft my first PhD journal article and creating an outline for a new Wisdom Scholarship on embodiment, spirituality, and religion. It will be the third and final scholarship I introduce and support. My own wisdom tells me that my own spiritual journey will be starting here, and it has probably already begun.

Throughout these 8 years, I have practiced Positive Psychology through coaching, training, research, assessment, supervision, and organisational facilitation. I’ve also contributed to the evolving professional standards in the field, trained dozens of practitioners, and co-supervised student research projects on Positive Psychology for a wide range of topics. It has been fascinating, meaningful, purposeful, and worthwhile, and taught me more than I could have ever anticipated or imagined.

At the same time, the intensity of this work has taken a toll on my mind and body, and made it challenging to focus on developing Inner Athletics and my interest areas but on reflection, I wonder if this was a gift. Maktub, as we say in Arabic. Perhaps it was written for me. Qadari, my destiny. Maybe these uphill years have also given me the strength and experience I need to keep moving forwards towards my calling?

I notice myself using the word “calling” and this prompts me to wind back even further, to the years that eventually inspired me to create Inner Athletics. They start simply and slowly before speeding up with the chaos, confusion, and density that violence, conflict, stress, trauma, and adversity bring. I know these years inside out, at least I think I do. But something is calling me to mindfully and lovingly rinse and hold them as the years of my life that have led me to become who I am becoming right now.

There is an intersection of movement, culture, and healing in these various fragments, which I call "memory vignettes". They contain a vision of "movement therapy" which my current craniosacral osteopathy treatment is bringing back to the surface. For almost 2 years, I have been experiencing non-stop tinnitus. There is no knowing how or why it started, it just began one day and hasn't stopped. Together with frequent jaw and neck tension, it can make me feel pretty lousy. I sense it’s my body’s way of speaking to me, telling me to listen. After useless trips to audiologists and a fruitless bout of cognitive behavioural therapy to tune out the high-pitched ringing, not to mention scores of stress reduction attempts using everything I know, I’ve ended up in cranial osteopathy. It is from this vantage point that I look back to gain insight to move forwards.

1978 – My conception in Dubai; my parents had just moved there from the UK.

1979 – My birth not long after the revolution in Iran was sparked. This revolution would eventually have a profound impact on my life, for it brought my first Karate instructors my way, including the one who would spark the idea for my present-day PhD.

1980 - Being taught to swim and feeling myself in water. Apparently mom threw me in which wasn't surprising. Mom had been an athlete, a swimmer, and was now a runner and squash player. She would go on to be captain of the men's squash team and together with my dad and others, oversee the annual Squash 3's in Dubai. I would grow up surrounded by elite squash players who partied hard but never failed to show up on top form on the court; their sudden seriousness amazed me.

1981 – Learning to walk at 18 months; I was a late learner. I now question, was it lack of strength, coordination, or motivation? Why did I take so long to move my body?

1982 – Starting nursery school; I hated the feeling of being left there alone. And I certainly didn't like that we had to wear white underwear for our first theatre performance. At a young age, I knew it wasn't right to do that. But somehow it was ok and accepted in those days to make little kids do such things.

1983 – We moved to the UK for about 9 months; life as I knew it was first disrupted. My lasting memory is having to wear dark green knitted knickers to school. As if that wasn't bad enough, we also had to do PE wearing just those same knickers and a vest!

1984 – Back in Dubai, joining a new school that focused on sport. The Dubai English Speaking School (DESS) became another home. To this day I have so many positive memories, mostly focused around the swimming pool (which is almost still the same) and the large sandy football pitch (no longer a sandy desert).

1985 – Competing in swimming from the age of 5. I loved the feeling after training of sunlight on my wet body as it dried my skin, and the feeling of a towel around my shoulders to dry me after competing. Sensory experiences like this are more common in my childhood years. I wasn't a big thinker but I did like to imagine.

1986 – A love of sport was well and truly embedded in my mind and body.

1987 – More swimming, more competing… and after-school activities focused on sport.

