I Went Shopping for Scented Candles. I Left Questioning Everything.

The rather unconventional story of how I discovered Kinesiology and the Secret load I was carrying.

I was 23 years old.

An age when most people are out partying, shagging multiple men, making questionable decisions and generally having the time of their lives.

Not that I wasn’t doing some of those things myself. 😂

But somewhere amongst the parties, boyfriends and general chaos of being in your early twenties, I’d also been through what I now affectionately refer to as my accelerated growth period.

And by accelerated growth, I mean life had apparently decided to cram several decades’ worth of character development into a couple of years.

Let me explain.

First, there was the dream.

A year or two earlier, a friend of ours, Ben,  died in a tragic car accident.

But here’s where things get a little strange.

The night of his accident, I’d had a dream about a car accident.

It was vivid! Mangled car, field of grass...

I woke the following morning in a panic, convinced that somehow I was going to be involved in an accident.

I couldn’t shake the feeling. I drove around like a Grandma all day.

Then, while I was at work, my mum called.

I answered the phone, and almost immediately she said:

“Oh no, I probably shouldn’t tell you this while you’re at work.”

MUM!

You cannot ring someone, say something like that, and then expect them to casually go about their day!

“Well, you have to tell me now!”

She told me Ben had been in a car accident.

He’d died.

Silence......

I remember asking when it happened.

“Saturday night.”

The same night I’d had the dream.

I couldn’t make sense of it. Why would I be 'shown' something like this but not be able to do anything about it. 

But that wasn’t the end of the dreams.

The following night, Ben appeared in another dream.

He was showing me all these wonderful things about his life. Things he was proud of. Things he’d experienced.

It was beautiful.

Almost like he was celebrating having been here.

And then, the night before his funeral, I dreamt of him again.

We were hanging out, just as we normally would.

Except at some point, I realised we were in a hospital.

A door opened along the side of the building, and beyond it were the most beautiful rolling green fields.

Ben was happy.

He looked at me and said something like:

“Come on, I’ve got to go now. Come on.”

And I remember saying:

“No, no, no. I can’t come with you. You need to go.”

And with that, he stepped off the ledge and into those beautiful green fields.

I woke up with the strangest feeling. Weirdly Profound.

As though, in some way I couldn’t explain, I’d witnessed him celebrating his life, making peace with it, and moving on.

Was it grief? My subconscious trying to process something enormous? Something more?

I didn’t know.

I still can’t tell you exactly what those dreams were.

But I can tell you they profoundly changed the way I looked at life.

Suddenly, the world didn’t seem quite as straightforward as I’d once believed.

And I was only just getting started.

Then came the potatoes.

About six months later, my sister and I were having a barbecue with our boyfriends, who happened to be best mates.

Everything was going swimmingly.

Until we realised we’d forgotten the potatoes.

A tragedy of epic proportions for an Aussie barbecue.

So off we went to the local Franklins supermarket.

Remember Franklins?

Anyway, there we were, two young women on a very important potato-acquiring mission.

We’d made it to the checkout.

The young bloke was putting our potatoes through when suddenly…

Three men burst into the supermarket.

Balaclavas.

Weapons.

Yelling.

“EVERYBODY GET DOWN OR WE’LL SHOOT!”

Well.

That escalated quickly.

I grabbed my sister, pulled her to the ground and suggested we crawl up one of the aisles to get away from the checkout.

Meanwhile, these blokes were robbing the tills.

Once they’d gone, we made our way back to check on the poor young guy who’d been serving us.

He was in shock.

“Oh my God! The potatoes!”

My sister and I looked at him.

“Mate, who gives a shit about the potatoes? You’ve just been in an armed hold-up!”

But he was adamant.

“No, no! The potatoes!”

You see, back in those days, the checkout scales and registers were connected in such a way that if something was sitting on the scales, the till wouldn’t open.

And guess what was sitting on his scales?

OUR FUCKING POTATOES.

Those bloody potatoes had stopped the robbers from opening his till.

Who knew the humble spud had crime-fighting capabilities?'

Anyway, the manager started calling out for everyone to stay put because the police were on their way.

My sister and I looked at each other.

There were security cameras everywhere, a store full of witnesses, and we had two boyfriends waiting for dinner.

So we grabbed our potatoes and went home.

As you do.

We walked in and casually announced:

“Oh, we’ve just been in an armed hold-up.”

