About Linda

I had to learn how to stop abandoning myself.

Mindfulness teacher, coach, maker — and someone who came to this work through necessity, not just training. This is that story.

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Why I do this work

I didn't come to this purely through training. I came to it because I needed it.

Because at a certain point, I had no choice but to start paying attention to what I had been carrying for a very long time. This is that story.

The day my classmates were attending their induction, I was having a biopsy. The results told me I had chronic myeloid leukaemia.

I left school at sixteen. Fashion had been a passion since childhood, and years later, in my late thirties, I finally went back to do the degree I'd always wanted.

That particular collision, the beginning of something I'd waited years for, arriving at exactly the same moment as a cancer diagnosis, is the kind of thing that stops you. Though in some ways, I had already been stopped long before I knew it.

A decade earlier, I had lost my first child. My son lived for less than an hour after he was born. He was perfect. He had caught an infection during my long delivery after a 42-week pregnancy, and he didn't survive it.

I don't have words for what that cost, and I won't pretend to. What I can say is that twenty-two months later my daughter was born, my beautiful, healthy daughter, and I threw myself into loving her with everything I had. Which was the right thing to do. And which was also, I think now, a way of moving forward by not quite stopping to feel what had happened.

I kept going. As you do. As women particularly do. You fold the grief somewhere inside yourself and you get on with the living.

What I didn't understand then, and what I understand very clearly now, is that the nervous system doesn't forget what the mind decides to set aside. It holds it.

I had grown up in a family that was loving and also, in its own way, chaotic, the kind of upbringing that teaches a child to be very good at reading the room, attending to others, staying steady, not asking for too much. Other people's needs came first. It was simply the shape of things, and it became the shape of me.

My partner has had significant health issues during our years together, which meant that care and attention were often again oriented outward. By the time my diagnosis arrived, I had been not listening to myself for a very long time. Decades, really. And my nervous system had been quietly carrying the cost of that.

The diagnosis

A cancer diagnosis, in your late thirties, is a particular kind of full stop.

Not the shock of something dramatic, but the shock of something that arrives quietly and forces you to cease.

I had to stop. And in the stopping, I began to understand something I had been moving too fast to see: that my body had been trying to tell me something for years. That the nervous system I had inherited from childhood — shaped by grief I hadn't fully processed and decades of orienting toward everyone else — was not in good shape.

That the running on empty wasn't a temporary state. It was a pattern. And it had been there, in one form or another, for most of my life.

I was lucky. Medically, I responded well to treatment. But the diagnosis was also, in a way I couldn't have anticipated, a beginning.

My body had been trying to tell me something for years. The running on empty wasn't a temporary state. It was a pattern.

What followed was five years of the most intensive, most healing work I have ever done — with a woman who had spent a lifetime in this territory, and who changed everything.

Five years of deep work

In the years that followed, I was fortunate enough to find a woman who changed everything.

She was 79 when we first met, 84 by the time our work together ended. She had spent a lifetime in this territory — the body, the nervous system, the patterns laid down early and carried forward — and she brought to our work a quality of knowledge and attention I had never encountered before.

Over five years, we worked through everything. The grief that had been stored rather than processed. The nervous system dysregulation that traced all the way back to childhood. The practised habit of showing up for everyone else while quietly disappearing from myself.

It was intense. It was also the most healing work I have ever done.

By the end of it, something fundamental had shifted — not just in how I felt, but in how I related to myself. I had spent the first forty-something years of my life not listening to myself. Those five years taught me how.

The practices we worked with:

Progressive muscle relaxation and somatic body-based work
Mindfulness and attention-focused meditation
Visualisation and guided imagery
The body's held patterns — one by one, with patience
Grief work — properly, unhurriedly
Nervous system regulation traced back to its earliest origins

"By the end, the joylessness I had been carrying lifted, slowly and then more fully. The exhaustion became something with a different quality: something that could be addressed, rather than simply endured."

This experience — alongside the academic study and years of working with women — forms the foundation of everything I do now.

Training & approach

Academic grounding matters to me — alongside lived experience.

I did not come to this work only through personal necessity. What followed — the academic study, the teacher training, the coaching qualification — gave me the language, the evidence base, and the professional rigour to hold this work responsibly for other women.

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MA Mindfulness-Based Approaches Bangor University — UK's leading centre for mindfulness research and MBSR training
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Certified MBSR Teacher Fully trained to teach Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction — the gold standard 8-week evidence-based programme
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ICF-Aligned Coach (ACC in progress) Coach training aligned to the International Coaching Federation ethical and professional standards
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Embodiment Practitioner Training with Mark Walsh — body-based, somatic approaches woven throughout the coaching work
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Trauma-Informed Practitioner Trauma Healing practitioner training — the work is always paced with nervous system safety in mind

Coaching is not therapy and does not treat mental health conditions. Where clinical support is needed alongside or before this work, I will always say so.

A note on neurodivergence

I discovered my own ADD in midlife — late, as many women do, having spent decades chalking up the effects to character rather than neurology. That discovery, and everything that followed from it, is woven into my coaching approach in ways that are too fundamental to separate out.

I understand from the inside what it means to live in a nervous system that doesn't match the productivity norms the world expects. Many of the women I work with are neurodivergent, or suspect they might be. You don't need a diagnosis for this work to be relevant, and you don't need to perform a kind of regulation that isn't natural to you.

The practices here have more than one door. We find the one that's yours.

Six years with neurodivergent young people

Alongside my work with women in midlife, I've spent six years supporting neurodivergent young people as a therapeutic tutor and mentor. That experience continues to inform my deep respect for different nervous systems, learning styles and capacities — and it's part of why my coaching is attuned to clients who don't fit narrow productivity norms.

A note on the work

I want to be honest about what this work is and isn't.

The patterns that most need attention in midlife have usually been in place for decades. They do not shift in a weekend workshop, and I won't pretend otherwise.

What I offer is genuinely supported, unhurried work — starting with The Reset, which creates the physiological foundation, and moving, for those who want to go deeper, into The Slow Unfold, which addresses the structural questions underneath.

If you are dealing with clinical depression, significant trauma, or a health situation that requires medical attention, those things need to be addressed alongside or before this work — and I will always say so honestly.

What I am is someone who has done this work herself. Who understands what it actually costs to carry too much for too long. And who knows that the distance between exhausted and genuinely well is real and navigable — with the right support, at the right pace, and without being asked to perform a recovery you haven't yet had.

This is not

A quick fix. The patterns that need attention have usually been in place for decades — they require patient, supported work, not a weekend shift.

This is not

Therapy, or a substitute for medical care. If you are carrying significant trauma or a clinical diagnosis, we'll talk honestly about what support is appropriate alongside or before this work.

This is

Grounded, evidence-based, deeply personal support from someone who has done this work herself — at a pace that honours your nervous system, without asking you to perform a recovery you haven't yet had.

Begin gently

If any of this speaks to something you recognise, I'd love to hear from you.

A free Clarity Call is simply a conversation — no pressure, no agenda. A quiet space to talk about where you are and explore whether this work might be right for you. You don't have to have it figured out to begin.

Book Your Free Clarity Call A quiet, confidential 30-minute conversation. No commitment required.