Welcome!
Are you a birth professional navigating the emotional rollercoaster of on-call work, juggling life and business and trying to gain clients who really light you up?
Are you a circle keeper or other professional in sacred women’s business wanting to build a sustainable and fulfilling career that honours your sacred and healing gifts?
Perhaps you’re a woman hearing the call to come home to your wild self?
I coach birth professionals, healers, empaths, nurturers and sacred circle keepers who want to thrive in life and business to build a profitable and sustainable business their way, that feels aligned from the inside out.
This work has been calling me for many many years and it has taken me until now to finally follow the drums of my soul.
Born on the waning gibbous moon, with my sun sitting just in Libra, I’m from Adelaide, South Australia, but love traveling with my family in our 1974 Kombi Mabel to wherever the sun is most bright and the forest meets the sea. I am first and foremost a mumma to two boy-wildlings (and bunny, Barney) and wife to my soul partner and high school sweetheart. I have a house full of boys who keep me balanced in my work with women.
Have you been looking for a way to work with your own energy and internal compass so that you do not become another number in the high statistics of birth professionals and sacred space holders who burn out and leave their soul work in the first couple of years out of their training?
Are you looking for a way to weave science with the sacred, to diversify your offerings and understand how your energy and sustainability in your work is so closely linked with how you package your offerings?
After many years of study in Psychology & Social Work I felt the urge to finally dive into birthwork that had been calling me for years. I didn’t understand how doula work would support me and my family like my degrees had done, or be anything beyond a hobby on the side so I enrolled in midwifery thinking it would be the more stable choice for birthwork. I tried to stick it out, I really did. Midwifery was just not what I thought it would be and doula work called me back. I was just not made to work in a hospital for 12 hours a day, work shifts, not get to know my clients and journey with them through pregnancy, birth and parenting, and I certainly was not cut out for the hierarchies, and policies that went against women centred care. I couldn’t work independently where I live so I left and I made it my mission to turn doula and birthwork into something that could not only support us financially, but that would light me up and help make radical change the world one birth at a time, now and into the future.
Some of the biggest downfalls for birthworkers that lead them to leave their soul-work is not charging appropriately for their time and services, feel unworthy and undeserving of being sustainable in work that doesn’t feel like work, not having clarity on what it is that they really want and how their work can get them there, and most importantly not putting themselves first and working against their internal compass, cycles and energy systems instead of with them as their greatest assets.
I believe we must honour both parts of our light and dark to support the whole. Our external environment mirrors our internal. As birthworkers and mothers in business, especially work that is energetically taxing as we hold space for others, we need to work from the inside out to create the life and business of our dreams, not the other way around.
I live to see all sacred space holders and birth professionals not only survive in this work, but to truly thrive. This means really finding the clarity on what it is you are here to do- not the doula down the road, not the circles by someone you see on facebook, or anyone else. This is about you, your inner wisdom and your core desires. I want to see the birth profession and all women’s work built up with a strong and solid reputation of being authentic, ethical and completely professional with the highest integrity. For us to unite as a whole with other sacred space holders and birth professions without or any sense of division, competition hierarchy or separation as to our value and our place in this field.
These are the most powerful and poignant tools that I have learnt in over 9 years of birthwork and sacred women’s business that I want to share with the world so that maybe you won’t have to experience the dimming of your light and your passion in any way. May you create a community that sustains you and harness the power of your internal alignment to truly thrive.
Often flow will come after a massive shift in our lives. It often takes a deep dive into misalignment to be forced back on to our rightful path; the path we were always called to be. Flow calls us to be at home within ourselves. However, we often don’t acknowledge our shadows, which are just the parts of us that we hide away and deny of love. But these are the parts that often hold the greatest gifts and messages for where it is we really want to be and how to get their… except, they can be really uncomfortable. When we experience massive challenges in our lives, all the ruts and rock bottoms, these are often the times where the gifts of our shadows are trying to burst out and our resistance to their discomfort leads things to go haywire… completely out of our control.
The birth of my first son brought about such massive transformation and change, in all the most painful ways. After 72 hours of labour, a hospital transfer, PPH and readmission into hospital for an infection and no milk supply I believed that my body was broken and I grieved the birth I thought I ‘should’ have had. I developed PND, PTSD and my baby didn’t stop crying for 12 months. I tried to go back to work in my professional social work position but I just wasn’t the same person and didn’t know where I fit. I recovered and grew stronger in my own sense of identity and I stripped away the years of conditioning, patterning and superficial expectations that had led me to be doing things that didn’t completely bring me joy.
(Inspired by Rumi).
Birthwork called me back and I finished both my doula and placenta preparation arts training and started taking clients for antenatal, birth, postnatal and placenta services. I also offered blessings, ceremonies, retreats, training days for birthworkers, circles and I started or contributed to a number of local birth groups to increase the community engagement in the area (that are still running strong)
I was working full time in birthwork and juggling motherhood. I had to learn to balance, honour the ups and the downs and find the gold nuggets even in the darkest days.
But I had more challenges to follow that would ensure that I could completely be free of anything that wasn’t serving me and truly honour my calling.
We decided to pack up our house and go travelling in a vintage caravan to make the most of the early years. My husband has a chronic condition that prevents him from being able to work full time so we thought this would be the perfect opportunity to live slowly in alignment with how we had always dreamed and work a little on the road.
