Being Well Being

21/08/2025

Children and adults are the same in this regard; shame disconnects us from ourself and from the other, because it is simply too painful. This brings a shutting down, even if a very subtle one.

To make a child or person do anything, is a dominating forceful approach, where we make ourselves bigger and the other smaller.

With safety and support in vulnerability there can be true connection, to self and to others. This brings cooperation. Actions then come from a place of honouring connection, honouring self and honouring other. This brings a very different kind of relationship. It is more joyful.

We do not need to be motivated by pain.

08/05/2025

Love this. ❤

Having grown up knowing these sentences to end so differently, and having met so many clients in their old wounds, I know that hearing these sentences genuinely said differently really helps to help repattern our inner realms.

Huge respect to all who work to heal their imprints as they meet their children. The world does not need more fear and domination - our society does need more openness and support and it's beautiful to witness.

10/11/2024

In early 2002 I walked through a park in London in shock, having realised the seriousness of some of the illness I was facing and that I might lose sight in both eyes. With one eye patched already for months, I walked into the idea that I had a budget to spend my vision on. One of the two things that came to me was that I wished to gaze deeply into people's eyes, to understand more of what it is to be human.

This has indeed unfolded, and now, with more than 20 years actually working as a healer and therapist, this work has never got boring.

It is a deep privilege to meet people in their vulnerablity, whether that it depression, cardiac arrhythmia, 3rd degree burns, downs syndrome, parenting challenges and overwhelm, dementia, spinal injury, childhood trauma, relationships, or whatever presents. I literally have worked with birth, death and almost everything inbetween and I am humbled and continually realising how much more to learn and understand.

So much of the understanding comes in meeting people simply where they are, and finding the courage to meet myself where I am.

19/06/2024

“The only reason we don't open our hearts and minds to other people is that they trigger confusion in us that we don't feel brave enough or sane enough to deal with. To the degree that we look clearly and compassionately at ourselves, we feel confident and fearless about looking into someone else's eyes. ”
― Pema Chödrön

I deeply love holding a safe space for people to develop capacity to be with ourselves with more compassion, even and especially in our deepest overwhelm and confusion. In so doing, I see again and again how much less fear arises is in looking into another's eyes. The more tolerarance we have for our own pain, fear and discomfort, the more we can allow a different kind of connection with our selves and with all our relations.

I consult with people in person in the Cape South Peninsula, and also offer global online consultations. Whatsapp now to schedule an appointment if this resonates.

15/06/2024

Having studied Aware Parenting, the body of work that Aletha went on to create, over 4 years, and practiced it in numerous wonderful ways, I am so glad she did this! Even more the inspiration

The first edition of The Aware Baby was published forty years ago today (June 15, 1984). This is a picture of me displaying it at a local book fair. I had typed the manuscript with an electric typewriter and mailed it to the major U.S. publishers, all of whom rejected it. One publisher said that the advice was too new and unusual. Another said that there was nothing new in it!

So, I decided to publish it myself. I bought a book on how to self-publish, ordered 5,000 copies, and stored them in my garage. I had no idea if anybody would buy them. (This was before Amazon and the Internet.) I am delighted that I sold all of them (and many more), and I published a revised edition in 2001. The Aware Baby has now been translated into 13 languages.

I am grateful to all the people who have supported me over the years and who have inspired me to keep writing books.

21/10/2023

If you're watching the rugby....
Are you holding your breath?
Go bokke! 🇿🇦🏉🇿🇦

15/10/2023

Why might you make an appointment with me?

If you would like to exhale, one of those deep lovely exhalations that does not require to push out the breath, but is simply and profoundly a softening relief of tensions, when the body and the mind both feel at ease and the breath spontaneously lets go; if you would like to feel this in whatever way, then come and see me. I can work with you online or in person.

It feels impossible to fully define what I do in my work, in the handful of words which social media favours. The scope of what I offer is unusually broad and deep. It’s been 22 years getting here as I journeyed with my own very serious health conditions for 2 years before I worked with anybody else. Since then, there has been ongoing study, in all kinds of directions, as I really have sought to understand deeply, to be able to help deeply.

I work with physical illness and injury, and I also, often simultaneously, work with mental-emotional stuckness and overload.
I’ve helped people make astounding recovering from stroke paralysis in just 2 weeks, and in similar time period I’ve also seen people come right out of serious chronic depression without even a need to talk.
I helped people through chemotherapy and life threatening conditions and I also help with a simple back pain or injury.
I work with whatever comes to me, through all stages of life, and through all of life experiences.
I support passage through trauma or major life change, be it injury or relationship, change in stage of life, acute or chronic illness or loss.
I work with chronic pain and complex-PTSD.
I work with death and dying.
I work with pregnancy and birth,
I work with all that you come with.

It might be there is nothing in particular “wrong” but that you would simply like to feel even more at ease and joyful. Some do come to see me simply for that deep joyful exhalation, nothing more and nothing less. The more deeply we are able to breathe, naturally without pushing or pulling the breathe, the more deeply we are able to inhabit our bodies and all aspects of our lives. Sometimes I say simple “I help people to breathe”, because the breath really is everything, the first thing to change in times of stress, and the first to release as we come to safety and ease.

I’ll share more about specific approaches over following posts. I have a range of tools and skills that I utilise; none of these are breathing exercises or breath interventions. I allow the breath to reflect where we are, and I listen to the tensions behind it. I hold a safe space.

11/10/2023

I'm back!!!
With a deep exhalation I smile into this space, so happy to be here connecting with you again.

It can be said that all of life exists in the simplicity of the breath. All of our living, a balance between the simple profound movement of the exhalation and the inhalation. Through these simple movements we are created and transformed, and through these simple movements, we in our way, create and transform the world. We meet the world and the world meets us; we act in the world, and we reflect and integrate inside of ourselves, we give into the world, and we receive and are subject to what comes to us.

Whilst the work of this page has been in the unseen inhalation, I've been through transformation of some really big challenges, and I've also got to explore some other deep and joyous passions. To be alive is to constantly changing; the more deeply we accept the changes, even if the changes bring huge challenges, the more fully alive we can be.

I look forward now to a bigger, deeper, broader way of being with my work and with all of you, as of course I'm not the same person I was a year or few ago and definitely much transformed from more than a decade ago when I started this page, and twenty years ago when I started working with people in a therapeutic way.

I'm here now with more insight, more skill, more understanding and a lot more empathy and compassion.

I'm here, with you.
Thank you for standing by me. Watch this space...