1988 – A shy personality becomes more apparent; it’s clear now that I was an introverted athlete. I didn't like speaking much and I still didn't think much. I was spontaneous and serious at the same time. Those characteristics still represent a core version of me. I was often told to smile but to be honest, I was much more content with peace. Joy emerged from such a state, it wasn't something to try to achieve.

1989 – A fall from a recently retired racing horse in the desert left my unconscious and injured; this was my first brush with the possibility of death. I still remember the terror I felt when the horse took off, then it goes blank until I regain consciousness in my mom’s car about an hour later. I fell quickly and was dragged by my ankle at breakneck speed to the side of a main road where a palace driver stopped and took me to safety. I’ll never know his name or what he did but his swift actions that day may well have saved my life.

1990 – War breaks out nearby as Iraq invades Kuwait; the Lebanese civil war, the Iran-Iraq war, the Palestinian intifada, they had all swirled around us for years by then. I also moved to an Emirati all-girls school run by the royal family. It wasn't exactly a choice. The schooling was said to be excellent and my sisters studied there. But unlike my friends' dads, dad's work didn't pay school fees. This school was free and for that I will ever be grateful to the Dubai government, as they paid for my secondary education.

1991 – I’m almost expelled from this school due to my love of heavy metal music and sharing a music video with a South African classmate whose stepmother complained to the school. That same classmate had seen her real mother shoot herself when she was 2 years old. We pounded our feelings out on the tennis courts every lunchtime, whizzing in for lunch with minutes to spare before our Arabic afternoon classes began. We didn't speak much; rather, we moved. And for us that is what mattered most.

1992 – I’m told all is forgiven. A new headmistress arrives and tells me how I was treated the year before was ridiculous. But it’s too little too late. The trust has already gone. I have absolutely no idea what social and cultural norms are expected of me, especially by English people. I have already donned a floor-length skirt and started disconnecting from my body. My South African friend has left and now, as the only white girl in my class, I am trying to navigate an Emirati-Islamic culture. My new best friend is Yemeni and I take up Karate. She is the only person who supports me, coming to my first classes and sitting at the back while I train, working on her art. She also teaches me Arabic calligraphy which sparks a life-long appreciation of beauty.

1993 – I continue to train in karate, going frequently because I love it. Dad tends to drop me off and pick me up, or I walk there and back. My instructors are Iranian. Sensei Shahram who walks around with a stick, whacking the older Emirati black belts in a bid to teach their bodies how to move correctly, and Sensei Afshin, my teacher, who taught me how to punch and kick. He also graded me for my first few belts.

1994 – GCSE time and mom persuades the school to let me study both music and art; as a result, I have to drop history and geography. My musical talent for piano composition quickly shines. I discover I can hear and write musical notes that I don’t have the technical skills to play. My pattern recognition emerges and my practice of Arabic calligraphy evolves, with my best friend correcting my work.

1995 – A teenage assault by an ex-boyfriend while I’m sleeping leaves scars that will take decades to address. It single-handedly ruins any sense of safety I feel in my body. He was a product of the Lebanese civil war and someone I trusted. Within weeks my face is covered in eczema wounds that bleed and crust. I can’t keep my hands from scratching my face while sleeping which makes it all worse. Someone thinks I've been in a car accident and I want to hide in shame. Does this create the metaphorical wound where the light eventually enters? Does it create a well of compassion in my heart for others who have experienced violence, leading me into humanitarian work?

1996 – I move to the UK for my A-levels. I’m not fully in my body nor in a familiar culture. My body becomes thin and the eczema spreads across my body. It doesn’t calm down for another decade and sees me bandaging arms, legs, and hands almost daily. I decide I can manage it all by eating lots of berries and doing Jane Fonda-like leg lifts in my tiny bedroom. I have to keep the window open in winter as the heat from the radiators burns my skin even more. It's cold and I want to go home.

1997 – Our French A-level class travels to Paris and I’m introduced to the Holocaust, La Droite et La Gauche, and Jim Morrison’s grave. I’m also regaining some mental and physical strength, working in a bakery shop on Saturdays, and I have a new boyfriend back in Dubai who I've met on holidays back. He’s Iranian, a boxing teacher who runs a shipping company, and he grew up during the Iraq-Iran war. He also fought in the war. It doesn’t last beyond a year but the positive memories remain.

