I was born seeing things. As a child I would tell my parents what was coming and then be in trouble when it happened. So I learned what a lot of children learn, that the safest thing to do with a gift nobody wants is to put it away.
I put it away for about twenty years.
I grew up moving around Australia for my father's work, always in rural places, always away from the mainstream. Part Asian in a very white system, clever and sporty and never quite fitting. I made state teams. I could sing. I was still the one who did not get chosen. Somewhere in there I stopped trying to be seen and started trying to be smaller, and then bigger, and then smaller again. I used food to manage feelings I had no language for, and I punished my body for not being the thing I needed it to be. I was in my teens. It went on a long time.
Adulthood did not fix it. I chose the things I thought I deserved rather than the things I actually needed, and I paid for that in money, in health, in a loss I do not talk about lightly, and in a stretch of years where I had no home of my own. I married. We moved abroad. I arrived in this part of the world heavy, anxious and depressed, and very good at looking fine.
Then one afternoon I was asleep and something poured a bucket of water over my head. I woke up bone dry. That was the beginning of the end of my not paying attention.
I started meditating. I found a mentor. I began, for the first time, to do the work on myself rather than around myself.
Not long after, I was taken to hospital thinking I was having a heart attack. A doctor told me to change my life or die young.
I changed my life.
I left the marriage. I stopped hiding the part of me that sees. And I found my way back into my body, which is the part I did not expect. It began with a cycling class. Then I was teaching cycling. Then I was a personal trainer. Then Pilates, on every piece of equipment there is, and yoga, and aerial, and Animal Flow, and strength. I trained to work with rehab clients, with disability, pre and post natal. I had forgotten how much I loved to move, and how much of my life had been spent in rooms full of people moving together. As a kid it was netball, swimming, basketball, athletics, water polo. My body had always known. I was the one who stopped listening.
As I came back to my intuition, something specific started happening. I could see illness in people. I would notice where someone was holding chronic pain before they had said a word about it. I would know something was wrong in a body that looked perfectly well from the outside, and I would be right often enough that I could no longer treat it as coincidence.
I did not want to sit in that as a mystery. I wanted to understand what I was actually perceiving. So I went and studied. Reiki, through to Master level. Spinal Attunement. Somatic Alignment. Planetary tuning. Mindfulness. I learned how the nervous system holds what the mind will not, and how the body keeps the record.
Alongside that I kept working on myself, with my mentor, on the things I had carried for a long time and the things I suspect I did not start carrying in this life at all. I still do that work. I do not think you can hold space for someone else's release if you have never been through your own.
For the record, my education has not been a straight line. I left high school before finishing. I started medical school and did not complete it. The degree I actually hold is in graphic design. For years I read that as a list of failures. Now I read it as the reason I understand people who are not where they thought they would be by now.
