Some fires do not roar. They smoulder.
They are not always loud. They do not always flare. Some fires burn low and slow—quietly, invisibly—until the foundation begins to weaken. That is the kind of fire many high performers carry. There is no dramatic breakdown, no visible collapse. Just a steady burn beneath the surface. A kind of heat that never entirely switches off.
You still deliver. You still lead. However, internally, the reserves are thinning. Not because you are fragile. Not because you are unfit. Simply because the system was never designed to hold this much, for this long, without a place to put it down.
I remember working with a senior executive team during a high-stakes turnaround. No one was falling apart, but there was a visible brittleness. Meetings were sharp, efficient, even impressive. However, there was a sense that something vital was burning away in the background. Little passion. Questionable purpose. Just capacity. When you carry sustained pressure without pause, that burn becomes background noise until it becomes a run-away fire.
That was the insight that shaped what would eventually become a private, symbolic practice. It is not reflective therapy. It is not a performance exercise. There is no narrative work or emotional processing. It is deliberately built to bypass all of that—to provide an action-based way to release what words cannot carry.
Informed by work in trauma theory, embodied cognition, and expressive writing research, we now understand that unspoken pressure does not just weigh on the mind. It embeds in the nervous system. It shapes how we show up in meetings, how we parent, and how we sleep. Not in extreme ways—just in subtle, compounding shifts. Like heat trapped underground.
People often say the same thing afterward: “I did not realise how much I had stored inside.” That realisation rarely comes through conversation. It comes through symbolic release—through an act that externalises what the body has been holding.
What they leave with is not just relief. It is a reminder. A phrase. A shift. Something they can come back to when the pressure builds again.
Because the world will not stop demanding more. But you do not have to keep letting it cost you what you never agreed to give.
You are not broken.
You are not failing.
You are just standing above something that has been burning for a long time.
And you are allowed to put it down.
Informed by
Barling, J., & Cloutier, A. (2016). Leaders’ mental health at work: Empirical, methodological, and policy directions. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 22(3), 394–406.
Maslach, C., & Leiter, M. P. (2016). Understanding the burnout experience: Recent research and its implications for psychiatry. World Psychiatry, 15(2), 103–111.
Pennebaker, J. W. (1997). Opening Up: The Healing Power of Expressing Emotions. Guilford Press.
Pennebaker, J. W., & Beall, S. K. (1986). Confronting a traumatic event: Toward an understanding of inhibition and disease. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 95(3), 274–281.