1998 – A university stint in Nice, France, doesn’t work out and 4 months later, I’m back in Dubai, doing a Summer job on the visa counter at the British Embassy. Culturally and socially, I couldn’t find my place in Nice. Motivated by my Moroccan dorm mate, I joined an Arabic evening class with an Iraqi teacher and this leads my French A-level teacher in the UK to encourage me to study Arabic at university in London. That pretty much seals my fate for work; join the British government or join an international organisation.

1999 – Karate training at the Student Union in London isn’t going anywhere. Looking back, I see again it was the cultural dislocation. I didn’t know how to communicate with my mostly English peers. But my Arabic and now Persian studies were going well. I had quickly dropped Politics for Persian, much to my dad's disappointment. I’m consistently in the top 2 in my Arabic class. The language learning seems to flow effortlessly. I feel at home again by nature of the subjects I'm studying. London also isn't so bad.

2000 – I travel to Isfahan, Iran, for a short Farsi language course before moving to Alexandria, Egypt, to study Arabic for the year. Alexandria is loud, the most chaotic place I have lived to date. It takes time but it grows on me and I come to appreciate the Egyptian dialect and way of life. It is the first dialect I learn other than Emirati. The next time I would return to Egypt would be en route to Jerusalem to set up a prison rehabilitation programme. I would meet my best childhood friend, now a dancer in Cairo. I would return a few years after that, just days before my divorce.

2001 – I travel to Tehran, Iran, for another short language course before moving back to London for my final year of the BA. It was a hot Summer in Tehran, hiding out under a black veil, hopping between taxis as I toured the city’s museums. I felt at home in Tehran, relaxed in a way I hadn’t felt in Alexandria. I also have my first black belt and a new Iranian karate teacher, Sensei Farmarz, who introduces me to the concept of “kime” in karate, a topic I will research in my PhD some 23 years later. On my return to London I take an Iraqi dialect class and focus my research on the impact of oil and trade on the UAE dialect and architecture. I write 5,000 words in English and 5,000 words in Arabic. The Emirati dialect and culture is one I love deeply that speaks to my soul; I am also in conflict due to my first year at the Emirati royal school and being threatened with expulsion by its British headmistress which evoked shame and confusion.

2002 – I leave for Jerusalem. It's my first proper job as an Arabic interpreter with the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). First, my Arabic teacher in Alexandria (who also taught me Arabic calligraphy) introduced me to the work of the Red Cross and Red Crescent. Then, an Arabic class mate recommended I apply. He got a job as an Arabic interpreter in Afghanistan. Our other class mate whose Arabic wasn’t as good got a job as a delegate and ended up in Tel Aviv, down the road from me. I end up in the Palestinian Authority’s Centres for Reform and Rehabilitation, just after Operation Defensive Shield and the massacre in Jenin. I had watched all this unfold on the news from the comfort of my parents' sofa in Dubai some months earlier. I still remember sitting in my Karate suit, drenched in drying sweat, eating a chocolate bar. I take that same suit and my black belt to Jerusalem, training with Sensei Abdullah after work.

2003 – I’m back in London studying for a Masters degree in Violence, Conflict, and Development. I’m also in the early stages of a relationship with a Palestinian man, a refugee from what is now Northern Israel who was raised in a refugee camp in Lebanon, who would one day become my ex-husband. My mind is filled with politics and social injustice, and the “white man’s burden”. I am introduced to Marwan Barghouti, Angela Davis, and other political prisoner figures and advocates. Something in me, something very physical, recognises the pain and injustice they speak of. The body has become an instrument of war. I’ve also started to grasp the various Palestinian dialects which will one day feel like home but right now, they seem alien.

