From a hundred plant labels to the forest floor — how I found my way back to my body

I didn't notice it happening. I was deep in research, cataloguing the plant kingdom, plant after plant, label after label. By the time I looked up, I had made a hundred of them. A hundred deep dives into roots, leaves, and properties. The plant kingdom doesn't have an edge. There's always one more to learn.

I wanted to work on it all the time. I was eating at my desk. I barely moved. And because I'm a physiotherapist, I understood exactly what that was doing to my body, even while I kept doing it.

So I started small. Pushing up out of the chair. Moving my neck, my arms. Nothing that would interrupt the work, just enough to remind my body it existed.

Then I put a yoga mat next to the computer. A few stretches, then back to the screen. Then a Swiss ball came in, for the core, still within reach of the keyboard. Then a kettlebell, right there on the mat. Each tool pulled me a little further from the chair without pulling me away from my work.

Then I started running. Short ones, at first. Out to a tree, and back. Then further. Until one day I was running through the forest and returning to my desk changed.

That cycle, chair to mat to ball to kettlebell to trees and back, became my morning routine. And eventually, it became the reason I went to live off the grid, in nature, for a long while.

I didn't plan any of it as a recovery method. It was physiotherapy, applied to myself, one small step at a time. And it's exactly why nature is built into Oasis-Office today, not as decoration, but as medicine. The forest was the first office I ever truly recovered in.

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