Before I began teaching yoga, I knew what it was like to move through corporate life while carrying more stress than I realised.

Looking back, what stays with me is not only what I was thinking during those periods, but what my body was quietly doing alongside me. The shoulders that had crept upwards. The breath I had barely noticed. The strange tiredness that seemed to arrive before the working day was over.

I find the moment between meetings revealing. You click “Leave”, open the next invitation and realise there has barely been a pause. The calendar tells you where to be; it says very little about how you arrive. For anyone exploring breathwork in Singapore, I would begin here: with the breathing that accompanies the ordinary rush of a working day.

If you arrange wellbeing sessions for colleagues, you may recognise this pattern in your own diary.

Being new at something feels different when the person on the mat beside you was leading the 9 a.m. meeting.

At your desk, you know the rules. In a yoga group class, you may suddenly be wondering where to put your shoes, whether everyone else knows the poses, and what happens if your body simply says, “not today”. When I hold a practice, I return to one simple idea: people should not have to perform wellbeing.

For me, rest is not simply a gap in the diary. In The pause between pain and peace, I wrote about spending three weeks receiving guidance rather than holding space for others, with ocean air, music and time to be cared for. That experience sits behind a question I bring to restorative yoga: could we let ourselves receive support while life is still unfinished?

For me, a pause is not the same as having nothing to say. It is a chance to hear what is about to speak: the concern itself, or the rush to defend against it. Before teaching yoga, I knew the strain of corporate life first-hand; yoga and mindfulness became part of learning to listen to myself again.

That is the possibility I want to explore through yoga for stress management: a little more choice in a moment that seems to demand an immediate response.