Where It All Began: The Story Behind My 300-Hour Yoga Teacher Training
Jade Canavan · Inner Lifetime, Lincoln · www.innerlifetime.com
A note before we begin: this one isn’t for the faint-hearted. It touches on trauma — including childhood abuse, sexual assault, narcissistic abuse and fear of violence — as well as PMDD and some very low moments, some of which I have never written about before. I don’t go into graphic detail about any of it. That isn’t what this piece is for. But I do name it, because it’s part of my story and part of why I’m writing. Please read gently, and step away whenever you need to. 🤍
Very soon, I begin my 300-hour yoga teacher training — and I’m going to write about it as I go. You’ll find that diary in Walking In With Open Eyes.
But before I can tell you about walking in with open eyes, I want to tell you where I’m walking in from. Because so much of what this training is likely to stir up has roots that go back a very long way.
This is that story. Some of it I have never shared before. It isn’t neat, and it isn’t easy — but it’s mine, and this time, I’m telling it on my own terms.
Why this post stands on its own. I’ve deliberately kept the heaviest parts of my story here, separate from the training diary, so that you can choose whether to read them. It’s long, and it isn’t light — and that’s OK. You don’t have to read it to come along with me.
If you’re mainly here to follow my 300-hour journey, you’re very welcome to skip straight to the bottom and sign up for The 300-Hour Diaries. I won’t be sending every diary update to my whole mailing list — I don’t want to bombard you — so only the people who sign up will get each instalment.
Where it all began
The more I practise yoga, and the more I live this life, the deeper I go — exploring not just why I feel the way I do, but what I’m actually feeling. Deciphering what it feels like. What emotion it is, or whether it’s several layered on top of each other. And where I feel it in my body. So much of it, I’ve realised, goes right back to the beginning.
I’m one of six children. Today, I don’t have a relationship with any of my siblings, other than the occasional text with one of my sisters — or with my parents.
I disowned my dad many years ago, because of who he is. With my mum, it’s a much sadder separation. We simply don’t have anything in common, and there’s nothing we can find to talk about to build common ground — trust me, I’ve tried. Conversations tend to end with me being told I’m talking waffle, and they usually get more detached from there. But she has her reasons, and I hold no ill feeling towards her. She is on her own journey — as are all of my family. Yoga helped me see that.
My dad was incredibly abusive. A violent drunk, and a narcissist. He cheated on my mum over and over again, he was violent towards her, and he controlled her — financially, emotionally and physically. My siblings and I, all very close in age, grew up in the middle of that chaos.
A crack round the face was normal in our house — more than once. Some of us got it worse than others. Arguably, I got it lighter than some of my siblings, because I was seen as the “favourite”.
But a six-foot-four man with that temperament, who used his size, his temper and his strength to punish us, was scary — and yet it became my normal. He had been beaten far more severely as a child than we ever were — that was his conditioning. I don’t think he is a very good person. But I do understand how he became who he is.
And here’s the confusing part. He was also the parent we experienced physical love from. A kiss. A hug. The same man who frightened us was the one who held us.
Maybe that’s why it hit him so hard when I turned against him. I was fifteen, and it was Valentine’s Day — I remember it very clearly. (Funny how I have a handful of super-vivid memories, and almost everything else is a blank.) He was hitting my mum, and I jumped in between them, screaming at him to leave her alone. I told him he was a bad person.
Something in me snapped that day. No more being bullied — for my mum, or for us. No more sitting by and doing nothing. It was probably one of the first awakenings I ever had, and I was changed forever after that day. I think this is where my ability to walk away from toxic relationships comes from - I remember this day and while its always difficult, I see how my life could turn out if I don't do it.
They split up — and then, of course, got back together four months later. I was told to either deal with it or move out.
I simply stopped talking to him while having to live in the same house as him. And he couldn’t cope, so he lashed out at me in the cruellest way he could. He made it very clear that I was the problem. And he always had a way of finding our weak spots, so he used mine: comments about how I had no boobs — my biggest insecurity as a teenage girl, and he knew it. I think that’s where the feeling that my body wasn’t good enough as it was really took root. (For the record, I had my boobs done at 30. One of the best things I’ve ever done, and for all the right reasons.)
