“It’s a joy to be hidden but a disaster never to be found”
I bring my capacity to hold with deep compassion and humour the unspeakable parts of us. I support the integration and digestion of experiences that are in our most feared places of expansion. Through this, I help you to find the courage to venture under the masks and layers of who you are not in order to liberate and release the vulnerable true essence of your natural innocence.
My mission is to heal separation by creating easy step-by-step structures that support trusting to feel more and fear less.
The right use of Power
I welcome people of all cultures, genders, sexual orientations, genital configurations and physical abilities with radical acceptance with the understanding that our personal power is influenced by society's systemic power structures and by our belonging in relation to status power.
I am currently studying the “Right use of Power” teacher training with Cedar Barstow and learning the power of acknowledgement, understanding, remorse, repair and learning that can heal the harm and impact we have caused others and where we have been impacted by others.
There is a free online introduction to the right use of power that describes the five types of power that support clear relationship agreements that acknowledge our up-power or down-power roles in different situations.
It takes courage and belonging to inhabit our personal power and authenticity to acknowledge where we may have made agreements that don’t represent the vulnerable aspects of ourselves that may be hidden in shame.
I believe we all have gifts to share in the service of integrating exiled aspects of humanity.
Africa
I was born in Africa, in Nigeria, during the Biafran war and raised in Kenya until the age of eight before moving to the UK. A few years ago, I flew to Gabon to study the Bwiti way of living and hold their wisdom teachings about life and eros, love and humility deep in my heart. The Bwiti is a tradition that is taught in six different languages by tribes from the jungle and the coast fused with Christianity. When I returned and reunited myself with my roots it was an integration that brought immense gratitude with the deep sadness and grief that I’ve carried inside me all these years when I was separated from my African family.
I nearly died of Falciparum Malaria and I am in deep gratitude to be alive with joy and humility. I understand that sadness births joy and they go hand in hand with each other to birth compassion and humility.
“Kudu” is my Bwiti Medicine name and translates to Turtle which means the one who waits for the last ones to arrive. This is my mission to be patient with radical acceptance as we all arrive together with exiled aspects of humanity coming home.
The ceremonies are a way of life with polyrhythmic music that expands consciousness which literally supports the neuroplasticity of new neural connections which helps people overcome intrusive inner dialogue and implicit memory interruptions that hijack a person being in their natural agency and attuned kindness and trust in decision making.
In a country where most families experience trauma and grief, The Bwiti, which is practised by 20% of the population, has literally saved souls from the kinds of despair that most of us in the west would not survive.
They have learnt to pray with humility and an attuned connection with nature and naturalness. They have learnt to be fierce in service in the protection of matters of the heart.
The Bwiti is not for the faint-hearted as this medicine teaches us to see reality and un-remembered truths that are repressed from our conscious awareness for good reason. However, what you can’t see might come back and bite you.
These profound wisdom teachings have given me courage with radical acceptance to trust the self-organising intelligence of everything.
The Bwiti has taught me the meaning of grace as a birthing from radical acceptance. Body Poem was birthed from this awakening of conscious awareness into illuminating unthought knowns. When we have less to lose and less to defend, our senses are liberated into receptivity and gratitude. “Grace” is our eros is liberated.
Plant medicines have transformed my life and I have been studying through understanding affective neuroscience perspectives the benefits of using plant medicines for healing trauma.
There is currently government-approved research into the use of MDMA and plant medicines including Ibogaine amongst others being conducted in clinical trials internationally. Therapeutic transformations have been achieved with trauma and addictions with literal rewiring neural networks back into healthy functioning.
Getting out of the Audience
I met Jonathan Kay in 2015 and I have attended every possible workshop of his that I can. He calls his workshops "Getting out of the audience". They are not for the faint-hearted and I have learnt that manipulation is futile if you try to do it 360 degrees. You actually can't hide the back of you if people are behind you and they are going to create you how they want to anyway. This man is a genius FOOL and never have I been more challenged and more rewarded.
I had to endure being crippled by my second-guessing guards before I discovered incredible joy in my imagination liberated from the straight jacket of the literal. This is neocortex liberation without plant medicines. He is a huge teacher of kindness and a ruthless freedom fighter for our soul’s evolution.
