The Walking Stick is a symbol of those people in one’s life who assist in upliftment, encouragement and forward momentum. Having an emotional, physical and spiritual staff to lean on can help traverse tricky terrain.
I don’t walk with poles or a walking stick—in fact the few times I have used someone’s for a difficult crossing or steep downhill, I have fallen. This indicates to me that I need to become more familiar with asking for support. My innate tendency is to always be self supporting and to hold others up. This can be to my detriment if I can’t equally find the people and resources to support me in supporting others.
A Walking Stick can be seen in the negative light of a crutch and using one can be seen to highlight one’s disabilities. It is, therefore, imperative to give this an archetypal symbology that encourages its use. The sense of outreach in difficult times is so key to reducing suffering and restoring well-being.
This current campaign to walk 1,000km to raise awareness for mental health and suicide prevention made me extremely vulnerable in the asking for support and extremely disappointed. My lessons around support are to lean in only when the support is actually there and being mindful of expectations of it, without using the lack of people believing in me to snap back into being 100% self supporting again.
When you carve a walking stick that ultimately provides support for your pilgrimage, it is like an analogy that can translate into the care and love offered to and infused into another human being that ultimately become the food that fuels that individual to be the support you one day may reach out for.
The pilgrim’s Walking Stick is a symbol that young, able-bodied people also make use of this often necessary tool for of support and that there is no stigma attached to utilising it, whether walking 5 or 45 legs of the Pilgrim’s Way. Using a Walking Stick can be a practice of mindfulness and gratitude—a way to honour the self and the body in recognition of its strength and also acceptance of its fallibility.
It holds the intention and reminder that there is always support at hand and it will challenge a different response when either needing to ask for or accept the offer of help from others. I can lean on something/someone temporarily and it’s ok to then lay it down, until needed again, without a) feeling obligated to be enslaved, and b) depending on it always being there.
Questions to ask yourself:
What held me back—cognitively, emotionally, somatically—in asking and/or receiving a hand of support today?
Who are the people in my community, tribe who are my walking sticks in life and how do I honour these people more by being receptive to their care?
You can follow, support and share my Walking for Mental Health fundraising campaign on BackaBuddy. All my socials can be found on LinkTree.
When asked why I chose the Camino de Santiago for this mission and to raise awareness for Mental Health in Suicide Prevention month, the answer was clear:
I have walked so many varied paths all my life, always with this libido driving me towards something there … yet not yet visible. There has been this calling, sometimes subtle and sometimes so intense it has brought me to my knees in prostration and frustration. And yet I have walked and walked and walked through injury, bad climate, distress and, most importantly, a deep knowing that there was something I was walking towards. Raising awareness for mental health; de-stigmatising conversations around suicide, trauma, grief and loss, and educating people with tools and techniques to recalibrate around adverse life events and debilitating emotional distress are what I was unwittingly walking towards on all my paths. My paths have been in psychology, investment banking, social development, coaching, meditation, mountain guiding, Vedic scriptures, travel and trekking, writing, creating, consulting, healing and helping. In short, Walking for Mental Health is my very own Camino de Santiago
With two weeks until departure for Spain to walk 1,000km whilst offering my skills, gifts, wisdom and work freely to fellow pilgrims on their own unique paths to their mental, emotional, physical and spiritual goals, I am reaching out once more for support for my campaign, which is almost 50% funded and which still needs over ZAR 20,000 to make it possible.
If you are unable to make a donation, please consider sharing the campaign with those who resonate with my vision and mission and please note that there are donor incentives for those who would like to experience my work.
Being a donor and supporting me to walk my talk means you become part of the journey of support for whomever I coach along the way. You become part of the solution.
I have been a quiet activist for most of my life, starting as far back as pre-teen when I thought donating my pocket money would end world hunger.
I have also been a not to quiet activist, getting hate mail when I was feeding hundreds of people made homeless in the settlement in Hout Bay.
I’m not so naive that I expect this campaign or even the work I do to change the world; what I do know though is that if I die a pauper having helped just one person survive the darkest moments of their life then that is a rich life indeed.
What it means to live well means different things to different people. For some it is accumulating money, status and possessions and for others it’s about relinquishing such things. Some people require luxury and some need simplicity and there is no right or wrong. The key is integrity, authenticity and self-reflection on the meaning that is being lived through you and how that motivates you to purposeful living.
For many years I accumulated as much as possible feeling my prior years life as a sensitive activist was washed away by the perception of a waste of time.
My years in investment banking and consulting was like putting a metal cast on a grazed knee—it was the ultimate burden that almost killed me by first breaking the spirit of who I was meant to be in the world.
As I stripped away the layers and left myself exposed to those who couldn’t understand my giving up my feathered nest, I recognised that behind the criticism of many was that longing to also find meaning … and the intense and debilitating fear that often prevents it.
I have shadow boxed with depression and addiction my entire life. A recent confrontation with depression, addiction and dysfunction has helped me address the relationship these have with connection, childhood trauma and hyper vigilance around personal safety, boundary violations and feeling the need to give myself away in order to be accepted … to exist even.
