True Nature Coaching & Education

In April this year, I had the honour of being accepted into Irene Lyon’s () first offical practitioner training, the Scientuitive Practitioner Track Level 1.

It’s hard to express in words the enormity of this moment for me.

I knew I wanted to work in the healing arts from the age of 28 (it was actually earlier than this but for the sake of brevity) and was successful at that time in being offered places in two masters programs in clinical psychology.

I chose the one that allowed me to create a life in a new city only to get a few weeks in and realise I couldn’t stomach the pathologising models of mental illness that were the basis of clinical psychology. So I quit.

Since this time, I have been seeking practitioner training that offers root-cause solutions to mental illness and I finally found this when I discovered Irene Lyon’s work in 2019.

Irene’s work on nervous system health is life changing. I don’t say this lightly.

In a little under two weeks, I will be flying to Canada to take part in the in-person component of her Level 1 Scientuitive Practitioner Track. I am so incredibly excited!

After 25 years of seeking, I am finally beginning my apprenticeship in the work I feel called to do. It’s the culmination of 1000s of hours of study, research, deep reflection, and healing.

I am so proud of what I’ve overcome to arrive here. And I’m so excited to share what I learn along the way to continue supporting others in their healing journey.

Love,
Sophie

I've been thinking a lot about relationships lately and the ingredients that make connection feel safe and easeful or tense and stressful.

We tend not to pay much attention to relationships and how to approach them in a way that supports wellbeing.

The way we relate is a habit, much like driving a car or doing the dishes. Our responses become automated.

Often it's not until we've been seriously hurt by someone that we stop to ask what actually is a healthy relationship.

What, if any, relational skills would you add to this list?

Saw this in a massage clinic today and couldn’t agree more 🔥🌏🌬️💧

Every time we try to avoid our emotions, we abandon ourselves.

There are many ways to do this. We do it through ignoring, distracting, over thinking, busyness, doubting, positive reframing, numbing etc.

When we do, it is the equivalent of abandoning a frightened, hurt child. In fact, it’s very likely we were abandoned in this way as a child and that it’s become internalised so that now we repeat the pattern over and over.

Avoiding your emotions sends the message that you, your feelings, and your experience don’t matter. It keeps you trapped in your wounding and trauma responses.

The healing for this hurtful pattern is to notice and practice turning toward the painful emotion. We patiently spend time with it, being curious about how it feels in the body, offering it curiosity and presence, like we would a child.

We learn to act compassionately toward ourselves, becoming the loving caretaker of our emotions and experience. And as we do this, we start to rewire a new experience into our system, one that is opposite to the experience of harshness and neglect in our childhood.

The cycle is broken by choosing love, over and over choosing love, until it becomes internalised as a new way of being.

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Have you ever noticed how hard it is to rest?

I heard James McCrae make this comment in a podcast episode I listened to recently and it struck me as so true.

Busyness is the norm. So many of us are hurrying through life and it feels so hard to stop.

The conditioning that our value is tied to our productivity runs deep and is toxic.

Underneath that sense of urgency is a nervous system running on survival mode. And if we stay in this adrenalised state week in, week out, month after month, eventually it will affect our health.

The nervous system needs to down regulate and spend time in rest for the body to carry out essential repair work and maintain a healthy immune system.

Rest is essential for our health and wellbeing. It really is okay to rest.

Starting to follow the body’s impulse for rest sends the message that you are listening and back in the driver’s seat rather than running on autopilot. The nervous system responds and we start to experience a sense of relief.

It doesn’t have to mean spending the afternoon on on the couch. It might be for 5 minutes. Or 3 minutes. Or 10 minutes. I find that pausing to rest regularly throughout the day helps with regulating my nervous system and reducing stress.

Yes, it takes courage to rest. But we all have courage. And the ripple effect is real. Our courageous action inspires others to take their own.

This is how we heal and create a culture where it is normal and okay to take care of ourselves.

Does this resonate with you? I’d love to hear about it in the comments ⬇️

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I’ve been reflecting on the dark place I’ve been in the past couple of weeks. I’ve been riding the waves of fear and shame, familiar characters in my life.

A truth I’m coming to accept more deeply is that I have chosen a soul-led life; the path of intuitive guidance over external programming.