Playback Theatre
Over the last 17 years, I have been training and performing as part of one of the world's leading women's Playback Theatre companies “Red Earth” (Formerly “Tarte Noire”) which facilitates what is termed "intimacy in the community" - Alison Fairlove.
I love being part of this community and sharing our stories. As a performer, improvisational theatre has deepened my capacity to be present in service of embodying aspects of another's internal world. Together we have deeply witnessed and playback each other’s internal worlds.
Body Poem
Body Poem is a form of therapeutic intervention that I have developed over the years born out of a Playback Theatre form called “Dream Form”.
The process is deeply relaxing and allows communications with the exiled parts of the self normally under censorship.
The process supports integration and the potential for acceptance to be with the just is of justice.
This is justice with our integrity and being in truth with ourselves liberated from time and energy-consuming denial and distraction.
Song of your Soul
One of my biggest teachers, over the years, is Ida Kelarova who held me safe in her ten-day darkness retreat, surrounded by potato fields and pine forests, where I went into my darkness and felt what I hadn't been able to feel alone before.
She has given me the most precious gift of my life, my receptivity to feel my emotions’ fullest range of expression without it being overwhelming. For example, we spent days singing into the depths of sadness, days singing the poignant joys from this immersion.
We spent a whole day in the dark with our rage that became a dark chorus into the night. This has opened my heart and deepened my compassionate acceptance and capacity to hold others’ intensity of affect and go where we need to go, acknowledging fears without avoidance.
Joy springs from felt compassionate immersion with our sadness, they harmonise with each other.
Rage is in the service of protecting what we love and love glows radiantly from the ashes where we have no more rage fires to burn.
Painting
In my early twenties, I completed a BA in Hons Fine Art in Leeds where I won The Annual Fine Art painting prize. I was political and loved playing with humour and studied feminism and the history of gender politics.
I brought the radical feminists from the University Fine Art Department together with the radical anarchists from the Polytechnic Fine Art Department (who both felt superior to each other). I wrote a play called "The Heart Breaks", which was about how Comparison and Competition Break the heart and creates separation.
Eye of Sound
Painting is a big part of my life and I have an art studio where I paint and exhibit my paintings of the sea, animals and nature.
I always paint with music which is a synaesthetic part of the process and Adam Westcott, an incredibly talented flamenco Guitarist and I created together a fusion of music and painting in performances called The Eye of Sound where we performed together with me painting while he played his guitar. We performed to audiences at several public events.
This was an experiment to liberate projection and perfectionism into receptivity into each moment so the painting is being received through me and the music.
Creativity
… and the children I have worked with have been my biggest teachers in understanding the developmental stages in child development and the creative process and how that relates to our confidence in spontaneity and sexual expression. This was originally born from my Fine Art Degree & Art Psychotherapy training and facilitating art groups for children which I did for seven years while my kids were at school. My research in understanding the creative process is part of the professional Body Poem training that I teach.
Up-rooted
After Psychiatric nurse training, I worked in the adult mental health system in, what was then, the darkest Hackney, in the straight jacket of the medical model controlling huge distress.
I was there for eight years as part of in-patient and community mental health teams facilitating group programs, managing care plans and integrating the Art Psychotherapy part of the program.
Coming home
Hackney was a place where the outsiders lived; people, like me, whose belonging, cultural and racial identity had been uprooted. People navigating loss and change.
It only dawned on me why I was working alongside staff and patients from Nigeria and Kenya when I found myself in tears coming home to my feelings.
I had come here to belong again and to support others broken from the trauma of separation from feeling safe. Here I discovered the extremes of what happens to the human psyche and body when we are not held safe experiencing overwhelm.
The Sexual Freedom Awards
In 2007, I was nominated for an Erotic Award by my now dear friend Dr Tuppy Owens, the political sexual freedom fighter, and founder of the national Outsiders organisation which supports people living with a disability to celebrate and have access to the support they need to meet their sexual expression and intimacy needs.
I won the Erotic Awards artist of the year for my work with the Outsiders organisation healing body image through painting people with radical acceptance and love.