Depression and addiction have deep roots and, although I have done decades of work on my childhood traumas (neglect, abuse, violations, hyper-vigilance and a lack of safety), as well as adult traumas (rape, relational and familial abuse, breakdowns, grief and self harm), I have to be vigilant. Sometimes my only saviour is feet in running shoes on mountain trails. Some call that an escape, others call it an addiction. I call it survival, serenity, self care. Running and hiking have always been my medicine; my means to process and progress on an ever-deepening spiritual path. Writing and story telling are my other elixirs. So, when looking for a passage through this mental health crisis, I recognised the Camino de Santiago as that tool that could save my life.
Grief is not always about losing someone you love, it can also be about losing aspects of self; it can also be mourning the loss of a person still alive and grieving the person you could have been if things had only been different.
My immediate aspiration is to walk 850 to 1,000kms across Spain from 17 Sep to 4 Nov ’25 whilst advocating for Mental Health with the sharing of tools & techniques with fellow pilgrims, to create a new narrative through coaching and story telling. I will also offer craniosacral therapy along the way. My long term goal is to use the unique combination of my qualifications, wisdom and experience to initiate teenagers from disadvantaged communities into nature therapy (using my years of experience and studies in social development) as well as corporates (using my long history in Investment Banking and Consulting).
“My ugliest parts, when met with mercy, can become my greatest assets.” ~ Frank Ostaseski
My work is not to help people live the kind if life I have chosen to live; it’s to show them that they have their own way and to help them uncover and/or develop the tools that will enable them to find the path that will appear only when they take that very first step. It can be overwhelming deciding (in the head) which of the myriad paths to take until a felt (in the heart) sense is realised.
To support me to support others whilst walking the Camino de Santiago, please click on the link to pledge your support: https://backabuddy.co.za/campaign/walking-for-mental-health I offer donor incentives in the form of vouchers for specific minimum donations.
The amount you donate will contribute to my pilgrimage to giving the topic of mental health the bandwidth it needs and supporting me to support others as they too walk to wellness. Together we can remove the stigmas attached to the topic of Mental Health and support people in their times of crisis and healing.
We begin so we can end and we end in order to begin again. Let’s get people walking their talk to better mental health.
Scan this QR code for my LinkTree, which contains all the relevant links for you tofollow, support and share the campaign as well as the work I do both here and abroad.
I am in Cape Town until October practicing in my Hout Bay therapy space for Craniosacral Therapy and Coaching; on the mountains for Meditation and Hiking/Running, and online for Coaching and 1-on-1 Yoga and Meditation.
All of my modalities can be combined into half or full day group or individual retreats.
A little background: I have a passion for holistic health and non-prescriptive self development. I believe in an integrated patient-centred approach to personal transformation and will take each individual on a journey to their own unique place of innate health using a variety of modalities.
These include: Craniosacral Therapy, Integral Coaching, TIME Meditation, Transformational Yoga, chakra purification, nutrition and personal psychology. A summary of modalities and costs is available at https://wellworthbeing.com/costs/
Our bodies are the vessels of our current existence and have an innate intelligence that we simply have to get in touch with in order to live well. Each body has its own stories; my job is to listen – to hear its stories as clearly as possible – and to respond effectively. I work with health, not illness, basing my therapy and coaching sessions on what is inherently well with your system as a starting point and we build from there.
Through bodywork and coaching sessions I re-establish the dialogue between your body and its inherent health and guide you to the best version of you that you can be. What you will get from a session with me is a 100% commitment to your wellbeing. I show up with curiosity and an open heart and allow my expertise, experience and intuition to guide each treatment.
Whether I am treating an individual or guiding a corporate team or school group, I bring the some dedication to the containment of the space and the transmission of information, knowledge and wisdom.
Contact me at wellworthbeing@gmail.com or WhatsApp on +27 74 1011 621 to book your private or group session(s). You can also buy a voucher (or five with a 15% discount) to gift to loved ones. Please share my website with anyone you feel may benefit from my work.
Namaste 🙏🏼 meaning: The divine light within me bows to the divine light within you. It is a greeting used as acknowledgment of seeing in you what you may not see in yourself and to use that as a mirror to reflect what I too have within me. You can use it while pressing your palms together in front of your heart and this brings mindfulness to breath and the subtle movement of your heart and lungs contained within the ribcage. The greeting done in this way fosters interconnectedness and brings a calm presence to the beginning of any interaction regardless of content.
I don’t only walk to preserve my budget. I walk to get lost. To see things the driver obstructs; to hear things the engine exiles. Humming birds and porcupine quills. I walk fast; my feet attempting to keep pace with my brain. Both, therefore, get lost fast too. I don’t only get lost of my own volition; I get lost following the erroneous lefts and rights, mismatched hands and words, often both unwittingly pointing me in directions I am loathe to explore. My internal maps plot emotional puzzles poured out of the box onto muddy roads, and I hold both the anxiety of not knowing and the wisdom of where I am.