According to the script of external programming, I have failed on many fronts - I am not married, I have no children, I have walked away from prestigious and well paying jobs, I’ve had multiple breakdowns and struggled with emotional health a lot of my adult life.

Yet, I have grown and learned so much. There is a deep well of wisdom within me.

💎 I have made the choice to face fear over and over again.

💎 I have cultivated so much compassion for myself and others through the experience of deep emotional pain.

💎 I have allowed myself to change beliefs as life experience leads to new perspectives.

💎 I have learned to rewire my nervous system and embody emotional health

💎 I have quit jobs and relationships to live in alignment with personal truth.

💎 I have grown greater and greater capacity to give and receive love.

💎 I have learned so much about what it is to be human from the choices and paths I’ve taken in life.

There is a critical voice in my head that sometimes wants to make me feel that I am failing. It compares me to others and finds me lacking.

Then there is another voice, one that comes from a deep, timeless place, that knows this is total BS. It knows that I’m exactly where I am meant to be and living the life I am meant to live.

To the black sheep taking the road less travelled, I see you and acknowledge your courage. This is not an easy path and often an invisible one. People can’t know from looking at us the internal battles we’ve faced and fires we’ve walked through to be where we are.

To do life any other way would come at the cost of health and sanity. It is not through lack of trying. I’ve been desperate at times to fit in and ‘be normal like everybody else’. However, it’s not to be this lifetime. This is a lifetime of radical authenticity. This is a life lived in service to soul.

Does this resonate? I’d love to hear from you!

Healthy relating is a key element of emotional health. The thing is, it can be hard to know what healthy relationships look like because there are few examples out there. We lack good role models.

It was a game changer for me when I started to take seriously the idea that we all have needs and that in healthy relationships, it’s safe to ask for these needs to be met.

It sends a strong message of safety to our nervous system when we start practicing communicating our needs. This is especially true for those of us who grew up in families where our needs were chronically unmet. It is also a fast way of sorting out who in our life genuinely cares about our wellbeing and who is there for some other reason.

Examples of asking for a need to be met:

‘I feeling overstimulated and have a need for some silence. I still want to be in your company. Would it be okay to hang out quietly together for a while?’

‘I’m feeling sad and need a hug. Would you be willing to sit and hold me for a while?’

The exact wording isn’t too important. The main principles are to focus on what you’re feeling and what you need and communicating this using ‘I’ statements.

It can feel scary and vulnerable to start expressing needs. We might think that we will be rejected and afraid of the pain that this might bring.

The short term pain of rejection is much less damaging than the long term pain of being in relationships with people who don’t care about you. The trick is to start small and allow yourself to make mistakes. We learn through giving things go and working it out as we go along. Learning relationship skills is no different.

If this resonates, I'd love to hear about it in the comments!

Getting clear about what trauma is helps to support the healing journey.

We become empowered by learning how the body, in particular the nervous system, works.

You might have heard that trauma is not in the event itself? Rather it's something that happens in the body of the individual who experiences the event. Animals in the wild face life and death situations everyday without becoming traumatised.

A big part of what causes trauma has to do with culture and the extent to which we are free to move and express through the body.

A big part of healing trauma is disconnecting from external conditioning about how we should think/feel/act and learning to follow the body's impulses instead.

Embracing this way of being builds nervous system capacity and grants us access to authenticity, clarity, and ease.

✨🦉 If this post sparked up some curiosity, I'd love to hear about it in the comments ⬇️

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Nature! We talk about it all the time that it can be easy to dismiss it’s power. We are part of nature: we belong with it and evolved to feel at home in it. The pace and the energy field in natural setting is one that our body recognizes on a cellular level and supports our nervous system to settle into a relaxed (or ventral vagal) state.

My body has been moving into burn out lately (more to come on this later) and when I tuned into my impulse about what it needed, the message was clear. It wanted to be amongst trees. So here I am.

One of the principles of healing I’ve discovered to be true is that of simplicity. We’ve made things so complicated in our culture that we can miss the point that the things the body need are simple: food, water, connection, rest, movement, attuned touch, play.

