Rise and Wild

07/09/2025

These days 🙏🏼🌱🍂 find out more about our Reset days, and if you’d like to join us on 30 Nov comment below and I’ll share more info 🥰

31/08/2025

30/08/2025

~ Tending to the fire (and what’s coming up this season) 🍂

It’s been five years this month since I left a job and a team I loved as an area, project and community manager, working for a global social change organisation. I’d been there for five years, learned loads and met some of the most inspiring (and at times, challenging!) people. I remember laughing a lot, and being stressed a lot, in an environment that enabled us to try new things and new ways of working. One of the highlights of that role was taking a much-loved event format “Engage”, out into the Peaks as an outdoor & walking event. Rise and Wild had been brewing long before I even realised that’s where we were headed. But ultimately, that job (and some other stuff) led me to burn out and I knew it was time to hand in my notice. So many souls supported, listened to, encouraged and endured me during that time 🙏🏼

Sat here now, having a brew , nattering to souls who are every now and then looking at the art on the wall behind me, between working on what’s coming up, I feel present, content, and so so grateful. There’s so much goodness coming up this season 🍂:

◦ Nurtured by Nature ~ a 6 week wellbeing programme (Aug - Sept)
◦ A community day at Hassall Green Nature Reserve (Sept)
◦ The Workshop in the Woods (Oct)
◦ Our Breath Connection days and weekend retreats (Sept + Oct + Feb)
◦ The return of our Sunday morning Wild Within (Nov)
◦ A new Friday evening restorative practice (Nov)
◦ Nature Facilitator trainings for the public sector
◦ Community + mindfulness training for a charity
◦ Being well through the seasons ~ coming soon
◦ Weekly yoga, movement, being and rest practices (Mon, Weds, Thurs + Fri).

Retraining 5 years ago and continuing to study, practice and live it, deepening my relationship with nature, slowing down, being in the woods more than I am online, nurturing pockets for deep rest and delving into my heart + bones has created so much space and wildness and connection. It’s the greatest gift to be here, nurturing what feels like a living venture and sharing, gathering with and honouring new + ancient ways to live out these lives with as much peace as we can find 🌿

28/08/2025

Feeling stressed? Join me for friendly, inclusive weekly practices supporting us to feel a little more at ease 🌿

◦ Monday evenings
◦ Wednesday evenings
◦ Thursday afternoons & evenings
◦ Friday mornings
📍at lovely, calm spaces around Macclesfield

Find out more & book here: https://www.riseandwild.com/yoga

22/08/2025

I love our Thursdays at the nature reserve, fully funded and free to attend nature-based yoga classes for the Green Angels - The Land Trust.

Accessible yoga classes for the community 🙏🏼🌳 (with full consent shared for photographs/videos being taken).

20/08/2025

Nature-based medicine 🌱

Over these past few months, I’ve been returning to the roots of practice and nature as my guiding life force. Calling upon, laying and dancing with, nurturing, listening, sharing & creating with the land.

Soothing a rattled nervous system, tending to grief, reinforcing boundaries and balance whilst dabbling with enchantment and tuning the dial for intuitive living. Deepening relationships with myself and other. Seeing, feeling and being seen. Coming into communication with herbs, making teas, receiving tinctures and adding more wild-grown and foraged food to my plate. I’ve been dreaming with mugwort, and singing with trees, chanting and breathing and reading and returning to the depths of my yoga practice like my life depends on it. All that being said, I’ve been doing less and being more. Resting more than I’ve rested in this lifetime before. The energetic shifts in return are abundant and anxiety that had been a familiar house guest has left the body of my soul.

Rise and Wild is my full-time work. But it is so much more than a job and even more than a business. It’s a way of life, a way of being, one of learning and living it and honouring our nature. It’s a roadmap and a journey. I’ve trained in multiple disciplines over the years and continue to study so that I can integrate new and ancient ways. There’s a daily practice and prayer and quiet activism living in this way, sharing with other souls who want to reconnect and rewild their lives a little bit also. Nature, yoga, coming together in community are balms for these modern times.

Here’s to remembering. And practicing.
Living it. And being 🌀

06/08/2025

~ Being, unraveling and the deeper work.

Over the past few months, I’ve been reducing the amount of work (work work) that I do. It came after the sudden loss of a close friend, recognising I was exhausted having missed some early warning signs, and dare I admit this so publicly, a series of panic attacks. My body was shouting at me to notice, and then beginning to shut down. The wellbeing practitioner that I am, in all of my humanness, my grief and my nurturing of others, had forgotten to take proper care of my own self.

Reforming. Rest. Therapy. I paused some of my weekly classes, cancelled some work, and for a time, said no to additional projects. I reduced time online, deleted more emails than I replied to and purposefully chose nature over technology. I’ve slept. And read stories. Stepped back from being the driving force of a lot of my relationships and asked for & accepted help from those who were in touch nonetheless. Whilst I’m not making as much money, one thing is really clear. This isn’t a break from work. This is and always has been the work.

