About

First things first, words are my jam! 

If they're not yours, click here for the less wordy Easy Read version of the whole website :)

 

 

My Why

There's a different vision within us for our future earth, for the way we relate to each other in all our gorgeousness... a vision that diverges away from doom and competition and individualism and scarcity and mistrust and cultures of exhaustion. Something that reflects the values I hold close, of courage, rest, play, and delight. 

The more space we hold to feel into that vision individually and collectively, to sense how that vision feels within our bodies, the more action we can take towards it. And that’s what somatic coaching is all about: feeling and action. Being with what is here now, allowing ourselves to feel it, and acting from there.

Our bodies have so much to tell us.

With courage and practice, we can learn to notice all that is here.

 

 

 

When we practice what is not always easeful within the systems we live in...

invitation without expectation

belonging without contortion

s p a c i o u s n e s s 

... we generate more choice.

 

 

 

What I Do

I offer soft-courageous playful spaces for curious & tender-hearted people who identify as neurodivergent or queer or QTIBIPOC...

so we can experience the restoration of feeling at home in our bodies, re-imagine our lives, embody our values, transform our relationships, step into aligned community...

and become the ancestors we want to be.

 

I offer online one-to-one embodiment coaching for people living anywhere in the world.

I run regular somatics workshops online, with just the right balance of structure and spontaneity, that move beyond small talk, so you can make meaningful connections without cringe or confusion.

I also collaborate with artists and poets on long-term projects that honour the beauty and creativity of my loved ones in Sudan and their community... so that we can direct our resources to support them energetically and financially.

Everyday Writes is a little ecosystem of offerings and invitations, where we can practice embodied acts of care with each other.

 

 

I do it for:

• the dance that happens when we don’t have to start at the beginning, when we recognise ourselves in someone else.
• the love of helping you to feel into your body, to settle into yourself, to trust what you know, to embody your values.
• the beauty that lives on the other side of having a truth be witnessed in its wholeness.
  
• the pride in moving towards being the elder I wish younger me had known. 
• the truth of knowing that things don't have to be like this, that our future is not a foregone conclusion.

 

I do it because through embodiment practice, we change.

It's expansive, it goes deep, it weaves its wonder into every aspect of your life, it enhances the learning and practices you’re already doing, and it generates curiosity, energy and action.

 

There is magic within the margins.

There is magic in neurodivergence.

There is magic in queerness. 

When we're wholeheartedly held, when we feel at home within ourselves, we can become the ancestors we're here to be.

 

I used to look at people who were laying relaxed in the park on a sunny day, their bodies settled, soft, open and unguarded, and wonder, “How do they do that?”

When I talk about remembering ways of being, I mean deep time remembering: the ways that we inherently know, as human beings part of nature, how to be in right relationship with each other, with and within our earth.

We may not have had much experience of this felt sense of inherent safety, belonging, dignity and connection within our bodies within our lifetime. We may not have been born into conditions that make it easeful for us to inhabit this way of being. 

Living from a place of centre within my body is something I had to learn as an adult. It's felt like a whole new language, an entirely different way of being. It's required my geekiness, my curiosity, but mostly my courage to go there, my courage to feel. In this process, we can begin by asking, “What’s here now?” in each moment, and bring loving presence to the answers that emerge. This is the practice I offer and hold space for.

And the answers, the embodied changes, slow and non-linear in their own sweet time, come through being held and witnessed within an ecosystem of relationship.

With support from friends, somatic practice spaces, communities, coaches, therapists, supervisors, and more resources than I can count, I've:

• signed up for initial coach training, because I felt envious and judgemental of the sheer capacity for joy of the people involved in it, and I was curious to know what those feelings were trying to tell me.
• let myself move towards people who I feel happy around… even when those moves felt vulnerable and awkward.
• learned how to hold the realities of my living experiences of marginalisation, while also aligning with spaces and practices that feel like freedom.
• connected, through ritual and practice, to the depth and richness of my own unique heritages as a mixed-race person
• navigated a new understanding of my neurodivergence and physical disability… and found grounding into a life that has space for both strength and rest.
• grown a compassionate co-parenting relationship with my ex-partner, and co-created networks of support for our kid who has additional needs… even when we had no idea what that might look like.
• taken a new lens to my trauma, away from approaches that focus only on the mind and towards somatics and embodiment.
• moved beyond the high ACES score I thought might define my life… and learned what it’s like to feel safe to play.
• embraced and nurtured dreaming, sensing & queering as my orientation to life.

 

 

It's felt transformational to realise that this magical body and nervous system I own in my forties is the same bodymind I’ve had all my life through the trauma and the joys… and to commit to taking care of it, thanking it, going easy on it, paying attention, listening to its needs.

I’ve had big conversations. I've felt new feelings and come home to ancient ones. I’ve made bold moves. I’ve felt like I’m moving backwards. I’ve course-corrected. 

Each day brings practice.

 

My approach & lineage

I’m inspired by planting seeds and seeing what grows, by people who bring playfulness into their serious work, by people who join the dots across the constellations of individual lives, social justice and our climate reality, by people who stay creative and courageous.

In untangling from individualism, naming lineage reminds us that we are not solo beings. 

This work is a continuation of the labour, energy, care, knowledge, commitment, fight, courage & generosity of those who came before us.

 

I share some of these roots to celebrate and honour the ways lineage shapes not only what we’ve learned but why we offer it in the way we do, what motivates us, what questions we’re with, whose work we’re continuing, what we’re choosing to interrupt or divest from, and how we locate ourselves in the long-time perspective of humanity before and beyond this moment.

