My professional background is in expressive arts and adolescent counselling, play therapy, and community outreach. For many years, I supported children, teens, and families navigating complex and often painful experiences such as chronic illness, abuse, high-conflict family dynamics, and the impacts of systemic harms. Those years deeply shaped my understanding of how trauma shows up in the body, how sensory profiles differ, and how healing isn’t always reached through words alone.

I was fortunate for a seminal period in my career to work within a multi-disciplinary team where clients and practitioners alike could access a range of complementary therapies. I saw first hand how these approaches could nurture emotional wellbeing and support nervous system regulation, often alongside talking or insight-based therapies. That experience led me to train as a Reiki practitioner at The Reiki Academy in London in 2014.

In my personal encounters with complementary therapies all over the world in the years since then, it became clear to me how rare and valuable it is to find practitioners who work in a truly collaborative and trauma- and sensory-informed way. So many people, particularly women, have told me stories to me of finding themselves in treatment rooms that look Insta-worthy, but were inside bracing against a texture, music, or touch that felt uncomfortable on some level and were perhaps unprepared for. I’ve been there too: tolerating a blanket that didn’t feel nice, feeling repelled by a scent in the room, or putting up with background music that jarred instead of soothed.

Those experiences now guide how I offer Reiki — with an emphasis on choice, collaboration, permission to shift and change mid-session, and ongoing consent. For me, it isn’t about striving for an image of stillness or calm. It’s about supporting women to connect with what feels safe, right, and restorative for them, in their own unique way.