However I got pregnant and my husband became very ill and after 4 months on the road we had to make an urgent trip back to family where we found ourselves homeless (because our house was rented and we didn’t have any work to pay any kind of mortgage or rent), my husband was completely bedridden, unsure if he would recover and I was pregnant and carer to a toddler and sick husband.
While things took me to the brink of despair and hopelessness, what kept me going and believing in hope for the future was my community and my work… my work brought me back to my natural wild self that felt safe and nurturing to my aching soul. I somehow found balance in the uncertainty by ensuring self care and self nourishment was a priority. I could not continue holding it together for everyone unless I was ok myself. I kept running circles, retreats and gatherings, connecting with like-minded women and working in alignment with my internal compass to remind me that I did not have to be a victim of my circumstances.
After my second son was born, he brought both a healing and traumatic birth experience all in one. I was reminded about what kind of broken birth culture we live in (with Adelaide being one of the most complex in the world) and while this time I felt completely strong and healed in my body- I was shown that it was not my body that was broken at all, but the system! And how vitally important it is for women and babies now but also for the next generations that we unite together to make significant and radical change to how we view and treat birth and the postpartum…. And also prior to that, how our beliefs around the menstrual cycle often underpin our birth culture.
In her book, the Women Who Run With The Wolves, Clarissa Pinkola Estes tells the story of a seal woman who comes on to the land, just as seals do to dance, mate, birth and nurture their pups before returning to their wild home in the sea. While she’s on land her seal-skin, which represents her ‘soul skin’ is stolen and she begins to ‘dry out’, lose her creativity and die. Because she isn’t able to return home to her wild self, even for just a short time and replenish her needs she becomes lost. This story hit home so hard for me as I felt for many years like I had lost my own seal-skin. In becoming a mother we are often limited in how we can honour our own instinctual needs to take care of us as well as everyone else as so we can feel ourselves begin to ‘dry out’. But reconnecting with your wild home, even when you are faced with huge responsibilities or massive adversities is not only possible, it is so so necessary (especially in a culture that wants you to forget).
“There is human time, and there is wild time”
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
Fortunately my husband recovered and we moved back home and things significantly improved… but we were all changed. For many years the overwhelm of these experiences as well as being a mother of two small boys, and being a multi passionate creative who offered soo many different services I fractured my energy massively. I have learned so much from these experiences and refined some absolutely invaluable tools that I wish I had known about back then. If you want a business that lights you up and and doesn’t continue to fracture your sensitive energy, this is a partnership made by the goddess.
I have since gone on to support Angela Gallo both write and teach her world-wide gold standard doula training (online and face to face) as well as continue to hold space for the local birthwork community, held gatherings, facilitated courses about working with the cycles, successfully launched (and tipped) a crowdfunding campaign, self published a range of planners for birthworkers and women in business to work in alignment with their own energetic compass and that were sent around the world, continued attending some births.
Despite my wild ride, I was put back on the path I was always meant to follow, it just took some reminders of my strength and resilience to find it again. The biggest thing I learnt though was that no matter how far I strayed, or how much external factors tried to take away my stability, my greatest protection and anchor has always been me. In re-learning and re-membering my innate ability to return home to myself by always acknowledging my internal alignment compass (or my Soul-Skin, Seal-Skin as Clarissa Pinkola Estes refers to) and answering the call back to my wild self as a priority above all else I have found a power source greater than any other….
I’ve resurfaced now with this powerful wisdom to realign with my strongest calling; to stand in my power as a teacher, coach and mentor supporting other birthworkers and mothers wanting to reclaim and remember this innate wisdom to help ignite their greatest desires and turn them into a reality. I want to hold space for those bringing new fresh energy into this broken, sick and fractured culture that doesn’t honour birth, death, our innate magical wild or our vital rites of passage.
I want to see you unearth the gifts that you are hiding away for all to see and benefit from.
I want to see you loving life in all that it has to offer and to acknowledge your deepest core desires, even when they make you feel a bit uncomfortable and make them happen!
Everything you want is possible and you are worthy.
The answers are already within you.
Together we will uncover your own unique rhythm and what balance looks like and feels like to you. To use your own energetic foundation as a compass of desire to guide you on this magical path.
It is my mission to guide women, sacred space holders and birth professionals back home to their innate wild self of living in flow with their own bodies and the earth. I specialise in personal energy restoration, unlocking your inner wisdom and gifts to live in full flow and thrive in life and business.
Together we will honour each phase and acknowledge each wound so that the light can find it’s way back in.
When you align from the inside out you rewild and you come home to yourself.
Before action, we must align from the inside out.
Much Love,
xxx
My formal qualifications, Memberships and experience:
Bachelor of Behavioural Science (psychology) (Flinders University)
Masters of Social Work (Flinders University)
1.5 Years of Bachelor of Midwifery (Flinders University)
Certificate IV Doula Services (Australian Doula College)
Certificate of Placenta Preparation Arts (APPA)
Chidbirth Education & Breastfeeding Counselling (Childbirth International)
5 years of working in both public and private schools as a school counsellor and group facilitator
Social Work Supervisor for the University of SA
Co-Founder of Adelaide Birth Network
Certified Reiki Practitioner
Writer and trainer for Angela Gallo’s Dynamo Doula Training
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