I believe breathwork found me, rather than the other way around.
How it began
A friend thought I might like breathwork and so suggested I try the free Sunday sessions run by Alchemy of Breath. I figured I would give it a go (having tried pretty much every other self-help and therapeutic practice out there) and jumped on one of their weekly breathwork calls, not knowing what to expect. What followed was so entirely unexpected: through the simple act of breathing, I felt something in me release that I couldn't explain or name. It was both difficult (I would later learn how resistant my body was to softening and vulnerability) and profoundly innate and effortless. When the opportunity arose to join the facilitator training programme I assumed it was beyond reach, but I jumped on the information call anyway. It happened to be the very last day the cohort was accepting new students and somehow, before I knew it, I was in.
I received my cancer diagnosis midway through that training. The breath became a rigorous companion as I navigated the crazy-making of what followed: the biopsies, the waiting, the opinions and second opinions, the relentless barrage of the medical world arriving all at once. I used breathwork during core aspiration biopsies when I was close to passing out. Through my training I had come to understand the shaking that follows invasive procedures, recognising it as my body completing the stress cycle, even when my medical team had no framework for what they were witnessing.
The decision
At graduation in Italy in August 2024, having just been advised that I would need a mastectomy and full axillary clearance, I was able to go deeply into the work of what my body had been holding. It was from there that I made the decision to delay western medical treatment and give myself the chance to work with my body holistically, through breath, diet, lifestyle and the kind of deep internal attention that breathwork makes possible.
Eighteen months on, my primary tumour has not progressed. Satellite tumours have disappeared. My relevant blood markers show inflammation levels below those of many people who are cancer free. I share this not as a prescription or a promise, but as a true account of what became possible when I stopped fighting my body and started listening to it.
Roots
I was relinquished at birth in Australia and spent time in a children's home before being placed in foster care. I was adopted at six months old, after multiple early attachment disruptions and periods of hospitalisation. I have done a great deal of my own work in this space, and it informs everything I bring to my practice, particularly with clients who are themselves adopted and who recognise, often with some relief, that they are sitting with someone who genuinely understands the territory from the inside.
What drew me to breathwork, beyond the emotional dimension, was its practical physiological grounding. The nervous system implications fascinated me: understanding why I defaulted to mouth breathing first thing in the morning, recognising it as my system moving into fight or flight as a residue of early pre-verbal experience. Noticing how patterns of breath connect to patterns of living. Understanding the profound knock-on effects of breathing well on sleep, on brain fog, on a general sense of being present in your own life. And then the deeper layer beneath that: the breath as an invitation to come inward, to notice the body, to learn that it can become the safe place you have always been looking for.
Before this
I spent thirty years in corporate life, managing large global teams until I reached a state of burnout that made it impossible to continue as I had been. I understand what it means to be on a treadmill you cannot see a way off, to make yourself the last priority, to be highly functional on the outside while something quieter goes unattended. Many of my clients come from that world.
I am deeply curious about the places where things intersect: breathwork, attachment, cancer, high performance and what it means to be fully present to the life you are actually living.