2004 – I graduate with a first class degree in Arabic and Persian, and a best undergraduate finalist prize. I’m back with the ICRC, this time in Tel Aviv visiting Palestinian political prisoners across the North of Israel. The first serious allegation of torture emerges and is followed by hundreds more. I spend my days in prisons and interrogation centres, documenting allegations of violence during and after arrest. I learn to keep my body absolutely still, moving only my arm and hand, as the stories spill out onto my page. If I'm still the prisoner speaks more, I learn. I take sugary biscuits with me to keep the prisoners’ spirits up. Unfortunately, I start eating some of the leftovers for myself. A pattern of eating after observing and feeling traumatic experiences begins. It doesn’t become a real problem though for at least another decade. Another decade later I realise that when it’s my own trauma, I stop eating and lose weight. When it is someone else’s trauma, I overeat and gain weight.

2005 – I’m addicted; I can’t stop. Just one more prisoner, one more message for another family. It doesn’t matter that I don’t eat or drink anything, I have to keep going. I'm 25 and blessed with energy. Along the way we get engaged in Haifa, staying in a Christian nunnery with Sister Rita. I officially convert to Islam in Al Haram Ash-Sharif in Jerusalem, next to Al Aqsa mosque. The Mufti’s assistant is what I can only call lascivious. His colleague’s brother is being held by the Israeli’s and prevented from family visits. Is there anything I can do? As usual, there is nothing I can do. My hands are tied. I’m experiencing what is the bane of humanitarian work, that we might prevent and alleviate some suffering but we can’t stop the war or conflict. A memory of a prisoner lingers. I have forgotten his name but not his story. He is a Karate teacher from Nablus and his presence in the midst of religious and political ideologies knocks me for six. I do Karate in my cell, he tells me, beaming from ear to ear.

I pause here in my memory vignettes. These are only snippets of each year of my life. What must it be like for the reader to digest only the top line which barely scratches the surface? I see myself walking into social situations in my current abode of the Peak District in the UK, a predominantly white and working-class area, and I gawp at myself. On the outside, I look like everyone else but on the inside, I am anything but the same. I wonder for the first time if I move differently as a result of the life I have lived and how I think. Am I really that different? Are any of us really that different from each other? Of course we are, my political side tells me. Of course we're not, my human side says.

Spontaneously, I get up to move now as I know what is coming next, in the 13 years I still have left to capture in my memory vignettes.

I come back to my laptop. In the few minutes that have passed I’ve opened my phone and seen a message from a university friend whose mother is slipping away and a birthday message to my partner. The postman arrives with a craniosacral therapy ball device for the base of my skull and I lie down to try it out. The dog barks, the door goes again, and I dash outside. I’ve left my laptop on the patio table and out of nowhere it’s raining! I race upstairs to grab my hairdryer and am soon blasting hot air onto the key board. It all seems fine and the rain stops suddenly. My dog and me relocate to the shed as the chaos is disrupting my partner’s energy. I feel waves of tiredness and irritation swimming through me. Not again, I think. Don’t drag me back into the vortex. What if I can’t get back out? That has happened many times before.

The vortex is about a decade of my life from 2006 to 2017 that is much harder to describe. I feel I don’t have the will left to document any more memory vignettes but a voice urges me on. It’s essential that I do this, all of this stock-taking, in order to gain the clarity I need to move forwards. No emotion, no drama; just the facts.

2006 – I move back to London with no plan other than to find a job. Within weeks, I’m volunteering, visiting a Sudanese asylum seeker at a prison near Heathrow. The roundtrip is costly and it takes almost the whole day from my shared accommodation in North London. I find a series of jobs, first with the Refugee Therapy Centre and then with Amnesty International. I’m back on Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories, and I’m preparing for my wedding. I don’t feel right in my body and it doesn’t help that my husband of a few hours points out that my wedding dress doesn’t suit me. You don’t have the arms for that dress, he whispers in my ear as we cut the cake and the cameras flash. A videographer is in front of us and I remember smiling, frozen in motion. I want to throw the knife back at him, metaphorically and literally, but I can’t move.

