I originally trained at the Laban Centre of Contemporary Dance and went on to gain a First Class BA (Hons) degree in Dance with Visual Arts and Film from the University of Brighton. But faced with the physical challenges of reoccurring injuries throughout my training, it was always Pilates I turned to for rehabilitation and lasting recovery.
So inspired I trained as a Pilates teacher and qualified through the Body Control Pilates Association and with Gordon Thomson.
I have been practising Pilates for over 25 years, benefiting from its profound effects. Now teaching in professional Pilates studios throughout London and Sussex, I offer both matwork classes and studio equipment based one-to-one sessions.
In recent years, a period of prolonged illness brought me back into stark relationship with my body once more. I was often frustrated by what my body seemed unwilling or unable to do. Where my body had always been strong, flexible and resilient, I had to adjust and soften to my body’s pace rather than override it. I continue to learn to surrender, discovering all the time that when I really attune to my body and engage in this process of deep listening, I discover so much.
We live in a society where we tend to outsource responsibility for our health to others. I’ve worked with many trusted specialists over the years and have learnt that although they may help point us in the right direction, we can ultimately find the answers for ourselves, from within. This process requires sensitivity, and through it we recover more of who we are.
In Conscious Body Pilates we give the body space to breath and to allow the muscles time to release their patterning. Because the body remembers everything, storing at a cellular level, events that the conscious mind may long since have forgotten, by moving slowly and consciously we can make surprising discoveries. Challenging experiences inform how the body moves, responds, or numbs. Through movement we may begin to soften the layers of protection we have created; we can release and create more space and feeling. We connect up more of the body and, in doing so, can begin to live with more vitality and health.
I support my clients to build strength from the inside out, like building a house with strong foundations. My intention is always to help deepen a client’s awareness, so that they can expand their capacity to tune in and listen and grow trust in their own body and its communications. The body does a very good job of keeping us alive and safe and it deserves our deepest respect.
As well as dancing, my experience has led me to draw on many other influences including the work of Gabor Mate’s Compassionate Enquiry, Peter Levine and Bessel Van der Kolk’s trauma work, Eric Franklin’s fascia release work, and Bert Hellinger’s Family Constellations.
Influenced by my creative and physical roots, I have a natural understanding and affinity with the body and use my knowledge sensitively and intuitively in my teaching.