Wise Physiotherapy

19/08/2025

*Contact (touch)*

A short piece emerged today, after noticing how my body responded to one of our profession’s ongoing debates.

Link in bio 🍄‍🟫

29/07/2025

This haiku emerged in a moment sweet of self-knowing and deep recognition, where what emerged was so clear in form, it felt like we were part of the same clean mirror. 

We’ve been sitting together for quite some time, finding safety through following, seeing following as wisdom, embracing wisdom as truth that exists in the space before language, before our minds try to make sense of it.

This place we’ve been sensing into is rich in raw, unprocessed knowing that hasn’t yet been shaped into concepts, diagnoses, or frameworks.

It’s an unbounded aliveness; an intelligence of organic movement that weaves in waves that circle and spiral, seeking ways to express and take form.

And what has been emerging is an inner map that directs itself through a practice of radical honesty, where the practice has become a necessity. 

When we inhabit this place together, we encounter parts that want to run from the reality and hide from the clarity; and yet, as we notice and welcome this wisdom, we find we must simply stay and witness.

Because to stay and witness and touch the ground that holds what will next emerge - is the way; it is the map. 

It is here that we pause, and share a wry smile; that small mirrored movement holding the elegance of complexity captured within a simply beautifully ordinary moment.

17/07/2025

There’s a moment, sometimes, when the parts that have been seeking home for so long suddenly remember they belong to the same body, the same village. When what has been hidden and compressed finds its way back to visibility, not through being fixed, but through being witnessed in their longing to reconnect.

In my work dancing Hakomi with pain and our bodies as wise, I’ve been experiencing this journey from hiding to visibility in the space between us, how our bodies hold languages that our mechanistic frameworks can’t quite capture.

How we can move together from the suppression of essential aspects to this organic emergence of who we’ve always been, our weird ones finally safe enough to come out and play.

The body knows things that words can’t reach. It speaks in rhythms and resonance, in the subtle softening that happens when we meet someone fully in their living body. When we stop trying to reassemble the pieces and start trusting what wants to organically emerge.

There’s something that happens when we witness not just the trauma, but the unwalked paths, the yearning for reconnection, the nonverbal wisdom that exists in what remains adrift.

When we make space for the literal, metaphoric, symbolic, hypothetical, physical, and meta-knowings that are intimately entwined. When we trust that the body is providing exactly the language it needs, even when that language doesn’t fit our contemporary frames.

Sometimes, what’s most needed looks like the careful tending of parts seeking home. And sometimes it looks like pure ebullient-ment, the simple joy of being fully, unapologetically alive in your living body.

The weird one has been waiting. Not to be understood or managed, but to be met with delight in their particular brand of magic. To be celebrated, not just accepted. To be joined in their dance back to wholeness.

What wants to emerge when it’s finally safe to play?

26/06/2025

[at what cost]

This haiku emerged from a moment of quiet recognition ~
when a long-held way of showing up was felt through the body
as no longer serving the one offering care.

When our professional training shapes us in ways
that reinforce beliefs about who we should be,
and how we ought to care,
we can find ourselves inside a paradox:

Serving outward,
showing up,
masking presence with performance ~
all while slowly losing access
to the very self that can truly meet another.

In our supervision space at Wise, grounded in Hakomi,
we begin here:
with what the body reveals
when it’s no longer willing to posture
and is ready to be met.

17/05/2025

[a trust]

“Come and hang with me and my mum, something will happen.”

That’s what my son said recently.

We weren’t planning anything. We weren’t “doing movement.” We were just together - on the couch, in our shared cocoon of recovery and presence after a long week of masking, school, and stretch.

It’s often like that with him. We don’t schedule regulation. It shows up in a 30-second silly dance, an armpit tickle fight, or a sideways glance that says, I’m ready now.

This is how I understand movement in my work, too.

It’s not a prescription. It’s not a program.

It’s what happens when the body feels safe enough to return to itself.

At Wise, I meet people - many of them neurodivergent, many carrying pain, many with bodies that have learned to freeze or brace or protect.

And rather than pushing movement, we listen first. We follow the thread of aliveness. We build safety, not instruction.

Because movement, when it’s real, doesn’t need to be forced.

It comes as a byproduct of presence. Of co-regulation.
Of being with, not doing to.

So often, when we stop trying to make something happen -
something happens.

🌳

06/05/2025

This haiku came through in a moment of attunement—one of those times when nothing needed to be said or done, only met.

In my work, I often sit with bodies that carry pain, fatigue, and protection. Many of the people I meet have grown used to being misunderstood, rushed, or reduced to parts.

There’s a kind of listening that happens beneath technique.

A kind of presence that doesn’t chase change but stays—gently—long enough for something new to be felt.

We know this, don’t we?

And yet, in the swirl of assessments, goals, and outcomes, it’s easy to forget that being with is often more transformative than doing to.

In my physiotherapy practice, integrating Hakomi somatic psychotherapy, I find myself returning again and again to the subtle, often unseen, terrain where nervous systems meet.

Where pain, fatigue, or shutdown aren’t symptoms to fix, but languages to listen to—patiently, relationally.

So much happens in the non-doing.

The pause.

The subtle shift when someone senses they are no longer being evaluated, but accompanied.

This is where I find the deepest work—in the moments we tend to what is evergreen—those living, resilient parts of us that persist beneath exhaustion, beneath shutdown, beneath the strategies that once kept us safe.

This kind of presence isn’t a method.
It’s a commitment.
To grace.
To complexity.
To not looking away.

This is the work I trust.

11/04/2025

There can be a quiet fear—or sometimes a strong resistance—that arises in a Hakomi session when we pause, slow down, and enter a space of not knowing.

