Tag: RECOVERY

Emerging from Burnout: A Scientist´s Yoga Story by Stéphanie Blockhuys

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Are you a stressed academic, feeling the weight of constant pressure and burnout looming over you? I understand—I’ve been there. My journey as a cancer scientist led me to a place of exhaustion until I discovered the transformative power of yoga.

In this blog, I invite you to join me as I recount my experiences in academia. My aim is to share my story and hopefully inspire you to prioritize your wellbeing. Take a step back, pause, and care for yourself. Through yoga, I found a path to rejuvenation and resilience, and I am eager to share these insights with you.

Let’s foster a culture of self-care and strength in academia – one where everyone can flourish and shine brightly in their pursuit of knowledge and innovation. In this blog, I use the metaphor of a caterpillar to describe my journey through burnout and recovery. Like a caterpillar weighed down by exhaustion, I entered a cocoon of recovery during my sick leave, where I discovered yoga and began to heal. Emerging as a butterfly, I transformed my experience into a meaningful career, combining cancer research and yoga therapy.

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Addiction and the University by Wendy Dossett

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TW: Sexual assault, suicide (ideation and attempt), addiction, alcohol and other drugs.  

In my final undergraduate year, an acquaintance who was seeking support for addiction issues told me she’d been advised by a recovery mentor to ditch her ambitions and not apply to go to university. ‘First things first,’ she had said. ‘My recovery is more important.’

I was stunned.

At that point in my life, more than three decades ago now, my own addiction problems were beginning to take hold. However, it would be more than ten years before I would acknowledge that. I had, at that time, little understanding of addiction, and no understanding at all of recovery. I considered the advice my friend had received to be utterly outrageous. Surely, a university education should be available to anyone in possession of the admission requirements! I objected, viscerally, to this person being figured as ‘too fragile’ for education. I considered the aspiration for education to be, not only a good, but a right. My own university education meant the absolute world to me. How dare some ‘non-university-educated’ person, (I assumed, on no basis at whatsoever), limit my friend’s reasonable ambition!

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