I’m a Certified Clinical Somatic Educator through Essential Somatics®. I also enjoy planning, organising and creating systems and processes so my passion is to combine these two loves in order to make a Somatic Movement practice accessible and practical.
I enjoy working at my computer but I also love to be active in my free time. Bouldering, hiking and playing netball are my favourite kinds of movement.
I am originally from the UK and have been living in Belgium since 2016. I am passionate about taking responsibility for my own health and so after finding somatic movement in 2014, I’ve been practising ever since. My practice keeps me grounded and keeps me learning about myself. I am a Certified Clinical Somatic Educator, having trained with Essential Somatics.
I have suffered with chronic pain for several years. In the beginning, I thought it was normal, surely everyone has a bit of back pain? But I soon realised this was not something I should simply accept. I soon felt like I’d “tried everything” and it was a struggle to see a day when things could be different. After several dead ends with conventional medicine, I decided to trained as a Pilates teacher to learn more about movement and taking care of myself. I enjoyed it, but it didn’t really help. So I continued my search and eventually my journey led me first to Feldenkrais and then on to Clinical Somatic Education.
After practicing Feldenkrais for a couple of years I was already used to slow and gentle movements and to be curious about what I found. But reading Thomas Hanna’s book (Somatics: Reawakening the Mind’s Control of Movement, Flexibility, and Health (1989)) was a complete revelation. For the first time in my life I suddenly started to feel the tension in my body and the movement patterns my brain was organising for me because I understood what was causing it. For a couple of weeks I worked on simple breathing exercises and the somatic movements described in Hanna’s book and the result was astonishing. Pretty much all the normal pains subsided and I enjoyed a sense of freedom I hadn’t felt in ages.
Since then I have continued a daily practice, attended workshops and utilised any resource I can get my hands on. In general, I have a lot less pain than before, but Clinical Somatics is not a silver bullet. It is after all the way we use our bodies that causes us harm, so going back to the same habits can bring the pain back. But I love the practice for its encouragement of self-awareness and it is this that enables me to monitor my wellbeing much more closely and with all that I have learnt about Clinical Somatics, be able to do something about it.
