About

How I Came to This Work

I didn't arrive at Somatics through a textbook. I arrived through pain.

For many years, traditional Chinese martial arts were the centre of my life. They gave me discipline, focus and a deep respect for how the body moves — but they also asked a great deal of it. Over time, the training took its toll. The injuries built up quietly, the way they do, until one day I couldn't move the way I once had - and the usual routes, rest, treatment, pushing through, weren't giving me my body back.

What frustrated me most was that everything on offer seemed to be done to me. I was a patient to be fixed, not a person who might learn to move differently.

Then I came across the work of Thomas Hanna, the philosopher who named the field of Somatics. His central idea stopped me in my tracks: that the body isn't broken so much as it has forgotten, and that the nervous system can be gently re-educated to release the patterns it's been holding for years. Real change, Hanna believed, can never be imposed from the outside - it must come from within. The difference, as he put it, between working on someone and working with them. I started with his books, almost sceptically, and then I tried the work on myself.

It changed things. Not overnight, and not by force, but by teaching my body to let go of what it had been gripping for years. For the first time, I wasn't waiting to be fixed. I was learning to look after myself.

That's why I teach this now. I'm not here to fix anyone - I don't believe that's how lasting change works. I'm here to help you understand your own body; to give you back a sense of ease and control, and to hand you tools you can carry for the rest of your life.

I came to this work to heal myself. I stayed to help others do the same.

The Roots of This Work

Reading Thomas Hanna's work - and that of Martha Peterson, whose training and certification trace back through the institutions Hanna founded, and who carries his approach forward today through Essential Somatics - was the beginning, not the end.

In late 2019, after reading both, I went on an Essential Somatics immersion weekend, intending to learn more for myself. I came away knowing I wanted to teach this work to others. During the years that followed - training largely through the upheaval of Covid - I qualified as an Essential Somatics Movement Teacher and, at the same time, completed my training as a Bones for Life teacher.

That might have been enough. But the work kept opening up, and in 2023 I began the full Clinical Somatic Education training. I graduated in October 2025, six years after that first immersion weekend.

It's not a quick qualification, and I didn't want it to be. This is work I needed to be sure I could offer properly - to you, or to anyone who walks through the door carrying pain they've been told they simply have to live with.

How I Work

Hanna’s idea - working with the nervous system, not against it - shapes everything that happens in a session.

Most approaches to pain work on the body from the outside: stretching, adjusting, releasing. These can genuinely help, but they often miss the part that’s actually in charge - your nervous system, which over years learns to hold certain muscles in chronic tension, usually without you ever noticing.

Fascia is part of why this matters. It’s the web of connective tissue wrapping every muscle in your body, richly supplied with its own nerve endings. When the nervous system holds a pattern of tension for long enough, the fascia around it adapts too. Many approaches try to change that tissue directly - but because fascia and the nervous system are so closely entwined, the tissue tends to follow wherever the nervous system leads. Change the pattern at its source, and the tissue often finds room to change with it.

That’s where somatic education works. Through slow, deliberate movement, you learn to sense what your nervous system has been doing - and teach it a different way. Nothing forced, nothing pushed through. The change comes from awareness, not effort.

What you leave with isn’t a quick fix. It’s a different relationship with your own body, and tools you keep using long after the session ends.

Why This Feels Different

If you’ve already tried physiotherapy, massage, or pain medication and found the relief temporary - or never quite arrived - you’re not alone, and you’re not doing anything wrong.

These approaches are often very good at what they’re designed for. But chronic tension and pain are rarely just a local, mechanical problem. More often, they’re a pattern the nervous system has learned and is quietly maintaining, long after the original cause has passed.

What’s different here is that we work with the pattern itself - gently, through movement and awareness, so your nervous system can find its own way to let go. It’s not a replacement for medical care, and it’s not a miracle. But for many people, it reaches something other approaches haven’t.

If that sounds like what you’ve been looking for, you’re in the right place.

Who This Is For

Many people who come to The Soma Room have been carrying something for a while - a back that’s never quite right, a knee that complains on stairs, shoulders that won’t drop, even when you tell them to. Often they’ve already tried physiotherapy, massage, or painkillers, and found the relief doesn’t last.

Some are simply tired of feeling braced. Years at a desk, an old injury that never fully resolved, or the slow stiffening that creeps in with age can all leave the body holding tension it no longer needs - tension so familiar it barely registers anymore.

Others are active people - walkers, gardeners, golfers, former athletes - who’ve been told to “slow down” or “expect this at your age”, and aren’t ready to accept that as the final word. And some simply want to move better, feel steadier on their feet, and stay confident in their bodies for years to come.

If any of this sounds familiar, you’re exactly who this work is for.

The Space, and The Person Behind It

The Soma Room sits in Montrose, on the Angus coast - a calm space, away from the busyness of everyday life, where sessions happen at an unhurried pace. There’s no rush here, and no clock-watching. Just time, attention, and room to notice things you might otherwise miss.

Movement has been part of my life for as long as I can remember. Long before Somatics, I was teaching skiing - something I’ve now been doing since the mid-1980s, and still do.

Decades of watching people learn to move, fall, recover, and find their balance again has shaped how I teach just as much as any qualification has.

This isn’t a practice I picked up later in life. Movement, and helping people move better, is simply what I’ve always done — Somatics is where that finally found its true home.

Training & Qualifications

Certified Clinical Somatic Educator (CCSE)

BEMER Business Partner

Essential Somatics Movement Teacher (ESMT)

Bones for Life® Teacher

MBA
Robert Gordon University

Spiral Stabilisation Trainer

Associate Member, British Society of Lifestyle Medicine (BSLM)

Get In Touch

If any of this resonates - whether you’re in pain, frustrated with what you’ve tried so far, or simply curious about a different way of moving through life - I’d love to hear from you.

You don’t need to know which session is right for you, or even whether this is the right fit at all. A short conversation is often the easiest way to find out, with no pressure and nothing to commit to.

Whenever you’re ready, get in touch - I’ll be glad to help.

Book Your Session