If you’ve just found my website and feel curious about working with me, it’s best you know that I rarely work with people who haven’t yet cut their teeth with another therapist or coach. I am best suited to clients who have already begun their journey of self-discovery – those who understand something of their family dynamics, have a level of self-awareness, are curious, open to possibility and willing to engage deeply. 

When a client falls quiet and something shifts in the room – these are the  moments I treasure. Not just a new thought, or a clever reframe, but a subtle change in the air and the energy— as if a deeper, older part of them has arrived, curious to be known. This is the level at which I most love to work: at depth, where the psychological self is welcomed, but not mistaken for the whole of who we are, something I conceptualise as the bigger Self. 

To me, bigger Self means those dimension of us that aren’t confined to our history, our strategies or behaviour. It includes the spiritual, somatic, emotional, psychological and intellectual, yet is somehow more than the sum of those parts. Over decades of receiving and providing somatic coach-therapy, I’ve come to experience this as a kind of quiet, luminous presence that sits just behind or underneath ordinary awareness. A client may arrive wanting to “sort out” a problem and together we discover that something in them is less interested in being fixed and more interested in being recognised – to be seen, heard, affirmed, validated.

My listening, then, is not only with my ears or my mind, but with my whole body. Years of training in somatics have taught me that the body is a living resource: a web of sensation, breath and posture that reveals how we have learned to survive and how we might learn to thrive. I pay attention to the way a chest collapses on a certain word, the tears quickly swallowed away, the sparkle in the eyes when a new possibility lands. My own grounded breath, steadied feet and open attention invite the client’s system to remember its own capacity for regulation and expansion.

I often imagine us as layered beings: on the surface, the everyday self with its plans and worries; beneath that, older patterns of protection and longing; deeper still, what I might call Self or Soul. We start with the presenting issue (of course) and then gently spiral inward, as safety and trust allow. Sometimes a client will say, “I don’t have words for this, but it feels right” and I know we are touching that inner layer where language falls away and being takes over.

Working at this level is less about doing and more about being – techniques and tools still have their place, but they are held lightly, in service of a larger intention: to accompany another human as they re-member themselves as whole.

I never quite lose my sense of awe at the courage it takes to show up in this way. To bring one’s body, history, hopes, and questions into a shared space, and to risk being seen at more than one layer at once. My role is to stand as a steady, compassionate witness at the threshold between the familiar self and that larger, quieter Self that is always waiting in the wings. From there, we listen together.