Joyful Being, Epworth Freemasons Hospital, Suite 2, Ground floor, 320 Victoria Parade, Melbourne (2026)

Q: What is the address?

Epworth Freemasons Hospital, Suite 2, Ground Floor, 320 Victoria Parade

05/03/2026

Therapists spill coffee too!

Both of these photos were taken two minutes apart.

Photo 1: professional psychologist calmly doing Telehealth.
Photo 2: iced coffee down my shirt.

Same desk. Same day.

When I started in psychology 20 years ago, I genuinely believed I had to hide the messy version of me. Being human didn’t feel very “professional.”

Back then the message was pretty clear: be professional, be composed, and keep your humanness quietly out of sight.

But the most healing spaces are the ones where people can be human. Messy. Emotional. Laughing. Crying. All of it.

In the work I do around pregnancy, loss, and early parenting, humans show up messy, brave, exhausted, hopeful — often all at once.

And I’ve learned that when the therapist can be a real human, it gives everyone else permission to be one too.

Because most of us are walking around trying to look like photo one while secretly feeling like photo two.

Professional enough to help, human enough to spill the coffee. ☕💜

Both can be true.

People don’t heal in perfect spaces.
They heal in human ones.

Being human isn’t unprofessional.
It’s what makes the work possible. ☕️

23/02/2026

✨ She booked in for acupuncture… and left with a job!✨

Meet Melissah.

She came into took my business card, and reached out for a coffee. Somewhere between talking nervous systems, mental load, and the invisible labour of modern life and parenting, I just knew — she gets it.

Melissah brings life experience. Wisdom. Curiosity. A grounded, thoughtful presence that makes you exhale without realising you were holding your breath.

She’s not a just “nod and smile” vibe
She’ll sit with you in the hard.
She keeps it real.
She’ll help you name it — hello mental load, hello overstimulation, hello “why am I carrying all of this?”
And she’ll work alongside you to build practical, doable support that actually fits your life.

She has immediate availability, for now, at Juno Specialists and her calendar is already filling before I have even had a chance to officially announce her joining.

If you’ve been meaning to reach out but didn’t want to wait months, this might be your moment.

New clients can complete the online enquiry form via our website or email hello@joyfulbeing.com.au and Mel, our admin support, will sort it for you 🫶🏻

Some people just feel aligned from the beginning. I’m so glad she’s here 🤍

23/02/2026

✨ She booked in for acupuncture… and left with a job!✨

Meet Melissah.

She came into took my business card, and reached out for a coffee. Somewhere between talking nervous systems, mental load, and the invisible labour of modern life and parenting, I just knew — she gets it.

Melissah brings life experience. Wisdom. Curiosity. A grounded, thoughtful presence that makes you exhale without realising you were holding your breath.

She’s not a just “nod and smile” vibe
She’ll sit with you in the hard.
She keeps it real.
She’ll help you name it — hello mental load, hello overstimulation, hello “why am I carrying all of this?”
And she’ll work alongside you to build practical, doable support that actually fits your life.

She has immediate availability, for now, at Juno Specialists and her calendar is already filling before I have even had a chance to officially announce her joining.

If you’ve been meaning to reach out but didn’t want to wait months, this might be your moment.

New clients can complete the online enquiry form via our website or email hello@joyfulbeing.com.au and Mel, our admin support, will sort it for you 🫶🏻

Some people just feel aligned from the beginning. I’m so glad she’s here 🤍

19/02/2026

I’m a very capable person. I have a psychology degree and know the science of parenting.

But when my capacity is reached there are parenting “fails” everywhere. I was so passionate about this message that I recorded this with unwashed hair + breakfast stains on my shirt 🫠 I only realised after and don’t have time to redo the video. Or I could say I am the ultimate professional and really embodying my message about capacity 🤭

I make so many mistakes parenting and don’t meet my ideal expectations ever.
Because I am regularly at capacity.

Capability doesn’t disappear in parenting —
bandwidth does. Thank you for Becky Shelby for your post on this concept

You’re not failing.
Your system is full.

Tell me your best capacity fail so we can normalise being human 🤍

16/02/2026

Today I temporarily hijacked my VA’s inbox.

Not because anything was wrong.
Not because there was an emergency.

But because it was her birthday 🎈

Mel is the person who answers your emails, fixes the links, sends the forms, rescues the calendar, and keeps this practice functioning.

She is the backbone of Joyful Being. I would be lost without her.

So I set her auto-reply to quietly invite clients to send her a happy birthday message — and then logged out before I could damage her beautifully organised systems (my admin game is not at her level and we both know it 😂).

For most of the day she had absolutely no idea how people knew it was her birthday 🤭 Small business birthdays sometimes require creativity.

If she’s ever helped you with bookings, reminders, forms or tech rescue, feel free to add some birthday love here. I promise not to touch her inbox again 🫶🏻

06/02/2026

This is one of those griefs that doesn’t have a box and doesn’t often get named.

Caring for ageing parents.

Parenting young children.

And knowing that every pregnancy loss shifted the timing for every woman in my family — altering the grandparent relationships we all hoped for 💔

It all matters ❤️

14/01/2026

When your child has a birthday, your system may do two things at once:
1. Celebrate growth and love.
2. Remember your pregnancy and birth journey.

For myself my family story includes a chapter written under emergency conditions for all of my pregnancies. On my children’s birthdays my nervous system always remembers the experience of pregnancy equaling high risk, uncertainty and extra monitoring. There is a grief that lingers that I never got to experience a “normal” pregnancy.

So on their birthdays my heart feels both full and tender.

I always take a little time for myself — to reflect, to honour what that season asked of me, and what it took to get here.
(Not to wallow. Not to undo it. But to honour how hard it was).

