Some of what brought me to this work is professional. Some of it is deeply, irreversibly personal.

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I grew up as a transracial adoptee and queer woman in environments where the visible examples around me didn't reflect my truth. For a long time, fitting in meant overriding what I knew about myself — suppressing what was real in order to be acceptable. It worked, until it didn't. In my early twenties, everything I had held down came to the surface at once. What followed were years of depression, therapy, and the slow, non-linear work of learning to trust what my body already knew.

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That journey is ongoing. But I've arrived somewhere different now — not in healing, but in practice. In direct, daily communication with my body's inner knowing. In building secure attachment with myself. In learning to name my truth and bring it into relationship with safe others.

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I also spent over a decade working in the helping professions — first in NHS talking therapy services, then in the charity sector. I rose into management in both. And in both, I experienced the same creeping incompatibility: systems that individualised human suffering, that treated people in genuine social and structural distress as though their pain was a personal failure of coping. I watched brilliant, caring colleagues and the people I managed being ground down by the impossibility of doing meaningful work inside structures that actively worked against it.

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I experienced burnout. Repeatedly. Over about ten years.

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What brought me to somatic work wasn't a professional pivot. It was a recognition — that the kind of help I had needed, and the kind of help I had always wanted to offer, wasn't possible without attending to the body. Without understanding that the nervous system doesn't just respond to events. It responds to everything we override in the name of keeping going.

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Now I work with mental health workers, social workers, and those in social justice — people doing the same work I once did, in the same kinds of systems — to help them find their way back to themselves. Not to become more resilient to impossible demands, but to reconnect with their own truth, their own body, and their own sense of what they need and what they stand for.