ABOUT ME
I live and breathe a creative approach to self-empowerment. It’s a daily practice for me and one I love sharing with others. I continually adapt and research different techniques and cultivate my own creative pathways, inspired by my life as a spiritual researcher and artist, along with my deep connection to nature and animals.
I have been a self-employed freelance designer, artist, and co-founder of Alamandria: The Art of Self-mastery, Mindfulness and Meditation for over a decade. Through my Alamandria work, with Mark Geard, I have facilitated many meditation and mindfulness workshops and retreats throughout Aotearoa, New Zealand. Running programmes for leadership teams, prison inmates, hospice staff and one-to-one sessions with private clients.
I have been a Youthline telephone counsellor, mentored youth, and been a volunteer at the Mary Potter Hospice – I started serving food to patients twenty years ago, and most recently facilitated Creative Mindfulness sessions for their staff.
I undertook The Art of Health one year certificate at Taruna College, and fulfilled a six week full-time storytelling course with Sue and Ashley of the International School of Storytelling. There have been lots of other short courses and professional development workshops interwoven throughout my life, these are just some of the highlights.
Most recently I have commenced a journey into nature communication with Eco Fluency and began a pathway into the art of composting and biodynamics with Blue Borage. I believe that the key to a healthy future for humanity is our connection and support of nature, the soil, plants, insects and animals, as well as our personal self-belief.
Meditation, contemplative enquiry and art are the cornerstones of my work – these engage the development of imagination, inspiration and intuition as well the development of our latent spiritual organs of perception. All my work, is devoted to the cultivation of these deeply human and spiritual aspect of our selves.
When I look back, I see that my journey with supporting others (albeit unconsciously) started at primary school when teachers often sat me with the ‘difficult’ or less popular students in the class. These were significant events at an early age where I discovered that the talented, intelligent and tender souls that lived beneath these rougher exteriors, were a testament to the potential that lives in every individual.
At age eleven I went to a very small private school in Wimbledon, London when my family moved to the UK. Being pulled out of my multi-cultural public primary school in Karori West, Wellington, where I lived an outdoor life, up trees, in streams, picking wild black berries and playing outside with friends until dusk. I now found myself in culture shock, in a small group of all girl, all English, wealthy, mollycoddled, high academic achievers – definitely a long way from my comfort zone! It was a difficult adaption for the sensitive individual that I was, but one that also integrated immensely beneficial new experiences into my being – history, travel, and a love of literature to name a few.
At age thirteen I visited Dachau Concentration Camp in Germany when I was on a European holiday with my family. I abruptly, and violently, awoke to the notion of evil and the counter forces that hold sway in the world. Forces that I now know need to be ameliorated through our own self-development and the cultivation of our spiritual life.
At age nineteen I became a Youthline telephone counsellor, whilst working at my first day job at the National Bank. I was also modelling at the time with dreams of pursuing it full time in Australia. The diversity of these three roles are indicative of a life leitmotif for me – whereby I have continually engaged across a wide gamut of life experiences.
So at this time, whilst undertaking the mundane work of data entry by day, and dressing up for catwalk shows or photoshoots in the weekends, I was also sitting by the phones at the Youthline premises during week nights. I took my first suicidal phone-call at this young age, an evening I will never forget.
I headed to Australia for a year, then returned to Wellington where a little while later I began a foundation course in design. During that year I was flown back to Sydney to model in Australian Fashion Week, and whilst staying in the 'model house' there I had one of life’s ‘aha moments’.
I had taken my homework with me; an assignment where we had to choose an object from nature and sketch it. I had chosen a large piece of bark with all its intricate details, undulations, and texture. In between the shows and the tenuous energy of the model house, I spent my time concentrating on this remarkable piece of bark, sketching it with complete immersion. It was in this space of focussed attention on this nature object, that I felt truly happy and at home. An incredible juxtaposition to trying to fit into a size zero dress amongst a sea of disingenuous personae.
As I wrapped-up my time at fashion week I was ‘discovered’ and approached with the dream agent and dream contract – here I was at last obtaining a long awaited goal and yet that little piece of tree was calling me home. In that moment my fate was sealed. I knew I had to return and pursue art and design in Wellington – where only months later I met my dear friend Mark, who became my design tutor and whom I later co-founded Alamandria with.