People ask me all the time. Friends, mostly, with their heads tilted, half laughing. Why do you do it so much? Why do you love it? Why this, out of everything you could have chosen?
I never quite know how to answer in one line, because the honest answer is that this work gave me myself back.
Let me take you to the moment I knew. It was week 2 of studying the science of how the mind and the body actually speak to each other. Nothing dramatic happened. There was no lightning. What happened was quieter than that, and somehow bigger. The noise in my head started to soften. That relentless inner voice, the one that narrates and worries and second-guesses and runs the same worn stories on a loop, the one I now think of as the monkey mind, began to slow down. For the first time in years, I felt calm. Not numb, not switched off. Calm. A kind of relaxation I had genuinely forgotten was available to me.
There is an old observation about this voice, and it is so simple it takes a moment to land. If you can hear the voice in your head, then you are not the voice. You are the one listening to it. Most of us live our whole lives fused to that inner narration, believing it is who we are. That week, for the first time, I felt the gap open up. I could hear the voice, and I could tell that I was the one sitting quietly behind it, watching. That gap is where the peace lives.
What the gap is, in plainer terms
The gap is not a mood and it is not a trick of concentration. It is the difference between being in the weather and being the sky the weather is happening in.
The gap is the half inch of space where you hear the thought and do not have to obey it. That is all. It sounds small written down. It changes everything about how a day goes.
So when people ask me why I do it, this is the truest thing I can say. I feel like I come home. I truly do. My mind slows, the noise falls away, and I arrive somewhere spacious inside myself where everything feels possible. From that place I become solution focused instead of stuck. I feel more joyful. More peaceful. More expansive, like the walls have moved out and there is suddenly room to breathe. And the more I have practised, the more my whole reality has shifted around me.
How it shows up in an ordinary week
Not as serenity. That is the part worth saying out loud, because the pictures suggest otherwise.
It shows up as a 2 second pause before I answer a message that has annoyed me. As noticing that I am tired at 3 in the afternoon rather than at 11 at night. As getting to the end of a hard conversation without having said the sharp thing I would have said 10 years ago.
It shows up as being able to be with somebody who is upset without needing to fix them, which is harder than it sounds and is most of the work.
Here is what I have come to understand. So much of what we call reality is really the belief system running underneath it. The old stories, the limiting patterns, the things we decided about ourselves long ago and never questioned. They are the impressions we have stored and never let move through us, and our reactions in the present are so often just the past asking to finally be released. When I do this work, my inner guidance system starts to settle and feel safe, and from that safety the old patterns can loosen. New beliefs can form. This is not wishful thinking, and it is not woo. Give the body the felt sense of safety and it stops working so hard to protect you.
What people try first
Almost everybody starts with understanding. You read, you work out what happened to you, you can explain your own patterns fluently to anybody who asks.
Understanding is worth having and it is not the thing. You can know exactly why your chest tightens and have it tighten anyway, on schedule, every time that particular tone of voice arrives in the room.
The second thing people try is discipline. More effort, better routines, a stricter version of themselves. That works until the week it is needed most, and then it does not.
You cannot think your way out of something the body is doing. The body has to be shown, slowly and repeatedly, that it is not in the situation it was in.
That is the part that still moves me, if I am honest. Because it means none of us are fixed. None of us are finished. The capacity to come home to ourselves and build something new is not reserved for a lucky few. It is in all of us. That is the thing I get emotional about. That is the thing I feel nervous and excited to keep saying out loud.
I did not arrive here from a textbook. I arrived here from living it. 10 years of coming back to this work, again and again, on the good days and the hard ones. 10 years of showing up, committing, sitting with the shaking and letting the body release what it had been holding, and watching my own inner world reorganise itself in real time. When you have felt your own signal system come back online, you teach differently. You are not describing the map. You have walked the terrain.
What I am trained in, and why that is only half of it
Trained in TRE, Brainspotting, IFS and breathwork. That is the honest list and it is deliberately short.
The training matters because this work asks for depth and care, and because somebody sitting in front of you deserves more than enthusiasm. It is not the reason I do it.
The price of freedom is your willingness to feel what is leaving as it leaves. In every moment there is a choice, to close down and store the pain, or to soften and let it pass through. I have made that choice, over and over, in my own life. And the reward has been enormous. My life genuinely changed. Not because my circumstances all fell into place, but because I stopped letting my old reactions run the show.
What to notice, if you want to start where you are
Notice the voice. Not what it says, just that it is talking. 3 times today, catch it mid sentence.
Notice where it lives in your body when it gets loud. Jaw, throat, chest, stomach. Most people have 1 reliable place.
Notice what happens if you do nothing about it for 30 seconds. Not fix it, not breathe it away. Just let it be there and keep sitting in the chair.
None of that requires belief, a cushion or a free weekend. It requires you to be slightly more interested in what is happening than in making it stop.
So why do I do it so much? Why do I love it? Because I know, from the inside, that this is available to everyone. That we can settle the signal, come home to ourselves, and start creating lives where we serve up our best selves and actually live them. That, to me, is the work of a lifetime, and I feel lucky beyond words to get to share it.
More like this
TRE, Brainspotting and Flash EMDR, what they actually are, in plain language.
From Portobello Road to a houseboat, the version nobody published.
If something in this has landed, and you feel ready to begin, not just to understand it but to feel it, that is where Regulated comes in. It is the first practice I offer, a gentle way to start settling your own signal and coming back to yourself. You pay what you feel it is worth, because I never wanted the first step home to sit behind a price. If you want it, write to me at anna@annalouoflondon.com or message me on WhatsApp.
Anna x
If you want the full version of this rather than a taste of it, The Deep Return is the session for it. 90 minutes, one to one and private, online or in person at The Hare and the Moon in Twickenham on a Tuesday between 10am and 1.30pm. Book a Tuesday.