Looking back, I think he was hurting. Every time I wouldn’t look at him, maybe he was forced to look inward and remember why. And he couldn’t cope with that. Projection at its finest.
On top of that, I was traumatised by men, and not at all interested in relationships, because commitment terrified me. I didn’t know any of this at the time, of course. But in hindsight I can see it, and understand it, so clearly.
My mum gave me an ultimatum too. She apologised, years later, and I don’t resent her for it. I get it. She had six children, she was doing her best, and I was making it very difficult to pretend everything was OK — or to play down how toxic and unhealthy the entire family dynamic was.
But there was no going back for me. Not long after, I moved out and went to live with a friend. Honestly, it’s all a big, mad blur.
Years later, I stepped away from the rest of my family too, after a long time of trying to do the right thing and always coming out as the bad guy. There were things being enabled by other members of my family that I couldn’t sit by and watch. I couldn’t change them. I couldn’t help them. So I walked away.
I can see now that all of this is probably how I ended up in relationships with the same pattern. Which annoys me, if I’m honest — because I deliberately never went for the kind of man my dad was. No “bad boys” for me. And yet along the way I discovered there are many, many, many shades of bad.
So much of how I related to myself, to my friends and to my partners comes from that time. Not choosing myself — not even knowing that I could. And a nervous system that was dysregulated for years, because chaos was all it had ever known.
Because chaos was my normal, I just thought I was a resilient person. For years, friends would say, “Jade, I don’t know how you cope.” But it’s all relative. We all struggle with things, and we all react differently to different situations. I thought I was simply resilient. It turns out it was all just brewing within.
I don’t hold bad feelings towards either of my parents now. I believe they both did their best with what they had. There is compassion for both of them — and compassion for me, which is exactly why I walked away. But not speaking to my family — not really feeling like I have one — does still affect me. And it has taken me time to admit that to myself. The isolation of not having them around in my low moments. Of not having that unconditional love we are all told we should have from family, and quietly grieving it.
I don’t let it hold me down, though, and I won’t let it turn into resentment. Instead, I choose to give my daughter the freedom, the respect and the choices I never had. And honestly, when she’s doing her teenage thing and driving me nuts, I really have to work on not lashing out with the “do you know how lucky you are?” comments, or “gosh, when I was your age…” Because that is my stuff, and it has no place being projected onto her. I think maybe most parents do some version of this — carrying something from our own upbringing that we decide to do differently.
The one I’ve never written about
There is something I have never shared in a blog before. I wasn’t ready. I am now.
I have been sexually assaulted. Twice.
I want to be clear that this isn’t connected to my childhood or my family. Both happened later, and separately.
The first time, I was doing my A levels (aged 17). Not long afterwards, I left school before finishing them.... i was a drop out. I told everyone it was for other reasons — and there were other reasons, real ones (family chaos ones), which made the story very easy for my friends to believe. Easy for me to believe, too.
The second time, I was in my mid-twenties, not long after I had left my daughter’s dad.
Both assaults were very different — and that difference has taken time to unpack and process. I had no guidance. I just went out into the world and learnt things the hard way — and I know I’m not alone in that. Experience has been my greatest teacher, and it still is. In both situations, I can recognise now that I was lost, craving connection, and very vulnerable.
Meeting certain people. Drinking. Trusting far too easily, and ending up in those situations. All of that came from my lack of awareness, my naivety — and, I think, a deep need to live, to connect, to find joy, to have fun.
And I forgive myself for that.
I want to be careful with my words here, for my own sake and for anyone reading who recognises themselves in this. How I got into those circumstances came down to my background, and where that left me as a person — it influenced certain decisions that resulted in me being there. What happened to me while I was in those situations is NOT on me. It has taken me a very long time to be able to hold both of those truths at once.
And here is the part that still takes my breath away. My body suppressed both of them. Not avoided, not pushed to the back of my mind — gone. For years.
