early years

I was born and grew up in the UK. A dreamy, creative kid who, in my late teens, got uprooted to Palm Springs, California, with my new step-family. I didn't take moving well. I had no language for it at the time, of course, but I can see looking back that I never fully grew roots back into the earth from such a sudden move. My reaction was extreme: I went from being a 'good' kid, to partying. Drugs. Hitchhiking to raves in the middle of the desert (sorry mum!).

After a family tragedy that led me into an even deeper tailspin of grief, I received a psychiatric misdiagnosis that sent me on a four-year journey of multiple psychiatric medications, and the consequent withdrawal and recovery process.

It was the hardest thing I've ever experienced, and I was only 22. I can look back now, over 22 years later, and say with absolute conviction that this nadir set me on the path I walk today.

During the recovery process, I found the desert. I started hiking every day — twice a day, sometimes. I started doing yoga. I spent long hours alone in the wilderness around Palm Desert, learning, slowly and painfully, to trust myself again. During the withdrawal process, I couldn't trust my emotions, my thoughts, my feelings — all of these things were volatile and terrifying. From a total breakdown of self, I had to discover what lay underneath it all early, and urgently. All I had was this budding connection to the earth, and a place I had to find deep within myself that was underneath all the terrifying volatility. Like a deep subterranean river. I think to this day, finding that connection is the only reason I survived.

Out of that came the beginning of a spiritual search. I studied Indian mysticism. I studied magic. I started a daily yoga practice. I sat in rooms with people chanting over ancient texts, looked around, and knew with absolute certainty that I didn't want what any of them had. So I drove home, sat outside with my back against a tree, and asked myself what I actually wanted.

The answer was: direct relationship. With the land. With the energy around me. No middleman, no authority, no one else's interpretation of what I was supposed to be feeling. I wanted to see behind the veil with my own eyes. I started gathering the plants I was getting to know in the desert and forming relationship with the land.

That question led me to a group of shamans based in Kentucky called the Makers, and the beginning of a ten-year apprenticeship that turned me inside out.

apprenticeship

My apprenticeship with the Makers was rigorous and deeply personal. Years of retrieving my own scattered energy, clearing what I'd accumulated and what had accumulated in me, tearing myself back down to the studs and learning to rebuild from the bottom up. I learned to see and interact with the energy world directly. What I appreciated most about the Maker tradition was its directness: not rooted in complicated ritual or myth, not adding extra layers of meaning to direct experience. We learned to experience the energy world as-is. No fluff, no romance, just practicality.

I was not a natural. While others in the group seemed to see and hear energy effortlessly, I felt nothing. My rational mind was strong, and I was — and still am, over 20 years later — deeply sceptical. Add to that the fact that I was still somewhat in recovery from a psychiatric misdiagnosis, and I was genuinely afraid of what would happen if I let go of my rational tether to the world.

I applied myself diligently, because I wanted to be in direct relationship with the energy of the natural world so badly. At the same time, I was terrified. I'd walk the canyons of the desert, trying to listen to rocks, to hear the plants sing, to see their energy directly. I tried and failed for years until one day, my teacher sat me down, gave me a gentle whack on the forehead, and had me stare at a leaf until I saw it. Turns out, I'd been feeling energy kinesthetically the entire time and dismissing it as nothing. I'd been expecting something that looked like a psychedelic trip, when in reality it was so subtle it's easy to dismiss — easy to ignore. Some people find it easy to suspend disbelief and experience the magic in the world. I wasn't one of them. Believe it or not, considering that I work with the energy world, I'm still not. I'm a sceptic.

I tend to work best with people who also struggle to believe what they're told without their rational mind and direct experience being satisfied.

My apprenticeship gave me what I'd sought: I was in direct relationship with the energy world in a way I'd longed for a decade earlier. I thought I'd arrived.

Which, looking back, was cute.

The great reconnection

All those years in the desert had led me into a deep relationship with the land. I'd been working as a herbalist, had my own product company, and was seeing clients doing 1:1 work both as a herbalist and as a psycho-emotional healer.

The feeling of something missing crept up on me slowly.

One night, I lay next to my sleeping husband, staring at the ceiling, with a pit of despair inside me so deep I could barely breathe. I loved my life. I had everything I wanted. I didn't understand, but I knew that if I didn't figure it out, it would swallow me whole.

The next morning I drove out to the desert — the place that had saved me a decade earlier. I lay in my favourite canyon for about twelve hours. Feeling the plants around me. Feeling the earth underneath me.

