As a child I experienced moments of intense bliss, suffering and confusion. This led me as a young adult to follow a path through the study of psychology, and I then spent sixteen years as a teacher in further education. Through community dance and other modalities I started discovering that the body is a way into healing and fullness of life, and this led me to a masters degree in Dance and Somatic Wellbeing. I am now registered as a practitioner with the International Somatic Movement Education and Therapy Association (ISMETA).

On completion of my undergraduate studies, I became a builder and director of Giroscope, an award-winning co-operative in Hull, providing housing for ourselves and other disadvantaged people. Over the course of this seven year living empowerment, I expanded my sense of what was possible as we challenged basic societal assumptions through our work.

I became interested in teaching in 2000 when, following a period of debilitating chronic fatigue, I met and worked alongside an inspirational and innovative further education teacher, Halima Nicholls. Halima was teaching in a more friendly and informal way than I had before seen, supporting and encouraging students’ own motivations and building a kind of community of discovery.

In my sixteen-year career in further education, teaching students experiencing learning difficulties and challenges to their mental and emotional health, I worked in the way Halima had inspired in me, following students’ interests and developing the curricula with them in dance, drama, emotional wellbeing and on the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award programme.

I attended many courses during this time, most notably with the Laban Guild for Movement, Dance and Drama. I was a regular contributor to their quarterly journal and one of my articles appeared on the reading list for The Royal Academy of Dance. I also completed the postgraduate Certificate in Education in 2005.

Anyone who knows me knows I am curious, that I listen and ask many questions. This capacity led me to a realisation that education was steadily becoming biassed towards academic intelligence while other deeper ways of knowing – such as sensing, feeling and intuiting – were overlooked. This motivated me to undertake an MA in Dance and Somatic Wellbeing: Connections to the living body, at the University of Central Lancashire where I was introduced to the practice-led research methodology, and where I came to sense and express myself more clearly and to frame the approach I offer here.

During my studies I was particularly inspired by the work of Janet Adler in ‘Authentic Movement Practice’, Mae Wan Ho in ‘Quantum Coherence’, Alfred Korzybski and J. Samuel Bois in ‘Levels of Abstraction’ and to what Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, founder of ‘Body-Mind Centering’, calls ‘Cellular Intelligence’. My own research project was a living inquiry of the skin as boundary, container and meeting place.

In 2019 I started volunteering with Emerging Futures, a national drug and alcohol support service who were looking to enhance their workshop programme by introducing body-based approaches, and I facilitated a successful and pioneering eight-week programme of Somatic Health (see Addiction Recovery section for more on this).

For two years a team of us have been working on courses that introduce people to Embodied Resilience – in response to overwhelm and burnout. During this time I have learnt much from Andrew Cook, www.body-mind.co.uk, a craniosacral therapist, about the science and practical applications of how the body and mind interact. During these courses participants are taken through somatic explorations to reconnect with their bodily sense of safety and from that place to naturally find their way out of burnout. Somatic practice sessions are then offered, by myself, to help participants embed this approach into their daily lives (see Finding Safety section for more on this).

I am also deepening my somatic, felt-sense, awareness through the teachings of Simon McKibbin www.living-presence.co.uk. Learning from and collaborating with Simon has been particularly influential in bringing availability to my somatic felt-sense of relationship in its widest sense, and to our co-respondence within the body and with the wider natural world.

The foundation of all of this growth has come through awareness of disconnection and reconnection of my body and mind. Through the felt-sense I can be with pain and discomfort in a way that naturally reveals inner ease, peace, lightness and liberation from fear. Through this moment-by-moment practice, initially introduced to me in Soto Zen meditation, somatic body-mind awareness is taking me further into conscious action. This is, in turn, inspiring me to connect to what is naturally flowing through and around me – as one undivided motion of being.