Why I do this work — and what it took to find it

I was a sickly child in and out of hospital, tonsils, appendix, adenoids taken out and a body that kept asking to be listened to. I learned early that the body has its own language and that most people don’t know how to read it.

In my late twenties, I was diagnosed with cancer, I was rushed for  surgery, luckily no chemotherapy. But it’s the kind of experience that asks you, and without negotiation, what you are actually doing with your time here.

I kept going. We built a family business and I did what needed doing, the way you do when life is busy and full with 3 young children and a husband that travelled constantly. There is always something that needs your attention to keep it together.

And then years later still unwell, still not right, the kind of tiredness that sleep doesn’t fix and doctors can’t find on a test. My thyroid was struggling and hormones a hot mess from my previous surgery.

It wasn’t until a naturopath sat across from me and actually listened. And got me back on my feet.

I enrolled in my Bachelor of Health Science not long after because I wanted to be that person for someone else.

I built my naturopathy practice and loved it but I kept noticing the same pattern.

I could support the body, the gut, the hormones, the sleep, the cortisol and people would feel better and life would keep going and within months they’d be back where they started.

Something was missing and I kept going deeper. Into coaching methodology, into behaviour change and identity work and the psychology of why capable people stay stuck even when they know exactly what they need to do. I completed my coaching training alongside my clinical work, because I couldn’t unsee the gap between the two.

The body was only ever part of the story, the pattern underneath the behaviour and that was what I was really looking for.

In 2020, my husband had a stroke, he was in rehabilitation in Melbourne. COVID meant no visitors and no exceptions.

I made meals and delivered them to the door until I couldn’t, I fought harder than I have fought for anything, his basic right to have someone in his corner. To not be just a body in a room that people walked past.

Eventually the only way out was through, we fled Victoria  back to South Australia for a fresh start.

And it was there, working part time in a psychiatrist’s office alongside my own practice, that something clicked into place that I hadn’t fully named before.

The clients in that office were veterans, people whose nervous systems had been shaped by things that happened long before they had any say in the matter. I implemented neurofeedback treatment, a way of working directly with the nervous system, below the level of language, below conscious memory. Because some things don’t get stored in words they get stored in the body. In the way someone holds their shoulders, in the need to always know where the door is.

I learned to read those signals without being told, I knew when to speak and when to be completely still. I knew what the room needed before anyone said anything, it wasn’t something I was taught, it was something I already knew.

One veteran made me a pen from resin, his way of saying what he couldn’t say out loud, others brought chocolates. They were small things that meant everything because what they were really saying was: you held the space, you let me be what I was without asking me to perform being fine.

I understood that in that room more clearly than I had ever understood anything.

It wasn’t until I sat with those veterans that I understood why fighting for Mark had mattered so much to me, why I couldn’t let it go, why the image of him in there alone was something my body could not tolerate anymore.

I already knew, long before I had words for it, what it costs to be left in a room with no voice and I already knew what it means when someone fights their way in to collect you.

They are not veterans, they are not in hospitals, they are, by every external measure, completely fine.

They have careers, relationships, families, and full lives. They are the person everyone else relies on and they are exhausted in a way they cannot explain. Their body hurts in ways that tests don’t show, they know what they should do and cannot make themselves do it, they look at the life they have carefully built and feel, lost and with some shame, that it doesn’t quite fit.

They come to me saying they’re tired, that something has been so sore for years and that they just can’t seem to get on top of it.

And underneath every single one of those stories is a version of the same thing. Somewhere along the way in childhood, a classroom, a workplace, a relationship, they learned that making themselves smaller was the safest option. And their nervous system filed that away and built an entire life around keeping them there.

I worked with a woman not long ago who was certain the answer was a complete change of direction. Everything in her life felt wrong: her work, her energy, her body, her relationship. She had been carrying it all quietly for years, managing everyone else’s needs, absorbing what came at her, wondering privately why nothing felt like enough.

Twelve months later, nothing in her external life looked dramatically different and yet everything had changed. She stopped absorbing those around her and started asking for more for her. She stopped holding the tension and her body finally relaxed the pain she had managed for years simply left. She found her way back to the creative work that had always lit her up, her relationships became easier because she was more relaxed.

The circumstances were never the problem they were just where the problem showed up.

Not the symptom, the thing underneath the symptom, the old decision the nervous system made usually long ago, and for completely understandable reasons that small was safer than seen.

The body keeps the score I learned that before I could talk, and working with the veterans cemented it for me.

My job is to help find out what’s on the page, and then, finally, put it down.

There are two places to go from here.

If you’d like to understand more about who I am and how I work the About page is where that lives. It’s not a CV. It’s a continuation of this.

And if you’re ready to find out what’s actually in the way for you the work begins with The Intensive.