Something cracked open that day. I realised I'd had a wall between me and the energy world for years — letting it in when it was convenient, then pushing it back. That day, I let it all flood in. All of it. It was overwhelming. And the moment I did, the pit of despair disappeared. When I pushed the wall back up, the despair returned. When I let the earth in, it dissolved.

Could it be, I wondered, that the feeling I'd been running from my whole life was simply disconnection?

Turns out... yes.

This revelation changed everything. I wrote a course — the Wonder Sessions — that I taught to over a thousand people: how to live in direct connection with the energies of the world around you. The earth, the elements, even things most people consider 'unnatural' — concrete, plastic, electricity. It taught me something I use every day now: you can feel as rooted standing in London as you can in the middle of a forest. The connection is inside you, not outside you.

In 2018, my husband and I left Los Angeles for the mountains — a small village called Idyllwild, a couple of hours from the city. For several years, I was as happy as I've ever been.

Things fall apart.

At the end of 2022, my husband left. Out of nowhere, or what felt like nowhere. He wanted to go back to Los Angeles. I didn't. And the life I'd built — all of it, at once — fell apart.

I'd been with him since I was twenty-four. My entire adult life had been built around that relationship. And suddenly I was in the mountains, alone, in shock, not even trying to rebuild yet. Just grieving.

Every day, I went out and hiked. For hours. Because the land was what I had. It's what I'd always had, and had held me through every single hard thing I'd ever endured.

One day, a few months in, I felt a presence. It was familiar, somehow, and because of my years of interacting with the energy world directly, I felt safe enough to explore it. I started asking it questions. It answered. It told me that my life had been like a bone that had broken and reset wrong, and that it had to be re-broken in order to set right again.

I talked to it for two hours. When I stopped, I felt completely fine. Not fixed. Not in denial. Not like I was bypassing reality. Fine. Oriented. Like someone had turned the headlights on inside me and I could see where I was going.

The next morning I was sad again, so I went back. And then again. And over the following weeks, I realised I was in conversation with my own spirit guides — a multitude of presences that were, in some way, also me. The part of me that isn't a separate individual self. The part that can see the larger context.

What they gave me, through what was one of the most painful periods of my life, was exactly what I now give to my clients: a way to navigate total upheaval with something underneath it. Not answers — a bigger picture. Enough context to surrender to the process instead of fighting it. The ability to fall apart and stay oriented at the same time.

I practised with family, friends, clients who'd been following my work for years. And gradually I understood that this — this direct transmission, this guidance — was what everything had been leading to. Every year in the desert. Every canyon walk. Every plant. Every session with a client trying to find their way back to themselves.

This is what I do now.

Who I am the rest of the time

I moved to London this year — with my dog, Eliza — a stark difference from the mountains where I'd made my home for the last eight years. It's where my Heart Path was calling me, so I followed it. I live in London like it's a wilderness, because to me it is. The land and city spirits here are just as alive to me as they were in the forests of California.

I go to the gym, run a lot, dance whenever I can. I subsist on Yorkshire Gold and Tony's Chocolonely, both of whom should probably sponsor me. I'm quite introverted, but love chatting to strangers. I love my home, and love to travel — often spontaneously. I'm most likely neurodivergent. I love consistency and change in equal measures. I love reading, wandering, exploring, going to galleries, taking classes. I find magic around me everywhere — which isn't something I would have ever imagined being true of myself when I was younger, but it's my life now, and it's effortless.

I live what I teach. It's not theory to me, but a way of existing that simply makes everything better: more beautiful, more connected, more whole, more purposeful, more alive. I don't consider myself a 'seeker' anymore because I found it. Which isn't to say I'm not a constant work in progress — I am. I'm still rebuilding my life after a divorce, and I'm always going to be in the process of growth and expansion because that's who I am and how I live. But the feeling of longing for something? That's gone. The feeling of something inside me missing? Nowhere to be found. The exercises I teach? I practise. The connection to the Guides? My daily lived experience. It's not something I step into and out of, but something I simply am. I spend much of my life now teaching others how to feel this way too.

I'm not the type of person you'd automatically consider 'spiritual': I swear, am quite snarky, am rational and cynical, and can be quite sharp at times. I love mischief. I'm definitely not a serene, oracular presence. I am still very much figuring things out as I go, and I think that matters — because the work I do with you isn't from a place of having arrived. It's from a place of knowing the terrain.

If you've found your way here

You've probably done the work. Therapy, perhaps. Coaching. Retreats, books, years of trying to understand the shape of yourself. And something is still there — underneath all of it — that none of it has quite reached.

That's not a failure of the work you've done. That's the signal. That's what I'm here for.

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