I
n the dim cold light of early January, the post Christmas and
New Year anxiety starts to kick in. My husband and I were
currently short of money but had hatched a plan to move to
the south of France to start a new life in just under two weeks.
We were discussing: (a) banking our giant glass beer bottle of
small change; (b) how to cash in my husband’s (Roman) pension; and
(c) how to partner with Virgin Galatic to do yoga retreats in space. All
foolproof plans!
The fact of the matter was it was all going to be absolutely fine.
But when you are one week and four days away from moving your
entire life, two little boys and cat to another country your brain
starts to do funny things and we started to panic. Fast forward a
week later and our life is strapped to the roof of the car, our cat is in
a box on my lap (weeing all over me already...and we had two days’
travel to go!) and our boys are iPadded up in the back. I am sobbing
into my neighbour’s chest who is trying to hold me at arm’s length
because I am behaving in a slightly deranged way and covering him
with snot.
It felt like the end of the world: we had given up our yoga studio,
Roman’s successful engineering job, my amazing sister and her
family round the corner, and our beautiful little street where we were
best friends with all our neighbours. Instead, we were driving across
Europe to a destination that we had never been to and a house
we had never seen. At that moment it was madness, complete and
utter madness and our family, friends and neighbours waving us off
trying to look positive knew it. But as is always the case, all the best
plans are a bit mad and all the best decisions take a sledge hammer
to your reality which crumbles to make space for a new one. In my
experience anyway!
I’ve done silly things like this in the past. Ski seasons when I hadMAKE
YOUR
SOUL
SING
om spiritom mind
never even seen a mountain; Japan when I didn’t understand a word
of Japanese; Morocco to work on a surf retreat when I’d never caught
a wave. But with kids it’s a different ball game; you can’t mess up.
Let me tell you a bit about how we came to this moment of being
covered in cat wee, watching my husband quietly freak out next to
me whilst the kids are shouting in the back “mummy and daddy are
a little bit mental” as we drive onto a dark and foreboding looking
ferry in the middle of the night.Make your soul sing
If I ask you to list all the things that make your soul sing and all the
things that you do in your everyday life, how many of them match?
I can tell you that out of a list of 10 soul ‘singers’ only about two
of mine matched last year. I yearned for sunshine, bright stars, a
big moon to follow, to feel relaxed and happy with my family out in
nature, to try something new each day, to work on what I wanted to
work on and not what I felt I should. To create a life that felt like a
holiday but still working and earning enough money to live on. My
husband and I were burnt out. We’d met six years ago and in that
time we’d been busy. Everyone told us we needed to slow down,
relax a little and stop working so hard. But during those six years we
had a burning desire to create magic. We started with a baby, we
opened a yoga studio, we had another baby and we put on the first
Soul Circus festival (six-week-old baby Niko strapped to my chest
as I ran round a field feeling more crazy and alive than I ever had
before!). The problem was that we had taken on way too much and
it was making us stressed and unhappy. Quality time together as a
family was rare and when it happened we were never truly relaxed,
knowing that the next day it was back to the office, back to the
money worries, back to the feeling of sinking. I persisted with myom mind
When you stop ‘doing’ yoga and
start doing life: Ella Wroath tells
the story of how she uprooted
her family to France in pursuit
of a happier, more fulfilling
work-life balance