After the Body Says No

In a world obsessed with optimization, productivity, and performance, what happens when the body says, "No more"?

What happens when the fight for success, survival, or identity can no longer be sustained?

In this deeply personal talk, Dr. Rodney King shares the story of how a world-acclaimed martial artist turned philosopher found his way back to something older than any system or strategy: natural wisdom.

Raised amid violence in the South Side of Johannesburg, forged through military service, and celebrated internationally for his work in self-preservation and martial arts, Rodney’s path was one of strength, until it broke him.

A diagnosis of severe cervical degeneration, chronic fatigue syndrome and CTE-like symptoms ended his martial arts career, launching a painful but transformative return to nature, presence, and the quiet voice of the body.

Alongside nature-connected healing, psychedelics, and deep philosophical inquiry, Rodney began to recover a kind of wisdom that isn’t taught but remembered.

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The art of survival

By the time most people would have said I’d made it, my body was already quietly falling apart. I was teaching around the world, running a successful organisation, finishing advanced degrees, and doing work that mattered to people I respected. From the outside, everything looked solid. Inside, something felt off. I was tired in a way rest didn’t touch. My mind would stall mid-sentence, searching for words that had always been there before. I told myself it was stress, pressure, the cost of carrying a full life at speed. I had spent decades learning how to push through discomfort, how to override signals, how to keep going. What I didn’t yet understand was that the very skills that had helped me survive — and succeed — were the ones I could no longer afford to rely on.

I didn’t learn those skills by accident. I learned them because, early on, they were what kept me safe.

I grew up on the south side of Johannesburg, in government housing, in a neighbourhood where you learned quickly how to read a room, how to keep your head down, how to get home without trouble finding you. Violence wasn’t an exception — it was part of the background hum. Gangs were common. Bullying was normal. You didn’t need to be especially unlucky to get hurt. You just needed to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Home wasn’t a refuge either. My mother was an abusive alcoholic, and rage could arrive without warning. I learned very young that intelligence didn’t count for much in an environment like that. Sensitivity didn’t either. What mattered was toughness — the ability to absorb impact, stay alert, and keep moving no matter how you felt.

I wasn’t naturally aggressive. If anything, I was imaginative, inward, drawn to the outdoors whenever I could find it. But imagination doesn’t stop a fist, and daydreaming doesn’t get you safely through the street. Around that time, I read a book that stayed with me: Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. Frankl wrote about surviving the concentration camps, and about the one freedom that can’t be taken away — the freedom to choose your attitude in any given situation.

That idea lodged itself deep in me. I didn’t have much control over what was happening around me, but I could decide how I met it. I could decide not to give up. So I looked for something that could teach me how to defend myself, to endure a hostile world.

That something turned out to be martial arts.

I started training when I was six years old. At first, I thought I was learning how to fight. In some ways, I was. But what I was really learning was how to endure discomfort, how to override fear, how to keep functioning when adrenaline flooded my body. I learned how to take hits and stay upright. How to push past pain. How to control my breathing and my reactions when things got intense.

Those skills became the foundation of my identity. They followed me into adolescence, into the military, into every high-pressure environment I entered later on. They gave me structure, discipline, and a sense of agency in a world that had offered very little of that.

Becoming someone who could cope

At that time in South Africa, military service is compulsory. I had never thought I would be well suited for military service, but in many ways, it felt familiar. The emphasis on discipline, control, readiness — none of that was new to me. I was used to being alert, used to keeping emotion contained, used to functioning under pressure.

I did well in this environment. I learned quickly, took on responsibility, and adapted to the demands of the role. There was a sense of competence there — of knowing what was expected of me and being able to meet it. For someone who had grown up in chaos, that mattered more than I would have admitted at the time.

But the military chapter didn’t last forever. And when it ended, it didn’t come with a clean handover into whatever was meant to come next.

I left carrying a lot of training in my body — habits of vigilance, fast reactions, a nervous system tuned for threat — but I lacked the education to easily transition to a new career. After much searching, fate presented an opportunity to work in nightclub security.

My training paid of quickly in that line of work. I knew how to handle myself. I was trained to read situations quickly, to step in before things escalated, to respond under pressure, and before long, I was running security for several nightclubs in the city.

And then one night, someone tried to kill me.

A bullet narrowly missed my head, and as my hearing slowly returned, I remember thinking, I can’t keep doing this. Not in a moral sense. In a practical one. This life had limits, and I was brushing up against them. I had survived again — but survival was starting to feel like a strategy with diminishing returns.

