On my bathroom mirror growing up was a quote by Henry David Thoreau:

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life.”
— Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854)


My parents didn’t instill much in me in the way of values, and we never had inspiring chats. But this quote quietly shaped me more than anything else has.
If there’s one thing I feel compelled to do, it’s live a passionate life—being fully present in whatever experience I’m having. I think 80% of health and longevity comes from that. It’s simply deciding that you will not have a mediocre life.

And that is a choice you make over and over again.

I’ve found myself in many soul-destroying situations where I had to choose to quit or leave instead of remaining quietly miserable. At first, it was terrifying to walk away—whether from a job, a group of people that didn’t feel right, or a stagnant living situation. But in my experience, when you say no to what doesn’t serve you, the universe supports you. Especially if it’s a conscious choice. Leave what doesn’t nourish your soul sooner rather than later, and harsh wake-up calls—burnout, crises, or accidents—don’t need to happen.

My experiments with intentional living started after enduring some really difficult experiences. I got married at 19 to a man I met online (the internet only got started when I was 16, so this was VERY early in the online scene). We met on a Smashing Pumpkins IRC chat room. I moved to the US and endured not only an abusive marriage but years of dead-end customer service jobs and no hope of a university education. I actually became suicidal.

My soul was dying. But I used every spare moment to devour books (starting with Thoreau) and read widely on everything I could find—spirituality, philosophy, literature. I gave myself the education I needed.

The first joyful and truly intentional thing I did was, after reading On the Road, quit my job to follow the Smashing Pumpkins around the country. I met Billy Corgan multiple times, and it was our chats (he actually sat down and talked with me) that got me out of a deep dark hole. Billy Corgan is one of the most passionate and inspiring people I’ve ever met. His giving me the time of day (as an obsessed fan) really made me value my life.

Then I came back to New Zealand and spent years doing what I was passionate about. I studied eco-tourism, outdoor recreation, environmental studies, ecology, and permaculture while exploring wild places. I volunteered as a hut warden for DOC, grew my own food, experimented with living money-free, and attended 13 ten-day Vipassana courses.

I had my daughter, explored intentional parenting, lived in intentional communities, house-sat, traveled to South Africa, took a yoga teacher training, opened a yoga studio, learned Theta Healing, ran women’s circles, lived in a van while road-schooling my daughter, and walked Te Araroa. Eventually, I moved to the place that felt most like home (which I recently discovered was where my ancestors first settled in the 1850s).

But living with intention isn’t just about choosing what you say yes to. It’s about creating enough space to actually engage in life fully.

Which is why I do one thing at a time. I focus intensely on the thing (currently, this business) and suck all of the marrow out of it.

And not just focusing, but creating space around your focus.

For example, I have spare time that I could fill with other activities, but I allow space for my passions to flourish. And I tell you, creating that space is hard. Being busy is not a badge of honour—it’s often a trauma response. When we fill all our free time with busyness, we aren’t truly living.

So often, we have to relearn how to be still, to make space, to simply be in the moment—fully present. The stillness side of Embodied Soul is designed to support you in feeling safe in your body, so you can live intentionally and focus on what’s most important to you.

​If you’re curious check out my offerings for Restorative Yoga, Embodied Processing and Intuitive Healing.

The stillness side of Embodied Soul has been slower to develop. At first, I wondered if this meant people didn’t really want it. But the truth is, stillness is simply harder to reach than strength.

Strength has clear pathways, it has a culture that actively explores what works and what doesn’t. In recent years, thanks to researchers like Dr. Stacy Sims, we finally have methods that really work for women. Stillness doesn’t have that kind of roadmap yet. Science is only beginning to understand trauma, nervous system regulation, and emotional integration. Science doesn’t understand the soul. There isn’t a neat formula, often you spend years navigating away from ungrounded teachings, spiritual bypassing, or cult-like modalities that promise so much but deliver so little. There are so many holes to fall into along the way.

And beyond that, stillness itself is difficult. When you pause, all the internal clutter begins to rise. Your busy mind, brain fog, stuck emotions, dissociation, old grief or fear becomes very obvious. It doesn’t feel peaceful at first. It feels exposing, uncomfortable, sometimes overwhelming.