Our boyfriends laughed.

“Yeah, right. Who were you talking to at the shops?”

“No, seriously. Three guys with guns. Balaclavas. Robbed the place.”

And then we pretty much got on with our evening. NO Drama, No shock, No Crying, just like nothing happened.

Because apparently, that’s what you do when you’ve just had guns pointed in your general direction while buying potatoes.

Looking back, I find our reaction fascinating.

But at the time?

We were fine.

Or so we thought.

And then life threw in THE Tumour for me.

Because apparently, the universe hadn’t quite finished with my accelerated personal development program.

I ended up being diagnosed with a massive tumour in my head.

Major surgery followed.

And suddenly, at an age when most people are worrying about what to wear on Saturday night, I was facing some rather confronting questions about my health, my future and my mortality.

So, to recap.

A friend had died.

I’d experienced dreams I couldn’t explain.

I’d survived an armed robbery.

And I’d undergone major surgery.

All before my mid-twenties.

But here’s the really interesting part.

If you’d asked me how I was doing back then, I probably would have told you:

“I’m good!”

And I genuinely believed it.

I was the positive one.

The fun one.

The one people came to with their problems.

The one who could find something to laugh about in almost any situation.

I was still going out, having fun and getting on with life.

I wasn’t sitting around dwelling on what had happened.

And somewhere along the way, I’d confused that with being okay.

Until a bloke at a market ruined my perfectly good illusion.

I was away on holidays and in Coffs Harbour we came across a stall at a local market.

I was wandering around, probably looking at scented candles and other things I absolutely didn’t need, when a sign caught my attention.

It said something along the lines of:

“Feel like the weight of the world is on your shoulders?”

"Shaggers Back"?

 I do remember laughing.

The shagers back  certainly got my attention.

But it was that first line that made me stop.

Feel like the weight of the world is on your shoulders?

Actually…

Yeah.

I kind of did.

I couldn’t have told you why.

I couldn’t have explained what I was feeling.

But something about those words landed.

So I wandered over to investigate.

Turns out the bloke was offering something called kinesiology.

Kinesio-what?

I’d never heard of it.

But apparently, I was about to find out.

Five minutes later, I was ugly crying on a stranger’s table.

I climbed onto the treatment table.

The practitioner started using my arm to do something called muscle testing.

He explained that he was checking different energy meridians in my body.

Righto.

No idea what that meant.

But I was curious.

He continued testing and eventually said that an emotion had come up.

Overwhelm.

He asked whether that resonated with anything happening in my life.

And I burst into tears.

Not a delicate little tear rolling elegantly down my cheek.

Oh no.

I mean proper, uncontrollable, where-the-fuck-did-THAT-come-from crying.

I couldn’t stop.

The practitioner explained his interpretation of what was happening.

He believed I’d been suppressing emotions and experiences that felt too overwhelming to process.

That I’d been carrying more than I realised.

And as he talked, I just kept crying.

Because suddenly, something was making sense.

All those experiences.

All that fear.

All that uncertainty.

All the things I’d somehow managed to pack away while continuing to be the happy, positive, fun-loving person everyone knew.

I’d never really stopped to consider how much of it I was carrying.

I’d been so busy being okay that I’d never really asked myself if I was.

And there I was.

Twenty-three years old.

On holiday.

Five minutes earlier, I’d been browsing market stalls looking at scented candles.

Now I was lying on a stranger’s table, crying my eyes out, while he talked about energy meridians and suppressed emotions.

What the actual fuck had just happened?

The strangest part? I didn’t even know I needed to cry.

That’s what stayed with me.

Not just the tears.

But the realisation that I’d been carrying something I didn’t know how to articulate.

I wasn’t consciously thinking, “I’m overwhelmed by everything that’s happened to me.”

I wasn’t walking around feeling sad every day.

I didn’t have a neat little list of emotions I needed to process.

I genuinely thought I was doing pretty well.

And in many ways, I was.

But that didn’t mean those experiences hadn’t affected me.

It didn’t mean there wasn’t grief beneath the laughter.

Fear beneath the positivity.

Or uncertainty beneath the confident exterior.

I had become incredibly good at getting on with life.

But getting on with life and making space for what you’ve experienced aren’t necessarily the same thing.

And that day, something shifted.

For the first time, I began to understand that we don’t always have the words for what we’re feeling.