If you relate to feelings of burnout, overwhelm, chronic stress, know that what you need is probably one of these things and that the answer to what you can do to support your system to relax is almost certainly a simple one. I’m not saying that conditions like burn out have a single solution but by continuing to feel into the body’s impulses and providing what it needs, it starts to send the message that we are listening and it’s safe to move into a more relaxed, parasympathetic state.

What is your experience of following your impulses when you’re stressed?

There are a couple of spots left in the Women’s Circle for Sensitive Women starting this Friday, 5th of April. Would it support you to connect with like-minded women? 🌟

🍂 As the change in season brings cooler weather and less daylight, this 6-week gathering will be an opportunity to slow down and tune into what your body needs. Join other highly sensitive women as we gently explore somatic practices to support the nervous system and emotional health.

🤔 This circle is for you if you’re someone who is curious about the ‘why’ and want to understand your sensitivity from a trauma- and nervous system-informed place. As a facilitator with lived experience of complex post-traumatic stress disorder, my priority is on creating a grounded and welcoming space where you feel safe to show up as your authentic self.

If you’d like to join us, comment below or send me a DM. I look forward to meeting you! 🌱

Sophie

This morning I was sitting on a bench taking in the view of the river with the ducks going about their business and the dappled sunlight coming through a beautiful Moreton Bay Fig tree, and I recalled how different this experience is for me now.

For most of my adult life, I couldn't sit on a park bench and enjoy the surroundings. I would feel anxious, exposed, and hypervigilant. I'd experience so much sympathetic activation, I would need to leave as soon as possible. Looking back, I can see the hypervigilance was a fear of being attacked. Not physically but verbally. This doesn't make sense from a rational perspective but my system was holding so much unhealed toxic shame that it was on constant alert to the possibility of being judged, criticised, or shamed in anyway.

It sounds crazy to say it but somehow the simple act of sitting on a bench for any period of time felt weird, stupid, and embarassing to me. It's like I needed a reason to be there. I would have moments of seeing things from a bigger picture perspective and think 'what has the world come to that humans can't even sit on a park bench without feeling awkward?'. I intuited that the shame I felt was not just mine but other's too. That in fact there are other people who would feel too self-conscious to sit on a bench and would judge me as weird for doing it (though now I realise these judgements would simply be thoughts in their head, not verbal attacks).

It's funny to think about it now. Sometimes it's hard to remember what it was like being in deep in freeze and nervous system chaos and so I'm glad for the opportunity to notice the shifts and appreciate the gift of nervous system regulation.

If you resonate with this experience or have similar social fears, know that healing is possible and that it does take time. Learning the basics of orienting and following impulse is a good place to start and I can teach you these skills. If you want to chat more about this either in the comments or via a DM, I'd love to hear from you.

To a world where it's normal to sit on park benches and be with the birds and trees 🦆🌳☮🌏

Our conscious minds are so strong and it can be particularly challenging to learn to come back to feeling and sensation when we’ve spent years, often decades, existing in our mind. Yet, it is true that the mind cannot problem-solve away our emotions. Sure, it will try (and try and try, until we are exhausted by the rumination carousel). It might even have some short term success but the emotion will still be there waiting for another opportunity to surface and be felt.

Learning to tune into and feel sensation is a practice. It’s about connection with ourselves and in the case of early childhood trauma, is about providing the kind of attuned connection we missed out on as little ones.

Each time we pause to notice and feel our sensations, we lighten the trauma load and shift our trajectory towards wholeness and healing.

To a world of embodied, feeling humans 🌏☮

Forgive me for doing this a little out of order. I thought I would introduce myself for those who don't know me and who might be interested in joining us for the women's circle for sensitive women.

I am a lived experience recovery coach who supports people to heal from mental and emotional distress. I draw on a 25 year journey of searching for answers to emotional suffering that started after experiencing my first panic attack at age 19.

The journey initially took me down the road of studying psychology. After graduating, I worked in mental health research for a few years before deciding to go back to study to realise my dream of becoming a psychologist. However, life had other plans. A few weeks into the clinical masters program, I discovered it was not for me. The pathologising and biomedical worldview of clinical psychology felt so wrong to me that I couldn't keep going. So I got to end of first semester and withdrew.

After this, I continued a career as a mental health researcher for several more years. Meanwhile, I spent all of my free time studying topics like trauma, attachment, emotional healing, and healthy relating.