So it makes sense that people hesitate, take their time, or move slowly toward it. And I’ve had to learn to allow that slowness, to stop questioning whether it means stillness isn’t wanted, and instead to trust that people will reach for it when they are ready. Nobody is going to trust me unless I’m ok with allowing each person to come to this work in their own time. And that’s important, because I never want anyone to work with me out of pressure.

Here’s the thing: I’ve been doing the inner work for years. It’s slow. It’s not linear. It works in spirals and layers, and it is infinitely harder than picking up a barbell. Stillness is about facing the inner demons, the grief, the rage, the fear. It’s about drawing on your deepest inner resources and going to the depths of who you are. It’s messy.

And although I love working with people to get stronger on a physical level, I am a deep person, and I require depth in my work. Not offering the stillness aspect would mean holding back a part of myself that yearns to be expressed.


So, what does stillness look like in practice?

I’ve created a few different offerings which are designed as a kind of progression: It starts with Restorative Yoga, which evolves into Group Somatic Healing, and then Group Intuitive Healing. For those that feel called to take it further and delve into advanced energy healing work, there’s also Theta Healing courses.  However, you’ll be drawn to the place that feels right for you to start. Your journey may not follow the format I’ve designed.


🧘‍♀️ Restorative Yoga: A Taste of Safety
Restorative yoga offers a gentle introduction to creating safety in your body. It’s a bridge from active movement to quiet, inward focus. A place to soften, settle, and begin to feel your body again. Hesitation to try restorative yoga is natural. Strength classes boost confidence, make you feel empowered, and expand your capacity to hold physical challenges. Stillness can feel very different: tender, exposing, and very vulnerable for some people.

I don’t embrace this idea of “vulnerability.” While it’s popular in healing circles, I don’t want to encourage you to be vulnerable. Vulnerability implies letting yourself be completely unprotected. That is not the goal. The goal is to build a container of safety first, developing a resource in your body that you can rely on. Only once you have that foundation can you discern when it’s safe to surrender, when it’s safe to feel fully, and when it’s safe to trust.

In Restorative Yoga, you’re simply exploring what it feels like to be safe and supported. You’re not processing trauma yet; you’re grounding into a cocoon of safety and reconnecting with your body.


🌱 Somatic Healing: Building a Reliable Resource
Once you’ve had that initial taste of resourcing through Restorative Yoga, the 5-week somatic healing course is where we really start to build the resource of safety into something reliable. Here, you learn to return to that sense of safety again and again, developing a deep familiarity with your body and nervous system, and an understanding of your emotions and patterns.

This course is experiential: you’ll feel grounded in your resource, begin processing suppressed material, and cultivate the capacity to hold your experiences with confidence. Safety becomes something you truly carry with you, not just a fleeting experience.


🔮 Intuitive Healing: Tuning Into Your Inner Guidance
Once you’re comfortable in your body and with your emotions, it’s time to listen to your intuition. In my 5-week intuitive healing course, you’ll learn to decipher the voices in your head, understand your strongest psychic senses, and connect to a higher truth. It doesn’t matter what name you give it: God, Source, Creator, we’re simply working with the energy of all that is.

This course is also about identifying the roots of your patterns: childhood experiences, ancestral trauma, and other influences, and understanding how they’ve shaped you. You’ll explore why certain situations appear in your life, what you are meant to learn from them, and how these insights help you tap into your higher purpose.

It’s a space to access your own guidance, rather than relying on someone else’s interpretation, and to strengthen your connection to your inner wisdom. This understanding allows you to move through life with greater clarity, purpose, and alignment


✨ Advanced Energy Healing: Recognising Yourself as a Healer
For those ready to take it to the next level, learning Theta Healing® is about recognising the healer within you. You’ll learn to work with energy consciously, access your own inner guidance, and create the life you truly want. You’ll become a certified Theta Healer and start to draw the people you are here to support. 

Theta Healing gives you the tools to transform your own patterns, align with your purpose, and step fully into your potential. It was a magical part of my journey. Even now, before any major life transition (such as creating this business), I book a Theta Healing session for myself. It ensures everything flows smoothly and I don’t get stuck on the small hurdles.


🤝 1:1 Intuitive Sessions: Bringing It All Together
For those who feel stuck, want guidance, or are ready to go deeper, my 1:1 intuitive sessions integrate everything I offer. These sessions help you understand your patterns, like what keeps you from committing to a strength program, or why certain habits and fears keep repeating. We explore inner child work, ancestral healing, trauma processing, and maybe even your life purpose.

