The festive season often arrives wrapped in glitter, warmth, and cultural expectation. We’re encouraged to feel joyful, grateful, and connected — yet the reality is more complex. For many, this time of year also stirs emotional triggers linked to family dynamics, grief, financial strain, sensory overload, or the pressure to perform happiness.

Click on the image to listen to TCFH podcast with me & Matt. It's a juicy conversation about the power of presence, the importance of embodied healing, and the beauty of returning home to our truest selves. Whether you're navigating your own trauma or holding space for others, this conversation is filled with insight and inspiration.

It can seem like an impossibility for most of us, as we push ourselves through each day, the grind of work, the struggle in relationships, the weight of trying to be the perfect parent/child/sibling/friend, the successful career-person and all amidst a world in multiple crises.

Grief

This blog may include triggering material for some readers and contains descriptions of trauma and childhood shock. The intention is to provide information and hope. Proceed only if you are comfortable with trauma topics.

When I was 10 years old, my family and I were involved in a near-fatal head-on crash with a truck and trailer unit, bearing a load of timber on the open highway. We were travelling home after a happy spring holiday, in the lakes region of Central Otago, New Zealand.

What I’ve noticed about my intimate relationships, is how easily triggered I get.

As a child, I had an imaginary companion, a tiger. I remember leading my nana by the hand, down to the hedge at the bottom of the garden, where my hut was, to visit the tiger.

The therapeutic world seems saturated with a multitude of modalities and approaches, but many of them are now incorporating the mind-body connection and mindfulness techniques.

I have been exploring various ways of understanding myself, my mind, my body, my surviving and thriving, over the last 30 years and have found the deepest healing has been through Yoga practices and most recently the addition of embodied Processing, which I have trained in through The Centre for Healing (Australia).

I am always wary and indeed I grow weary, with the overuse or misuse of language, yet the work I find myself drawn to, is full of buzzwords. You know... words like 'co-create, hold space, curiosity, trauma or trauma-informed'.