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.
I’m not a fan of anything prescriptive. I believe in teaching people how to awaken their innate wisdom rather than touting methods for wellness, healing, training or life goals in general. This is because if we are in tune with the intuitive nature of the body, mind and heart we will spontaneously gravitate towards that which will ultimately benefit us on a deep somatic level.
Thirteen years ago, and for several years beyond, while I was going through the trauma of separation and divorce — and all that entails when egos are frayed and children are hurting — I would take myself to the icy Atlantic and breathe meditatively through the freeze as I gradually submerged myself in its numbness. Once I had calmed my sympathetic nervous system and slowed my heart rate and breath, I would lie back and surrender to the support of the water, relaxing fully into her arms. All the while my calming inner dialogue would remind me that this will pass, that I will be warm again, that nothing is forever and that the Law of Impermanence is my soulmate. I was generally the only person back then … incredulous onlookers considered me mad. But now it’s a method; now it’s en vogue; now everyone, whether or not they are intuitively being called to #icebathing, will force themselves to go there because now you’re considered crazy if you don’t.
Having said all of that, I’m always up for a #challenge! So when I met a friend this evening for a swim in the tidal pool, and he set his watch for 20 minutes, there was zero chance I was going to get out a second before the goal regardless of having lost control of my lower jaw at around the 15 minute mark.
With the sun behind mottled clouds, after 20 minutes in thirteen degree Celsius water, I fumbled over belt and buttons and managed to tap my thumb in just the right place to capture the magnificence of yet another magical Cape Town sunset. And then I had to recruit a driver so my body could shake out all that needed to be released.
WELL WORTH BEING 