Strength, emotional embodiment and the body's intelligence: a conversation with Gillian Evans

Gillian Evans is a psychotherapist, a yoga teacher, and a social anthropologist. She works with the body, the breath, and the talking cure simultaneously — not as separate disciplines but as different routes into the same territory. Her practice is oriented around a single question: what are the conditions for human flourishing?

We spoke about energy management, emotional embodiment, the particular pressures on high-performing women, the second flowering of menopause, and what physical strength training has unexpectedly given her. What follows draws on that conversation.

Energy is not a constant

One of the most useful reframes Gillian offers is the idea that energy is not a background condition. It is not simply there or not there. It is something that flows, that can be managed well or poorly, that can be overextended until it cannot recover, and that requires conscious stewardship.

For high-performing women, this reframe is often resisted. The capacity to keep going has been a source of identity. The assumption that energy can be demanded of indefinitely, that movement practice and discipline will compensate for overextension, is deeply embedded. But the body does not operate on that logic. It has its own accounting.

Gillian describes the pattern clearly: a woman who has been energised takes that energy for granted, extends it habitually in all directions, experiences the crash of burnout, slowly recovers, and then extends all over again. The cycle repeats. What it does not do is teach her the energetic decision-making — her phrase — that would allow her to sustain performance and wellbeing simultaneously.

That decision-making involves learning to say, as she puts it, that my energies do not allow me to say yes right now. Not as an excuse. As an honest and precise reading of the system.

What the body embodies

Gillian's training as both a psychotherapist and a movement practitioner gives her a specific lens on the body that differs from the purely biomechanical. She works from the understanding that we embody our history — not just as a metaphor but as a literal structural reality. The emotional tensions arising from a lifetime of social relations, from cultural demands, from the specific load of womanhood, take up residence in the tissue.

The psoas is one of the muscles she returns to: a deep hip flexor that also connects the diaphragm to the spine and the leg, and which holds the memory of the foetal curl. In bodies that have been running on cortisol, managing outward, holding the world together, the psoas is almost always gripping. It presents as stability. It functions as restriction.

What is significant is that this kind of holding can feel like strength. It is organised. It has structure. The woman who has been braced through years of managing everything often moves with what looks like confidence and capability. But underneath the bracing — which is revealed when the tissue is worked with attention and intelligence — is something different. Not fragility. Gillian is clear on this. What is underneath is truth. An emotion that has not yet been able to move.

Once it can move, things change. In the body first. Then, often, in the decisions a woman is able to make about her life.

Strength training as a route into this

Gillian came to strength training relatively recently. She has practiced yoga for over 30 years. She swims. She has a movement life that is already rich. What surprised her about adding strength training to that — and specifically about working with a coach who understands emotional embodiment — was what it revealed and what it unlocked.

The parts of the body that are emotionally braced, she observed, are intrinsically weak. The tension feels like it is holding the structure together. But when you work into it with load and with attention, what is revealed is the weakness underneath the bracing. And from that weakness — that vulnerability — comes an access to strength that was not available before.

She described finding her voice as one of the outcomes. Not a metaphor for confidence in the conventional sense. A more precise thing: knowing what is true, and being able to make decisions from that knowledge. Strength training, approached this way, had opened something that years of yoga and therapy had been circling. The specific quality of physical load, applied to the places that had been holding, moved something.

This is consistent with what I see in my own work. The session that starts with a client lying down, barely breathing into the lower torso, held at the sternum — and ends with them lifting something heavy and looking up with a different expression on their face. Not exhaustion.

Something more like arrival.

Menopause as a second flowering

Gillian brings a cross-cultural perspective to menopause that is worth sitting with. In Japan and China, she notes, menopause is understood as a second flowering — a time when the energy that has been flowing outward for decades, toward children, toward family, toward work, begins to return to the woman herself.

This framing does not deny the challenges. It recontextualises them. The slowing down that menopause requires is not a diminishment. It is an invitation for a full life re-evaluation. And that re-evaluation, Gillian suggests, often opens something that the preceding decades of outward focus did not allow: contact with how much anger, resentment, and accumulated injustice a woman has been carrying without naming it.

This is not comfortable. It is also, she argues, potentially revolutionary — in the precise sense of a woman rethinking her relationships, her structures, her sexuality, and her relationship to the social world she has been navigating.

The practices that support this are not complicated. Yoga, in particular the alignment-based hatha work that attends to breath and energy as well as form. A meditation practice that begins with two questions: how am I, and what do I need. Good psychotherapy. Honest female friendships. And, as Gillian has found, strength training with a coach who understands what is held in the body and how to work with it.

In Chinese medicine, the decade from 50 to 60 is experienced in relation to how the woman cared for herself in her 40s. The work done now is not just for now. It is an investment in the quality of what follows.

The constant inquiry

The conversation ended with an image I have kept returning to. Gillian described the question of what stands in the way of a woman's full radiance as a constant life inquiry. Not a problem to be solved. Not a box to be ticked. A living question that the body holds and that the practices — training, movement, rest, breath, honest relationships — keep opening.

The body, she said, will show the way. It will show the way toward alignment with what is possible. Not by being forced or managed, but by being listened to with genuine curiosity about what it is trying to communicate.

This is, fundamentally, the same thing I ask of every client who arrives in my studio. Not what can your body do today. What is it already telling you?

Gillian Evans is a psychotherapist, yoga teacher and social anthropologist. You can find her at yogianthropologist.com. Her next retreat is in Sardinia in July. If you are interested in working with me on the embodied strength and performance side of this, my 1:1 spaces in South East London are open.

If you are an active woman in your thirties or forties who trains consistently but feels like something is off — energy, recovery, focus, or all three — you might benefit from working with a coach who understands the full picture. I work with women in person in South East London and online. More details can be found here.

Seema Chopra works with high-performing women to train intelligently, recover well, and sustain performance without burnout