Are you the one I’m writing to? My heart pounds as I ponder what to say.
First let me ask you this - have you realized how much the world has changed?
Was there a quiet moment in your life when you began to realize something is wrong - not with you, but with the world you have been asked to trust?
It may have started as a passing shadow. A sense that the explanations you’ve been given about your body, your health, your pain, your fatigue, your anxiety… don’t add up. A sense you’re being talked down to. A sense that what you’re feeling in your own body doesn’t match what you’re being told.
Most women push that feeling away at first. We’re trained to. But for some, the shadow emerges into a shape that can’t be dismissed. And once you let yourself look directly at it, you begin to see that the confusion wasn’t yours. It was pressed upon you.
I want to speak to those women. The ones who are waking up.
Because I woke up too.
For me it didn’t happen all at once. It unfolded over decades - teaching group fitness, personal training, working with bodies through massage therapy and yoga, teaching at the college, diving into anatomy and research. I had so many questions! But I often felt the theories were too neat, too linear, too reductionist, to match what I was seeing in real human bodies.
It wasn’t until I dug deeply into the research - following who funds what, the studies that can’t be reproduced (over 50%), the findings that are suppressed, and the expensive /traumatizing treatments that persist despite no evidence of benefit. I realized something that changed me forever: the system is not designed to heal you. It is designed to manage your decline (and call it care).
And then COVID peeled back the curtain entirely. I watched as global agendas moved in lockstep, as parroted narratives became enforced doctrine, as reasonable voices were silenced, fear became a governing tool, and logic was outlawed.
I watched how quickly human beings would hand over their sovereignty to an authority that promised safety but did not have their wellbeing at heart. I saw the medicalization of everyday life rise with horrifying speed. And I watched my sisters in the healing arts, women - brilliant, intuitive, powerful women - begin doubting their own experience and their own eyes.
That was my point of no return. Once I saw the truth of it, I couldn’t unsee it.
And I understood that if people didn’t reclaim their own understanding - of their biology, their terrain, their adaptability, their sacredness - they would have no defense against a system that sees them as consumers of treatments rather than divine sovereign beings.
This is where Rouleau came from. Not as a brand or technique or movement class.As a correction and reclamation. As an act of remembering what is real, and telling the truth about it.
My friend, your body is not a collection of failing parts doomed to wear out over time.
It is an adaptive, intelligent, self-organizing system that heals through self awareness, movement, load, circulation, and coordination. It is a terrain, not a battlefield. It doesn’t need to be dominated, manipulated, medicated, or forced into obedience.
It needs the right inputs: breath, movement that stimulates healing, rhythms that hydrate tissues, strength that rises from the ground up, and the slow return of trust in your own design.
Healing doesn’t come from masking symptoms! It comes from understanding what those symptoms are pointing to.
Hear this: Relief is not recovery!
In many cases, relief delays true recovery and restoration. And the longer we numb, ignore, outsource, or suppress, the more enmeshed we become in a system that benefits from our dependency.
This is why I speak the way I do. Why I teach the way I teach. Why I refuse to minimize your experience into a diagnosis or a label - casting a spell that says, “You can’t come back from this.” And why I feel, with every cell in my body, that we must turn the ship around.
Because there is too much at stake.
Our healthy future.
Our children’s health.
Our ability to trust what we feel.
Our ability to live without fear.
Our sovereignty.
You cannot outsource something as personal as healing. You cannot hand your life over to experts who don’t know you. You cannot assume that someone else will protect your wellbeing more fiercely than you will. And you cannot thrive in a system that profits when you are confused, compliant, and quietly deteriorating.
We need a different path.
One that honours the body as a living history of your life.
One that respects its intelligence.
One that recognizes healthy movement as medicine.
One that recognizes that the body improves when we give it the right inputs.
One that teaches sovereignty instead of dependence.
One that invites people to not just to get better - but to understand.
That is what Rouleau is.
A way back to yourself.
A way out of confusion.
A way out of fear.
A way out of dependency.
A way forward for those who sense that the world is not what they were told - and that their bodies hold more wisdom than they ever realized.
And to the women who are waking up, I want to say this plainly:
You are not alone.
There are more of us than you think - women who see the cracks in the system, who feel the pull toward something truer, who want skills that actually matter, who want to protect their families from unnecessary harm, who want to understand their own bodies, who want to carry this work into their communities, who want to be part of something that outlives all of us.
This is not about my legacy.
It’s about our responsibility as women who are waking up.
If you feel the call I am describing - if something in your chest or your belly or your bones is saying “yes” - then you are already part of this tribe.
We are building something stronger than the system that failed us, one body at a time, one conversation at a time, one remembrance at a time. I believe this is why we are here now - with our eyes open.
If you see what I see, you are not alone.
And if we band together, we will be stronger.
Denise 🌿
