Where This Work Comes From
People often ask where this work began — whether it is somatic, ancestral, organisational, or literary. The honest answer is that it emerged slowly, over years of immersion in fields that don’t often speak to one another, but should.
At its heart, this is work about attention.
My early training was experiential and lineage-based. I studied healing and shamanic practice through Shamanka and Sacred Trust, and later undertook a three-year training in divination and symbolic systems with Tim Raven. What I took from these spaces was not belief, but discernment: how to listen without imposing meaning, how to recognise when something needs containment rather than explanation.
My understanding of the body deepened through working with horses. Horses are uncompromising nervous-system mirrors. They respond to coherence, not performance. They taught me more about regulation, boundaries, and shared fields than any theory could. You cannot override a horse with interpretation; you can only meet it with steadiness.
Later, trauma-specific study — including collective trauma work and integrative somatic training — gave language and structure to what I had already witnessed: that overwhelm travels through systems, not just individuals; that strong experiences do not need dramatisation; that regulation is relational.
Alongside this, my professional life has remained grounded in organisational and educational settings. Postgraduate study in health promotion and higher education, and experience in organisational governance, continually bring me back to structure. Distress does not arise in a vacuum. It is shaped by workload, hierarchy, culture, and policy as much as by personal history.
The literary dimension of my work has been influenced by writers such as Anne Boyer and Leslie Jamison, whose work resists isolating illness inside the individual body. Like them, I am interested in how systems press upon the nervous system — and how writing can widen the frame without losing intimacy. The observational care of Oliver Sacks also remains a touchstone: close attention without reduction.
Over time, these strands have converged into a single orientation:
Nothing needs to be forced into meaning.
Nothing needs to be fixed to be witnessed.
Regulation comes before interpretation.
And resilience is rarely individual — it is relational.
This work continues to evolve. It is less about answers than about creating conditions where systems — whether families, organisations, or communities — can return to steadiness without anyone having to carry the whole weight alone.