I spiral the town. A tuk tuk driver has passed me several times on the 10km walk to cover a 4km distance trying to find my way to the Wewurukannala Vihara Temple. “Get in. No money, I help you”, he says, and drives me left where the last hand indicated right. Giant Buddhas and the tunnels of hell. Formidable trolls and grotesque monsters. Torturers and demons. I run from Dante’s Inferno into the den of the temple elephant fighting its chained feet in its own version of hell. Punishment can sometimes come without crime. Movement is not always a choice.
Pushing into physical, emotional, mental and psychic (sweet) pain is the system’s means of purification and it is with this knowing that I follow my path. The roaming map of cardinal points and dotted lines is redundant. To plot the sights I have to find meaning in the terrain. It’s never this OR that. No absolutes. It’s only ever both AND that. Travelling expands me into the dynamic landscapes of the outer and the inner and gives me prompts to live into. It shifts my perspectives and changes my reality, stretches me to shed the ego system in favour of the eco system that informs my knowing rather than my known.
INJF, 29/11, Enneagram 4. I have attached to labels that work for me to shed the ones maliciously given. I struggle with my tangled mind and restless body over liquid marzipan dressed up as a regular flat white, at Dots Co-working Surf Cafe. I’ve been avoiding the coffee spots here. Because it’s Ceylon. It’s all about tea. Opportunistic to a fault, though, any market here is swiftly seized; entrepreneurship aroused by Europeans clamouring door-to-door for real espresso. If Hiriketiya is the goldmine of coffee lovers, Dots is the golden goose and the coffee costs its weight in gold.
STaY WEiRD demands the wall behind Hiriketiya Beach. Last night’s storm has brought the cold river to the ocean. I swim in pockets of remembered waterfalls and ride the waves. Bodysurfing; floating; buoyant. It often takes complete isolation from the regular distortions and distractions of daily life to sit with Me; to not turn away from the things that haunt and hurt; to allow those too to dissolve and discharge. I merge.
Having compensated for so long around ADHD and narcolepsy, perched on that cross-over spectrum with autism, has been a struggle to some degree but mostly a blessing. It has caused me to almost lose or take my life; has gotten me into a whole lot of risk taking, and resulted in some radical burnout episodes. Yet it has also forced me to up my game in motherhood; driven me to all kinds of personal, financial, health and study achievements, and encouraged an immense amount of courage to bubble up from my depths. It is my superpower.
As with maps, labels and identities do not a human being make. They give a guideline to better understanding. Integration is the full access key to cohesion. The terrain is in a constant state of dynamic change as other factors come into play and change the landscape; as new developments get constructed, as new roads get build, as old ones grow over or go into disrepair or are totally demolished. Being is also a verb.
Men with hoes dig and sandbag; the beach collapses like I do into the river in flood. Sun beds teeter on the edge. Always alert, evaluating, deliberating, I show them where to dig a channel to let the water out. Diversions are sometimes required. I linger at the beach, perched on a rock at the far end where my eyes can soften and settle on the hazy palm-encrusted crescent panorama of sea, surfers, sun worshipers, and that spray-painted wall on the very edge of the surreal.
When I travel I don’t have the same drains on my energy. My attention, intention and energy are (hyper)focused on making things good in the world. I feel a great call to go where my work is most needed and valued. I give of my gifts, my skills, my experience and logical thinking. I give of my heart and my commitment. There’s a sense of symbioses that pulls on my year’s word, Equanimity. My work changes lives. It is egotistical to feel insufficient. Arrogance and humility are upside down. I treat a young foreigner. I ‘see’ violation. “It’s not your fault”, I say. She weeps. “It’s not your fault”, I repeat. #metoo
‘It is the intentions, the capacities for choice rather than the total configuration of traits which defines the person.’ — Amelie Rorty
I recognise the irony in how inconspicuous I feel in a place I am so different and yet in Hiriketiya Bay where there are so many people who look ‘like me’, I get that uncomfortable edge of standing out. I micro-dose on public exposure and retreat to the containment of my homestay where writing and meditation are my closest allies and comfort. Detecting a tendency to be infatuated with being the outlier; the weird one; the pioneer who many only understand in hindsight, it can also find me fatigued. I have lapses justifying myself; I play myself down; lose focus trying to conceal myself. The pendulum is my kryptonite; it swings too high. Vertiginous.
The inner parts, both real and also not true, are identities to observe and let go … parts that need befriending not battling. I hold it all in dualistic dynamism: the anxiety with the joy; the isolation with the connection; the contraction with the expansion. The true warrior transmutes conflict into dance and thus the battle ends. Building courage is like building a muscle. I am not fit like I have previously been, but I am strong. I have lost inches of physical matter and, since the cells hold memories, the secreted physical waste drains emotional and mental sludge too.
Hot bitter coffee juxtaposed with warm mango and coconut flesh. My body takes it all and condenses it into a concise and accessible mingling of tastes and textures that create my human experience. I greedily assimilate, remaking all that dwells beneath my skin. I want to change my name to days of the week. Every day is a poem; a metaphor; a waymarker with no final destination. And my body is the poet.
My last day in Hiriketiya brings symbolic showers, an apt affirmation of renewal as I wander to the Bay for a final swim. The ocean is my church. I lie on my back and gaze at the clouds; gentle rain anoints my face.
WELL WORTH BEING 