In 2011, I walked out of a hospital on the morning I was supposed to have surgery.

A scan had revealed a large uterine fibroid and, after a short consultation, I had been placed on a waiting list for an operation. Sitting in the hospital that morning, I realised I was about to undergo surgery without properly understanding why, what my alternatives were, or how I actually felt about it.

So I left.

That decision wasn’t about rejecting medicine, and I would never suggest anyone else should make the same choice. What mattered was the realisation that I had stopped paying attention to my own experience and handed over decisions about my health without feeling that I was genuinely participating in them.

That moment sent me down a long path of study. I trained in clinical aromatherapy, women’s health, menopause, massage, Chinese medicine and somatic approaches to trauma. I remain an obsessive student - the Gemini in me is never going to stop.

And I found qigong.

Qigong changed much more for me than how I moved or breathed. It changed how I understood my place in the world.

The more I practised, the harder it became to experience myself as something separate from everything around me. We are constantly exchanging with the world - air, food, water, warmth, microbes, sensation, relationship. We affect and are affected by the environments we live within. None of us exists on our own.

That understanding gradually changed what practice meant to me - and then the genocide in Gaza happened.

I had been politically engaged when I was younger, but somewhere among work, business, mortgages and everyday life, that part of me had receded. Gaza made looking away feel impossible. It also brought me back to the question of our responsibility for the world we participate in creating.

Because we are not just shaped by the world around us. We also shape it - through what we accept, what we question, where we put our attention, how we use our resources, how we treat one another and what we are willing to act on.

That has changed how I understand qigong too.

I’m not interested in practice as a way of becoming so calm that nothing affects us. I’m interested in what happens when becoming more present to ourselves also makes us more present to everything else.