My Story - hi!

For most of my life, I have performed.

I stood on stages, sang my own songs, made art from the inside out. Yet all of this time, I was quietly, or not so quietly, terrified.

Every single time I had to share my work or my voice, nerves overtook. Not the good kind of nerves. The kind where your legs stop working (I literally had to be carried on stage once). The kind where words that had been sung a hundred times completely evaporated. Where the overwhelm became so strong that cancelling the gig, retreating, hiding was the only option available. The fear playing out in my body was all consuming; this was my nervous system’s love language. It was trying to keep me safe, for whatever reason (no doubt based on past experience) but it was acting as if I was staring death in the face.

I loved creating, but I was undone by being seen.

Those that know me well will recognise how I spent years swinging between moments of confidence and a kind of quiet shame I couldn't quite name. It was a sense that I was, simultaneously, too much and not enough which meant that I looked to others for reassurance that I was doing it right, being it right, living it right. And when you are looking to others for validation, or worse, permission, life starts to look a little like like someone else’s. Especially when the life I was wanting to lead actually looked very different to most of the people around me. I have never enjoyed traditional, conventional ways of doing things, but you would never have known this by looking at me from the outside.

Then in 2020, I had my first Conscious Connected Breathwork session.

I have never found the right words for what happened during that session. Something cracked open. I felt joy and love in my body in a way I hadn't accessed before. I witnessed my own heart scatter green emeralds across my chest (yes - seeing colours can happen when moving energy in the body!) and I released so much held grief. 

And it left me connected to something I can only describe as my own intuition, and a lot of hope. It also left me with clarity.

I had been disconnected from myself, my needs, my wants and my deepest well of creativity for a very long time.

That one session changed the direction of my life.

After finding the right school, I trained in Breathwork, deepened into Reiki, studied Human Design, completed a Masters in Creative Practice while leaning back into the transformative power of language on the psyche from my Masters in English all those years ago. All the while learning, through direct experience, what it means to come home to yourself through the body, and then open yourself up to the life you’re meant to lead.

I began to apply a new kind of objectivity to myself and to my art. To be present and curious in the uncertainty rather than, honestly, plagued by it.

I noticed that I stopped needing the outcome to be perfect in order to feel safe enough to begin. This is where perfectionism goes to die.

I now stand on stages and I love it. I now do talks on breathwork and creativity and I thrive in this. I now guide groups of people during breathwork sessions and feel completely at peace when doing so.

And this is not because fear completely vanished, it is still there sometimes. But because I found something more reliable than the absence of fear.

I found presence, and I found the breath. And these, I have learned, are the ultimate teachers.

This is why I believe that the body is the doorway.

Not strategies. Not frameworks. Not more information about what you should be doing differently.

The body. The breath. The felt sense of your own aliveness in this moment, right now, before the story of your life kicks back in.

When we learn to live in the present, in the truth of our own direct experience, away from the stories we have grown up with and into, the old narratives begin to lose their grip. Creativity flows not because we forced it but because we finally got out of our own way enough to truly SEE the world.

Confidence stops being performed, it's inhabited. And this is where we find OUR voice. Not someone else’s. 

We are living in a time that is desperately hungry for a different kind of energy.

The world has long been shaped by those who lead with force, with dominance, and with the kind of power that takes, rather than tends. And in that world, many of us have learned, whether consciously or not, to make ourselves smaller. To doubt the validity of our own intuitive knowing and to seek permission before we speak, which is not a coincidence. And it is not your fault.

But here is what I believe: the women who have done the work of coming back to their own source, who have learned to speak from presence rather than performance or learnt narratives, from truth rather than fear, are some of the most revolutionary forces on earth.