Then, in 2022, I was off work sick with burnout, and something began to loosen. The memory from my mid-twenties came back first. A few months later, during my 200-hour training, I remembered the earlier one. Both hit me like a ton of bricks. I broke down, and I felt all of it — so much of it that I have spent the four years since unpacking and processing it.
These aren’t things you talk about once and release into the ether. I could feel the trauma stored in my body, and that’s what I continue to work on — slowly, gently, with a lot of self-compassion.
Our bodies and minds are so clever in the ways they try to protect us. They held this for me until I was ready to hold it myself. And I love my body for that. What an exceptional thing to do for me. I believe it unravelled exactly when it was meant to.
Over the years I’ve freed myself from the shame of plenty of things. Mistakes. Reckless decisions. The cringe-worthy moments we all have. This one is bigger. But hiding it away isn’t something I want to do anymore. I want to put down the shame and the heaviness — and I think part of putting it down is saying it out loud.
I have also found real comfort and peace in believing there is a reason for all of it. Because I get pain. I get discomfort. I understand trauma in my own way, and all the other dark corners we so often keep hidden. I don’t think I could hold space for other people the way I do if I hadn’t sat in those corners myself.
And because I’ve sat in those corners, I can feel so much joy and gratitude for the beauty in life, too. When things get a little heavy, I’m able to reframe — to look at the situation in a more balanced way, and to lean on gratitude, on the beauty around me, and on all the things I do have.
How I got there came down to my experiences. What happened to me was not for me to carry.
Not a dickhead. A predator.
Sadly, these revelations came up while I was in a relationship with a man I will simply call the predator. Because that is what he is. I had moved to away from my home to start a life with him.
When I finally found the courage to open up to him, it was the first time I had ever said it out loud — not only to him, but to myself. If I ever said it out loud when I was younger, I don’t remember.
And he betrayed my trust almost instantly. He didn’t just ring one friend. He rang several “friends” — people who weren’t really friends at all, just men he had met years before and barely knew — to try to track down one of the men who had assaulted me.
I think his ego saw it as an opportunity. A reason to reconnect, and to come across as the big man. The protective man. The one capable of getting justice for me.
Then he told my close friends — people who didn’t even know — and just like that, it was all out. Something I had only just found the words for myself was suddenly no longer mine to share.
I think that’s why it has taken me so long to be able to touch on this. It was released into the world on someone else’s terms. This time, it’s on mine. And even writing this, I can feel something lifting.
Over the last few years I have also spoken to so many people who have experienced something similar, and it has saddened me to realise how common this actually is. Holding it in. Storing it within. And just getting on.
None of it was about me. He didn’t break my trust to protect me. He broke it to feed his own ego.
And I forgave him. I shouldn’t have — or rather, I should have recognised it for the red flag it was. But he was very convincing. He cried. He was gutted. He was so sorry.
Then, as narcissists do, he made it about him. We ended up in therapy together — for the impact my story had had on him. I sat in those sessions, helping him deal with what had happened to me. Writing that down now, it’s madness.
Eventually, I did get to the point in one of those sessions where I said: hang on. What is going on here? Why are we talking about this for you, when this happened to me? That was when the tables started to turn. I was waking up — and he didn’t like it.
We never spoke about how I felt. He wasn’t interested. He needed me to help him get over it. And it kind of ruined therapy on the subject for me for a long time — I struggled to talk, or even think, about it without getting cross, because it reminded me of his needs rather than mine. And thinking about him came with a whole host of emotions and regrets.
There was no room to process any of it properly while I was with him. But I have spent much of the last two years — while building up the Newark Road studio, and settling into a new home from scratch — doing exactly that. And I feel good about where I am with it. I wouldn’t be writing about it to you if I didn’t.
