The Full Story

The child

I grew up on a ten-acre farm, where my childhood was spent making mud pies, building things, playing in the fields and creating worlds out of whatever I could find.

My dad was wonderfully crafty. He built us tree huts, see-saws, tree stump seats and hammocks between trees. I spent hours outside, playing, imagining and creating. I was always drawing, painting, singing or finding some new way to express what was moving through me.

I also sensed things I didn't quite understand.

I drew faces of people I had never met. When I felt sadness I would put the feeling into a stone and take it to the river without anyone showing me to do that. At around five years old, I remember calling on Jesus to help spirits find their way into the light. Nobody had taught me to do this either. It simply felt natural.

I had a peculiar relationship with words and numbers, writing them backwards, and an almost instinctive feeling that I could decide what I wanted to become good at and bring it into being.

I didn't have the language for intuition, energy, spirit or psychic perception. I was simply experiencing the world in my own way.

Looking back, I can see that the things I would spend my adult life exploring were already present in that little girl. My imagination. My sensitivity. My relationship with nature. My fascination with the unseen. My need to create.

I didn't know then that these seemingly separate parts of me would eventually become the foundations of my work.

I only knew there was always more to discover.

Nineteen: following the unseen

At nineteen, I began exploring tarot. It was one of the first doorways into a world I had been circling for years. I became fascinated by the symbols, the cards, the archetypes and the possibility that there were layers of meaning beneath what appeared on the surface.

One question led to another. I explored angels, energy healing, Reiki, metaphysics, the Sacred Feminine, the Divine Masculine, consciousness, mythology and the mysteries of the human psyche. I became interested in the relationship between what we think, what we feel, what we carry and what we create in our lives.

I wanted to understand why we are here. What shapes our experiences. How we come to believe certain things about ourselves. What happens when we stop living according to expectations and begin following something that feels more deeply our own.

My exploration wasn't confined to books or spiritual practices. I was living, working, travelling, falling in love, experiencing heartbreak and discovering how little the neatly packaged answers of the world could sometimes explain about being human.

Art remained one of my greatest teachers. As a teenager, I sang the national anthem to a crowd of around 40,000 people. At twenty, I was named Southland Makeup Artist of the Year. I built a career in makeup artistry, working on film sets, fashion shoots and runways. I learnt how to turn creative ideas into something tangible, how to see beauty in details and how to bring an imagined vision into form.

But art was never just about the finished piece.

I would begin with a blank canvas and allow images, colours and forms to emerge without necessarily knowing what they meant. Sometimes faces appeared. Sometimes I felt as though I was discovering something rather than consciously creating it. Painting took me somewhere my thinking mind could not always reach.

I became fascinated by the space between imagination and perception, and by what could reveal itself when I allowed the process to unfold.

I also studied life coaching, human resources and business, trained in Reiki and NLP, became a Red Tent facilitator and continued seeking spiritual teachers and mentors. Over more than fifteen years, my exploration has moved through many traditions and disciplines, each opening another doorway into the mysteries of life.

But I was never interested in spirituality simply to accumulate knowledge.

I wanted to experience it. I wanted to understand what it meant to trust my intuition, listen to my body and follow the strange little inklings that kept drawing me towards something I could not yet name.

And then, at twenty-five, the life I had built began asking me some very different questions.

When the life I had built stopped feeling like mine

By twenty-five, I had achieved a great deal of what I thought success was supposed to look like.

I had bought my first home by the sea, travelled internationally, built a successful makeup artistry career and won awards. I was working as an executive assistant, attending meetings with CEOs and Ministers, and had even met the Prime Minister of New Zealand.

From the outside, I had plenty to be proud of.

But I remember sitting at my desk and realising that none of it necessarily added up to the life I wanted to live.

I was tired of working towards things that looked successful but didn't necessarily feel like mine. I wanted more creativity, freedom, meaning and magic. I wanted to know what it felt like to follow my soul rather than spend my life meeting expectations.

Around that time, several things in my life began to unravel. I wrote off my car in an accident. My house flooded. A relationship changed. A flat tyre and a brutal dose of flu added to the feeling that life was rearranging itself around me. I experienced glandular fever.

I began what I called a life cleanse, trying to clear out old ways of thinking and decide what a healthy, happy life might look like. I changed my habits, moved my body, explored the womb and began looking at my life through a different lens.

Yet even as I made the changes I thought I should make, something deeper was stirring.

I could do everything right and still feel that something was missing.

I was beginning to understand that becoming a more efficient, more organised, healthier version of myself was not necessarily going to bring me the extraordinary life I craved.

I wanted to stop building a life that looked right and begin discovering what was true.

So I started writing.

And once I began, I knew I could not return to the same way of seeing the world.