I walked away from that work not long after, and decided to turn towards a longstanding dream of mine: teaching martial arts. The school developed slowly at first, then with momentum. Students came, then instructors. I found myself building something that felt both demanding and humane — a place where toughness wasn’t confused with brutality, and control didn’t require numbness.

For the first time, the skills that had once kept me safe were being used to help others feel safer in their own bodies. That mattered to me. It gave the work weight and direction.

I didn’t know it then, but this was the beginning of a long stretch of life where things would look, from the outside, as if they were finally falling neatly into place.

Turning survival into a life

The school grew faster than I expected. What had started as a small, focused group began to attract people from further afield. Invitations followed — first to teach elsewhere in the country, then internationally. I found myself on planes more often than I was at home, carrying the work into different contexts and cultures, adapting it to rooms full of bodies I’d never met before.

Alongside that, the scope of who I was teaching widened. Fighters, yes — but also military units, security teams, and others whose work required them to function well under extreme pressure. These were people for whom losing control, even briefly, could have serious consequences.

That suited me. I was still oriented toward effectiveness, toward systems that held up when things got chaotic. I refined the training further, breaking it down, pressure-testing it, translating embodied knowledge into something that could be taught quickly and reliably. The more I did that, the more demand increased.

At some point, I realised I was no longer just running a school. I was running an organisation. There were instructors to train, programs to maintain, expectations to meet. The work took on a life of its own, and I adapted again — stepping further into planning, coordination, and leadership.

Around the same time, I returned to formal study. Not to change direction, but to deepen it. Psychology, mindfulness, leadership — frameworks that could help me understand what I was seeing every day in training rooms: how stress narrows attention, how fear lives in the body, how quickly people lose access to their skills when their nervous systems tip into overload.

From the outside, it looked like coherence. A life where experience, teaching, and study all reinforced one another. I was doing meaningful work, at scale, with people I respected. But internally, my life didn't feel like success.

Turning towards nature

I felt sick, but I couldn't put my finger on why. I came to think of it as "high-functioning depression". I was productive and, by most external measures, doing well. But emotionally, everything felt flat. I told myself I was tired, stressed, over-committed. I was used to pushing through discomfort, and this felt like just another thing to manage. I had built a life around competence, and I was still competent. That made it easy to ignore what was missing.

I might have carried on like that for much longer if my marriage hadn’t ended.

The separation was sudden and decisive. When it became clear that the relationship was over, I felt that my life was upended, and I was once again confronted with the undeniable need for a change.

It was the hardest decision I ever made, but I had to leave South Africa.

The move wasn’t part of a grand plan. It was a response to necessity — emotional, relational, practical. I needed distance. Space. A chance to stop reacting long enough to hear what was actually going on inside me. I didn’t yet know what I was moving toward. I only knew that the life I had been living no longer felt inhabitable.

After some time in Thailand, I found myself on the Isle of Man just before the world closed down.

When COVID hit, movement stopped. Flights were cancelled. Borders hardened. What I had assumed would be a temporary stay became an extended period of stillness. There was nowhere to rush to, no schedule to maintain, no way to outrun myself. For the first time in decades, my life slowed to the pace of the place I was in.

At first, that was uncomfortable. I was used to motion, to purpose defined by activity. Without that, the days felt exposed. Empty in a way that couldn’t be filled with effort.

So I started walking.

It wasn’t a strategy. I wasn’t trying to fix anything. I just needed to move, and the island made that easy. Coastlines, fields, narrow paths shaped by feet rather than engines. I walked every day, often for hours, letting my body set the pace instead of my plans.

Something began to shift.

Not all at once. Not dramatically. But I noticed that my breathing changed. My shoulders dropped. My attention widened. I started sleeping more deeply than I had in years. Thoughts that had felt knotted began to loosen, not because I’d solved them, but because I no longer grasped them so tightly.

I hadn’t realised how long it had been since I’d spent sustained time outdoors without an agenda. As a child, nature had been one of the few places I could relax my guard. Somewhere along the way, I’d forgotten that. Out on the land again, walking in weather, noticing light and tide, I felt something familiar returning — a more intimate relationship to the world.

Encountering Gaia

That led me back into study, but from a different place than before.

I wasn’t trying to optimise performance or sharpen techniques. I wanted to understand why time in nature was having such a profound effect — not just on me, but on people more generally. I began exploring research on nature connectedness, ecological psychology, and the ways nervous systems co-regulate with living environments.

What I found wasn’t fringe. It was quietly robust. Evidence that human wellbeing is deeply entangled with the health of the ecosystems we inhabit. That attention, rhythm, and meaning emerge not in isolation, but through relationship.

This time, study didn’t pull me away from my body. It brought me back to it. The science helped me articulate what I was already living — that recovery wasn’t something I was doing to myself, but something that was happening through relationship with the more-than-human world.

