And relax...

"So Katy, what do you do to relax?"

It was September 2007 and we were sitting in the dark outside a pub by the river in Gravesend. Three months had passed since the ex announced that he wanted to split up and my daughter and I had moved out of the barn a few weeks previously. Until then I'd had only the vaguest of notions of what shell shock might feel like. Now, though, I knew. Or at least I knew that there was probably a name for the numbness, the gripping crushing sensation that had grabbed me and sucked all of the air out of my body, the cartwheeling spinning nauseating disorientating sense of disassociation.

I lit a cigarette, aware of David and Liz peering at me in the half light from the other side of the wooden bench. The question hung in the air above our heads along with the lazy streams of my exhaled smoke. "What do I do to relax?" I repeated Liz's enquiry, my short-circuited brain trying hard to grasp the words and the meaning contained within them. The conversations drifting from other tables, the thudding of the remains of my heart and the thrum of the remains of the day's heat vibrated between us as I tried to think. Finally, I answered truthfully. "Nothing. I don't do relax".

I was shocked by my own revelation. Over the months that followed I reflected on that statement over and over again as I slowly started to draw the shattered parts of my psyche back together. There were some very dark days indeed during that time, a time that seemed at once both endless and fleeting. And yet, although moving imperceptibly like a glacier, my personal threads did start to re-join.

Liz and I went away to stay for a few days in a beautiful spa hotel to celebrate the passing away of the fiendish year that was 2007. We sat one evening in the hotel lobby and wrote lists in our notebooks: lists of people or things to be grateful for; lists of things that we wished to let go of; lists of things that we planned to do over the coming twelve months. Then we read them to each other, as if by speaking the private words we had written out loud we would make a real pact with each other and the world to make them so. Of the three lists, it was perhaps the third one - the looking ahead one - that was most significant. In one way and another, most of the items on my list were about learning how to relax - accepting that I needed to actively work on introducing some balance.

I have never recognised that I needed anything quite so much in my life and I committed myself to this resolution with a vengeance. In doing so, I have also learned that I am somebody who relaxes by 'doing things'. Since then, I have become a regular attender at classes at the sports centre four or five times a week; learned to scuba dive; taken up riding lessons (albeit sporadically) again after a quarter of century; walked the dog here there and everywhere; and a hundred and one other things beside. Of all the classes I tried and took part in at the sports centre, it was yoga that appealed to me most. I don't know why; it just grabbed and took hold of me in a way I cannot explain.

Yesterday was the first full day of my Yoga Foundation course. It's the first step on my way to (hopefully, possibly, eventually) becoming a yoga teacher. That final goal is still perhaps three or four years away at the moment; the foundation course the building block for what will follow. I enjoyed the first session enormously, even though at the same time I recognise that I really am still very much a beginner on the nursery slopes.

It is funny that you don't recognise life changing events at the time. No fanfare, no drum roll, no swishing of big red velvet curtains to announce their arrival. But Liz's question sitting outside the pub that night 18 months ago or so completely changed my life.