I started questioning the ideas I had inherited about success, relationships, happiness and the person I was supposed to become. I began paying attention to the feelings that kept returning, the experiences that seemed to carry a message and the moments when life appeared to be revealing something I could not have planned.

I wanted to know whether magic was real.

And I was willing to follow the thread to find out.

The blood, the rose and the womb

My relationship with the Sacred Feminine deepened as I began exploring menstruation, the womb, creation and the ways women have been taught to understand their bodies.

I became fascinated by the cycles of the feminine and the parallels between our bodies and the natural world. The moon, the tides, the seasons, the cycles of death and rebirth. I was drawn to the possibility that ancient wisdom lived within these rhythms, something we had become disconnected from in a world that so often expects us to be consistent, productive and in control.

I wanted to explore that wisdom for myself.

At one point, I began working consciously with my menstrual blood as part of a personal ritual. I collected it and returned it to the Earth, placing it on my rosemary bush with an intention around releasing old relationship patterns and changing the way I experienced love.

I was interested in the womb as a centre of creativity, not simply in the physical sense of carrying a child, but as a symbol of our capacity to create, transform, gestate and bring something new into being.

Returning my blood to the Earth felt like an intimate act of relationship. A way of honouring my body, my cycles and the creative force I felt moving through me.

Then, one day at work, a colleague asked aloud, “Who is Rosemary?”

She was talking about someone else, but I stopped in my tracks.

Rosemary was the very plant I had been working with.

I experienced the moment as a synchronicity, one of those strange intersections between the ordinary and the meaningful that had become part of my spiritual life. It invited me to pay attention to what I was exploring and to the relationship I was developing with the symbols and experiences around me.

I began to see ritual less as a way of forcing life to deliver a particular outcome and more as a way of entering into conscious relationship with what I was ready to change, release or create.

The experience opened a deeper inquiry into womanhood, the feminine and the ways we might learn to trust our own cycles rather than fight against them.

I became fascinated by the rose as a symbol of feminine power. I had a rose tattooed on my wrist before I fully understood why I was drawn to it, and later planted my first rose beside the sea, near my rosemary.

I watched it grow from the mud, producing tiny leaves and eventually soft pink buds.

There was something in the rose that spoke to me.

She did not need to become another flower. She did not need to compare herself to the plants growing beside her. She simply grew into her own nature.

I began to see this as a lesson in the feminine: the courage to unfold without constantly measuring ourselves against someone else's idea of beauty, worth or success.

I explored the Maiden, Mother and Crone, goddess archetypes and the many faces of feminine power. I was interested in the parts of womanhood that had been dismissed, hidden or made to feel shameful, and in the possibility of reclaiming a deeper relationship with the body.

For me, menstruation became part of a much larger conversation about creativity, intuition, cycles and belonging. It was a way of remembering that we are living beings, with rhythms and needs that cannot always be accommodated by the pace and expectations of the modern world.

The more I explored, the more I wanted to understand the relationship between the womb and the Earth. That was when one of the most enduring images of my life emerged.

The forest within

Following a particularly intense period of personal exploration and a traditional Māori romiromi treatment, I found myself reflecting on what I was carrying emotionally and what it meant to allow old experiences to move through me.

I began to experience vivid inner imagery.

I saw myself floating in a deep sea of water, followed by a vision of fertile brown ground, with millions of trees growing and falling.

A living forest.

I had asked myself a question: What does the inside of my womb look like?

The image that came to me was not what I expected.

I have never forgotten it.

It felt like a key, a doorway into a way of understanding the body, the feminine and the Earth as deeply connected.

I began to contemplate the womb as a landscape. A place of creation, potential, mystery and transformation. The trees growing and falling seemed to express something I had been learning throughout my life: that creation is cyclical, that endings and beginnings belong to one another, and that what is happening beneath the surface is not always visible to us.

A forest is never simply one thing. It contains growth and decay, emergence and return. What falls becomes part of what nourishes new life.

I began seeing these same patterns in the experiences of being human. The identities we shed. The beliefs that fall away. The relationships that change us. The periods when we feel lost, only to discover that something new is taking shape beneath the uncertainty.

The vision brought together my interest in the womb, the feminine, the natural world and the mysteries of creation.

It was as though the forest I loved outside myself had revealed itself within me. And it changed the way I saw the Earth.

The vision in the Peruvian jungle

Another experience that stayed with me happened after I had my first wisdom tooth removed.

I was terrified. My nervous system was in overdrive, and despite having several injections to numb my mouth, I felt everything. I went home cold and shivering, lay down and closed my eyes.

What followed felt like being transported into the deep Peruvian jungle.

