— Yaku, Upasana Somatic
Where understanding ends,
my work begins.
My childhood crossed two homes. After my parents divorced in Peru when I was eight, I stayed with my father, close enough to watch his depression daily, from inside the home. Later I moved to London with my mother, who carried the tension, anxiety, and conflict of holding everything together alone. What I internalized was the same in both homes: I suppressed emotion, performed strength, and lived a step ahead of my own body. A survival mechanism I carried into my late twenties. What I had watched in my father’s body, I would later feel in my own.
In 2018, after eight years of distance from my father, I went back to see him, as the man I thought I was, not the boy who had been neglected. This was the turning point. The wound had simply been waiting. I left with a contraction in my chest that wouldn’t lift. Something in me finally stopped being able to manage. The wounded inner child became the present.
In the months after, my depression opened the wound deeper than I had ever felt it. The job I’d built my self-confidence on had ended, and a five-year relationship break-up followed. My asthma worsened, my immune system kept failing, I withdrew from everyone. My body was speaking loudly with me. I just hadn’t known how to listen.
For years, I had known the story — every wound, every pattern, every name for what I was carrying. But knowing wasn’t the way through. Change came when I let the body speak, when seeking support became a felt practice rather than an idea. The system began to settle. Small steps. Trust. A kind presence. The way back became the work I do now.