It’s a vulnerable place to be.

So much of how we’re taught to make sense of ourselves is through cognition and language.

Knowing becomes about naming. Understanding becomes about explaining. We feel safest when there’s a map—something to follow, something to hold.

Yet in Hakomi, we enter through the body. Through sensation, emotion, image, impulse. The map isn’t pre-drawn. Sometimes there is no map—just a felt sense, a thread we follow together.

It’s no wonder the nervous system tightens here.

Of course there’s fear. Of course the parts of us that rely on structure for safety show up.

This resistance makes sense.

And still, something else becomes possible when we stay in the unknown with care. Not clarity in the old way—but something true, alive, and deeply coherent begins to take shape.

We don’t always know how— but we can begin here.

In the not-knowing, we’re not lost—we’re just listening differently. And we’re doing it together.

26/01/2025

New blog: Resting in relief: disrupting complex systems with presence and principles ~ relational experiencing as embodied physiotherapy

For the last four years I have been weaving Hakomi (Hakomi mindful somatic psychotherapy) into my work as a physiotherapist, developing a way of being that meets our bodies relationally and somatically.

My original intention was to up-skill to embrace the pressing need to hold the nuance of embodied trauma, uncertainty, and complexity in a way that resourced and dignified both my clients and me.

However, what unfolded was a deep transformation of my personhood and a recognition of the inherent power of presence.

Honouring what I had always felt, yet not fully known—something needed, yet often invisible and unavailable within physiotherapy learning environments.

We needed depth in a way that disrupted the traditionally organised-cognitive-pathoanatomical-hierarchical system we inhabited. There was so much being missed in nonverbal communication, our bodies the source of unseen intelligence.

My experience in the client seat of Hakomi is where this clarity first emerged. What once felt like a void, now cradled in the quiet of a deeper knowing, began to unfold in its own time.

🌳 link in bio if you’d like to read more

31/01/2024

This haiku emerged from a session with a human who is turning towards pain that has been inside for a very long time, yet has been hard to reach on her own.

30 years of living in a body constantly shamed, judged, criticized, dismissed, and deemed inept. She exists disconnected from what it might be communicating, afraid to actually pay attention.

To maintain protection around what is most important, most tender, makes so much sense.

And yet, we know more now, about how deep beliefs shaped through early and past experiences can influence the right here right now.

How they can interrupt the experience of living life.

The myriad of ways we avoid interacting with the painful experience of pain and its companions - isolation, rage, shame, despair - to name a few, is both fascinating and clever.

Noticing how we are being clever is a beautiful way to gently bring curiosity to sit alongside judgement, to give us a different way to see the world we inhabit.

Accompanying people, really being with them, as they begin to explore their unfolding layers, is where this work, for me, has so much potential and grace.

To move with them as they go deeper, beyond what was thought to be a dead end, into an experience that has space for something delightfully unfamiliar, has a tenderness that words cannot capture.

29/01/2024

12/12/2023

Exploring somatic experiences with neurodivergent people necessitates an embodied, genuine, and consistent relational safety.

A quality of being, I would argue, is not given the value, space, or commitment it requires.

To be lost on the edges is a very common experience for neurodivergent people living within an inherently neurotypical world.

An experience of never quite fitting in to a world that does not cater well for difference, and predominantly responds from a place of fear, can result in deeply felt, yet hard to turn towards, hard to connect with, hard to articulate, shame.

As a strategy to protect from the pain of shame, trying becomes the dominant overwhelming experience.

An efforting that forces, pushes, and insists on putting one’s own sense of self aside in order to attain the unattainable - safety in belonging.

When most moments are then met with a familiar sense of failure, the efforting returns, convinced that the answer is to simply try harder; to push more, regardless of the ongoing pain experienced.

Exhausting and despairing.

There is so much going on inside, so many layers that build, each one erecting walls to house the pain and armour against the next onslaught.

And so, to even begin to explore these experiences in an embodied way; to start to notice them, feel into them, and make sense of what emerges, felt sense relational safety is not only crucial, it is wholly necessary.

This beautiful human is doing just this. Wading into her pain, meeting her many walls, and gently unearthing the 40-year-housed and oh so wisely protected sacred ground. So that, together, we can witness and honour the many layers, and give them what they always needed - the permission to be. And met with love.

It is such an honour to meet in this place, as she bravely tries on expansion as stays open to another way of being.

05/12/2023

It’s coming to that time of year where we can start to speed up; our lifeworlds subconsciously moving at a pace influenced by our environments, relationships, and social expectations.

So I deeply appreciate this work that centres around slowing down, and even more so, deeply appreciate those willing to stay the course and slow down with me.

I got to work with this delightful human in person this week, as we normally meet online.

I can only speak for myself, yet the influence of real person 3D presence has a quality I liken to honey. It has a thickness, a viscosity to it that permeates the shape of the session.

Today we explored some beautifully tender themes around the embodied impact of touch, unearthing themes of safety, trust, support, and excruciating vulnerability.

I used to employ the use of my hands in session with less intention and tracking and responding that I do now. I could argue that my intentionality around the influence of my hands is different.

In giving myself space from the way I was taught to use my hands, I was able to renegotiate my relationship to them, to physio, to healthcare, and to the people I work alongside.

The way I relate to touch now is vastly different. And it has emerged through seeing my own body differently, allowing a surrender of sorts to finding wisdom through my own embodied understanding of what it means to support another.

Using touch in this way, to explore old wounds and cultivate new pathways and beliefs, feels clear and consensual.

And wholly supportive of those walking their paths.