Natalya YurmanovaWhen Your Life Stops Being a Case to Solve—and Becomes a Story You Write

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For fifteen years, the question Natalya was answering wasn’t “What do I want?” It was “How do I stay standing?” In a life like that, wanting things gets pushed far into the background, and a phrase like “finding yourself” sounds almost like a joke at your expense.

A codependent relationship. Money trouble. A divorce. The death of her ex-husband. And years spent gathering knowledge from every direction she could find, trying to understand what was happening to her.

Then came a point where she knew plenty—and still nothing changed. What she needed was to stop treating herself as an endless repair project.

Today Natalya lives in Drezna, a small town outside Moscow. She is the author of two books and the founder of Impuls Tochek, a space for women: “Time to Exhale” art evenings, bodywork, talks at women’s clubs, training for practitioners, and several streams of income.

And nearly all of it was already in her—just in separate pieces. The experience, the creativity, the professions, the pain, the writing, the ability to truly feel what other women feel. What was missing was a system that tied it together.

I had a husband, a child, a job, and an ordinary household. Looking in from the outside, nothing would have made you say something was wrong—especially since so many women around me were living more or less the same way. The problem was something else: there was very little of me in that life.

There was a codependent relationship and there were money problems. I was mostly the only one working, while raising my son and learning beauty services so I could do my own nails and hair, because you always want to look good. Deep down I knew this wasn’t normal, and I wanted a completely different life: a healthy relationship where I was loved and respected, not an emotional seesaw of “I love you when you’re good, I hit you when you’re bad”; work that brought both joy and money, not just the obligation to keep the family from going hungry; and the chance to be there for my son as an emotionally steady, healthy, happy mom.

The moment after which I could no longer slip back into denial came on our second wedding anniversary, when yet another fight broke out over drugs. In that moment I thought very clearly about my son, and I felt that with a father like that he could never be safe. And at the same time I realized that I had never been safe myself.

Around then I was taking a big business course, and in the section on working with clients there was a psychology module where I saw my own situation laid out in front of me—a situation that by then had lasted fifteen years. The course was talking about abuse, and at home I was watching it all play out live. It was almost surreal. I decided I needed help to understand whether this was really what it looked like and what I could do about it, and three days later I was sitting in a therapist’s office. For me that was one of my first truly grown-up steps: not spending another ten years explaining away what was happening, but admitting that I needed help.

After that, my life was full of learning: different fields and specialties, psychology, all kinds of practices. That knowledge genuinely helped me stay on my feet—through the divorce and, later, through my ex-husband’s death—and I don’t want to diminish that path. But at some point I noticed something strange: I knew a great deal, yet I couldn’t pull it together into one coherent system that worked for my good instead of feeding the sense that something was always wrong with me. It was like a huge cabinet full of tools that I’d open every time without knowing which one to use.

I came to Clirium in October 2025 with exactly that. I didn’t need one more explanation of why something was wrong with me—I needed a way to finally put myself back together.

— key points

One of my most important discoveries was studying and accepting my own innate design—which is what opened up the ways I could fulfill myself. My one-on-one work with Victory put me back together practically molecule by molecule. Clarity came on its own, without the emotional strain and relapses that many practices treat as normal, and understanding turned into inner footing. After that, I had no desire to go back to my old magical thinking.

Once I saw that my leading direction is creativity, I stopped treating it as something frivolous that could wait until later.

I went into creative work for real: I finished my first book, started writing songs and poems again, and began to paint. Out of that grew the “Time to Exhale” art evenings, where a woman can step away from the pressure of everyday life for a while, breathe out the stress, make things, learn something new, and simply be herself. I also added bioenergetic massage. I published two books (both in Russian): “12 of June. A Woman’s Confession. Sex, Death, Freedom,” my personal story told, as I say, with the raw side out; and “You Don’t Know Yourself. Mind. Body. Spirit.,” a guide to finding personal harmony.

The most interesting part is that none of this came out of nowhere. It had all been in me before—I just hadn’t gathered those parts of myself into one life.

Today I call myself the founder of Impuls Tochek (roughly, “Impulse Points”), a space for women—and, if you like, the main character of my own investigation. For more than five years, working as a nail technician in a small town, I held women’s hands in mine and listened to their stories. Across the manicure table we talked about marriages, children, fears, money, divorces, love, loneliness, and dreams, and we lived through the pain and the joy together.

Gradually I realized that doing a great manicure wasn’t enough for me, because what interested me was the woman herself. So today, a woman who comes to me can get not just a manicure but also a bioenergetic massage, come to an art evening or a gathering, and read my books. For me, Impuls Tochek isn’t an attempt to cram everything I know how to do into one project. It’s the opposite: it’s what happened when the scattered parts of me finally stopped competing with one another and came together as one system.

I often have moments when I think, Is this really my life? An especially strong one came on the day my second book was released, when several things happened on the same day. I looked at myself and understood: I’m now the author of two books, I have someone close and beloved beside me, I have projects, and people are reading my writing and leaving hundreds of comments about how these books help them.

And I stopped for a moment, because all of this is so easy to shrug off—to tell yourself, “Well, it’s just a book. Well, I met someone. Well, I did a project.” And if you don’t shrug it off yourself, others will gladly do it for you. But behind every one of those “wells” are dozens of small decisions nobody saw, fear and resistance, tears and losses, moments when I wanted to give up on everything. So I’m learning to own my results—not by turning them into a crown, but simply by acknowledging that I really did take those steps, and through them I found freedom, inner harmony, and myself.

If I put the woman I was next to the woman I am today, I have no urge to scold her for putting up with so much, for not understanding, or for not leaving sooner. I want to hug her, thank her, and say, “Sweetheart, it’s all going to work out. Listen to yourself, go, try, don’t give up.” Back then she didn’t yet know that her courage and her love of life would, in less than a year, bring her to the love she had only dreamed of, and that she would become an author and the creator of a space for women. All she could do was make the next choice.

The biggest decision of my life was to take responsibility for it: no one is to blame for where you are, and everything you want is created by your own actions and choices.

And if a woman in a similar place were standing in front of me, I’d tell her what I once needed so badly to hear myself: everything you feel is real, you’re not imagining it, you have a right to every feeling, and each one matters. Choose yourself, and let go of those who never chose you. And when you choose the path back to yourself, help will come—most likely not from the people around you right now, but you’ll meet the right people along the way when the time is right, and each of them will have their own purpose in your life. So welcome them, and be grateful.

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