Chapter One
The Ordinary World
“We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly.”
— Anaïs Nin
Once upon a time…
Once upon a time there was a Faery Princess who had lost her faery powers. She insisted on being locked up in a high tower and nobody was allowed to see her. Every night she cried tears of silvery moonlight that flooded out of the high tower like a waterfall.
The people in the village all wondered why the Princess had lost her powers and everyone had their own opinion about it. Someone thought that the Princess’s heart had been terribly broken and was unfixable. Another thought that the Princess had done something so horrible, so unspeakable, that she locked herself away in shame. And yet another person in the village thought that the Princess was simply lazy and irresponsible and had given up her powers to be able to sit by the fire and read all day.
But all of the people in the Faery-dom gazed upon the high black tower and wondered when the Princess would come down again. Her powers were greatly missed. However, not that many were still alive who could remember what it had been like when the Princess was living amongst them.
The Pillow Room
I was six years old, and it was my first year at preschool. There was a room there that the other children talked about with wide, gleaming eyes — the pillow room. It was exactly what it sounds like: a room full of oversized pillows, soft mats, and cushioned walls. The idea was that children could go in, let loose, scream, throw themselves around. A place to be wild and free.
Most of the kids loved it. They would charge in like small, joyful animals — running, screaming, hurling their bodies into the pillows, climbing on top of each other in heaps of laughter and noise.
I watched from the doorway. Intrigued. A little scared.
One day I decided to try. I walked in, and the teacher closed the door behind me. And it was as if a bomb went off. The noise hit me first — not just the sound of it, but the feeling of it. It pressed against my skin. The energy of all those children, all that chaotic joy, all that uncontained wildness — it slammed into me like a physical force.
I lasted about thirty seconds.
I walked straight out, went back to my drawing table, picked up my crayons, and continued colouring. I never went back to the pillow room.
At six, I did not have the words for what had happened. I did not know about energetic sensitivity, about nervous systems, about the way some of us are wired to absorb everything in the room. I only knew that it was too much. And that I was different.
“I have always been this way. It was not a phase. It was not something I would grow out of. It was the signal — arriving decades early — that my relationship with energy would define my life.”
— Helena Willow
I did not know it then, but the pillow room was my first lesson. Not in weakness — in sensitivity. In the truth that I could feel things other people could not feel. That my body was registering information that went far beyond what my eyes and ears could take in.
It would take me another thirty years to understand what that meant. And to stop treating it as a problem to be fixed.
You may recognise this feeling — the quiet exhaustion that settles into your bones after years of holding space for others.
Perhaps you have your own pillow room. Your own version of the moment when you first sensed that the world was landing on you differently than it landed on the people around you. Maybe it was a crowded classroom. Maybe it was a family gathering where you could feel the tension no one was naming. Maybe it was the slow, grinding realisation that you were always the one people came to with their pain — and that you had no idea what to do with your own.
If you are reading this, there is a good chance you are tired in a way that sleep does not fix. You may have tried everything — the supplements, the retreats, the meditation apps, the therapists. Some of it helped. None of it was enough.
Something is still missing. And the part of you that knows this is the part I am speaking to right now.
The Teaching
What Is the Energetic Body?
The energetic body is not a metaphor. It is the felt sense of aliveness that moves through you — the current beneath your skin, the warmth in your chest, the heaviness in your limbs when you have given too much. It is as real as your bones, though it cannot be seen on an X-ray.
If you are a sensitive woman — and if you have read this far, you almost certainly are — your energetic body is like a sponge. You walk into a room and you absorb. You sit beside a friend who is grieving and you take on her grief without meaning to. You scroll through the news and your chest tightens, your shoulders creep up, your breath goes shallow. You do not choose this. It simply happens.
Most of us have never been taught that this is what is happening. We think we are anxious. We think we are broken. We think we need to try harder, do more, push through.
But here is the truth that changed everything for me: you are not carrying your own exhaustion. You are carrying everyone else’s too.
I think of a woman I once worked with. She was perpetually busy — lists upon lists, tasks upon tasks, an endless cycle of doing. Not because she loved the work. Not because she was inspired. But because stillness felt dangerous. If she stopped moving, she would have to feel what was underneath. And what was underneath was terrifying in its vastness.
Over time, she began to notice how much of her “doing” was actually fear. How much of her productivity was protection. She was not lazy when she rested — she was brave. Because resting meant feeling. And feeling, for a woman who absorbs everything, takes real courage.
“You are not behind. You are not lazy. You are not broken. You may simply be exhausted from carrying too much for too long.”
— Helena Willow
The first step on the spiral is the simplest and the hardest: awareness. Before you can tend your fire, you must learn to feel it. Before you can release what is not yours, you must learn to notice that you are carrying it.
This is not a failure of strength. It is a feature of sensitivity. And sensitivity, I have come to believe, is not a wound to be healed but a gift to be tended.
From the Lineage
“The body keeps the score. But the body also keeps the medicine. Learn to listen to it — not with your mind, but with your hands, your breath, your attention.”
Practice: First Awareness
5–10 minutes
1. Find a quiet place where you will not be disturbed. Sit or lie down comfortably.
2. Close your eyes. Take three slow breaths, letting each exhale be longer than the inhale.
3. Bring your attention to your chest. Without trying to change anything, simply notice what you feel there — warmth, tightness, emptiness, movement.
4. Now expand your awareness to include your whole body. Where do you feel aliveness? Where do you feel numbness or absence?
5. Notice if anything you are feeling does not seem to belong to you. A mood that arrived from nowhere. A heaviness that has someone else’s texture. You do not need to do anything with this — simply notice.
6. Stay with this awareness for five minutes. There is nothing to fix. You are simply learning to feel your own fire.
Reflect
1. When did you first realise you experienced the world differently than others around you?
2. What does depletion feel like in your body? Can you describe its texture, temperature, weight?
3. What have you tried so far that didn’t work? What drew you to those approaches?
4. If your inner fire could speak, what would it say to you right now?