It’s also why my immune system was so weak during that time. It wasn’t just the immediate devastation of leaving a relationship — which is painful, whatever the circumstances. It was the aftermath: the ongoing betrayal and the lies that followed, starting from scratch both personally and in business, and, beneath it all, the trauma from the assaults. If there was a bug going round, I got it. It felt like one thing after another. I had to cancel classes (this was before I had other teachers to help with cover), and on top of that came the guilt of cancelling — of prioritising my health. A vicious cycle of big emotions.
So it isn’t only the assaults themselves. It’s the pattern I have had to face since: people-pleasing. Not speaking my truth. Not feeling like I could take up the space to do so. Being the perfect target for abusers. I haven’t changed who I am — and while I was a prime target, and probably still am, I am much more aware now. I sit with emotions, situations and experiences, and I reflect. The more uncomfortable they are, the more important I think it is to sit with them, so that I don’t see things through rose-tinted glasses, or in a way that distracts me from the truth. That’s a big one.
I know the word narcissist gets thrown around a lot these days. There’s a joke I once heard — ask any woman, and 100% of her ex-boyfriends are narcissists. I get why that’s funny… although it also saddens me, because there is a big difference between somebody who is a bit of a “dick” and living with a narcissist. Huge. So I’m not talking about somebody who is unkind. I’m not talking about a selfish ex, or someone who was emotionally unavailable. I’m talking about a predator. Someone who seeks out people like me — trusting, maybe a little “damaged” in his eyes — and dangles a carrot.
And I fell for the carrot.
I hoped for it to be something so badly that I believed it far too easily, because my heart craved it so much. Craved the love, the future and the security. Even when all the signs over the time we spent together became increasingly obvious that it wasn’t love. The need for it, and the future that had been painted for me, simply overwrote the reality in front of me. I was also going through burnout at the time, and I do factor that in. I didn’t have much left in me to see clearly. In hindsight, the textbook signs were all there. And I am so grateful for the beautiful friends — two in particular — who helped me see it when I couldn’t see it for myself.
The more I learn about narcissistic abuse, the more I understand that it often stems from the person’s own needs not being met when they were young, or from their own internal struggles — and that helps me practise compassion. I still don’t know whether a narcissist does these things consciously or unconsciously, but I suspect it leans more towards the unconscious, because their own shadows are too much to face.
The ultimate test
By the time I left him, I had already given up so much — my corporate career, my friends, my home town. Almost everything familiar. I had even sent all my money over to him, towards our life together. (I know, I know — what a numpty. But hey ho. Back to that whole learning-from-experience thing!) I did all of this because he made me feel safe to, I had no idea it was all to isolate me, to control me, and paid the price, quite literally towards the end for being so trusting.
So walking away from him became the ultimate test. Was I really willing to live authentically? Was I really willing to let go of the material things? Was I really going to learn from my past, and start taking action to prioritise me and my needs over those of others?
He didn’t want it to end. He begged me to stay. And when he realised I wasn’t bending to his will the way I usually did, that’s when it got bad. The mask fell off completely. He became manipulative and aggressive — and then fully committed to telling everyone that I was all of those things. He went out of his way to start moving in the circles I was in, almost undercover, and then saying, “Hey, I think you know my ex.” I later discovered he had been tracking my iCloud account for months, without me being aware. It was bloody scary. An entire new kind of invasive abuse.
But I stuck to it. Walking away left me with nothing but my pride and my authenticity. And it taught me an enormous amount about who I want to be in this world.
Two seconds in the car
For a long time afterwards, I dreaded seeing him again. I was scared he would be violent — that he would hurt me. He had never physically harmed me before; that was all mental. But having watched how committed he was to his lies, and to an entire false reality, I found myself thinking: who the hell is this guy? And I worried what else he might do. I now have cameras around my house. That’s the lasting impact he’s had on me. (Although, honestly — it’s good to have cameras anyway, right? That’s how I see it.)
A few months ago, after a very long time, I drove past him for the first time. He saw me. I saw him. And I froze. It was probably two seconds, but it felt like the whole world slowed right down.
On his face I saw something I hadn’t expected. Embarrassment. Shame.
I could see that he knew what he had done. And that was healing in itself. The moment I had been dreading for so long finally happened — and I was OK. And now even if we were to cross paths again face to face, I will hold my head high.
