Before the Practice Found Me
The floor, the gym, the breath—all before I understood what I was really running from.
Last week
Those first nights in Halifax, I didn’t even have a bed.
I crashed on the floor.
Money was tight—just enough to cover rent for a few months, if that.
Conor had a spare bed at his family’s place outside the city.
Once we had time, we made a day trip to go get it.
That’s when I saw rural Nova Scotia for the first time
Musquodoboit Harbour.
Quiet. Vast.
Something in it softened me.
In those early days, I spent time helping out on the family land.
Clearing brush, hauling junk, whatever was needed.
Simple work and grounding.
I knew I needed income.
Signed up with a temp agency, and they placed me in a warehouse.
Not glamorous, but steady enough that they offered me full-time.
Right across from the warehouse?
A gym.
And that gym saved me in a way.
East Coast Fitness.
Only the second gym I’d ever stepped into—
but this time, I was walking in alone.
For a while, I had a great training partner.
I still remember what he taught me.
I lifted. Sweated. Got stronger.
A rhythm was forming:
Work. Train. Cheap rent. Decent food. Great beer.
From the outside, it might’ve looked like I was settling in.
But inside?
I was drifting.
Homesick. Emotionally all over the place.
Forty-hour workweeks weren’t built for how my brain moves.
Still I kept training.
And during that time, I stumbled into yoga.
By accident, like most good things.
A random VHS Conor gave me.
1980s style—big socks, unitards, soft-spoken cues.
But it hooked me.
Breath.
Movement.
Space.
I started doing it regularly before workouts.
Didn’t call it a “practice,” but it gave me relief.
Some of those asanas stayed with me. I’d come back to them on the hard days.
For the first time since I was a kid,
I felt something quiet in my body.
Of course, that quiet didn’t last.
Eventually, I found the wild ones.
Found the shows.
Found the chaos.
I came to Nova Scotia to escape the party
but the party just intensified.
And so did I.
I left Toronto running.
I arrived in Halifax searching.
That feeling?
Now I know
I wasn’t just running away from the city.
I was running away from myself.
-Red Shanti
This hit me so profoundly. The way you trace the physical spaces, warehouses, gyms, and rural roads to the inner journey is so beautifully done. Thank you for sharing this chapter of your story with such raw honesty.
To Red, from the place between fire and function –
re: “it’s not burnout. it’s heartbreak”
This landed in the chest, not just the mind.
Because you’re right: it’s not burnout, not really. It’s not about workload or balance or even pace. It’s grief. Repeated grief. Grief with no funeral and no acknowledgement. The heartbreak of being in systems that extract your best and spit out your essence. Of giving and giving and watching meaning haemorrhage in silence while others clap you for resilience.
Your piece echoes the raw pulse that underpins so much of my own work—particularly the Liturgy of the Burnt Out series. There, we explore what happens after the Instagrammable collapse. After the wellness retreat. After the out-of-office auto-reply. The slow resurrection of people who were never supposed to break, but did. Or didn’t—but bled anyway.
What you name is the invisible fracture. The betrayal of putting your soul into the work and then being told you’re too much for caring. I’ve lived that. Built whole frameworks to survive it. And still, your words shook something loose.
This isn’t a call to quit. It’s a call to remember that what’s breaking is not you. It’s the conditions. The values. The expectations you were never meant to carry.
Thank you for lighting a signal fire for those of us still walking through it.
— Rob
Liturgy of the Burnt Out | postc4p.substack.com