In the vision, my body was laid down in a meditative position before thousands of people chanting “Om”. A woman approached and showed me movements to make over my body, using different circles, rhythms and patterns - she told e that i could heal myself; it was revolutionary at the time.

I woke several hours later. The experience left a lasting impression on me and inspired me to explore Reiki. It became part of my growing interest in the body's own intelligence, energy, movement and the ways we can enter into a deeper relationship with ourselves.

I had already been studying spirituality, but experiences like this made it personal in a completely different way. I was no longer only reading about the mysteries of life. I was encountering them through my own body, dreams, visions and experiences.

I wanted to understand what I was perceiving. I wanted to learn from people who had devoted their lives to this work. I wanted to explore ancient traditions, symbols, the unseen forces and the different languages through which people have tried to understand the human experience.

So I kept learning.

I explored Reiki, energy work, NLP, life coaching, archetypes, mythology, consciousness and the Sacred Feminine. I sought spiritual mentors and studied the work of teachers and writers who opened new ways of seeing.

I became interested in what could be understood through the mind, and what might only become available when we stopped trying to think our way through everything.

I learnt to recognise that not every experience arrives with an explanation. Sometimes the understanding comes much later. Sometimes the meaning continues to unfold throughout a lifetime.

And sometimes we have to be willing to follow the thread before we know where it leads.

The Earth became my teacher

I had always loved being outdoors, but something changed when I began spending more time beside the ocean and within the particular landscape I called home.

I painted more. I observed more. I became increasingly attentive to the natural world and the way it seemed to meet me in whatever season of life I was moving through.

The sea, the trees, the weather, the plants and the land itself became part of my spiritual life.

I began noticing how the natural world expressed the cycles I was learning to recognise within myself. How a tree could lose its leaves and remain whole. How a rose could emerge from dark soil. How what appeared to be an ending could also be a preparation for new life.

There were moments when my own emotions seemed to find an echo in the landscape. I remember experiences of grief and emotional release that coincided with thunder and lightning, the sky opening as something within me was finally allowed to move.

These experiences deepened my sense that nature was not simply a backdrop to my life. The Earth had become a living presence with whom I could be in relationship, a teacher whose patterns offered me a different way to understand existence.

I began exploring the relationship between the inner landscape and the outer one.

The body, with its own rhythms, cycles and intelligence. The womb, as a symbol of creation. The forest, with its networks and patterns of growth. The ocean, forever moving between tides. The seasons, reminding us that life does not remain in one state forever.

I was drawn to Gaia, to Papatūānuku, to the Earth as Mother and to the sense of belonging that comes from recognising ourselves as part of the living world.

In my understanding, we are not separate from the Earth. We are made of her. We live through her systems, her seasons and her nourishment. The world outside us and the world within us are in constant relationship.

The more I explored, the more the Earth became a language through which I understood my own life.

I began to see the natural world as a mirror, a guide and a place where the intelligence of life could be encountered directly.

At around thirty, I began bringing these threads together through Earth Embodiment™.

The name held something essential for me. Earth. The body. The process of becoming. My own initials, ME, also became a personal reminder of Mother Earth and the relationship between the individual and the greater living whole.

I began creating gatherings, creative workshops and guided nature experiences that invited people to step into that relationship for themselves.

Over four years, I facilitated around fifty events.

I wanted people to experience what could happen when they slowed down, entered a natural landscape, worked creatively and paid attention to what was moving within them. I wanted to create space for wonder, expression and the kind of knowing that can emerge when we step outside our usual routines.

Earth Embodiment™ brought together my art, my spiritual exploration, my relationship with the feminine and my love of the natural world. It gave shape to a thread that had been moving through my life for years.

The Earth had become more than a place I visited.

She was part of the work itself.

The body as a portal

My relationship with the body has continued to deepen through my experiences of pain, change and transformation.

A severe L5 spinal injury brought me face to face with a kind of pain I could not simply think my way out of. It interrupted my life and made me pay attention to my body in ways I had not experienced before.

In my spiritual exploration, I began contemplating the lower spine as a place to reflect on foundations, ancestry, lineage and belonging. I became curious about what it means to feel rooted, what we carry from those who came before us, and how our relationship with the past shapes the way we inhabit the present.

The L5 became a symbol through which I could explore these questions, alongside the physical reality of the injury itself.

What does it mean to feel truly at home in your body? What histories do we carry? What patterns have we inherited? What happens when we begin listening to the body as well as the mind?

These questions continue to lead me towards new experiences and learning.

I have explored different approaches to the body, including Ortho-Bionomy, Spinal Wave and somatic practices. I remain fascinated by the relationship between physical experience, emotional life, energy and the patterns that shape us.

