There are seasons when caring for others becomes so consuming that we quietly disappear from our own lives.
I returned from Western Australia carrying the fullness of choir camp and Yoga Fest, only to step immediately into another season of care. My partner was recovering from surgery. Half of our small team was away on carers’ leave. The family’s needs were swallowing me whole while also becoming part of the productivity trap…The needs around me were real and immediate, so I tuned myself entirely towards them.
Without noticing, I stopped listening for my own needs.
For a month, I tried to keep everything moving—our home, our team, Living Koko and the people I love. Eventually, the strain began to show. Things cracked. The light I am usually able to offer so freely became difficult to find within myself.
In that darkness, the mind can become the hardest algorithm to break.
The thoughts we feed become the thoughts we are shown again and again. When we are exhausted, the mind can keep returning us to fear, inadequacy and everything left undone. The harder we try to think our way out, the smaller the world can become.
I looked for distraction instead of balance. I kept moving because stillness meant hearing what was happening beneath the surface. Even active rest became another form of productivity – a walk with something to organise, a quiet moment used to answer messages, time away filled with thoughts of what needed doing next.
And caring for others became the most convincing form of distraction. It looked like love – and it was love – but it also allowed me to keep placing my own needs at the bottom of the list. I could tell myself I was resting from work while continuing to carry everyone around me.
There is a difference between pausing and truly resting. There is a difference between being needed and being well.
Finding our way back requires us to interrupt the pattern gently. To recognise that rest does not need to produce anything. It does not need to make us more efficient, more useful or better prepared to return to work. Sometimes rest is simply the place where we meet ourselves again.
This weight did not begin in a single month.
It has been almost a year since the fire in Samoa, and truthfully, it feels as though we have only started to emerge from the thickness of that. There is so much that happens behind the work people see: the damaged harvest, the interrupted supply, the rebuilding and the responsibility of continuing to support the families connected to our cacao.
Here in Melbourne, other pressures continued to gather. We added the words “gluten free” to our chocolate packaging to give our community greater clarity. That small act led to a change in our council classification and almost $9,000 in new compliance expenses during the first year, with approximately $5,000 in recurring costs each year thereafter. (I need to sell a lot of little chocolates to cover that one)
One thing rarely breaks us on its own. More often, it is the slow accumulation of things carried quietly. Sometimes its noticing that you don’t have capacity for anything of joy.
And then the Equinox arrives.
A moment when light and darkness meet. Not to defeat one another, but to share the sky.
This year, the Spring Equinox is not asking me to rush towards brightness or become the lively version of myself everyone recognises. It is inviting me to return gently – to notice where I have become depleted, where life has grown crowded and where I have forgotten to include myself among the people deserving of care.
How do we find our way back to ourselves?
Perhaps we begin by accepting that we have not disappeared. We are still there beneath the duties, the exhaustion and the many roles we have been trying to hold. Returning does not require a dramatic transformation. It may begin with something very small: a proper meal, bare feet on the earth, an honest conversation, a quiet cup of cacao, or allowing someone else to carry what we can no longer hold alone.
In the Pacific, our relationship with land teaches us that renewal is not hurried. A cacao tree cannot be forced into fruiting before its time. The soil must be nourished. Branches must be pruned. Light and air must be allowed through. What is damaged must be tended, and what has finished its season must be released.
I am not so different.
Sometimes returning to ourselves means asking what needs pruning.
I have been asking myself – Which responsibilities are truly mine? What am I carrying from habit, guilt or love that has become too heavy? Where have I mistaken endurance for strength?
Balance is not a perfect division between work and rest, darkness and light, giving and receiving. It is a living relationship between them. Like the Equinox, it asks us to notice when one has overtaken the other—and to make room again.
I am learning that care must travel in both directions. I can love my family, tend our business and remain committed to our cacao-growing communities without abandoning myself in the process. I am part of that circle of care too.
Spring also marks the return of our Pasifika Movement and Cacao Spring and Summer Series.
In the middle of business pressures, personal responsibilities and the chaos unfolding across the world, these gatherings create a rare space where I can give and receive at the same time. I arrive to share my culture, movement and cacao—but I am also restored by every person who enters the circle.
We meet people from across the world and invite them to experience Pacific Island culture through somatic healing, movement, cacao and time on Country. We gather in nature, move with nature and remember that we are nature—not separate from it, not required to perform for it, simply part of its rhythm.
For me, these gatherings are a full realignment. They bring me back into my body, into community and into relationship with the living world. They remind me that healing does not always happen alone. Sometimes we find our way back to ourselves in a circle, moving and breathing beside others.
So this spring, I am beginning again—not by leaping forward, but by returning to my roots. By moving slowly enough to hear what my body and spirit have been trying to say. By remembering that asking for help is not failure, rest is not something we must earn, and even the person who usually carries the light is allowed to need shelter from the dark.
The Equinox reminds us that darkness is not the end of the story.
The light returns little by little.
And perhaps that is how we return to ourselves too.