Lets start at the beginning (Copy)

I loved cooking and would spend hours pasting butter and sugar together to make shortbread. I also took huge delight in cooking for others. However, the sensitivities I felt so strongly often made me confused in my body, either feeling things hugely or nothing at all. I became anorexic (and bulimic) at around the age of 13 (pretty much the time that my hormones kicked in). All I simply wanted was to survive on sugar. A few biscuits and nuts a day would get me through and allow me to jump from one cortisol hit to another. It was from this time that  I feel I became disconnected with my body and seemed to solely live in my mind… I later was to discover this was down to huge dysregulation in my nervous system.

So, the hunt for this lost connection started. I trained at Leith’s School of Food and Wine in 2006. Invited back as a teacher, I taught there for over 12 years (as well as do all sorts of foodie things along the way). After years of working with food and, probably more relevantly, through having my own children and seeing first-hand how important nutrients was for their fragile little bodies, I slowly started to reconnect my lost body and mind together.

Studying my children - their issues with their retained reflexes, their lack of sleep, their sensitivities -  I began to pick up more and more about this secret world of the body. I invested time and energy learning ways to make them better and more secure in their bodies but ironically continued to ignore my own needs, still detached from the idea that they may apply to me.

The body is amazing and will give you clues when it is off kilter. The difficulty is learning to listen to those clues. In a Western world where we are told to take the medicine and suppress the signals, this can be a very difficult thing to do. When did you truly listen to your intuition?

Asides from learning about my sensitivities through my son, it was also my menstrual cycles that made me aware that something wasn’t quite right within me. I stopped viewing them as an inconvenience to be ignored, and instead I started to learn from, and listen to, them. –I acknowledged  the damage I had created from not listening to my body, and not  connecting to myself on even the most basic of levels.

I was crafting courses for people to understand the wonders of eating well, yet all that time I was depriving myself of the knowledge I was desperately seeking - which was less about eating well and more about  accepting and sitting with myself. I was addicted to being busy and living in a heightened state of stress, so trying to truly connect to myself and my to my nervous system, didn’t feel fathomable.

Extensive  research, training in both yoga and reiki,  thousands of hours (and £!), on online courses, and mind and body work, and, most importantly,  creating an entire community around me of talented women in alternative treatments; all brought to me  a deep understanding and connection to a much stronger message:  that I needed to finally start trusting in myself, and in this deep inner knowledge I had created.

In 2020 I was diagnosed on the Autistic Spectrum.  I had suspected this for a while - it seems to simply just join an already long list of labels that to be honest I no longer want to use to define me.

My message is to simplify and streamline all I have learnt over time and through personal experience to help to connect you to both mind and body so that you do not have to do as much searching as I have.