2007 – He moves to Doha and I pass by en route to Lebanon. I like Doha but I have another job with the ICRC, this time in Beirut. It will take me into the depths of Nahr El-Bared, a Palestinian refugee camp that the Lebanese army destroyed. Not out of nowhere; it had become a refuge for fighters, mostly foreign, en route to Iraq and Syria. I documented their stories of torture. I also, for the first time in my working life, finished work on time at 6pm and headed to Yoga, Pilates, and Karate classes. And I bought a keyboard on that mission, feeling a pull to play piano again. It was the mission that would spark the vision of "movement therapy" after seeing the work of physiotherapists at a local NGO called Nasim to heal torture survivors. I understood this work intuitively but had absolutely no idea what movement therapy meant. Why didn’t the vision just say physiotherapy? The next steps would have been much clearer.

2008 – I’m back in Doha, working for the Qatar Red Crescent. It is the last year eczema will ravage my body. This time, it is concentrated in my hands, in between my fingers, and I’ve taken to wearing gloves to work. The sticky Summer heat burns my skin, making it itch even more. Blood regularly stains the white cotton gloves and I'm ashamed to show my hands. Thankfully in an Islamic work environment I don't have to shake any hands, and nobody asks me why I'm wearing gloves. I start an Ashtanga yoga teacher training course and soon after, walk out of my job in an angry burst. My marriage erupts a few months later and I find myself staring at my husband’s fist. He is threatening to smash my face in if I say one more word. In his right state of mind he would be horrified by such behaviour but he’s gone into a blind fury, triggered by a stressful workday and me forgetting to buy laban at the supermarket. I’m no longer working so why wouldn’t I get the laban? The attack floors me, literally. After he leaves the room, I collapse and memories of my traumatised 15 year old self splutter through my legs which have now gone weak. It takes 30 minutes or so to stand back up. I can’t leave my marriage though, as dad has cancer and is about to undergo treatment.

2009 – Dad’s treatment is successful, I get a long-distance job with the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Cresent, and I tell my husband I’m leaving. Within months, I’m back in Jerusalem, visiting the Palestinian Authority’s Centres of Reform and Rehabilitation. But this time I’m with the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) and working with the prison leadership to secure better conditions and processes for the prisoners. We set up a bakery in Nablus and sewing workshop in Jenin. For the first time in writing these vignettes, it is the Arabic that comes to me first. I have to translate from Arabic to English to describe the vignette. I operate fully in Arabic at work; I barely speak English these days. Outside of work, I look for places to move. I start a Psychology conversion degree and eventually complete it but none of it speaks to me. I set up UNODC’s office and launch the prison programme, then I walk out. My body can’t cope with the emotional distress of the separation arguments, and I’ve taken to melting bars of chocolate in milk on my little stove to cope. My eating is starting to spiral.

2010 – I’m back in Dubai, taking Pilates reformer classes and completing my conversion degree. I travel to London for yoga teacher training, then I travel to New York and Canada for my sister’s wedding. My body feels light and free. I am back to eating normally and enjoying life. I turn down a job with the British Red Cross in London in the tracing department. I have no idea what to do and I'm starting to panic. In that place of not knowing, I end up going back to Doha for a final bout of 6 months. In that time, I teach Yoga at the Ritz Carlton and a woman’s flat to her and her colleagues. I want to leave my husband and get a divorce but they’ve paid me to deliver 10 weekly sessions and I can’t let them down. My conscientiousness just won't let me.

2011 - It is the husband who eventually forces the divorce. We go before a Qatari judge and in 3 days it’s all over. I’m thankful I’m fluent in Arabic. I’ve left without a penny and I don’t care. A job with the United Nations Relief & Works Agence for Palestinian Refugees in the Near and Middle East (UNRWA) awaits me in Gaza. Within weeks I’m teaching Yoga from my new apartment and working on refugee health. Prisons are far behind me now. The first bombs and rockets hit. We have to leave this apartment block and I move to a new one, a first-floor apartment overlooking the sea. All the windows were blown out in the last war but they've since been restored. It is the perfect place to teach Yoga after for 2 years. It also becomes home to my Health Coaching studies and weekly psychotherapy sessions. I travel to London for a Summer course in Dance Movement Psychotherapy (DMP), still pulled by my vision. The lecturer tells me to get some work supervision. You shouldn’t be carrying that kind of work alone.