What discomfort has taught me
That relationship was the last time I felt the kind of discomfort I’m feeling now. Probably because its coming back to the surface as if my body knows it is ready to be let go of.
All of it — leaving my corporate career, my friends and my home town, and then leaving him — changed my relationship with discomfort. Having lived through so much of it, it has become far more acceptable to me. I don’t see it as a sign that something has gone wrong anymore. I accept it as part of life. That’s why I bring it into my classes — gently inviting you to stay with discomfort rather than run from it. And it’s helping me now, as I face some discomfort of my own.
I have done a lot of work around the sexual assaults. And over the last few years, I have also been working on forgiving myself for becoming a target for a predator — and on forgiving him, too. That last part is really important to me. It’s another reason forgiveness flows through my classes. Forgiveness is for us. Not them. Forgiveness also lets us release the heavier emotions: anger, regret, resentment, embarrassment. So when I say in class, “Be the energy you wish to see in the world,” that’s where it comes from. I don’t want to be a big ball of heavy emotions. I want to bring light to this world, to balance out the pain and the shadows. But to do that, I must face my own.
I am so much closer to putting all of this behind me. But I also know it will always be one of my chapters. It has made me into who I am — and I really am happy with who I am. It’s a gift in its own way. Painful, challenging, and yet there is gratitude there for it all. Without it, I wouldn’t be who I am right now: committed to being the best version of myself, and to living a life as close as I can to compassion, humility and authenticity.
I truly believe that even the most painful experiences can be an opportunity to learn and to grow. I’m not saying the bad things that happen to us are OK. They aren’t. But there is an option to own yourself — with forgiveness, with accountability, and by taking steps to protect yourself from it happening again.
And there’s an option to be radical, too: to try to stay soft. To not let the armour over your heart grow impenetrable, or shut you off from the beauty in the world. Because one thing I know for sure is that for all the bad and the painful, there is the equivalent in beauty, love and peace.
That isn’t me saying I am to blame. It’s me taking control back, and moving forward in a way of my choosing.
So why share any of this? Because for me, it helps give it all meaning — and I believe it helps me do what I do from a genuine place. And because I feel it’s important to use my experiences to give other people hope. To show that it is possible to come through the other side of things like this — and to help people see how powerful, transformative and liberating yoga can be.
We just have to be brave, and commit to it. To show up for ourselves, in a world that teaches us to put ourselves last while we run from task to task.
There is still work to be done, and that’s another reason I’m scared of this training. Even with all the work I have done, I expect some of these things to come up again — though of course I can’t know for sure. I think it’s going to help me shift some of that heaviness. And I know I may have to go back into the trenches with it to get there.
And I’m ready for it. 🙂
Where I go from here
That’s where I’m walking in from. If you’ve read this far, thank you. Truly. It means more than I can say.
In Walking In With Open Eyes — part one of The 300-Hour Diaries — I share what’s coming up for me as I prepare for the training: the fear, the excitement, PMDD, leaving my safety blanket, and the things that have helped me most along the way.
Part one — Walking In With Open Eyes — follows in a few days.
Follow The 300-Hour Diaries. I’ll be writing as I go through my training. If you’d like each new instalment sent straight to your inbox, sign up below.
Come As You Are
Inner Lifetime is a beginner-friendly yoga studio in Lincoln. If yoga has been quietly calling you — or if a friend has been nudging you for years and you’ve been saying nah, babe — your first class is completely free. No experience needed, no flexibility required, and nobody will ask you what brought you.
Use code 1STCLASSFREE_IL when you book.
Inner Lifetime, Unit 3, 421 Newark Rd, Lincoln LN6 8RS
If this post has brought anything up for you: Samaritans are there any time, day or night, free on 116 123. Rape Crisis England & Wales (rapecrisis.org.uk) supports anyone affected by sexual violence or abuse. NAPAC (napac.org.uk) supports adults who were abused in childhood. And for PMDD, IAPMD (iapmd.org) has peer support and information.
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