My Story
From listening to the body to changing the way we live
My work began with the body.
I trained and practised across osteopathy, Western medical acupuncture, herbal medicine and psychosomatic therapy, spending years working directly with people experiencing pain, persistent physical symptoms and complex health concerns.
I loved understanding the mechanics of the body. But the longer I worked with people, the more interested I became in what couldn’t always be explained by structure, diagnosis or treatment alone.
Why did some symptoms continue despite doing all the “right” things?
Why did the same patterns seem to return?
And why did what was happening emotionally seem so intricately connected with what people were experiencing physically?
Those questions changed the direction of my work and eventually, my life.
My body became part of the story too
In my twenties, while I was building my career as a health practitioner, my own health began to change.
I developed severe cystic acne. I was frequently unwell with colds, fevers and other infections. I experienced an ulcer on my eye, joint stiffness, hives and unusual rashes.
I tried many of the things I would naturally have considered at the time. Changes to my diet. Acupuncture. Herbal medicine. Skin treatments. Mindset and even emotional work.
Some things helped.
Nothing seemed to explain the whole picture. On reflection I was trying to control and fix everything.
And there was an uncomfortable contradiction I couldn’t ignore.
I had spent years learning how to work with the body, yet I wasn’t really listening to my own.
Eventually, I stopped asking only, "How do I fix this?"
And started asking, "What is this showing me?"
That question opened an entirely different conversation.
I began becoming curious about the emotions I hadn’t fully experienced, the decisions I hadn’t wanted to make and the parts of my life that no longer felt right.
Rather than seeing my body simply as a problem to solve, I started listening to it as information.
It became increasingly clear that the physical experience and the way I was living were not separate.
As I began processing what I had previously suppressed or pushed aside, I also began making changes.
I left my well paid job.
I took time away.
We drained our bank accounts and moved countries with a 20 month old toddler.
I changed the way I worked. (I felt it was the only option I hadn’t tried and my health was suffering for it).
And slowly, the trajectory of my life began to look very different.
The work was no longer only about feeling better.
It was about being willing to listen to what my experience was asking me to change.
The same questions began changing the way I worked with clients.
After working with thousands of people in clinical practice, I had become very good at noticing patterns.
I could often see connections between what someone was experiencing physically, what was happening emotionally and what was occurring in their wider life.
I began asking different questions.
Not simply, “Where does it hurt?”
But:
What was happening when this began?
What feels unresolved?
What are you holding onto?
What haven’t you allowed yourself to feel?
What might this experience be asking you to notice?
The conversations changed.
So did the work.
And I became increasingly interested in helping people experience and process emotions rather than only understand them intellectually.
The Release Process®
Over time, the way I was guiding people through emotions developed into what is now the Release Process®.
It is a four-part process for identifying an emotional experience, allowing yourself to experience and process it, listening for the information within it and integrating what you discover.
It sounds simple.
The depth comes from learning to stop overriding what you feel.
For me, emotional processing became foundational because once we are willing to experience what has remained unresolved, we have much more information available to us.
Sometimes that changes how we relate to our body.
Sometimes it changes a relationship, decision, or a boundary.
The way we lead, we desire, or the life we are willing to create.
BUILDING SOMETHING OF MY OWN
I had built something I never imagined letting go of
By this point, I wasn’t simply a practitioner working with clients.
I had built a bricks-and-mortar clinics from scratch (bought and renovated a commercial building) and only months after bought a second business to turnaround. I was a business owner, managing a team and carrying all of the responsibility that came with creating something that other people were now part of too.
The clinic was my second baby.
I had poured years of my life into building it, and for a long time I genuinely thought I would never let it go. I loved it!
And yet, alongside everything I had created, there was something else I couldn’t quite ignore.
A sense that there was more.
I didn’t necessarily know what that “more” looked like. What I did know was that despite having built the career and business I had once wanted, there was a part of me that still felt deeply unfulfilled.
Something in me knew I wasn’t fully doing what I was here to
The PIVOT
The pivot wasn't driven by certainty
When the pandemic temporarily closed my clinics for 8 weeks I began taking more of my work online.
From the outside, it might now look like a natural progression.
It didn’t necessarily feel that way while I was living it.
There was fear. There was uncertainty. There was the practical reality of running an established business and managing a team while simultaneously feeling pulled towards something that didn’t yet have the same history, structure or certainty behind it.
But The Art of Listening to Your Body kept growing.
More importantly, I could feel where my energy was.
The work that had begun as something alongside my clinical practice was becoming increasingly difficult to treat as a side project. It was growing like an exponentially beautiful beast.
And eventually, what I had been feeling internally became too obvious to ignore.
LETTING GO
There came a point when I knew
I had always thought the clinics would be part of my life.
They represented years of work, risk, responsibility, identity and an enormous amount of love.
Selling wasn’t about escaping a business that wasn’t working.
It was about being willing to let go of something that was working because I knew it was no longer where I was meant to put my energy.
That was very different.
Eventually, I sold the clinic business (within one month) I once thought I would never let go of and stepped away from clinical practice.
The Art of Listening to Your Body became my work.
In many ways, that decision embodied everything I had been teaching.
These experiences aren’t separate from my work.
They are part of what I bring to it.
Because listening is only the beginning.
There is a point at which personal work stops being only about what we need to heal or release.
The question becomes:
What do I want to create with the space that becomes available?
This is where much of my work lives today.
Emotional processing remains the foundation.
From there we can explore identity, relationships, leadership, desire, capacity, decisions, opportunities and the ways we unconsciously recreate what is familiar.
I am endlessly interested in the relationship between our internal experiences and the lives we create around them.
Not because I believe there is one prescribed way to live.
Quite the opposite.
I want people to become better at hearing themselves.
My life looks very different today
I live 20 minutes from Wānaka surrounded by mountains, animals and considerably more space than I had when this journey began.
My 5 horses have become unexpected teachers and increasingly part of my in-person work.
I travel because new environments change the conversations we are capable of having.
I continue to learn, experiment, question what I think I know and allow my own work to evolve.
And I remain fascinated by one deceptively simple idea:
What changes when we become willing to listen differently?
To our emotions, bodies, patterns.
To what we desire.
And ultimately, to ourselves.
Where my work lives today
Private Work
For people who want to work closely with me across the deeper layers of what is happening in their body, relationships, work, identity and life.
1:1 online and in person retreats
Retreats
Intimate experiences in New Zealand at my home with horses international group retreats that create space to step outside everyday life, experience yourself differently.
The Art of Listening to Your Body
The educational home of my emotional processing work, including the Release Process®, programmes, masterclasses and resources for understanding emotions and the body.
Healing Beyond The Diagnosis
My book exploring the experiences and observations that changed the way I understood the relationship between physical symptoms, emotions and healing.
Full of inspiring real stories.
There is always more information available when we become willing to listen.
My work has evolved considerably from where it began.
I expect it will continue to.
The common thread is curiosity.
About the body, emotions, and human behaviour. About the patterns we repeat and the possibilities we sometimes cannot see while we’re inside them.
If something here has sparked that curiosity in you too, you can explore my work below
What Other People Are Saying
