About me

and how I got here.

I have been in the field of mental health for four decades, both as a service provider and user. 
I spent many years in talking therapies, at the end feeling that i was rehashing the same story, but little was actually changing.i never knew if it was helping as i kept feeling stuck and bogged down by the past.
 

I stumbled across breathwork quite by chance, at first with hof. I was immediately interested because it made me feel better. It gave me some headspace. From thereon, as I began to feel better, I knew i wanted to be able to offer this to other people. TRE was recommended to me as a superb way of healing deep rooted trauma as well as everday stress and once I began deepening my healing with TRE, I knew I wanted to be a practitioner so that I could offer this to others.

Past history.
After graduating in Sociology (and later studding for an MA) , I began working with people who had suffered trauma as children and were self harming as a way of managing their feelings. This involved working with the homeless population in Bristol. I worked on a one to one and also in group settings. 
I stayed in this field until my children were born, when we moved to Devon where I worked part time as a photographer and looked after my 2 neurodivergent children full time as a single Mum.

Age 49 yrs, I found out I had breast cancer. In hindsight, it was a warning sign from my body to look after myself. At the time I saw it as my body betraying me. It was a frightening time as my children were very young. Instead of self crae, i worked harder than ever, pushing myself to my limits on a daily basis until I could barely function anymore, quietly berating myself for not being the person I felt I should be.

As my neurodiverse children hit their teens and entered mainstream secondary, they wobbled and I wobbled to the point my anxiety was so acute, it felt difficult to do the most basic thing - breathe in and out. I kep thinking "all I need is someone to sit and breathe with". At that point, having never came across brethwork, I thought I was weird and silenced myself - until I came across Wim Hof and realised that breathwork was actually a 'thing' and I could indeed find people to breathe with.

I then realised that far from being a crank, my intuition was spot on. I was looking for co-regulation - tapping into the innate wisdom of my body that knew I needed people, support and to start really looking after myself so that I could regulate my own nervous system and deal with my own past issues on a much deeper level - on a somatic rather then intellectual level.