Hero

Maybe you're not falling apart.

Maybe you're composting.

Book a Free Discovery Session

Maybe you are not broken.

Maybe you are mid-shed.

Your healing was always in you.

My job is to tend the conditions

until your roots are woven deep

and you no longer need support.

Irreverently reverent

somatic eco therapist

What sort of a therapist are you looking for?

Maybe you need a therapist to help you belly laugh so hard you have to wipe your eyes and catch your breath. One that can hold safe space while you ugly cry your way to your beautiful truth.

The truth that you are a gift to this planet. But that can be really hard to hear sometimes, even harder to believe it when you are carrying the weight of the world, and a sack full of historical traumas/dramas.

But let's be honest. If you are brave enough to even start the work to find your authentic gifts, that work can be tricky. So it helps to have skilled company that walks shoulder to shoulder with you and makes the journey more easeful, safer, and less painful. Kind of like a happiness sherpa.

One that can help you navigate out of the forever looping the same stories in your head. Someone who can show you the exit out of the brain, through the body.

All is welcome

Your darker places don't scare me. The parts of you that feel too much, too complicated, or too hard to explain. Those are welcome here, too. I have my own. And I have learned, they are simply guardians of our gifts. And they need to be deeply seen in loving compassion, not judgment, before they release their treasures.

I hope to come to know the nuance of you. All of you, the hot messes hidden in the spare room, and the button downed forward facing "winner" parts too. It is all welcome and all celebrated.

How I work

I am a creative somatic ecotherapist. This means I use nature as my co-therapist. She helps to regulate and hold space with me. My work is informed by Hakomi and Internal Family Systems, an embodied methodology that bypasses the masks and works with the core material through conversation with your body and parts of your personality that have protective roles.

Not talk therapy that loops in your head. Noticing, gentle inquiry, and suggested releasing movements that let the body lead. All done as slowly as necessary to create a safe container. Never so far that we break anything that cannot be put back together better than we found it.

Sessions can happen in my cottage studio, fresh flowers, an Irish Doodle laying like a rug on the floor. Or out in the bush by the river, where the water does half the work. Or online, in your home or your favourite piece of bush that has signal. The land holds what words sometimes can't.

Most therapy sends you in circles, trimming the bushes of thoughts. We go for the roots. They live in the body, and for many, the body has become a scary place to visit.

Think of it like a dam. Most of us are carrying a reservoir of historical stuff we haven't dealt with. Left alone it becomes a toxic swamp. But blowing the whole dam at once isn't healing, it's a flood.

We drill tiny, strategic holes. Safe exits, one at a time. The pressure releases slowly. Then we start filling it back up with clean water. Eventually the holes seal themselves and what was a swamp becomes something that generates power.

That's the work. Slow, safe, and surprisingly effective.

RITES OF PASSAGE

Rites of passage is an ancient means of helping people through life transitions. From childhood to adolescence, from adolescence to adulthood, from adulthood to elderhood. In indigenous cultures, it was held by community, a deep trial that initiated the person into the next level of themselves.

Most of us never had that holding. And there is grief in that, whether we know it or not. The work is to honour that loss, and then to create the conditions to cross the threshold with integrity, confidence, and a new uplevelling of life skills.

If you are standing at a threshold right now, wondering why it feels so hard, it may be because nobody ever showed you how to cross it. That is not a personal failing. It is a gap in what was handed to you. We can fill it.

About Me

A cheeky therapist who took the long way to her seat.

Fifteen years as a women's health nurse consultant, holding women at the most threshold moments of their lives. Fifteen years as a therapeutic photographer and filmmaker, using art to question the cultural stories women are handed about their bodies. Eight years as a youth worker, supporting at-risk young people through creativity, bushcraft, and rites of passage.

I've spent years studying Hakomi, nonviolent communication, ecotherapy, rites of passage, and bushcraft. Not collecting credentials. Assembling a very specific set of tools for a very specific purpose. To create containers for women's empowerment.

I use nature and creativity as my primary tools to support the shedding of what no longer serves you and growth into what was always there and needed support releasing.

When I am not working as a therapist, I work as an educator. I am helping to develop a new way of educating the whole child at Earth School Aotearoa.

And I am training teachers in using Nature and Neuroscience in their classrooms. Supporting teachers at risk of burnout find their way back to their passion and reintroducing them to the support of nature as a regulating tool in the classroom.