2012 – After 10 sessions with a DMP who specialises in healing from trauma, including torture, I decide that I’m better off teaching Yoga. I’m not a dancer and I can’t relate to the language of dance that informs the way the body moves. It will take another few years to understand that it is swimming and Karate that inform the way I move and how I process other people’s movement patterns. These ways of reading the body come to me through Yoga teaching. I read my students’ bodies but not with an intellectual mind. I read the through my body and I know from a deeper place what they need. I am not trying to help them though, I’m just trying to teach a little bit of Yoga to ease everyone’s stress. Yoga has helped to heal my body and I just want to share this with others. Deep down I know it isn’t the movement therapy vision but for now, it is serving a purpose. I wind up in Canada for a few weeks, visiting my middle sister and attending a Phoenix Rising Yoga Therapy course. Maybe I'm meant to be a Yoga Therapist...

I take a deep breath. I’m so very tired. It’s my partner’s birthday in present day but he’s in his own world and I still have 5 more years to cover. There is still so much more that led me to create Inner Athletics. Not in a million years could anyone who doesn’t know me ever guess, unless they’ve walked a similar path themselves or crossed paths with me at an earlier stage on my path, before I moved to the UK. Nobody will see the metaphorical blood that has long since washed off my knuckles and knees. I have fallen so many times, more times than I care to capture in the memory vignettes. But I have also been blessed more times than that with a light guiding me forwards.

I take a break for lunch and chat with my partner. The tinnitus rings loudly. My jaw aches but my head tension has gone where my hair sits. Yesterday’s craniosacral osteopathy treatment helped. Just the tension around my eyes and forehead remains. It is then I remember how in 2010 I explored the possibility of re-training as an osteopath but didn't. I couldn’t work out how to afford 5 years of living in London. I also wasn’t completely sure it was the right path. If I’d taken the job with the British Red Cross and not returned to the marriage, I could have done the degree part-time on weekends. But I wasn’t thinking straight back then, or maybe life just had other plans. Instead, I was living month to month. I couldn’t imagine my future life at all. It was just a felt sense.

2013 – I’m back in Dubai, finally. I had always wanted to come home to work after my Arabic and Persian degree but we weren’t encouraged to do that. Get your experience elsewhere, we were told, and then come back. Dubai wasn't a place for graduates then. Well now I was back and I had high hopes that I was home for good. Only the reason for my return was my parents’ retirement and relocation to the UK. I was now in charge of the family home and dogs, and it was quite the responsibility after a good decade on the move. I had plans for that year, to complete further yoga teacher training and complete postgraduate studies on global health policy. I was a newly certified Health Coach and saw myself teaching Yoga, practicing Health Coaching, and consulting on refugee health for international organisations. It was a neat plan, perhaps the best kind of vision and plan I could create at that time. I had even found work with Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), a medical NGO, in Dubai. But the role was temporary and I wound up back at the UN, this time the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA), making the long commute by car to and from Abu Dhabi each day. After work, I would quickly walk the dogs and race to Karate class. It was almost a life, I very almost made my return to Dubai work out, but I was exhausted from all the driving. It left barely any time for a life and loneliness was setting in hard.

2014 – I left UNOCHA, travelled to Thailand for more coach training, and discovered my great uncle Walter was a prisoner of war held by Japan. The ICRC couldn’t ever visit him as the Japanese didn’t allow them in. He was left tortured so badly he couldn’t father children. He apparently lived a quiet life with my great aunt, intervening in family bouts of violence when they erupted. This news knocked me for six just as a former ICRC colleague from Beirut was arrested and detained in Egypt. Life was swirling and changing. I was also deep into women’s yoga and dabbling in fitness. I was trying to manage my nutrition better. I desperately wanted to earn my second-degree black belt in Karate and my fitness repeatedly let me down. I returned to Dubai, set up my practice, and found my first coaching and consulting clients. Or rather, they found me. It was the start of self-employment and a hard, lonely road to making ends meet. That road has continued to present day, twisting and turning each year.

