BROKEN BY THE SYSTEM. Rebuilt by my Soul.
When the life that defines you disappears
Who do you become?
A memoir about identity, loss, and the quiet courage required to begin again,
when everything you built your life around is no longer there.
by Kersten Stengel, Author, Speaker, Reinvention Mentor
Read The First Chapter Free
About the book
This book is for anyone who has ever wondered who they are outside of what they do.
For most of her life, Kersten Stengel lived with purpose.
A respected educational leader and volunteer emergency services responder, she thrived in demanding environments and believed deeply in the systems she served.
Then a workplace assault took everything.
What followed was not just injury and chronic pain. It was years of systemic failure, institutional silence, and the quietly devastating experience of being managed as a case number rather than a person. The identity she had spent two decades building, the one that told her who she was and what she was for, simply stopped being available.
The question that remained was the hardest one she had ever faced.
Who am I when the identity that defined me is gone?
BROKEN BY THE SYSTEM. Rebuilt by my Soul.
This is the story of what followed.
The chronic pain.
The isolation.
Two trips to India.
A return to science and clinical study.
The slow, non-linear, deeply personal process of rebuilding a life from the inside out.
It is not a story about recovery in the conventional sense.
It is a story about reconstruction, the kind that requires sitting with the hardest question long enough for a true answer to surface.
Foreword by John Ogilvie,
Founder and CEO of Byron Yoga Centre
One of Australia's most respected voices in yoga education
John Ogilvie is one of Australia's most respected voices in yoga education. Byron Yoga Centre, which he founded, has shaped the training and lives of thousands of practitioners across Australia and internationally. His decision to write the foreword for this book is not incidental. Byron Yoga Centre and John's own teaching are woven into the story of Kersten's recovery and rebuilding. His words open the book because he witnessed, in part, what is written inside it.
“Yoga, at its heart, is a path of returning to alignment - with truth, with purpose, and with the deeper self that exists beneath the changing circumstances of life. Kersten’s journey reflects that process.”
- John Ogilvie, Founder, Byron Yoga Centre
Meet Kersten
Kersten Stengel has spent more than a decade living the questions this book explores, and the last year understanding what to do with everything that journey gave her.
She is an Author, Speaker, Reinvention Mentor and Leadership, Identity & Organisational Advisor. Her work focuses on identity, purpose and reinvention, drawing on her expertise in clinical nutrition, yoga therapy, nervous system science and coaching to help people navigate profound change and discover what comes next.
Before this work, Kersten spent almost two decades in education and educational leadership and more than eight years volunteering in emergency response through surf lifesaving - experience that shaped her understanding of leadership, high-pressure environments, service and the human cost of always being the one who copes.
Kersten holds a BSc (Hons) in Applied Biological Sciences and a BHSc in Clinical Nutrition. She is also a qualified teacher, Yoga Therapist, ICF Coach, Tertiary Education Clinical Supervisor and number one bestselling co-author.
She works in partnership with Exercise Physiologist Clio Austin through Stengel & Austin Consulting.
Broken by the System. Rebuilt by My Soul. is her first solo book.
Ready to read the full story?
Read the book that began as a question and became a decade of work.
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