ra
healing

For most of my life, I thought feeling like shit every day was just what it meant to be alive.

I didn't have a name for it. I didn't know that the numbness, the way I'd learned to leave my body before anyone could hurt it again, the constant low hum of gray underneath even my good days, that this was a nervous system doing exactly what it had to, after a beginning that taught it there was no safety to come back to. I was 38 before I understood I'd been living with complex PTSD my entire life. Not broken. Just never taught the way back.

My mother was diagnosed with cancer while she was pregnant with me. She had me anyway, and died not long after. My father remarried, and for most of my childhood I lived with emotional and physical abuse. By seven or eight I already knew, in that deep-body way children know things, that I didn't belong there. At fifteen I ran, first from the house, then from New Zealand entirely, to Australia, with no plan beyond distance.

What followed was over a decade of trying to outrun a nervous system I didn't yet have a word for. Drugs. The wrong people. A grandparent's death while I was too far away and too dissociated to fully feel it. I moved from Perth to Sydney, got sober cold turkey, and built a life that looked, from the outside, like it was working, high-level sales, then a career in fitness that tipped into an addiction of its own, bodybuilding and powerlifting and an obsession with aesthetics, because I'd learned very young that how I looked was the one thing I could control, maybe the only thing. Every high was temporary. Every day underneath it was still gray.

The addiction didn't stay confined to substances or training. It showed up in perfectionism, in a relentless inner critic, and in relationships, one long-term relationship that lasted nine years, then a string of ones after that I couldn't seem to keep, cycling in and out of connection without ever landing anywhere stable. If you know complex PTSD, you know this part of the pattern: the nervous system that can't quite believe it's safe to stay, so it doesn't.

The shift started small. A friend invited me to a Buddhist temple, and I went twice a week for months, desperate for any kind of peace, learning to sit in silence and just notice my breath. One day a monk said something that split something open in me: what we're looking for is not happiness, it's peace. I started removing everything in my life that wasn't bringing me either. Stoicism came next, and got me through some of the hardest years. Then I found Joe Dispenza's work and learned how to consciously generate feeling in the body, and for the first time, I caught a glimpse of a version of myself I could actually recognize.

But glimpsing her wasn't the same as becoming her. A relationship ending in a way that broke something in me sent me looking deeper, and that's when I found EMDR. It worked at a level underneath language, before I had words for what happened to me, my body already had the memory. EMDR let me go there, to the parts of the story that lived in tissue and nervous system rather than sentences, and slowly, carefully, let go of what I'd been carrying since before I could speak. That's where I found forgiveness for my father, for my family, for the child who thought this was just what life was. And somewhere in that process, I finally understood: this wasn't just my story. I had complex PTSD, and I was going to spend my life helping people heal it faster than I had.

I trained in every modality that actually moved something in me, clinical hypnotherapy, psychotherapeutic and cognitive education, IFS-informed work, breathwork, EMDR, future-focused work, and trained in energy healing, which cracked open the understanding that I was so much more than a body I'd spent my whole life trying to control. I closed the door on the life I'd built, gave myself eight months to build a full practice from nothing, and did it.

Then Bali undid me all over again, in the best way. It asked me to release the last of an identity built on how I looked, and I let it. I went deep into plant medicine and shadow work, into a relationship that healed relational wounds I didn't know I still carried, to Egypt, into Kundalini training, into sound and voice. Every layer taught me the same thing from a different angle: becoming who you truly are is not a broken process to be fixed. It's a beautiful, cyclical one, and it can move faster than most of us are told.

I don't work from one modality. I work from all of them, at once, because that's what actually holds a whole person, the mind, the body, and the parts that are neither. Healing isn't only the clearing work, the trauma processing, the nervous system regulation, the parts work that clears out what's been sitting in the house too long. It's also the energetic work, the ritual, the sound, the ceremony that decorates the space once it's clean. We don't only ever clean the house. We also get to decorate it. Both matter. Neither is optional. Human Design became one of my guides in learning to trust my own uniquely built way of working, and as my practice grew, I had to keep letting go of methods that had served me but no longer fit who I was becoming. That's the same thing I now watch happen in the leaders, healers, and coaches I work with: something that worked for years stops working, and the real task isn't finding a replacement, it's having the confidence to let it go and trust what's next, even before you can see it clearly.

Ra has been with me since before I understood why. I'm the only person in my family with an Egyptian name, and no one has ever been able to tell me where it came from. I searched for years for the right name for this work, and then, on a quiet afternoon in Bali over a cup of coffee, it arrived on its own. Ra is the sun, the light that shines directly into darkness, that opens each day and then lets it close, that makes room for both. That's what this work is. Not the absence of darkness. The willingness to meet it, and still rise.

I do this work now for people who've already done the work, the leaders, healers, entrepreneurs, and coaches who are expanding in the world and can feel that something underneath still hasn't caught up. I'm not here to fix you. I don't believe you're broken. I'm here to hold the container while you remember who you were before the world told you who to be.