2015 – I spent 5 months writing my first book, Wild Zen: An Inner Roadmap to Humanity. In that time, I had continued to coach clients but not focused on my business. I was swept up with writing and Karate training, and trying to manage my nutrition. I wasn’t happy in my body or with my fitness levels. Little did I know that this unhappiness would last another decade at least until I finally started sorting it all out. As my annual self-employment visa and licensing fees loomed, I took another temporary job with MSF and returned for a final stint of humanitarian work, this time to Jordan, the Syria-Turkey border, and Northern Iraq. I remember training up a new colleague in a Syrian refugee camp in Irbil, knowing that my time in the field was already over. I felt sad but ok. It was well and truly time to leave but I still had no idea where to go next. Nobody ever tells humanitarians this, that after such meaningful work you can feel absolutely lost.

2016 – I began writing my second book, Cherry Blossom Dojo: The Way of Inner Strength. One of my favourite authors on the Tao Te Ching happened to be a Positive Psychology Coach, and she coached me through the writing of this book. She ended up working with us at the Positive Psychology Academy several years later, inspiring the Hope Scholarship. Of course, I didn’t know all that would come at the time. She was just my incredible writing coach who got my urge and need to write reflectively. I knew in my heart that I wrote to make sense of my life and find clues for where to go next. It was my dad’s worst nightmare I imagine. He is so practical and I am so intuitive. I let my heart lead me to the next place but the trouble with this approach to life hit hard with the reality of making a living. I was giving all my energy to Martial Arts, training in Karate and Judo, and writing. I was lucky enough to attract various consulting contracts with different bodies of the United Nations but there was only so long my past professional reputation could keep me afloat. I was also drawn into Sufism and back to creating and selling my Arabic calligraphy. The more I trained in Martial Arts, the more I created.

2017 – I trained as a self-defence instructor in the UK, pulling the ligaments in my arm during grading. That knocked me out of a Karate competition and unbalanced me in Judo training. I then left a Judo competition with a shoulder impingement. The injury hounded me for months, driving me into a sleep-deprived depression and bout of overeating. When physiotherapy didn’t work, I ended up in a German healer’s office. Whatever she did in holding my head took the pain away, at least enough for me to sleep better and start regaining my sanity. I was painting abstract and my last painting titled "Power Struggle" made me step back. It was dark forces swirling with the light. I decided to stop painting and stop creating, and focus on training. These experiences and realising I couldn’t afford to keep living in Dubai let me to closing the family home of 40 years. I did so with a heavy heart and sense of failure. I had tried so hard to live a life beyond humanitarian work. I had tried so hard to get fit and achieve something in Martial Arts. I had rediscovered my love of swimming. I had returned to the beach. Both of those joys had been taken away with the eczema that etched my body with pain. I was moving again and with nowhere to go except the UK, I took a deep breath and headed into my Fitness Instructor and Personal Trainer course. I tried not to look back all this time but if truth be told, I looked back all the time. And this is how I found myself here, at the cusp of drafting my first journal article for my PhD.

I took a deep breath. Those words stay with me. I took a deep breath and I held it all in, all the experiences, all the traumas, and all the dreams. I haven’t spoken much about myself in these past 8 years in the UK. Who on earth in this part of the Peak District or even my own family could grasp anything of what I've lived? My family members have lived very different lives to me, which isn't unusual with Third Culture Kids. Where I have zig zagged left, right, and centre, they have travelled a straight and predictable line.

I see potentially where the neck and jaw pain emanates from. Not that I am a doctor or trained to diagnose such a thing. It’s a sixth sense that I’ve been holding my breath. I can make up many stories why but the short version is stress and sedentary computer work. Could this be the energy ball the osteopath has been waiting to move?

I release a deep exhale. It’s a sunny day. It’s present day. I’ve done what I thought was impossible. I’ve written these memory vignettes, not for anyone else but for me. I’ve rinsed the facts, at least the summary of them. That summary has connected me to the rest of my life. It is important moving forwards to stay connected to this thread.

Much as I want to know what comes next, I know enough by now to let all this settle. Not so long that I forget but rather, enough to come back to my breath and then see where this spirit of mine - or the life that lives through me - is leading me next.