There is a conditioned response to the somatic (mostly unwitting and unchecked) resistance to the felt sense of whatever is happening in the moment and, as with any form of conditioning, it can be reprogrammed with access to an equal measure of considered and conscious resourcing. 

Struggle can be used as a tool to justify one’s actions or one’s suffering and prevent one from fulfilling one’s dreams and desires and successes because it has become too painful to let go of the pain, and the samsara it locks us into. Often it’s just easier to be in the struggle than to step up and show up so it’s important to not get too attached to the strapping and then fail to acknowledge that the wound is no longer there. Letting go of the identity of injury can be empowering and can create the space for taking on the responsibility of stepping fully into one’s essential self. Treating your struggle or your wound as your Everest or Kilimanjaro can provide the telos to pull you on the very path you need to traverse towards your recovery and integration; it can be your elixir or your golden thread that highlights your unique gifts. We are not here to be perfect, we are here to heal. And the first part of any healing process is to recognise the wound as a symbol of healing rather than as an obstacle in its way.

Through a combination of trauma release exercises, yoga, meditation, chanting and light touch therapy, we can together co-create a safe holding space that gives your system permission to let go. This isn’t about fixing anything; it’s about finding a new set point from which you can operate more effectively without feeling under threat. 

Born feral, I spent my early years mostly naked and coated in mud, carving out sacred spaces in the roots of a huge tree at the foot of the garden to invite the tree spirits to come make magick with me and teach me through alchemical play. I was mostly wildly inappropriate, non-conformist and not of this world.

In an era of this unbridled freedom being less acceptable than the brutality of beating a child to tame them into someone more appropriate, I lost this spirit and filled the void with sugar, alcohol and general co-dependence to mask the shame I felt for desiring the wild connection to the tangled messy natural world.

Shame is not innate but something we are taught by the adults and society that shapes us — often by force and coercion — so as to better fit the expectations of a dysfunctional reality.

Finding my way back to who I was born to be has felt even more brutal than those early beatings and has taken repeatedly falling through crevasses, analogous of birthing portals into different origins, until I reconnected with full-bodied intentionality to resourcing through nature.

I recently went through another birth canal when I graduated as an Integral Coach with UCT GSB and recognised that resourcing with nature is not the same as embodying it. Walking the Otter Trail I further recognised that embodying nature is, for me, about accessing the feral and wildly inappropriate child within until she is fully integrated, living through me and pulling me in line with the trajectory of her playful nature spirit being.

This means no longer trying to fit in to be accepted by those who consider me to be inappropriate; neither does it mean adopting new age mantras that deny this reality … what it means for me is to simply embrace my inappropriateness and unashamedly love all of it; all of me.

“My life is my message.” Gandhi

I am a PCC Certified Integral Coach (UCT Graduate School of Business). Offering a range of specialised modalities, life experience and a unique skillset, I work functionally and dynamically from the foundations of your central nervous system to regulate, connect and integrate all levels of your consciousness — physical, vital, mental, relational and spiritual.

The Chinese symbols for listening are an ear and a heart and so it is, through opening my heart in deep listening, I invite you  to open your intuitive mind and wise heart to your innate embodied purpose. Knowing the path is not the same as walking the path, making it important to embark on an experiential process of discovery and creation of the path less trodden: to step onto the road meant only for you. 

I am an explorer, a pioneer and a pilgrim. Through decades of intentionally disrupting my own story, I bring the capacity to disrupt your story. I have learnt through experience that the greatest adventures—on mountains and in life—come from losing the path sometimes so that the less obvious pathways can be found. Obstacles are not intended to necessarily turn you back and can be used instead as a ratcheting open of your curiosity to the inner resourcing you can recruit in order to travel through and beyond them.

What I offer is an authentic expression of who I am so that you can find the same in yourself; a provocative invitation to shed the layers of who you’re not and find the courage to stand naked in the clothes you were born to wear so you can re-enter the world, your community and your immediate family with renewed vitality, confidence and calm. No one can become who they need to be by remaining who they are. Sometimes it takes crisis and sometimes curiosity; always it takes change.

Together we seek the questions for the answers you already hold within; together we co-create the map that best narrates your passage  towards your inner calling.