That’s not sadness instead of having gratitude.
That’s sadness inside my immense gratitude.

I don’t ignore the journey and the cost to get to my beautiful outcome.

I am letting the full story be whole.

So if birthdays bring up more than just cake and candles for you — if they carry memory, tenderness, grief, relief, love, and a quiet “I made it” — you’re not doing it wrong.

You’re just letting yourself sit with what that was.

And that matters 🩷

30/12/2025

This year I have nothing impressive to show you. No neat “before and after.”

This was a year of going inward.
Of meeting myself more honestly than I ever had.
Of noticing the deeper patterns that keep me stuck — and sitting with them instead of outrunning them.

As someone with complex PTSD, that’s not small.

That’s unlearning safety patterns that once kept me alive.
That’s letting go of control.
That’s staying present when every part of you wants to scan, fix, manage, or flee.
That’s learning how to build a life that you want without any healthy template or examples.

Every time I tried to move forward with ideas for my business to manage demand, life asked me to pause.
To strip things back.
To begin again from something simpler. Quieter. Truer.

I learned how to keep showing up each day not knowing the next step. And I can’t say I loved it.

It was uncomfortable.
It was anxiety provoking.
It was out of my control.

👉 Some of that looked like doing what was needed in the short term —
❤️ showing up, working extra hours from my hallway at home, keeping things steady in my business — while the deeper stuff quietly reorganised underneath.
❤️ asking for help from psychologists in my network to assist with referrals
❤️ business mentoring to find out how to build something sustainable and lasting in the messy middle stage of business
❤️ placing boundaries on anything non essential while working more

And honestly?
This feels like the most successful year I’ve ever had.

Because there is so much freedom in knowing all parts of yourself —
instead of trying to manage yourself into being who you think/or want yourself to be.

Also… quietly, internally?
I feel like I’m finally catching up on being a grown-up.
And I’m on fire. Psychologically. In a very good healthy way 🔥

I still don’t have a plan for my business moving forward in 2026, but at least I’m out of the way 😂

22/12/2025

While I’m out of office over Christmas, I decided to give you a present:
sassy “Jackie” one-liners to send my vibe your way while I’m on leave. 🎁

These little gifts are reminders to hold onto during the tough days — because you are not failing, you are most likely responding to your context.

I’ll be back in the office Monday 5 January, and I can’t wait to see my clients in the new year.

Need support while I’m away?

You don’t have to navigate this alone. Here are some trusted lines:

• PANDA (Perinatal Mental Health): 1300 726 306
• For When (Perinatal Mental Health Navigation): 1300 24 23 22 (Mon–Fri, 9–4:30)
• Red Nose Grief & Loss Support: 1300 308 307 (24/7)
• Beyond Blue: 1300 22 4636
• Lifeline: 13 11 14

💛 Please take these one-liner presents as permission to rest, lower the bar, and be compassionate to yourself!

18/12/2025

Loving your life isn’t always easy.
It means learning how to stay with yourself when it’s hard.
When things don’t look how you imagined 💔
When you’re grieving the family you don’t have — or the support you needed and never got

There is a particular kind of grief in building a life without any experience of or support from a safe, present family.
And there is also strength in learning how to build a support team anyway.

Friends. Chosen family. Therapists. Colleagues. Community.
People who show up in small, steady, human ways.

This year stretched me internally.
It broke some illusions that maybe things might change.
And it taught me how to hold grief and keep choosing my life.

If this resonates, you’re not doing it wrong.
You’re doing something very brave 🫶🏻

11/12/2025

Because honestly?
It’s not the perfect moments that bring us together as parents… it’s the messy, chaotic, slightly unhinged ones.
Share a moment that made you think, “Yep. This is parenting.”
You’re safe here. We laugh with you, not at you. 💗✨

10/12/2025

Connection vs Authenticity in the Perinatal Period

One of the most confronting parts of early parenthood is realising that some of the connections you’ve carried through life weren’t truly built on you.
They were built on who you had to be to stay connected.

The perinatal period has a way of stripping things back.
Sleep deprivation, the intensity of caring for a newborn, the sudden expansion of responsibility, the hormonal rollercoaster, the identity shift—all of it makes masking and self-abandonment so much harder to sustain.

Your nervous system won’t let you ignore your needs the way you used to.
Your baby’s needs force clarity.
Your capacity shrinks.
And for many people, that’s when the truth of their relationships starts to surface.

You may begin advocating for yourself, your time, your rest, your boundaries—sometimes for the first time ever.
You might speak up where you used to stay quiet.
You might push back where you used to over-function.
You might protect your child in ways no one ever protected you.

And suddenly… some connections feel shaky.
Not because you’ve done anything wrong, but because the version of you those relationships relied on is disappearing.

This is where the grief lands.

Grief for the friendships that don’t survive when you stop overgiving.
Grief for the family relationships that feel different now that you won’t play the old role.
Grief for the parts of your identity that feel foreign or lost.
Grief for the safety strategies that once worked, even if they cost you pieces of yourself.

None of this means you’re failing at connection.
It means you’re moving toward authentic connection—the kind that can hold the real you, the messy you, the newly-expanded you.

The perinatal period isn’t just about becoming a parent.
It’s about becoming someone who can’t lie to themselves anymore.

And while that honesty can shake things apart, it can also build something sturdier, truer, and far more connected than what came before 🫶🏻

Joyful Being

05/03/2026

23/02/2026

23/02/2026

19/02/2026

16/02/2026

06/02/2026

14/01/2026

30/12/2025

22/12/2025

18/12/2025

11/12/2025

10/12/2025

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