From Exhaustion to Gratitude: Healing My Story With Squash

This week, a deep wave of healing rose to the surface. It brought with it memories of my squash career, memories I hadn’t wanted to revisit for a long time. For years, I carried heaviness around the way it ended. The final few years were tough, physically, mentally, and emotionally. I was exhausted. The sport I had once loved with every cell of my being had begun to feel like a burden.

When I retired, I told myself I was done. I couldn’t bring myself to exercise again. The thought of moving my body in that same driven way made me recoil. What once gave me life had become the thing I resisted most. For the past six years, movement hasn’t brought me happiness. It stirred emotions of loss, thoughts that I wasn’t as good as I once was, that I couldn’t train like I used to. Beneath it all sat deep resistance, and often, tears of victimhood.

But something shifted this week.

Remembering the Love Beneath the Layers

As I looked through old photos, the moments of fierce focus, of representing Australia on the world stage. I saw a version of myself I had almost forgotten. The woman in those pictures wasn’t broken. She was strong, determined, and full of purpose.

In those images, I could feel what I used to feel: the rush of stepping onto the court, the electricity of the crowd, the thrill of testing my limits. I remembered that I truly loved this game. I loved the discipline, the structure, the challenge, and the grace of it all.

For 17 years, squash was my entire life. I lived and breathed it. I trained with the Australian Institute of Sport, traveled to over 20 countries, and represented Australia with pride on the Pro Tour and at the Commonwealth Games. Every morning began with purpose. Every sacrifice was made for a dream I believed in wholeheartedly.

In Action against Franziska Hennes, of Germany at the Women's World Team Squash Championships in 2014. Photo: Getty Images

The Unseen Side of Greatness

Of course, there was another side, the one few ever see. Behind the medals, the uniforms, and the world travel were years of relentless pushing. My mind and body had become machines for performance, and somewhere in that process, my spirit became weary.

When I think back now, I can see that those difficult years weren’t a failure, they were part of my soul’s preparation. Squash was never meant to break me. It was meant to shape me. It taught me the discipline, resilience, and endurance that I now bring into every area of my life especially my work as an energy practitioner and educator.

It showed me how energy flows through focus, emotion, and intention. It taught me that consistency and devotion build strength, not just in the body, but in the energy field that surrounds and animates us. And it taught me what it means to follow something with my whole heart.

Healing the Relationship

The healing I’ve done this week has helped me rewrite my relationship with sport and with my own body. I realised that the exhaustion wasn’t caused by squash itself. It came from the energy I was in at the time, pushing, striving, chasing worth through performance.

Now, I understand that movement can be sacred again. I can exercise not from force, but from joy. I can move my body to express gratitude, not to prove something.

When I see those photos now, I no longer feel resentment. I see a young woman who gave everything she had and in doing so, laid the foundation for the woman I am today.

Competing against compatriots Kasey Brown & Donna Urquhart during the Women's Squash doubles bronze medal match in New Delhi 2010 Commonwealth Games. Photo: Getty Images

Integration: From the Court to the Energy Field

My years on the court were my first initiation into understanding energy. Though I didn’t realise it then, I was learning how vibration, thought, and emotion shape outcomes. I was learning how energy directs focus, how it shifts under pressure, and how balance not force creates true flow.

That understanding is what I now share in my work today: teaching others the importance of energy health and how energy shapes our physical, emotional, and spiritual existence.

Squash was never the end of my story. It was the beginning of my becoming.

It gave me the foundation for everything I now teach the awareness that our energy field holds our patterns, our potential, and our purpose. What I once applied through athletic discipline, I now share as tools for energetic alignment, presence, and remembrance.

Marcus beside me, his belief never wavered, even when mine did. He saw the strength in me I had forgotten.

Today, I honor that girl with the racquet, the one who gave her whole heart to something bigger than herself. I no longer carry hate or exhaustion when I think of squash. I carry gratitude.

Gratitude for the places it took me. Gratitude for the lessons it taught me. Gratitude for the strength it helped me uncover.

Because now I see it clearly: every moment on that court was leading me here, to this deeper understanding of energy, life, and the power that flows through us all.

Competing against Nour El Sherbini of Egypt during the quarterfinals of the Women's World Team Squash Championships 2014 in Niagara on the Lake in Ontario, Canada