For me, embodiment is not about forcing the body to comply with an idea of who we should be. It is about entering into relationship with the body we actually inhabit, becoming more attentive to its rhythms and learning to listen to what our experience is asking of us.

It is another doorway into the same mystery that has followed me since childhood: the intelligence that exists beneath the surface, waiting for us to become quiet enough to notice.

The body has become one of my great teachers, not because I have solved its mysteries, but because it continues to open new ones.

The feminine, the wild and the parts we were taught to hide

My exploration of the feminine has always been about more than womanhood as a social identity.

I am drawn to the Sacred Feminine as a creative force, an intelligence that moves through cycles, intuition, creation, destruction, receptivity and transformation. I have explored the stories of goddesses and archetypes, from Isis to Hekate, and the ways these figures illuminate the many dimensions of feminine power.

The feminine, as I understand it, is not confined to one ideal of beauty, behaviour or spirituality. It is not simply softness, motherhood or the ability to care for others.

It contains fire as well as tenderness. Boundaries as well as openness. The power to create and the courage to let something end.

I have spent much of my life learning to reclaim the parts of myself that did not fit neatly into the person I thought I was supposed to be.

The intuitive parts. The creative parts. The parts that felt too intense, too different or too difficult to explain. The parts that wanted something beyond the sensible path laid out in front of me.

I know what it is to be a woman who can achieve, perform and make things happen, while quietly wondering whether she is living in alignment with her deeper nature.

I also know what it is to discover that the answer does not come from becoming more acceptable.

It comes from allowing more of yourself to exist.

My work with creativity grew from this understanding. So did my interest in the feminine, the womb, the cycles of life and the relationship between women and the Earth.

I have seen how easily our original impulses can be covered over by expectation. How quickly a judgement can become a belief. How many people have learned to stop painting, stop dreaming, stop trusting their instincts or stop pursuing the things that make them feel most alive.

I remember an older man who came to one of my creative workshops after a teacher had told him as a boy that he could not paint. He had not painted since.

I have never forgotten what it meant for him to pick up a brush again.

That is part of why I create spaces for people to make, explore, feel and discover. I want to make room for what has been dismissed, what has been silenced and what has been waiting patiently beneath the surface.

Not so that everyone becomes a particular version of a spiritual woman, an artist or a successful person.

But so that we have the freedom to discover our own nature.

The work that has been forming all along

When I look back, I can see the thread connecting all these experiences.

The little girl who sensed the unseen. The young woman who achieved what she thought she wanted and found herself yearning for something else. The signs that drew me into a deeper relationship with life. The rosemary and the ritual. The vision of the forest within the womb. The woman who followed a dream into the mysteries of the body, the feminine and the Earth.

The artist. The seeker. The student. The oracle.

I have spent more than fifteen years exploring spirituality, metaphysics, creativity, energy work, the Sacred Feminine, nature connection and the deeper questions of being human. Alongside my personal path, I have studied, trained, written, created and worked with people in many different settings.

My books, Blooming and Goddess Speaks, and my podcasts, A Wild Life and The Wellspring, are part of that wider exploration. They hold different pieces of the questions I keep returning to: creation, consciousness, the Earth, the feminine, intuition and the extraordinary process of becoming ourselves.

My work today brings these threads together through Earth Embodiment™, creative practice, writing, spiritual exploration and individual work as an oracle.

I am interested in the places beneath the surface. The symbolic language of the soul. The patterns we keep repeating. The creative force that wants to move through us. The parts of ourselves we abandoned to belong. The moments when life seems to be asking us to become someone we have not yet imagined.

I am drawn to those who have always felt there was more to the world than what could be seen or explained. Those who notice synchronicities, dream vividly, sense what is moving beneath the surface or feel a pull towards the ancient, the elemental and the mysterious.

Those who want to deepen their relationship with the body, the Earth, their own intuition and the creative intelligence within them.

I do not see my work as a destination or a set of answers. It is an invitation into a deeper relationship with your own life.

My own journey has taught me that the path rarely unfolds in a straight line. Sometimes an ending becomes a beginning. Sometimes the thing we thought we wanted gives way to something more meaningful. Sometimes the sign we have been waiting for arrives in the most ordinary moment, and we have to be willing to notice it.

I am still learning. Still listening. Still creating. Still following the thread.

I want my work to be both my livelihood and my legacy: a body of creative and spiritual work that makes space for people to remember what makes them feel alive, honour their own knowing and recognise their belonging to something greater than themselves.

I am not here to teach people to become someone else.

I am here to create, explore and guide in ways that invite us back into relationship with who we are beneath the expectations, conditioning and stories we have inherited.

The Earth is the temple. The body is the portal.

And there is a kind of magic in becoming fully, unapologetically yourself.

Even if you are different. Especially if you are different.