My Story
For most of my twenties, I was running on adrenaline and didn't know it. I was finishing a PhD in astrophysics, caring for my mother through her cancer, pushing hard at everything I touched. I loved the intensity of it. I didn't understand until much later that what I was experiencing as aliveness was a nervous system in chronic survival mode.
Then my body stopped cooperating.
What began as fatigue became chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, migraines, IBS, insomnia, and a brain fog so thick I could barely read. I was in my early thirties. I could no longer climb the stairs without needing to rest. I grieved the version of myself who had once climbed mountains, skied double black diamonds, pushed through 400-metre rock walls.
I tried everything. The supplements, the strict diets, the meditation practices and Vipassana retreats, the breathwork, the talk therapy. I brought the same overachieving approach I had used in my career to the project of getting well, and found, with no small amount of irony, that the striving itself was making things worse.
What finally changed things was Somatic Experiencing.
For the first time, I wasn't being asked to think about what had happened, or to reframe it, or to push through. I was learning to slow down and work with what was actually happening in my body: where the energy was stuck, where the breath stopped, what my nervous system had been holding for years. It was slow. There were no dramatic breakthroughs. But gradually, over months and then years, something started to settle.
I retrained as a psychotherapist and then as a Somatic Experiencing® Practitioner because I wanted to offer this work to others. I later added CranioSacral therapy and nervous system education to my practice. I work with clients online from anywhere in the world, and in person in Bali, where I'm based.
I work with women who are where I was: doing everything right, and still not feeling better.