These sessions are highly personalised. I work with your energy, your body, and your story to help you identify the blocks holding you back and develop strategies to move forward. This is a space where you can bring all of your experiences together: strength, stillness, intuition, and begin to see the bigger picture of your growth and capacity.

1:1 sessions also have the option of creating a personalised exercise program, and we can offer ongoing sessions and support to help you stick with it.

​
💖 My Take on Stillness
Stillness isn’t about surrendering blindly. It’s not about laying out all of your vulnerability on the table. It’s about slowly building safety, strengthening your capacity to hold the uncomfortable stuff, and discerning when it’s truly safe to open. That container is what allows confidence, clarity, intuition, and stillness to flourish.


📅 Upcoming Offerings:
🧘‍♀️ Restorative Yoga: Fridays & Sundays at 5:15 pm (please book at least 3 hours prior).

🌱 5-week Somatic Healing group: one evening a week (1.5 hr sessions), 5 weeks — $150, 3–5 participants max.

🔮 5-week Intuitive Healing group: alternating with Somatic Healing, same price and format.

✨ Theta Healing® Basic course: 3 days, coming soon.


💜 Message me to register your interest or to learn more.

I am SO grateful to have found this space.

The past couple of years have been difficult for me, emotionally and financially. I made a bad investment, trusted the wrong person, found myself stuck owning a gym in a community that wasn’t supportive of it. 

Instead of walking away from the investment, I trusted my intuition. I knew that the gym in Māpua wasn’t the right thing for me, but there was something magic in the heavy lifting — both for myself and for others.

I knew that the gym was a stepping stone to creating something more aligned. I just didn’t know what it would look like exactly. 

I spent a year keeping the gym afloat out of my own pocket, basically supporting someone else to make a living off of it, while I completed a personal training course and heavy lifting teacher’s program and mentorship. And I used the gym to deepen my own training and learning.

That period of time required a lot of trust that I was on the right track. The personal training course, which I was doing to get my REPS registration, was tough. It was filled with endless assignments and it had a toxic, body shaming tone. 

I had conflicts with the tutors because our views on fitness and body positivity were at odds. It was a course designed by men, for men. There was no mention of women’s training needs being different to men’s or of what women need in peri and post menopause. They told me that if I didn’t focus on training people for aesthetics, I would never get any clients. It took everything I had not to quit. 

I remember being so relieved the day I finally got the certificate.

The very next day I ran a 54 km ultra marathon. 

It was my first ultra (first marathon as well), and I was very nervous. I was worried I’d be the slowest person on the course, coming in after dark. But I knew I had to attempt it, I’d put so much energy into training for it. I surprised myself by finishing in less than 8 hours. It was the most joyful experience ever. An initiation into a new phase of life.

The ultra marathon feeling so easy was a sign that life did not need to be difficult anymore. I’d done the hard work. I’d persevered. I’d trained. I’d studied. All while solo parenting. I’d carried other people and I’d lived off my savings for long enough. It was time to bring some joy, ease and abundance into my life. I’d earned it. 

Completing that ultra marathon created a huge shift in my energy. I felt like I could do anything. I set a strong intention to create something that felt aligned with my soul. I set out to find a place where I could bring together all of my work.

And then, effortlessly, in less than two weeks, I found this place.

Everything flowed, like nothing I’d experienced.

Support arrived exactly when I needed it and my trust in the universe was restored.

Here’s the key though: I had to learn to trust myself first. I had to persevere through lots of hardship, and struggle before I was ready to stop compromising. 

I had to go through the shadows and really feel the pain of carrying everything on my own.

That’s what I needed to get stronger.

And now, I feel like I am carried and I am held. Not by anyone in particular, there’s nobody there in the background to catch me, I don’t have anyone to go home to each night who supports me. But I trust that I’m carried by something far greater. The universe does have my back. 

The universe also knew that giving it to me the easy way wouldn’t have made me so strong and competent. If any of this had come easily, I wouldn’t now feel so capable of holding space for all the people who will be coming to me for empowerment, support and healing. 

Anyway, thank you so much to all my crew from Māpua who have stuck with me through this transition. You are amazing! I would have really struggled without you.

And thanks to all the wonderful, new people who have joined us!

I’m excited to watch this community grow.