This time has been one for hundreds of cups of tea, and tears, and coming deeper into relationship with the medicinal properties of herbs, of healing and nurturing a nervous system that’s been battered by grief, exhaustion and overwhelm over the years. Doing more of the work that I thought I had already done, teachings that hadn’t been fully embodied. Peeling away another layer to the onion. We can think about rest, understand & advocate rest, but that doesn’t actually equate to rest.

Journeying deeper down the track from mind, the thinking & figuring out, to being in my body, allowing time and digestion and expression. To feel all that we are feeling in both this heart-breaking and wonder-filled world. And recognising what a privilege it is to be able to do this. To say this, when so many people are suffering, feels unjust. Life isn’t fair, witnessing war and famine and the climate be in crisis, it’s cruel and heartbreaking and I don’t really know what to do but I know I need to be strong for what lies ahead. I’ve stepped both away and toward… Continued in images ♥️

26/07/2025

☺️🙏🏼🧡

17/07/2025

I love these photos, they capture a glimmer of the joy, connection & peacefulness we return to at my Mindfully Wild workshops at Hassall Green Nature Reserve with the Green Angels - The Land Trust.

I guide one of these each season, as an opportunity for folks to slow down, learn some calming mindfulness techniques, connect with one another & nature and nourish our wellbeing.

🍃🐛

13/07/2025

Keeping cool & calm through these summer days?

𝐉𝐨𝐢𝐧 𝐦𝐞 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐚 𝐠𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐥𝐞, 𝐫𝐞𝐣𝐮𝐯𝐞𝐧𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐡𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐢𝐧 𝐲𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐰𝐞𝐞𝐤. 𝐓𝐡𝐞𝐬𝐞 𝐜𝐥𝐚𝐬𝐬𝐞𝐬 𝐨𝐟𝐟𝐞𝐫 𝐚 𝐠𝐫𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐝𝐢𝐧𝐠, 𝐧𝐮𝐫𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐩𝐫𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐜𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐛𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐮𝐬 𝐛𝐚𝐜𝐤 𝐭𝐨 𝐛𝐚𝐥𝐚𝐧𝐜𝐞.

Surrounded by plants, natural light and space, we move through achievable, straight-forward yoga postures, and learn how to relax, strengthen and connect our bodies and minds. All elements of the classes are invitational and suitable for people new to yoga, as well as people who have a regular practice.

Classes can be booked one at a time for £10.
Or if you book for 6, you get one free ☺️🌿🙏🏼

Wednesdays 6pm
Fridays 9.30am

📍 The Wellbeing Space, Pickford St, Macclesfield

Find out more or book here:
https://www.riseandwild.com/yoga

And if you have any questions at all, feel welcome to message me here or through my website 💌

03/07/2025

Finding quiet joys amidst the chaos of the world. The pink of the roses that blossom once a year & the warmth of my old boy 🐈 happily basking in the summer sun. Watching ducklings grow and their connection to the water; those little orange legs wiggling up in the air as they dive down for insects. Cups of tea with butterflies and gathering with neighbours to watch caterpillars in the long grass.

It all sounds so small, what’s the significance of a strawberry when there’s so much happening that’s out of our control? These are moments we are likely to miss when we are stressed, experiencing suffering and destruction around the world and within our own. They don’t get a look in when we’re busy, busy, busy. But they can be a little burst of presence, maybe even wonder. Here I am, *right now*, igniting a sense of being part of something, anchored to something so much bigger than, just me. The mundane has magic waiting for each of us. The strawberry tasted sweeter than any other of the season, grown and gifted by a lady who brought them to share at one of our classes. Kindness. Togetherness. Nature’s rhyme, the passing of time. The clouds that - if we blink we might miss the light shining, just like that and the way it can feel in our chest to experience such deep and fleeting beauty.

Hands in the earth, toes bare on the grass and legs light, held by a hammock that has carried so many others through the years before. Creating and enabling pockets for rest, comfort and companionship. Man, it’s what we and our frazzled nervous systems need right now. Softness. The intertwining of trees and the rising, hiding and transforming moon illuminating the night. It’s all here, waiting for us to notice ✨

25/05/2025

This little pocket of woodland next to Alder Hey Children’s Hospital has been a sanctuary for us this week 🌳 The birds, especially song of Robin and Wren softened the sounds of traffic and ambulance sirens, and the canopy of trees created a sheltered space for us to deliver Nature and Health facilitator training in the middle the park.

Alongside Carl, who is a senior mental health practitioner, psychotherapist & forest school leader in CAMHS, we have been guiding his colleagues and PhD students in the NatureWell approach. This 3-month accredited Green Care journey explores deepening our relationship with nature, anchored in a One Health approach that intertwines personal, social and ecological wellbeing.

Therapists, mental health practitioners, social care workers & students have been immersed in the first part of the course this week, which takes them experientially through the pathways to nature connection, introducing ecotherapy and outdoor facilitation skills. Supporting them to relax, learn about, connect with, feel inspired and immersed with nature, knowing they are going to then deliver green care opportunities within the NHS for young people and families… it’s one of the most fulfilling branches of the work I do.

Slowly, together, within societal systems and beyond, we are remembering these earthly, at one with nature, ways 🍃