Somatic practitioner
For centuries, women were taught to leave their bodies. The world needs us back in them.
I'm Rachel, a somatic practitioner. I work with the anger, grief and midlife mess women were told to keep to themselves.
Women have been told to be calm, pleasant and small for so long that most of us learned to live from the neck up: thinking our feelings through instead of feeling them, managing everyone's moods but our own, getting very good at being fine.
Then midlife arrives and fine stops working. The rage comes up faster and the patience runs thinner.
I think that's a good thing. What the world needs now are women who can feel what's true, say it out loud, and stay centred in their bodies while they do.
The body starts saying what we couldn't.
Who I work with
If you've never quite fitted the mould and you're done pretending to – you're in the right place.
The women who find me rarely fit the mould. Some have built lives that look nothing like the ones they were handed. Others look perfectly ordinary from the outside and have spent years thinking differently to everyone around them, questioning what they were told not to question and never quite feeling like they belonged.
They're sharp, they're capable, and they can tell you in detail where their patterns came from. What they're tired of is living as a version of themselves that was built to keep everyone else comfortable.
Many are mothers, plenty doing it on their own. A lot are in the thick of perimenopause, watching their tolerance for nonsense disappear. Almost all of them are the one everyone else leans on, and they've started to wonder who's holding them.
I'm not in the business of breakthroughs.
Big cathartic moments make good stories, and they rarely last.
What lasts is slower: getting back into your body, feeling what's actually there, and unravelling the layers of conditioning you picked up so early you mistook them for your personality.
One by one the masks come off, the nice one, the capable one, the fine one, and you get to meet whoever's been underneath all along. I'll be alongside you the whole way, at a pace your nervous system can actually take.
Hi, I'm Rachel
I've never followed the conventional path. I spent my twenties racing yachts, which in hindsight was a very effective way of never sitting still long enough to feel anything.
Yoga found me first, then breathwork cracked me open, and somatics finally gave me the tools to change the patterns I'd spent years being able to describe in detail.
I built a retreat in Bali that became the number one retreat on TripAdvisor, and lost it when COVID closed the world. Three weeks later I'd moved everything online. Since then Lucy Foster-Perkins and I have trained over 2,000 people through The Whole Health Project, and we're the authors of Somatic Practices for Trauma.
These days I'm a solo mum to my daughter Yemaja, living in Bali and very much in midlife myself. I know what it is to hold everything together while your body disagrees.
I've been doing my own work for over twenty years, and I'm still doing it. That's the only reason I'm any use to you.
Where to start
Free
Where did your anger go?
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Course
Anger Alchemy
A self-paced course that turns the reframe into a daily practice.
Your anger has been waiting a long time.
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