My Founding Story

 

Roots in the Wild and Awakening to the Sacred 

I was born in remote Tasmania and spent my earliest years on the land, raised by a German mother and a farmer father whose ancestors migrated from the British Isles. Those wild, early spaces anchored a deep, enduring love for nature.

Introduced to meditation by my mother at age twenty, spiritual practice has profoundly shaped my life. Through meditation, I experienced an awakening that inspired me to intellectually question everything, including my own identity.

 

In my youth, a six-month overland journey along the western coastline all the way to Darwin deepened my connection to Country as I spent time with remote First Nations communities in Fitzroy Crossing and Shady Camp in the Northern Territory. Just after my first marriage, I lived in Japan for 12 months and taught English to kinder children in a Buddhist temple near Ichinomiya.

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My early path was shaped by remarkable women, including the late Dr. Simonne Jameson, a psychotherapist and art critic who trained with Carl Jung in Zurich, and my dear friend Arian Young, a Chinese medicine practitioner and former Tibetan nun. I trained in Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), the secular gold standard program. Years after my first awakening, while on retreat, I experienced a deeper, heartbreaking moment: embodying a true sense of my interconnectedness with the whole living world. Decades of silent retreats eventually led me into formal Dharma teacher training in the Insight tradition under the mentorship of Subhana Barzaghi, Senior Insight Dharma Teacher, Zen Roshi, and PACFA Supervisor. The Dharma has been an invaluable anchor to my life and work and helped me reclaim my own ancestral roots and practices.

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From Individual to Living Systems

Graduating with a Counselling and Coaching degree as a mature-age student, I completed specialised training in Ecotherapy and immediately fell in love with the approach, feeling strongly drawn toward a social focus, group facilitation and community weaving rather than an individual approach felt very natural to me. Through thousands of hours facilitating leadership coaching, EAP counselling, and corporate and public workshops, including a 12-month WorkSafe-funded mindfulness program in educational leadership across Victoria, I witnessed profound stress and burnout. Working as an EAP counsellor across Australia’s large corporations and institutions, supporting people at all levels from frontline workers to executive leadership, a core truth began to dawn on me: in the West, our culture has a tendency to pathologise individual distress rather than taking responsibility for examining the very systems causing harm to both people and the planet. 

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For a period of time I worked part time for a large corporate EAP provider serving Australia's largest institutions, my clinic was based on the 16th floor of a CBD building, seeing six clients a day in a room with no window. Even then I was wearing my ecotherapy hat, supporting people to wake up from ego-centric, individual sense of self, to the truth we are part of the conscious living web through working somatically. At the time, my husband was a co-founder of a sustainability technology startup, guiding corporate organisations through decarbonisation in the built environment. Yet while I longed to take my work outdoors and return to the land, I initially struggled to figure out how to fully transition to a nature-based way of working. The turning point came during the COVID-19 lockdowns. As I began seeing a few of my own clients outdoors, the vision crystallised: I wanted my work and eventually my life to be deeply connected to nature, and for nature.

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Rooting the Vision

After participating in placemaking projects with Boroondara Council and Vic Walks, I joined Stonnington Council's Eco Champion program and volunteered with Rewilding Stonnington, planting indigenous flora in local public spaces. As a passionate gardener, I rewilded my own backyard, where my urban studio for art and client work was based and that quiet act seeded the vision for The Eco Retreat: a land-based sanctuary where people could connect to the wilderness for community healing while learning how to care for the natural world. In truth, my partner and I had dreamed of living a land-based life for decades, but now the vision was actively taking root.

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Over the years, I have offered ecotherapy, mindfulness, and nature-based workshops in collaboration with Stonnington Council's sustainability leaders and Parks Victoria, including supporting Riverfest with the popular Breathe with the Birrarung event. The Work That Reconnects approach supports us to understand cultural narratives around the meta-crisis, how the system functions, and the work of transforming culture in the Great Turning—themes I have weaved into my Earth Stewards program.

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As a bi-racial mother, artist, and practitioner, my work is deeply informed by questions of lineage, belonging, intersectionality, and the land. I draw personally from what I've learned about my Celtic and European ancestry, weaving embodied ways of feeling into connection, dreamwork, active imagination, and deep listening into all that I do. I am committed to unlearning internalised systems of oppression, supporting First Nations sovereignty, and exploring how we transform our relationship to land, power, and practice. I am passionate about wilding and protecting natural spaces, developing local sustainable food systems, and fostering community resilience through common purpose.

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The Next Chapter

Today, my life looks entirely different from those fluorescent-lit office spaces. As custodians of a land-based retreat on a 70-acre farm and forest in the Otway foothills of Boonah along the Surf Coast in Victoria, my daily rhythm is anchored to the seasonal cycles of the land, the quiet wisdom of plants, and the deep resilience of the natural world. With The Eco Retreat now launched, we are establishing community-centered initiatives, including an organic food and herbal medicine garden, a fruit orchard, regenerative land stewardship for local wildlife, a creative studio, and hands-on training and volunteer opportunities. I help conscious leaders, professionals, and creatives step out of the frantic pace of modern burnout and into a more rooted, integrated way of being. Because just like the land, we don't heal by pushing harder, we heal by remembering how to belong.

 

Credentials & Background

Qualifications & Formal Training

• Bachelor of Counselling (Coaching) – ACAP

• Registered Clinical Practitioner – PACFA (Reg. 28445)

• MBSR & MBCT Certified Teacher – Mindfulness Training Institute Australasia

• Dharma Teacher Training – Insight Meditation Institute 

• Work That Reconnects Facilitator Training – Spiral Journey 

• International Certificate in Applied Ecopsychology – Dr. Geoff Berry

• First Nations Cultural Awareness & Narrative Practice – IndigenousX & Dulwich Centre

• Mindful Self-Compassion Core Skills Training – Christopher Germer, PhD & Kathleen Cator

• Jungian & Post-Jungian Clinical Concepts – Applied Jungian Studies

• Trauma-informed practice in Education - Smiling Mind. 

• Art Therapy Certificate – CECAT

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Affiliations & Community Projects

• Committee Member, Insight Meditation Institute (IMI)

• Community Initiatives: Co-creator of Breathe with the Birrarung (with Stonnington Council & Parks Vic) and Mindfulness in the Park (with Boroondara Council & Victoria Walks).

• Creative Practice: Active studio painter, author of The Mindfulness Workbook (2016), writer at The Wild Muse and Slow Acres and teacher on Insight Timer. Co-founder of The Eco Retreat (Boonah, Victoria).

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