I Was Killing It at Work.
I Was Dying Everywhere Else.

I want to tell you something I was too afraid to say out loud for a long time.

At the height of what looked like my most successful years in corporate technology, I was falling apart. Not in any way you could see from the outside. My calendar was full, my performance reviews were glowing, and I was the person people called when something needed to get done. I showed up. I delivered. I smiled in the all-hands meetings and took on the extra projects and said yes when I meant no, because that's what high-performers do.

But here's what was actually happening.

I was waking up at 3am and lying there, heart quietly racing about nothing I could name. I was getting through meals without tasting them. I was in conversations — real ones, with people I loved — and feeling like I was watching myself from somewhere outside my own body. I was exhausted in a way that sleep didn't fix. Not tired. Depleted. There's a difference, and I didn't have the vocabulary for it yet.

"I thought the problem was my schedule. It took me years to understand the problem was my nervous system."

I kept waiting for things to slow down so I could catch my breath. The project would wrap, the quarter would end, the busy season would pass. And then I would rest, I told myself. Then I would feel like myself again. But the busy season didn't pass. It just changed shape. And I kept running.

The moment I couldn't ignore anymore

I remember sitting in a glass-walled conference room during a meeting I had called. I was the one who had sent the invite, written the agenda, prepared the slides. And somewhere in the middle of it, I had a thought so quiet and so clear it stopped me cold.

I don't want to be here.

Not in the meeting. Not in the building. Not in the version of my life I had worked so hard to build. I didn't want to blow it up — I wasn't at that point yet. I just felt the sudden, undeniable truth that something had gone deeply wrong between who I was on paper and who I actually was inside. The gap had gotten too wide to keep pretending it wasn't there.

I finished the meeting. I answered the follow-up emails. I went home and made dinner and did all the things. But something had shifted. I couldn't un-feel what I had felt in that room.

What I now understand about burnout that nobody told me

Burnout isn't just being tired. That's the part people get wrong — including me, for a long time. We treat it like a scheduling problem. We book a vacation or sleep in on a Saturday and expect to feel fixed. And when we don't feel fixed, we blame ourselves for not recovering fast enough.

What was actually happening in my body was a nervous system that had been running in survival mode for so long it had forgotten any other setting. Fight, flight, or freeze — on repeat, for years — dressed up in business casual and sitting in conference rooms. My body wasn't burned out on work. It was burned out on the chronic, low-grade state of emergency I had been living in and calling ambition.

"It's not burnout. It's your nervous system asking for help. And it's been asking for a long time."

This is the reframe that changed everything for me. Not because it made the burnout easier — it didn't, at first. But because it moved the conversation from willpower to physiology. From "why can't I just push through this" to "what does my body actually need right now." That shift in language opened a door I didn't know was there.

The road back wasn't linear. It wasn't pretty. And it was worth it.

I want to be honest with you: the path out of where I was didn't look like a 30-day reset or a morning routine or a meditation app. It looked like hard conversations. It looked like learning to sit with discomfort instead of scheduling over it. It looked like yoga — not the performative kind, but the kind where you're lying on the floor in savasana and you finally stop running long enough to feel what's actually there.

It looked like going to an ashram in Goa and having a teacher look at me and say something so simple it broke me open: you cannot pour from a vessel that has never been filled.

It looked like studying Buddhist philosophy in Japan and learning that the goal was never to eliminate suffering — it was to stop adding to it unnecessarily. It looked like sitting in ceremony in Guatemala and asking myself, for maybe the first time, what I actually wanted my life to feel like. Not look like. Feel like.

And slowly — not all at once, not in a straight line — I started to come back to myself.

Why I'm telling you this

I built CorporateYogi because I know how many of you are sitting in that glass-walled conference room right now. Maybe not physically. But you know the feeling I'm describing. The performance is intact. The metrics are good. And something underneath it — something you can't quite put language to yet — is quietly asking you to stop.

I'm not here to tell you to quit your job or sell everything and move to Bali. I'm here to tell you what nobody told me when I was in the thick of it: that what you're feeling isn't weakness. It isn't ingratitude. It isn't a character flaw or a failure of resilience.

It's your nervous system asking for help.

And help is available. You don't have to figure it out alone, and you don't have to wait until things get worse before you start.

"You've spent years becoming who the world needed you to be. This is the work of becoming who you actually are."

That work is the most important thing I've ever done. And it's what I show up to do with every client, every session, every conversation.

If something in this piece felt familiar — if you read a sentence and thought that's me — I'd love to talk. Not a pitch. Just a conversation. The kind where you can be honest about where you actually are.

That's what the discovery call is for. It's free, it's confidential, and it might be the most useful 30 minutes you give yourself this year.