“Sooner or later we must realise there is no station, no one place to arrive at once and for all. The true joy of life is the trip.” ~ Robert Hastings

Joan Didion said you should be on nodding terms with some of the people you used to be but, for me, I can barely be on nodding terms with some of the people I am … so I kill them off like serial suicide. The death of a seed is the final death for that seed, but life emerges from each and every death–and from each and every seed–with appropriate dialogue with the universe. There are no endings, only beginnings, so if you want to have new birth, new revelation, new insight into life as you grow, you will have to learn to keep dying until you emerge exactly as the seed intended you to be. 

It has been said that the opposite of addiction isn’t sobriety but connection. As a child who grew up disconnected, it’s not surprising that I was a sugar addict from before I can remember and, since sugar is a gateway drug, it’s also not surprising that my need to numb out from my reality in the form of flavoured wine, parties, boys, exercise and multiple jobs and studies became my addiction as a teenager and young adult. Some addictions care at least on a healthy trajectory but, in my current reality, whatever is done as an intentional or unwitting distraction from wherever I currently find myself is an addiction none the less because it takes me away from my self, my body, my mind and my heart.

When I did my first Art of Living course 15 years ago and committed to first a week then a hundred days … and then some … of no alcohol, sugar, coffee, chocolate, junk food of any kind, it literally saved my life as I extracted myself from a dysfunctional marriage, toxic friendships, life-threatening lifestyle choices and began the process of full-being (I say being, not body because it was multi-dimensional) detoxification.

Because like attracts like, once the impurities in the physical, emotional, mental and psychic bodies have been released, the cravings automatically wane and an intentional (and often excruciatingly painful) shift in choices naturally, with time and practice (and a whole truck load of patience), brings a state of harmony between inner and outer.

It takes courage and it takes commitment because, with addiction, when you re-introduce the substance associated with trauma denial/alleviation, the cascade effect in the chemical process in the physical body will get triggered by the emotional body to automatically begin craving the substance or behaviour because, generally, no matter how much shadow work one does in the back of that cave, there are always triggers waiting to send that ricochet of bullets through your psyche.

I have conquered most of the addiction demons but I still have a ‘sweet tooth’. Over the decade and a half I have worked with this vigilantly and have transmuted my craving for sugar into something that looks like this. Perhaps my brain is tricked into believing it’s a sugary fix or perhaps it is just the right kind of dopamine kick to appeal to my bliss. Whatever it is, this is pure indulgence and deliciousness and it contains no sugar, no preservatives, no dairy, no gluten. Beneath the layer of organic figs, raisins, raw cashews, superfoods cacao nibs and goji berries is a smoothie bowl of superfood Lean Green protein mix and chia seeds. This post would quadruple in length if i were to endeavour to list the beneficial nutrients in this one bowl of breakfast. 15 years ago I was pre-diabetic; yesterday I had my blood sugar tested for a medical form and it couldn’t be more perfect. Change is never easy and sometimes it’s a revolutionary act … but it is inevitable and it is essential.

On Friday I completed my second coaching qualification with the UCT Graduate School of Business.

The past year has at times been harrowing as I have once again studied, coached, documented, submitted, researched, understood, doubted, wrestled … 

Mostly it has involved visiting the back of the cave where more deep excavation has been required to find my gifts within my wounds in order to more fully embody the unique way of being I bring to this Integral Coaching space.

If my life is a pilgrimage, I have trained intensively for this one, my backpack is packed and I am ready to walk the myriad paths for which my clients require a fellow pilgrim to assist them on their unique and specific journeys.

Have a scroll through my website and, when you’re ready to walk your path to purpose, CONTACT ME for a free 15-minute chemistry call to find out if you’d like to book me as your guide.

Often people–sadly, mostly boys and men–are shamed for their sensitivity; they are told to ‘toughen up’, told the world is a harsh place that needs guarding against. The world, however, is crying out for sensitive people.

It’s less important to find ways to be less sensitive and more important to find more tools to manage your sensitivity. Just like we can’t get rid of the people in the world that cause us harm and hurt so too can we not eliminate all the things in the world that make us ill. It’s critical therefore to accept these things will always be present whilst feeling into the current moment reality of how things are right now. It’s not what happens but what you do with what happens that counts.

Instead of protecting oneself in a world that requires toughness, it’s important to claim one’s sensitivity and allow others to claim their’s too because it’s only in living one’s truth that others have permission to live their truth too. And only then will the world become a place that requires gentleness.