I am a supporter of the Outsiders organisation and have had an active part in facilitating sexual freedom events over the years. I used to perform annually at the Erotic awards and the Night of the Senses and one year I was the Mistress of Ceremonies.
For a couple of years after this, I was a judge for the Sexual Freedom Awards Ceremony awarding other pioneers in the field of sexuality.
I have also been part of SHADA (Sexual Health and Disability Alliance) which is a group that meets to raise awareness of the impact that dis - the ability to belong has in relation to sexual expression and access to intimacy. This group have made difference in many people's lives who have limited choices in these areas.
Glastonbury Festival Disability field
For four years, I organised the disability field support team at Glastonbury festival with “front of house” serving tea and ten practitioners offering free bodywork and counselling. Together, we co-created a haven of pleasure and relaxation supporting the people camping in this field and their carers to manage the stress of camping and the intensity of excursions out into the crowds. Alongside choreographing this program with my son dancing and my daughter offering face painting, I set up a cosy studio and painted people celebrating their beauty.
The Medical Model
After Art college, I went on to train in psychiatric nursing and learnt the medical model’s Pharmaceutical interventions with uncontainable unregulated emotional states.
Hackney Hospital, was named the worst Psychiatric institution in the country.
The Shoreditch Center - The Jewel in Hackney’s crown
Anesthetization of feelings
Alongside this, I had a placement in Surrey and specialised in working with people who were self-medicating. I worked as an art psychotherapist supporting them to increase their physical and psychic capacity to feel and trust in life again. This was one of the hardest jobs I have ever done as the pain of feeling can be so massively feared if once upon a time it felt like we might die from such heartbreak. Alcohol and drugs exacerbate these splits and the separation between body and mind. Sometimes it's whatever gets you through the night but here also is our human potential to split us from our kindness with such self-harm.
How do you persuade a person it is much better to feel grief than it is to die? I am grateful to the capacity for image making to hold strong feeling states and make them bearable as this has worked for me but I'm even more grateful now to embodiment training which supports the step-by-step increased capacity to feel and come into presence.
The Squiggle Foundation
I attended the Squiggle Foundation year training studying the work of Donald Winnicott whose theoretical models of understanding form the foundations of Art Psychotherapy as a practice.
It’s never too late until it is
During this time I also worked with people who were preparing to die at Guys Hospital, in London. I listened very closely to their regrets and remorse with all, they were learning to forgive and make peace with. I listened and learnt that when we don't listen in to what is true for us, it wakes us up in the night and at the end when it might be too late.
"When you were born you cried and the world rejoiced, Live your life so when you die, the world cries and you rejoice" - a song we sing in Playback theatre.
For some people, these openings come in near-death experiences or at certain ages that mark our lives with a sense of knowing that there's something more. These openings can happen while we are daydreaming or they wake us up in the night with questions like 'where am I going?', 'what is my purpose?” and 'what do I truly want to experience in this one precious life before I die?'
Art Psychotherapy
I trained and completed a foundation year followed by a Post Grad. Dip. Art Psychotherapy and learnt more deeply the necessity to find symbols from our souls to bridge loneliness.
Psycho-Analysis
During this time, I went into Jungian Analysis three times a week over 4 years with the Society of Analytical Psychology and I'm deeply grateful to Esther Green, who has now passed over, for supporting my integration. She taught me in my early twenties that I was allowed to have my own feelings. This was the beginning of my journey to understanding boundaries.
Group Analysis
During this time I completed the Introductory year training in Group Analysis with the Institute of Group Analysis, London.
Neuro Linguistic Programming
I have been gifted with inspirational NLP teachers Roger and Emily Terry who have taught me how we can re-frame everything in their NLP Practitioner with Evolution Training which I wholeheartedly recommend as their teachings are fused with medicine teachings from spiritual paths aligned with natures wisdom and not in clever manipulation and commodifying relationships like some NLP training teach.
The Metis Medicine Society, Sweet Medicine path
I have completed Gateways I, II and III of The Deer Tribe Metis Medicine Society, Sweet Medicine Path discovering the teachings from the natural laws of nature and the use of rituals and ceremonies for creating containers for healing.
