About Me
My clinical work is contained by elders in my field for whom I hold deep respect. I also rely on the more-than-human world surrounding us. A few years ago, a shamanic practitioner taught me to ask my environment for support and guidance on my daily walks. This practise has become a ritual, keeping me and my client work connected to something more than ourselves, even through difficult and fractured times.
"I imagined the wind moving through all these places, and many more like them: places that were separated from one another by roads and housing, fences and shopping centres, street lights and cities, but that were joined across space at that time by their wildness in the wind. We are fallen in mostly broken pieces, I thought, but the wind can still return us to ourselves." Robert MacFarlane, The Wild Places.
With over 25 years of experience in yoga & mental health, I bring a deeply relational and embodied approach to my work. I bring not only professional training but significant lived experience to my practice. As a late adopter and mother through non-traditional paths, as someone who has faced serious illness and come through the other side, and as a person who has navigated my own psychedelic journeys, I understand first-hand the terrain of transformation, grief, resilience, and becoming.
This embodied knowing informs every aspect of how I work, with humility, authenticity, and deep compassion for the complexity of being human.
As a mother of an adult stepson and two adopted children, I navigated the adoption process as a late adopter, becoming an 'older' mum and creating a functioning, happy family with older children. I understand first-hand the complexity of non-traditional paths to parenthood, the grief and joy, the judgment and invisibility, the profound work of bonding and attachment when children don't arrive as infants. My own life experience informs my compassion for anyone whose journey to or through parenthood looks different from the cultural script.
More broadly, I'm passionate about addressing the lack of ritual for passing into adulthood in modern Western culture. Without meaningful rites of passage, many people struggle to claim their authority, their maturity, and their place in the world. My work, both one-to-one with individuals and with couples, families, and groups, hopes to begin addressing this gap, creating space for people to mark transitions, honour endings and beginnings, and step more fully into themselves.I have a passionate interest in the intersection of performance, psychedelics and contemporary psychoanalytic theory and welcome discussion and collaboration around this.
Sexual Health & Chemsex
During the AIDs crisis, I volunteered for a national HIV charity as a 'Safe Sex Advisor', Buddy and Fundraiser. I learnt so much from the gay community about grief, resilience, loyalty and the importance of activism. I continued my affiliation with the charity after becoming a Psychotherapist. Through my work with them, I became specialised in sexual health, facilitating group-work with sex-workers, working with chem-sex from a non-judgemental, harm reduction, and relational perspective. I also worked individually with African HIV+ people and with MSM and gay men struggling with issues around identity, sexual health and relationships. I understand that the intersection of sex, substances, and intimacy is complex territory that requires both clinical expertise and deep compassion. My work honours the full spectrum of human sexuality and the varied ways people seek connection, pleasure, and transcendence. In this work, I create space for honest exploration without shame, acknowledging the heartbreak, the isolation, and the risk; the myriad challenges of these experiences. My priority is supporting you in finding your own path towards wellbeing and authentic relating.
Reproductive Trauma & Rites of Passage
A significant focus of my practice is reproductive trauma and the infantilisation of childless people. Our culture often lacks meaningful ritual for those who do not follow traditional paths of parenthood, leaving many feeling unseen in their grief, their choices, or their circumstances. I have undertaken qualitative post-graduate research, examining the impact our culture's lack of recognition for the childless person. I work with individuals and couples navigating fertility challenges, pregnancy loss, chosen childlessness, and the complex emotions that arise when life doesn't follow the expected script.
Illness, Mortality & Survivorship
I have also journeyed through my own cancer experience and, although now clear, I bring this lived understanding to working with cancer patients, parents with cancer, partners of cancer patients, and cancer survivors. Facing serious illness changes everything; our relationship to our bodies, to time, to what matters, to who we are. The experience of illness, treatment, and survivorship carries its own trauma, its own grief, and its own invitation to profound transformation. I understand the isolation of illness, the fear, the way cancer reshapes identity and relationships, and the complex terrain of survivorship; where you're meant to be grateful to be alive whilst also grieving everything that's been lost and changed. This lived experience allows me to sit with the full complexity of what it means to face mortality, to be in a body that you may feel has betrayed you, and to find a way forward that honours both the trauma and the possibility.
Qualifications and Training
- Institute of Psychedelic Therapy - Depth Relational Process
- MIND Foundation - Professional Member
- Psychedelic Assisted ACT Psychotherapy - Clerkenwell Health
- Acceptance and Commitment Therapy Training - ACT (Psychworks)
- Advanced Creative NonFiction Writing Diploma (Cambridge University)
- EMDR Therapist Levels 1 - 4 (EMDRWorks)
- Spiritual Threads in Psychological Work (Confer)
- Eco - Therapy Training (Confer)
- BPS Advanced Certificate in Clinical Supervision
- M.A. Integrative Psychotherapy (Middlesex University)
- Advanced Diploma Integrative Psychotherapy (Minster Centre)
- Post Graduate Diploma Integrative Counselling (Minster Centre)
- Foundation Integrative Counselling & Psychotherapy (Minster Centre)
- Mentalisation Basic Training (Anna Freud Centre)
- Yoga Alliance UK Accredited Senior Yoga Teacher SYT (CCU & Minded Inst.)
- Restorative Yoga Teacher Training (YogaCampus, Roger Cole)
- Yoga Therapist for Mental Health (Minded Inst.)
- Yoga Therapist for the Special Child (S.Sumar Method SYC)