What if your wellness was much less about optimising your fitness, perfecting your self-care routine, or dieting -- and much more about a return to your body, nervous system healing and deeper nourishment?

Hi, I'm Katarina. I'm a somatic practitioner, nervous system regulation and integrative health coach.

I believe that healing isn’t about external wellness solutions, it’s about slowing down enough to come home to your body, reconnecting with your needs (and your desires), and learning to live from a place of inner safety. Wellness only matters when it can serve you and not hinder you. When it serves you, health becomes a foundation for living a meaningful life, not something to consume or obsess about.

What I see is that we sometimes take wellness too far - in trying to keep ourselves well, we overwhelm ourselves when we become obsessive or we fear food or we feel like our bodies are fragile - and that’s another version of health getting in the way of our fulfilling life. It’s another coping mechanism that contributes to overwhelm and silent burnout.

We have to strike a balance and instead find wellness by returning to being in relationship with our bodies so we can inhabit them, be at home in our core true self, rather than live outside of ourselves and struggle. Tuning into true health so we cam stop chasing symptoms with external solutions, trying everything under the sun to make symptoms and pain go away. We would do better to slow down enough and tune in, to listen to the symptoms - they are messages from the body. Getting rid of them is only going to suppress them. Getting curious instead will help process stored stress and trauma, and we can find freedom from the maladies and health issues. We begin to inhabit our bodies instead.

We cannot treat stress-related health issues without addressing the entirety of the persons nervous system. When I started working with an embodiment coach, there was something profound happening when I was working with my own nervous system. It’s like I was finally coming home by being in my body. It felt safe, grounding and empowering.

Felt sensation is the doorway into our bodies and emotional trauma and conditioned thinking need to be addressed in the body if we are to heal and grow. Return to safety to stabilise the nervous system is essential if we want to have capacity for the big things in life.

It’s a time of bigger change as you enter midlife and peri-menopause. Maybe you’re stepping back from a career that’s cost you too much, starting something on your own, finally making space for what actually lights you up - but you keep putting it off because you don’t have the energy to start.

The past two decades of living from a place of frenetic stress and internal chaos has left you feeling depleted, disconnected and unwell.

You need someone to help you to stabilise your nervous system so you can rebuild the capacity and enough health to live the meaningful life you desire. So that change comes naturally, from clarity, not desperation. So that you become more grounded, present, regulated and centred, not rely on the sheer power of your will and performing capacity which you no longer have.

I've spent over 8 years working with smart, capable professional women who have built perfect diets and exercise routines only to feel hollow, depleted and disconnected inside.

I know how you feel - here is how I know:

As a late Gen X woman now in my early 50s, I know first hand what it’s like to have been shaped in our culture to be everything, for everyone, but myself. Actually, I could be myself as long as I didn’t step on any toes along the way. Mustn’t be seen too bossy and brash, must not be outspoken or make other people uncomfortable.

For a long time, I was unaware how I was subconsciously conditioned to try to get it all right, doing all the things I should do but ultimately feeling empty in my core. It’s not me.

And so, like so many highly capable women, I built a life around approval, performance and perfection. It looked successful on the outside but deep inside it was a different story - beneath the perfect appearance I felt lost and apathetic. Often feeling like there is something inherently wrong with me.

My body, while resilient on the surface, started to show signs and symptoms but I wasn’t listening because I didn’t know I could listen, already disconnected from the pain. 

Seemingly small health issues started to creep up. I developed chronic health problems that were a mystery to me because I improved everything I knew how to - a healthy diet, improved routines, yoga, home cooked food, supplements. But still, I was anxious inside, and the way I was dealing with stress by ignoring it, without realising it.

Chronic people-pleasing and performing patterns had kept my body living with chronic inflammation. So many women experience chronic health issues as a result of these survival patterns such as autoimmune conditions, chronic pain, anxious and low mood states, and fatigue. As someone who has lived with chronic people pleasing and chronic health issues, I understand from deep personal experience the kind of cost that comes with holding the line of performing stability and success.

Do you relate?

After trying all the things I could to help myself like meditation and journaling (which I could never sustain or feel like they worked for me!), I stumbled upon an embodiment session where I worked with my nervous system, and for the first time something truly shifted inside of me. I was hooked. I felt like I was finally home in my body. I had my energy and vitality back and I felt excited by life, with true capacity in my nervous system for all that I was holding and needed healing.

After 20+ years in London and Belgium, I now live in the Cotswolds with my husband David, our kitten Taggie, and far too many spices and books, supporting women worldwide in finding their way back to themselves.

I also hold a master's in philosophy and international relations and am an integrative coach, cook, gardener, writer, and solopreneur.