Things took another turn when I had 3 breakdowns in 5 years. I became fully dedicated to healing trauma and this is when I found the approaches that work. I became educated in nervous system health and somatic trauma work and spent 2.5 years immersed in a deep healing process to rewire my nervous system.

I had to find the answers myself. They weren't taught in university. It's been a long road to get where I am and I'm proud of who I am today. Now, I take all that I have learned to support other people in their recovery journey. I know that real healing is possible and it's my passion to guide people through the journey of rediscovering their truth, vitality, and happiness.

If my story resonates and you'd like to know more, or if you just want to say hi, I'd love to hear from you!

Hi All, I have an exciting announcement to make! I’m running another women’s circle, starting April 5th, that is for deep feeling, sensitive women. Is this you or a woman you know?

Being highly sensitive (or an empath) can be isolating and difficult especially when we don’t have the tools to nurture our sensitive nature. Each week will introduce knowledge and practices to support grounding, embodiment, and connection to self with a focus on nervous system health. It’s also an opportunity to form connections with other women who share the experience of being highly sensitive to build your support network.

Running for 6 weeks on a Friday night in Goodwood, we will meet to share, learn, and connect with time to chat over tea and snacks. The circle is limited to 7 women.

To find out more and book your spot contact me via DM or email at [email protected]

I hope to see you there! xo

Orienting is a foundational piece of nervous system health. It’s something that all animals do in the wild. It’s the behaviour of connecting to the external environment through noticing objects, space, and where we are in relation to these.

When this information is able to flow through and be registered, it helps to signal to the nervous system that all is functioning as it should and it can relax. The trouble is so many of us lose connection to our external environment and become absorbed in the thinking mind rather than tuning in to what’s around us.

This week I’m having the opportunity to spend time in nature without an agenda or schedule and I notice how orienting starts to come onboard naturally. It got me thinking about how our biology is wired to be in natural environments and that living in urban environments disrupts the body’s organic impulse to orient. I believe our bodies have a physiological expectation to be in nature; that evolution has wired this into us on a cellular level and that living in artificial environments alienates us from the natural process of orienting. This is one of the ways we become separated from ourselves.

It is possible to regain the capacity to orient in urban environments. It just takes intention, commitment to self, and practice.

Orienting is one of the nervous system “basics” I teach in my coaching sessions. If this resonates with you, feel free to DM me to find out more. I currently have capacity to take on 1-2 new clients.

With love and peace x

✨✨ Hello everyone! I've been quiet here lately. There's been lots of change and transition and I tend to retreat in the face of uncertainty to allow the process of not knowing to unfold.

This morning I was inspired to write a blog piece on my explorations of neurodiversity and sensitivity. I'm excited to share a part of it with you here. If it resonates and sparks curiosity, I invite you to head on over to my website to read it in its entirety.

✏️✏️✏️
Reflections on autism, high sensitivity, and being an empath

This morning I’m aware of the deeper ways that I try to keep myself hidden out of fear of my authentic self being rejected and ostracised. The feeling of needing to hide has been with me as long as a I can remember. There is a belief that lives in my being that says I am wrong and I am aware of trying to compensate for this wrongness at all times.

I've been exploring autism, high sensitivity, and empathy lately and this morning came across a video* that deeply moved me. It moved me because of what it revealed about the rich inner life and intelligence of a person the medical establishment would deem as disabled and/or disordered. It gave me a window into a life of sublime subtlety, wisdom, and beauty that I haven’t had the opportunity to witness and contemplate before. It expanded my awareness of the human experience and showed me the deeper layers of conditioning I carry around what is considered ‘normal’, ‘valuable’, and ‘worthy’. It also revealed more deeply the extent to which I try to hide because of a belief of being wrong/defective coupled with the fear that in order to be worthy of love and acceptance, I must blend in.

As I explore, I am feeling out the idea of the label ‘autism’ or ‘autistic’ and right now it still feels wrong to me. The reason is that many of the traits identified as being common to autism, especially in women, are ones that are deeply intelligent, caring, and compassionate.

