Why I Built Awareness Work – and Why I’ve Been Building It Since I Was Two

I am standing at an intersection in London.

I am very small, holding my mother’s hand, waiting for the light to change. Around me the city moves. People are rushing, shoulders hunched, faces closed. I can feel something underneath it all. Something hidden. A heaviness in people that they themselves don’t acknowledge.

I am two or three years old. I have no words for any of this.

But standing at that intersection something ignites in me – quietly, completely, passionately – a sense that I am here for a reason. Here to help make change.

I made a conscious decision on that day, and it has stayed with me ever since.

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I grew up as what we now understand to be an empath and a highly sensitive person. The problem was, I didn’t know that then. I wish I had!

I felt not only what people were expressing but what was beneath that, usually followed by a rush of understanding of that person’s particular pains and history. I felt the grief behind the smile, the fear behind the anger, the longing that was not spoken.

As a child this was overwhelming and isolating.

I became quite mute for a time. I didn’t have the language, and I didn’t have anyone to share it with.

A creative and open-minded school helped bring me back to myself.

But the question and dedication that had woken in me at that London intersection never left.

Why were people so burdened? Why were they so far from themselves?

I genuinely didn’t understand it and I genuinely needed to find out for my own healing and sanity.

At eighteen I left for Europe with a backpack.

In a small coastal town in Spain I spent months befriending a wild dolphin – a peak experience for me. I rode on its back hanging on to his fin. We had many games we devised and played together for hours in the water.

This relationship became, in ways I still find difficult to describe, one of the most important of my life.

Something I had always sensed was possible – real contact, unguarded presence, a quality of connection and alert communication on many levels, unfiltered by the usual human defences.

This experience further sharpened my search.

What followed was nearly a decade of travelling – Southeast Asia, India, Ireland, America, Mexico, Canada, Turkey, Bali and many places in between.

I sat in silence in a traditional Buddhist monastery in Thailand.

I attended the Maha Kumbh Mela in northern India – thirty million people gathered in one place, among them a million naked sadhus emerging from years of solitary practice.

I was young and I was looking, and what I was finding, across every culture and tradition I travelled through, was confirmation that human beings have always known there is something deeper available than the lives most of us are living.

In Dublin I managed a healing centre with forty practitioners and quietly tried everything.

I was accepted as a student of Sogyal Rinpoche and attended ten-day Dzogchen retreats on the west coast of Ireland as one of the youngest people there, given a scholarship because I was considered a genuine student.

I received teachings directly from Sogyal and the lineage holders gathered with him.

I taught Buddhist meditation at the healing centre.

I was forming, slowly and from many directions at once, a picture of something.

Then I met one of my most important teachers – a psychotherapist working at the edge of what therapy could be, bridging somatic and group process work with consciousness, trained at Esalen Institute in California.

I moved to Sedona, Arizona to train with him.

For four years we travelled the world together delivering intensive workshops – Ireland, America, Turkey, Bali, Australia – to groups of thirty to a hundred people at a time.

I was learning from a master healer.

I was also, through my own deep personal healing, moving through the very territory I would one day help others navigate.

I returned to Australia in my late twenties with a daughter, and thirty years of questions that were slowly, finally, becoming answers.

I opened a private practice, and completed a Masters in Counselling and Applied Psychotherapy.

I kept training, kept refining, kept asking –

what actually creates lasting change?

What does it take for a person to come home to themselves, to this living planet, and to the intelligence that moves through everything?

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What I have come to understand, after all of that, is something quite simple.

Beneath the personality we construct – the coping strategies, the protections, the ways of moving through the world that we develop to survive our particular childhoods and families and cultures – there is a self that is whole and fundamentally well.

The work of genuine healing is finding the way back to that – layer by layer, gently, with real guided support, only by those who have taken the journey themselves.

This covering (or obscuration) happens to everyone.

Some of it is personal, some cultural, some carried over generations in the body long before we are born.

The symptoms of it are familiar – anxiety, depression, difficult relationships, a persistent sense that something is missing.

These are not weaknesses.

They are what happens when a person has lost contact with who they actually are, living in a culture that no longer shows the way.

Awareness Work is what I built in response to this.

It is my clinical psychotherapy practice over the last twenty years, culminating in a six-month programme, now coming into its eighth year, with over two hundred graduates and a team of therapists and facilitators I have personally trained.

The process moves through every layer of covering in a way that is felt and embodied rather than merely mentally understood.

We work in a group, which changes everything – the shared experience becomes part of the healing itself and a palpable sense of contributing to the healing of the collective.

The work is real, progressive, sometimes challenging, often relieving, connecting and joyous.

People often describe it as the most significant thing they have ever done.

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I still feel what I felt at that London intersection.

That quiet, unbreakable sense of purpose in a small child who could feel what the people around her were carrying.

This programme is what I have spent my life building toward with unwavering focus.

If this resonates, I hope you’ll stay and be part of the community gathering here.

I have much more to share… Thank you for being here.

If this resonates, you can read more about The 6 Month Therapy Course by Awareness Work, or apply for a discovery call, here.