My Medicine name given to me is “Running Cheetah”
I attend sweat lodges and teaching sessions and over the last 15 years, I’ve been learning the alchemy of the pipe. I have completed the first level of training in Sexual Shamanism with Kenneth Ray Stubbs, who is my lifetime mentor in understanding energy and the many dimensions, mostly out of awareness, that are at play influencing the physical planes that we are learning as humans to inhabit.
Recapitulated Shamanic De - armouring
I completed the fourteen-day training with Sabina Tschudi and Johannes Schroder which released my body armour (contracted facia, ligaments and muscles that hold metals and scar tissue from emotional impacts) I learnt the importance of voice, breath and movement in liberating the kundalini (or unwinding the Dura which is a tube of tissue that surrounds the spine and brain that contracts to inhibit sensory communications in response to stress) When we relax through movement voice and breath our orgasmic energies can flow again and there is the possibility of restoring body harmony from harm
Aura Perception Analysis
I completed the 14-day intensive in Phoenix Arizona from early morning till midnight every day (with homework!) Aura Perception Analysis training with Thunderstrikes, Harley Swift Deer. This was training in de-armoring the mind and learning about the matrix of the "luminous egg cocoon" we inhabit. I would not have survived this intensive training had it not been for my dear friend's Chi energiser which I went on every night before sleep and every morning before travelling back to the classroom. Those of you who have had sessions with me over the years will recognise this essential piece of equipment in my session spaces as a way of letting go of the left brain’s monopoly.
Tribute to Coco
Tribute to my beloved companion of 14 years "Coco" 2006 - 2020 who practised relaxation in over 6000 hours of embodiment sessions facilitating naturalness, compassionate witness and was an excellent guard of the space. He was part of so many people’s journeys in the hours we spent inhabiting the four quadrants of the Wheel of Consent. His favourite quadrant was allowing. I miss him. He was slightly challenged in group settings not liking clapping but he learnt self-regulation with support and contributed his gifts of naturalness to several embodiment training.
Tantra
In 2003 I began training with Shakti Tantra, that at the time was a pioneering leading-edge series of programs dedicated to liberating people from shame. Hilary Spenceley and Sue Newsome had woven many teachings including Quodoushka, Bioenergetics, Osho and eastern Tantra.
This made the Shakti Tantra formula profoundly effective for change (which is not for everyone as we all have different emotional responses to change if it happens deeply and quickly). After a few years, I joined the Shakti Tantra teacher team specialising in teaching the then-famous Women's program.
I have explored coming out of hiding from shame-less into shame-free. I experienced the 'Namaste' of witnessing myself and others with kindness and being me without second-guessing how I will be received.
Only when released from this can we trust our spontaneity and open our sensory receptivity, trusting spontaneity and learning to feel more and fear less is a journey into states of grace and kindness.
Quodoushka
In 2003, I went on to train directly with my Quodoushka teachers Batty Gold (ThunderBear) and Rose Fink (ThunderEagle). Quodoushka is a vast matrix of teaching about sexuality essential for sex and relationship education and I have attended 5 of the level 1 training along with levels 2 and 3 and have embodied these teachings with my intimacy training. I was delighted to sponsor and assist the UK Quodoushka workshops in Devon in 2015-16
Dark Eros
Dark Eros is a deep dive training that is a fusion of Tantra and BDSM developed over many years by John Hawken who is one of the original Tantra teachers in the UK with his tantra school Sky Dancing. His training has evolved into The Paths of Transformation which I have been deeply honoured to be a guest teacher with him contributing affective neuroscience and wheel of consent understandings. This year in 2019, we are together bringing new light to Dark Eros combining the Wheel of Consent and neuroscience with this brave exploration into integrating exiled parts of the self with erotic energy.
ASIS
I co-founded The Association of Somatic and Integrative Sexologists (ASIS). This is an organisation that lists the codes of conduct and ethics of professionals working in the fields of sexuality and provides insurance for practitioners in these fields.
The ACSB
I am a professional member of the ACSB (The Association of Certified Sexological Bodyworkers) and I am a member of the Ethics Committee.