Enjoyed this? Head on over to read the full post at my website truenaturecoaching.com.au. Peace ☮️

There is such a wide misconception, especially in spiritual circles, that our thoughts create our emotions. This is biologically incorrect. Our brain is an end organ. The many processes and functions that go on in the body send a constant stream of information to the brain where it is filtered and then interpreted by the conscious, language-based part of the brain, which we experience as thought. The brain is downstream from the action, receiving data from the activity of the different body systems. It creates a narrative about what we are experiencing. It is an interpreter of feeling, not a creator of it.

This makes sense if you think about our capacity for thought as babies. What we call ‘thought’ is the conscious, language-based inner voice that constantly chats away at us. We aren’t born with language. As babies, we don’t ‘think’ in the way adults do because we don’t yet have the language skills that create conscious thought. Babies experience the world purely through felt sensation. This doesn’t mean we aren’t aware. Our intelligent body and nervous system is taking in huge amounts of information from the environment in a continuous surveillance process that assesses whether we are safe or in danger. We don’t need conscious thought for this. The body has its own consciousness that isn’t verbal or thought based.

This is why so many people are now coming to understand that the way to heal is to feel; that the way to change our felt experience of life is to develop the capacity to be with and feel our emotions and physical sensations; that our capacity to allow emotion to move through us shapes the pattern of our thinking. Avoiding, distracting, dismissing, pushing down emotions keeps us stuck. Emotion is meant to move. If we are stuck in cycles of negative thought, it’s signaling that we are emotionally stuck.

If you are emotionally stuck and want to learn to feel, my work as a psychospiritual life coach can support you. Somatic awareness and healthy relating are key to this process and are what I specialise in. I offer 1:1 sessions in Goodwood and have capacity to take on 2-3 new clients. DM me for more info. I would love to hear from you.

Grateful to the beautiful friend who gifted me this Pocket Art book 🌺 I feel resistance every time I think about engaging in a creative activity, however, I notice that unless I consciously make the time to allow for it, I can easily run on ‘doing’ mode for days even weeks at a time. The thing that allows me to move past it is to give permission for absolutely anything to come out, with no judgement. The passion I feel for the wellbeing of children and seeing these moments as an opportunity to rewrite the script for my own inner child is the fuel for this fire 🔥

One of the activities in this book is to draw a self-portrait 😜 it would be so easy to turn away from this activity because of the field day my inner critic could have with it. It was actually surprisingly fun and I was pleased with what came out onto the page 😀

Sending love to your inner child 💗🐥

If you’ve ever gone to someone when you’re in dark place or when you just want to vent, you know the feeling.

You share what’s going on. Maybe you cry or express some emotion. Suddenly, you can feel that person’s anxiety. They start going into unsolicited advice, they offer you the bright side (“well at least x didn’t happen!”) or they begin to panic or spiral.

You can feel your frustration building up. We don’t want to be fixed. We want someone to just listen. To just be there. To let us express.

Many of us grew up in anxious homes where there was no toleration for stress. We believe everything must be fixed. There must be a solution. We don’t know how to actually just *be* there for someone. To just listen. To ask them how we can support them.

It’s a loving act to be. To trust someone’s capability. To ask them what they need in that moment.

Have you experienced this?

This is something I’m reflecting on tonight. The feelings aren’t the problem. Fear, shame, sadness, anger are not the problem. Emotions are not a mistake; they do not need managing or fixing. The problem is that we are afraid of what will happen if we do feel them and so to avoid this, our system goes into overdrive, pulling out every trick in the book to suppress, push away, distract, and squash uncomfortable feelings.

This is what creates stuckness. When our psyche decides that there are natural, innate body sensations that are unsafe to experience it starts to limit what’s possible for us. There become things we can’t do, places we can’t go, people we can’t be around, experiences we can’t have because of the risk that it might mean having to experience the painful feelings. In reality, we are running and hiding from ourselves.

The freedom that comes with being able to be with painful and uncomfortable emotions is immense. It opens up a whole new world of possibilities that were not previously available. It creates movement and potential. ‘E-motion’, the word itself denotes movement and motion. Emotions are meant to propel us forward in life.

The capacity to feel pain is directly proportionate to our capacity to feel pleasure. Both are a part of life and both are what make life the adventure that it is. Learning to feel and be with emotions is the game changer for living a healthy, vital, and inspired life.