This is the landing page for my BackaBuddy Campaign as well as for the evolution of Walking to Wellness: Conscious Somatic Integration Therapies. Read the interview here.

My goal is to walk 850 to 1,000kms across Spain from 17 September to 30 October.
My mission is to advocate for Mental Health with the sharing of tools and techniques with fellow pilgrims to create a new narrative through coaching, story telling and metaphor. I will also offer craniosacral therapy along the way to those in need of nervous system regulation.
My vision is to make Walking for Mental Health: Coaching and Therapy on the Move accessible to all. To do this I will 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).

Mental Health is not simply the absence of Mental Illness; it is much more than that. It is a relationship you have with yourself on all the levels of your being; how you connect with your environment, and the way you are engage with your community.

Mental Health gets little bandwidth in a society of competition where the one who dusts herself off and gets back to a so-called normal as quickly as possible is the one who succeeds. I am an over-functioning adult who has shadow boxed with depression and addiction my entire life. When going through a massive nervous breakdown, my close circle of female friends were tasked with hiding it at all costs from the general community, my young child, and from an ex husband who would have used it to win the custody war he had been waging for years. We live in a society that, instead of supporting over-burdened people in their times of struggle, exiles them to be labeled diseased or disabled.

A recent confrontation with depression, addiction and dysfunction has helped me address the relationship these have with being treated as nothing more than an inconvenience and nothing less than invisible as I adapted to the stereotypical masking required to fit the personas and labels of a dysfunctional normality. Forged in the fires of life, I grew strong and scrappy and feisty and resilient. 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). Each struggle for survival brought me closer to my purpose, and each diploma, course, certificate and training I have done has fuelled the flames of the decades of self-development and healing I have done.

Travel has been my soulmate, writing and story telling my gurus, and shoes on feet on mountain trails my medicine and meditation; my means to process and progress on an ever-deepening spiritual path.  Some call that an escape, others call it an addiction. I call it survival, serenity, self care.

I am not a religious person but, when looking for a passage through this recent looming mental health crisis, I was struck one day by a piercing clarity and instructed that the Camino de Santiago was the tool that could save my life. More than that, I was being called to transmute my own darkness into a light to walk others back to wellness too.

Walking for Mental Health: Coaching and Therapy on the Move is a purpose that found me when all my knowing fell away. The tunnel was a passage towards something significant.

Please click on BackaBuddy to pledge your support (donor incentives are detailed on the Walking for Mental Health campaign page). The amount you donate will contribute to my pilgrimage to giving the topic of mental health the bandwidth it requires and, in supporting me to support others as they too walk to wellness, we can together remove the stigmas attached to the topic of Mental Health.

Everyone who takes part in this campaign will ultimately benefit from being part of changing the way we work—and walk—with Mental Health.

You can follow me on YouTubeas I walk. Currently there are some clips from my 2019 Camino de Santiago—I completed the Coastal Portuguese route and returned to Porto to begin all over again on the Central Route. There is always more work to be done and pilgrimage is a perfect facilitator. As I work and walk and coach and Camino I will add more clips here and on my Instagram @Mental_Health_Pilgrim. To follow, share and support this coaching pilgrimage, my LinkTree has all my socials: https://linktr.ee/Walking_for_Mental_Health 

I believe life happens in spirals. Each time we traverse another Hero’s Journey, that includes departure, initiation and a return with medicine (a gift), there is a death before new growth. It takes the revisiting of the same cave—yet changed from each subsequent journey—to develop the (in)sight to see clearly in the dark. Grief is not always about losing someone you love, it can also be about losing aspects of self; grieving the person you could have been if things had only been different. 

A surface-level summary of Who I Am gives an indication of all the paths I have walked on my personal pilgrimage of unbecoming to unwittingly develop the aspects of Self that I now pull together into a common thread. It can be overwhelming deciding (in the head) which of the myriad paths to take until a felt (in the heart) sense is realised. 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 show up and take that very first step.

Everything I have done up to this point has equipped me to walk my talk to guiding individuals, corporates, and teens from disadvantaged communities up mountains and into forests so that they can find their unique frequency in nature.

This is just the beginning of a paradigm shift I plan to create through walking people back to wellness, supporting them in their times of crisis and healing; two sides of the same coin. It begins with the Camino de Santiago and will extend into Wellness Walks in Cape Town, Nepal and beyond. 

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.