Around that time, I had a transformative psychedelic experience. During that experience, I had an overwhelming sense of being in relationship with something vast, alive, and intelligent — not abstractly, but intimately. The name that came to mind was Gaia. Not as a metaphor, and not as a belief I’d adopted, but as a presence that was already there, whether I acknowledged it or not.

The message I received from this encounter was simple and unsettling: I am in pain, and I need help.

At first, I couldn't imagine how I could make a difference to something so massive, so profound. Over the next few years, I continued to explore and experiment and study, in search of ways to honor this calling I had felt. But it wasn't long before I was came to realise that my own healing wasn’t separate from the health of the world I was walking through every day. They were part of the same process.

The Cost of Survival

For some time, I had noticed small disruptions in my daily life.

At first, they were easy to dismiss. Losing a word mid-sentence. Forgetting why I’d walked into a room. Struggling to follow a thread of thought that should have been familiar. None of it was dramatic. I was still functioning. Still competent. If anything, my life felt more coherent than it had in years.

I assumed it was fatigue. Or age. Or the residue of stress finally unwinding. I had spent most of my adult life pushing my nervous system hard; it made sense that there might be an adjustment period as things slowed down.

But the moments became harder to ignore.

One afternoon, I stood in my kitchen, unable to remember how to tie my shoelaces. I knew that I knew. The information was there somewhere. But I couldn’t access it. I remember the sensation clearly, the feeling that something was undeniably wrong.

I kept going for a while longer, adapting as I always had. Finding workarounds. For a while I wore only flip-flops to avoid confronting that feeling again. But it was becoming clear that this problem wasn't going away on it's own.

This eventually lead me into a series of medical assessments, scans, and conversations that confirmed what my body had already begun to tell me.

The conclusion, when it came, was clear enough: I was showing signs consistent with chronic traumatic encephalopathy. The likely result of decades of head impacts — in training, in fighting, in work I had once considered normal. The prognosis was uncertain, but the direction of travel wasn’t.

This wasn’t an interruption to my life. It was part of it. The cost of choices that had once been necessary, then meaningful, then habitual. There was grief in that — for the body I’d trusted, for the future I’d assumed, for the parts of myself that had been built around physical mastery and precision.

I was told that continuing to train and teach martial arts carried real risk. That the work I had organised my adult life around was now something I needed to step away from.

Letting go was painful. Martial arts wasn’t just a profession; it was a language my body had spoken since childhood. Walking away meant releasing an identity that had carried me through danger, given me purpose, and shaped how I understood myself in the world.

But it also clarified something.

The life that lay ahead of me could no longer be built on force, speed, or endurance. It would have to be built on attention. On listening. On rhythm. On relationship.

In a strange way, the diagnosis didn’t undo the path I’d been on. It completed it.

Thinking from the body back out

For most of my adult life, my answers had been practical. Train harder. Refine the system. Teach what works. Solve problems through effort and control. Those approaches had served me well — until they didn’t. And once they fell away, I found myself without the familiar tools I’d used to orient myself in the world.

I began to notice that the things supporting me now were not achievements, but relationships. With place. With time. With my own limits. Walking each day, listening to weather, feeling fatigue and responding to it rather than overriding it — these weren’t strategies. They were ways of being in contact.

This is where philosophy entered my life in a new way.

Not as abstraction, and not as something separate from the body, but as reflection rooted in experience. Questions about what it means to belong to a living world. About whether meaning is something we generate internally, or something that arises between us and the environments we’re shaped by.

Looking back, I can see that this turn toward philosophy wasn’t as abrupt as it might appear. Even in my most physically demanding years, martial arts was never about aggression for me. I wasn’t interested in domination or intimidation. What drew me was calmness — the capacity to remain present when things got intense.

At its best, martial arts taught me how to regulate myself. How to breathe under pressure. How to feel what was happening rather than react blindly to it. In that sense, the work was philosophical long before I would have used that word. It was an inquiry into how little tension was actually required to meet a moment well — how clarity emerges when the nervous system is settled, and how power follows calm rather than aggression.

If there was a guiding principle emerging, it was this: life seems to go better when we stop trying to dominate it, and start trying to participate more carefully.

That participation isn’t passive. It requires attention, responsiveness, and a willingness to be changed by what we’re in relationship with. It asks us to listen before acting, to feel before deciding, to notice rhythm before imposing speed.

This way of living doesn’t promise safety or certainty. What it offers instead is belonging — a sense of being part of something larger than the projects we set ourselves.

After a life organised around survival and mastery, that feels like a different kind of strength.