Sometimes, we don’t even consciously recognise what we’re feeling.

We just know something feels heavy.

Something feels off.

Or life seems harder than it should.

So what happened next?

Well, I became fascinated.

I wanted to know more about this strange thing called Kinesiology.

How had a conversation, some muscle testing and a few questions opened up something I hadn’t even realised was there?

I started asking questions.

Lots of questions.

Eventually, I signed up for a kinesiology course.

I completed the training, but I didn’t immediately make it my profession.

Life had other plans.

It wasn’t until years later, in my mid-thirties, that I returned to studying Kinesiology with ICPKP a highly reputable Kinesiology School and eventually began working with clients.

But that experience in Coffs Harbour had planted a seed.

A very important one.

Here’s what I understand now that I didn’t understand at 23.

We humans are extraordinarily adaptable.

We find ways to keep going.

We compartmentalise.

We make jokes.

We focus on the positives.

We become the strong one, the capable one, the person everyone else can lean on.

And sometimes those strategies genuinely help us navigate incredibly difficult experiences.

But they can also become so automatic that we lose touch with what’s happening beneath the surface.

I see versions of this in my work with clients all the time.

People who tell me:

“I don’t know why I react like that.”

“I know it shouldn’t bother me, but it does.”

“I’ve done so much work on myself. Why am I still stuck?”

Or my personal favourite:

“I’m fine. I don’t know why I’m crying.”

Oh, I know that one well.

I’ve been that person.

And something I’ve come to appreciate is that insight doesn’t always begin with a perfectly articulated story.

Sometimes it begins with a sensation.

A tightening in the chest.

A lump in the throat.

A sudden wave of emotion.

Or simply recognising that you’ve been carrying far more than you realised.

Our bodies respond to our experiences, often before we’ve consciously found the words to describe them.

That doesn’t mean every physical sensation is a suppressed emotion, or that muscle testing can scientifically reveal hidden truths.

But it does mean that becoming curious about our bodily responses can offer another doorway into understanding ourselves.

For me, kinesiology was that doorway.

The muscle testing was part of the process, but the real transformation came through the awareness, the questions, the emotional expression and the space to explore what I’d been carrying.

And that continues to influence how I work today.

Your body has a story, too.

These days, when someone comes to see me, I’m not simply interested in what’s wrong.

I’m curious about what they’ve experienced.

What they’ve learned to believe about themselves.

How they’ve adapted.

What they’ve had to become to feel safe, loved, accepted or in control.

And whether those old ways of navigating life are still serving them.

Because sometimes the patterns that helped us get through one chapter of life become the very patterns that keep us stuck in the next. (I'd love to put this in neon lights).

And we don’t always recognise them until something invites us to look a little deeper.

For me, that invitation came from a ridiculous sign at a market in Coffs Harbour.

And a complete stranger who asked me about overwhelm.

Twenty-something years later, I’m still grateful I stopped at that stall. "Weight of the World on your Shoulders? Shaggers Back"?

Because what began as curiosity about a rather unusual therapy eventually became a career devoted to helping people understand themselves more deeply.

Not by telling them who they are.

But by creating space for them to discover what they might not yet have the words for.

And sometimes, that discovery changes everything.

One last thing…

I often wonder what would have happened if I’d walked straight past that stall.

If I’d laughed at the sign, bought my scented candles and carried on with my holiday.

Would I have discovered kinesiology another way?

Maybe.

But I’m glad I stopped.

Because that day taught me something I’ve carried into every session I facilitate.

Just because you’re coping doesn’t mean you’re not carrying something heavy.

And sometimes, the first step towards feeling lighter is simply recognising the weight.

So I’m curious…

Have you ever had a moment when you suddenly realised you weren’t quite as okay as you’d been telling yourself?

Maybe it was an unexpected conversation, a moment of stillness, or an emotional reaction that seemed to come out of nowhere.

I’d genuinely love to hear your experience.

And if you’re curious about exploring the patterns, beliefs and experiences that may be shaping how you feel and respond to life, that’s exactly the kind of work I love doing in my one-on-one sessions.

No armed robberies or potatoes required.

Although I can’t promise there won’t be tears.

Or laughter.

Quite often, there’s both. 

I usually cry first 

Larissa Halls
Intuitive Mind-Body Guide -  Trained in Kinesiology, Life Coaching and Somatic Healing
Everyday Inspiration Mind Body Wellness

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