PART 2 - Psychotherapy, motherhood, dance, and the slow path to a new career
This is Part 2 of my career change story. If you haven’t read Part 1 yet, here it is.
https://dancemovementbreathing.eu/blog/i-built-the-career-i-dreamed-of-why-was-my-body-br
If you’ve already read Part 1, skip the embedded link and just continue reading here for Part 2.
In Part 1, I told the story of how I went from studying linguistics to becoming a cognitive neuroscientist, completing a successful PhD, working at Imperial College London, and securing a prestigious fellowship in the Netherlands.
From the outside, everything looked right. I was successful. I was respected. I was building exactly the career I had dreamed of.
And yet, my body was starting to tell a different story.
The knee problems. The jaw tension. The exhaustion. At the time, I didn’t understand any of it.
This is the story of what happened next.
Photo by Ananya Dutta Photography in Maastricht.
The pause I didn’t know I needed
When the pandemic arrived in early 2020, I thought my biggest problem was that my research project had been interrupted.
My contract was ending. The world was shutting down. Nobody knew what would happen next.
But once the initial uncertainty settled, something unexpected happened. For the first time in almost fifteen years, I stopped running. And I realised, I was exhausted.
Not the kind of tiredness that disappears after a good night’s sleep. A deeper exhaustion. I went to bed tired and woke up tired again in the morning.
Looking back, I think I had been moving toward burnout for quite some time without realising it.
During lockdown, I made a simple agreement with myself. Every day I would do three things:
- Drink a breakfast smoothie (my teeth were hurting so much in the mornings that I could not ingest anything solid, only liquids),
- Dance.
- Lay in the sun.
That was it. No five-year plan. No productivity strategy. No optimising. Just one day at a time.
And slowly, something inside me began to soften.
When the solution doesn’t solve the problem
My contract ended. I had to leave my apartment. Nobody wanted to rent to someone without a secure job.
For a while, I stayed with a friend.
Then I went to Greece for a holiday.
I took this shoot at the south coast of Crete, when I was on vacation with my friend.
And on my birthday in August, I received wonderful news. My professor had secured new funding. I would be able to continue my project. I remember feeling relieved.
Perfect.
Now everything can go back to normal.
Now I can finish collecting data, I can publish, and I can continue building my academic career.
I restarted the position in October. And one month later, while preparing a presentation about my progress, I got vertigo.
Photo by Brooke Balentine on Unsplash
The room spun.
I couldn’t focus on the computer screen.
I had to lie down.
For nearly two weeks, I could do very little. Even listening to an audiobook felt like a major activity.
The presentation was eventually rescheduled and everything continued.
But something important had shifted. Because the return to work had not fixed whatever was happening inside me. I had spent months believing that uncertainty was the problem. Then certainty returned, but the symptoms remained. That realisation stayed with me.
Maybe the issue wasn’t my circumstances.
Maybe something deeper was asking to be seen.
“Dance has saved your life”
To investigate this unresolved feeling, I started psychotherapy. Not because I wanted to change careers. Not because I was deeply unhappy. Simply because I sensed that there was something I wasn’t understanding.
One day during therapy, my therapist said:
“Dance has saved your life.”
I remember thinking she was exaggerating.
Today, I think she was absolutely right. Dance had always been my hobby. My outlet. The thing I did after work to decompress. The thing that balanced the stress.
Or so I thought.
Looking back, dance was doing something much more important. It was teaching me to listen to my body.
Slowly.
Patiently.
For years, my body had been speaking. The knee, the jaw, the fatigue, the teeth grinding, the pressure. But I couldn’t hear it.
Dance created enough connection that eventually I started listening to what my body had been saying all along.
Photo by Ananya Dutta Photography
The realisation that changed everything
Then came the insight that shook me the most.
I realised I was living the life my parents had envisioned for me. Not the life I had envisioned for myself. This is difficult to write because my parents love me deeply. They want the best for me.
And I had genuinely enjoyed my academic career.
I still love science.
I still love research.
I still love learning.
This is not a story about academia being bad.
It is a story about alignment. Somewhere along the way, becoming a professor had become the destination. But when I looked honestly at my life, I realised my deepest ambitions were different.
I wanted freedom.
I wanted movement.
I wanted health.
I wanted to feel alive in my body.
I wanted to remain mobile and independent for the rest of my life.
These were my ambitions. Not publication counts. Not academic titles. Not prestige.
When I saw this mismatch, I couldn’t unsee it. And yet, I didn’t immediately quit. In fact, I did nothing. I simply sat with the realisation. For a long time.
Because some truths take time to settle.
The clue I almost missed
A year later, after data collection was finished, my professor and I started developing a large grant proposal together.
The project involved dance.
We wanted to investigate how breathing, heart rhythms, and brain activity synchronise within individuals and in the group during dance and movement activity.
And suddenly, I felt alive again. I was energised. Creative. Motivated. Ideas were flowing effortlessly. I was fully engaged.
That experience taught me something important. The problem had never been research itself. The problem was that I had drifted too far away from what mattered most to me.
The body.
Movement.
Creativity.
Human connection.
When those elements returned, so did my enthusiasm.
The unexpected gift of pregnancy
Around that same time, I met my partner. And only a few months later, I became pregnant.Yes, it was indeed a very creative period of my life.
Pregnancy changed me in ways I never expected. Watching my body create a human being felt profoundly empowering. For the first time, I truly understood the creative capacity of the body.
Photo by Ananya Dutta Photography
And a new thought emerged.
If my body can create a human being, perhaps I can create a different life, too.
Not overnight. Not recklessly. But intentionally.
Perhaps I could stop forcing myself into roles that no longer fit.
Perhaps I could choose differently.
Perhaps I could trust myself.
The career change that took eight years
People often imagine career changes as dramatic moments.
A sudden decision, a leap of faith, a bold resignation letter.
That was not my experience.
For me, the first signals appeared around 2016. The knee injury, the growing tension, the increasing need to dance just to feel balanced.
The realisation came in 2020.
The actual career change happened in 2024.
Eight years.
Eight years from the first whispers to the decision.
And even then, the transition happened gradually. I continued teaching at university, facilitating dance and movement workshops, building experience, and in general exploring what was possible.
Then I eventually moved to Greece and introduced myself in a new way:
“I am a dance and movement facilitator.”
“I am a cognitive neuroscientist.”
“I am both.”
The beautiful thing is that I never truly abandoned one identity for another. I integrated them. The science stayed. The movement moved from the margins to the center. And my work today exists precisely at that intersection.
What I learned
If there is one thing I learned from this journey, it is this:
The body often knows long before the mind is ready to understand.
Mine certainly did.
The knee. The jaw. The exhaustion. The vertigo.
They were never the problem.
They were the message.
I simply needed enough space, enough stillness, and enough courage to listen.
And perhaps that is why I care so deeply about helping people reconnect with their bodies today.
Because sometimes what we are looking for is not another strategy. Not another plan. Not another productivity system. Sometimes what we need is to listen.
And trust that the next step will reveal itself when we are ready to take it.
Photo by Ananya Dutta Photography
As I write this, I am curious:
Which part of this story did you recognise yourself in?
Was it the ambition?
The exhaustion?
The feeling that something wasn’t quite aligned?
If this resonated with you, I’d love to hear your thoughts. Simply email me at dancemovementbreathing@gmail.com .
I read every email personally.
— Dr. Katerina Kandylaki
Dance, Movement & Breathing | Cognitive Neuroscientist