Lineage doesn't feel like lists. It feels like stories swirling, tides meeting. But here goes:

 

My way of being and holding of space is sustained by my own learning lineage that includes: my English-Sudanese-Syrian-Scottish heritage with its ancestral guidance & practices, Coniston Water, stories of the Nile, navigating growing up Black in a town in Cumbria, my grandparents' involvement with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, a visit to the Martin Luther King Center at the age of 11, embodied care felt within refuge spaces for refugees, hibiscus flowers, libraries. Later: generative somatics, Disability Justice, intersectional and Black feminism, ACT UP, the real Blancas and Pray Tells whose names I don't know. Ideas about different ways of being reached me through: Lama Rod Owens, Prentis Hemphill and The Embodiment Institute, Mia Mingus, Staci Haines, Kai Cheng Thom, Mary Bond, Bayo Akomolafe, Rowen White, Camille Sapara Barton. On my shelves and in my ears: James Baldwin, George Michael, Beverly Glenn-Copeland, Tracy Chapman, Derek Jarman, and more music and books than I can name. 

My personal somatics practices that support my bodymind through experiences of chronic pain are rooted in Clinical Somatics, intuitive energy, dance, and more.

The somatic practices I offer are informed by the knowledge and lineages of: Healing Justice and Transformative Justice, Buddhist traditions of non-dualism, Strozzi Institute, humanistic psychology, indigenous collective grief rituals, Gestalt theory, civil rights and social justice movements, martial arts traditions especially Aikido, Family Constellations, Internal Family Systems, Hakomi, and more. 

The lineage of somatic coaching I'm qualified in holds complex relationships with appropriation and commodification of indigenous practices and wisdom traditions, that are being taught outside of their original cultural and place-based contexts. Staci Haines has co-created a Living Lineage deck, that seeks to explore the complex collective story of the lineage of what we call "somatics". You can find it here.

As someone living in Scotland, my relationships with embodiment practice have been shaped by this harmful extraction, and have reached my awareness through books, podcasts, teachers and trainings via the culture of my geographic location in our world. 

It feels integral to our healing... to be in creative practice around lineage, to explore how to better tell the stories of the ways our bodies of water meet. I'm committed to lifelong learning that seeks to know and honour lineage, question source, and support us to be in practice that emerges from our own unique heritages, so that we can be with the depth of what's here. 

 

Experience

I am trained as a somatic coach, having initially trained as a transformational life coach. I bring skills in both embodied self-awareness and conceptual self-awareness.

 

My work will always be deeply rooted in and enriched by:

• my formative experiences in loving community with people seeking asylum & refuge

• my relationships with loved ones in Sudan who have been displaced by ongoing conflict

• my experiences as a queer disabled Black person with English - Sudanese - Syrian - Scottish heritage, including my living understanding of the ways different systems of oppression reinforce each other and enact harm, and my experiences of the beauty, wisdom & possibilities that breathe outside of those systems

• twenty years as a freelance writer helping people to tell their stories in support of social change
• lifelong involvement in grassroots community projects built around refugees' quality of life, advocacy for neurodivergent, BIPOC and disabled people, and LGBTQIA+ wellbeing

 

I celebrate my neurodivergence for my capacity to combine approaches and skills, in the same way that my identity is rooted in multiplicity and intersectionality. My love of diversity, of queering, of nuance is evident in the way my coaching practice continues to evolve alongside my professional learning and personal somatics practice.

 

My ongoing professional interest lies in: 

• embodied/somatic approaches to healing and collective transformation
• the overlap of simple living, decolonising, custodianship of our earth, somatic alignment, generational healing and collective wellbeing
• practices that both support you as an individual and co-create the conditions for us all to feel held in community.

 

 

Professional Qualifications

ICF-Accredited Diploma in Body-oriented Coaching, The Somatic School

Body-Oriented Group Coaching, The Somatic School

Qualified Transformational Coach, Dr Sarah Madigan's Spectacular School

Trauma-Informed Coaching, Susana Rinderle 

Self-Guided Embodiment Basics, The Embodiment Institute

SAND (Supporting Autism and Neurodiversity) Training, Differabled Scotland

MSc Creative Writing

BSc International Development

 

Currently training towards

ICF Level 2 (Professional Certified Coach) accreditation

 

Current Community Memberships

The Practice Ground by The Embodiment Institute

 

 

Things I love

Voicenotes from friends, kimchi on everything, NPR Tiny Desk concerts, the buzzy energy of a playful idea, the lyrics to ‘Whole of the Moon’ and 'Under Pressure', looking closely at things, any performance that creates a liminal world with its own rules, lists.

 

Daily rituals

Doorstep cuppa, phone-free early morning, never-the-same-twice smoothie, strength-training for my hypermobile body, gratitude, intentional somatic practice, the same (perfect) song 15x over.

 

Practices that support me

Loud music, writing, forests, water, visioning with others, grief rituals, Tarot, speaking to the birds, dancing.

 

Things I no longer do

Hate on my body and mind, compare my current capacity to how I used to be able to do things, consume so much media that I can’t be present in the world, push through moments and days where I need to rest, stay in spaces that are committed to staying the same, think that being playful is unprofessional, judge myself for all the ways I need help.

 

You can usually find me

Coaching clients & facilitating workshops & parenting & writing & queering my life & practicing not knowing in community, always with a sense of wonder at the amazingness of beings and our earth, and imagining the texture of a world where everyone gets to thrive.