My Story

At it's root, every human story explores the battle between the light and dark within. My story is no different...

Are we all being sold a lie?

I started my career as a journalist writing entertainment news at Ok! Magazine and Hong Kong Tatler. I had a blast going to fancy parties and interviewing celebrities but somewhere along the way I got disillusioned. I was a child of the 80s and I’d grown up believing the route to happiness was wealth, external success, fame and glory. I thought all those shiny, beautiful people in the glossy magazines would be deeply content. Once I worked for those glossy magazines, I discovered the opposite was true. Time and again, I found myself interviewing someone who was meant to be living a life we all wanted and noticing that this person was feeling lonely, trapped and sad. I saw the pain behind the canned media responses, the fake smiles and the ridiculous Diva-like behaviour. I found myself reporting on one celebrity breakdown after another.

I’m a journalist in spirit as well as in profession. If I find a curiosity in life I want to understand it. So I started to study psychology, mental health and spirituality in a quest to understand exactly what it is that makes us humans happy (you can check out some of my favourite books here). Along the way, I also experienced my own inspiration and struggles. I launched and sold a content marketing business, I had three babies and I watched someone I loved die slowly and painfully from cancer. As life threw it’s ups and downs at me, I tried to apply all the stuff I’d read in my books to my life and I realised just how challenging putting theory into practice really is.

The Five-Thousand-Year-Old Question

Ultimately, my search to understand human nature led me to yoga. I was lucky enough to meet several amazing yoga and spiritual teachers and I noticed they approached life differently. They weren’t on a desperate quest to “be rich, revered and awesome,” they were simply enjoying the ride and as a result, they seemed a lot happier than those rich and famous people I’d interviewed in my twenties. So that got me thinking… are we all being sold a lie? Instead of grasping for riches and Instagram likes, is there another path to happiness?

When I took my yoga teacher training course, I realised that my question was not new - yogis had been pondering this very topic for over 5,000 years and they had developed a highly practical, highly effective path to mental and physical happiness through yoga. This study sent me down a rabbit hole reading about many different traditions and belief systems across the world. I was blown away to discover that at their roots, most of the ancient spiritual traditions - from the Yogis of India to the Sufis of the Middle East to the Mayans of Central America - all unpicked human nature in the same way. They all noticed that we are made up of light and dark and every human story is a tale of the battle between this light and dark.

This topic has inspired many stories throughout history (from Star Wars to the Bhagavad Gita), including my own novel, The Mayflies are Gathering. Mayflies is about a virus that causes its victims to hear dark voices in their heads and feel an uncontrollable urge for violence. In this novel, I explore what the world would be like if we all heard our shadows as real personalities, how this would force us to battle our darker sides head on.

Since I was writing a fast-paced adventure story, there was only so much of the theory I was able to put into the novel so what I learned along the way has now found its way into themes for my yoga classes and retreats and this blog.

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