About Fiona
Movement has been my first language for as long as I can remember.
As a child I danced - ballet, jazz, tap - finding in movement something I could not yet find in words. At sixteen my mother took me to my first Tai Chi class, and something quietly shifted. I began to understand that movement was not just expression, it was inquiry. A way of asking the body questions the mind had not yet thought to ask.
Yoga arrived in high school and never left. Over twenty-five years of practice, it has been my companion through the best and most difficult chapters of my life. Not as performance or discipline, but as a living, breathing relationship with my own body - one that has deepened with every year, every transition, every loss, and every return to the mat.
I completed my 500-hour Yoga Teacher Training at Byron Yoga Centre in 2009, and have been teaching for fifteen years - fortunate beyond measure to have shared practice with people from all over the world. I hold a Bachelor of Fine Arts and a Postgraduate Certificate in Education, and have carried a love of creativity and artistic inquiry into every aspect of my teaching.
My approach is slow, breath-led, and deeply attentive. I bring curiosity rather than prescription — meeting each person as the unique, intelligent, whole being they are. I do not believe in fixing. I believe in listening. In creating the conditions for the body's own wisdom to emerge.
Sessions are available online and in person, and are always tailored to you.
Portugal
For ten years I helped to establish and manage an off-grid eco retreat centre in the heart of Portugal — a picturesque valley where we raised small children, grew mountains of organic vegetables, and harvested litres of olive oil each year. It was a life lived close to the earth and close to the body. It was also where my teaching deepened in ways I could not have anticipated. I taught classes locally, guided retreats at our own venue and at centres across Central Portugal, and had the profound privilege of hosting and learning from many extraordinary teachers who passed through our doors.
Living off-grid, in rhythm with the seasons and the land, taught me something that no formal training ever could, that the body already knows how to regulate, how to rest, how to return to itself. It simply needs the conditions. It was a joy to witness many guests at our centre experience a glimpse of off-grid living, and to experience a week of wholesome food, yoga and meditation, rest and relaxation.
In 2017, the wildfires that devastated Portugal tore through our valley and took everything we had built. Our home. Our retreat centre. Our business. Years of work, of love, of community was all gone in an hour.
What followed was one of the most harrowing periods of my life. The acute shock of losing everything so suddenly and so completely is a particular kind of trauma, one that does not announce itself neatly or resolve on any predictable timeline. It lives in the body.
I developed PTSD in the aftermath of the fires and I began, for the first time, to truly understand, not intellectually but viscerally, in my own nervous system, what it means to be a body that has been through something overwhelming and does not yet know it is safe. It took me three years to acknowledge and truly recognise.
My yoga practice held me in that time. Imperfectly, incompletely, but faithfully. It gave me somewhere to bring the sleeplessness nights and the deep grief. I also began to feel the need for something that worked even more directly with the nervous system, as I battled the five years of challenging Portuguese bureaucracy that the fire threw me into. I tried some counselling, and also six months of talk therapy, but I needed something more. That search brought me to a modality of somatic therapy called Embodied Processing.
Healing is never linear. I had to find a lot of trust and surrender, and my body, extraordinary in its intelligence and resilience, responded. I did not come to this work from the outside, it arose from my own lived experience.
“The body’s language is subtle, but it is the language of our being. Learning to listen to it can lead to profound transformation." - Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen
Teachers
I have been shaped by a rich and diverse lineage of teachers, each of whom has left something essential in my practice and my understanding of the body.
I have studied directly with Randall O'Leary of Swara Yoga, Uma Dinsmore-Tuli of the Yoga Nidra Network and Womb Yoga, David Life and Sharon Gannon of Jivamukti Yoga, and Muz Murray, author and teacher of mantra and Vedic philosophy. My early practice was grounded at the Iyengar Institute in Maida Vale, London, and deepened through time spent at the North London Buddhist Centre.
I have been profoundly influenced by the work of Sally Kempton, Donna Farhi, and Tias Little — teachers whose approach to yoga as an embodied, contemplative practice mirrors my own.
My introduction to somatic movement came through Blanche Mulholland of Somatic Alchemy, a meeting that opened a door I did not know existed. From there I was drawn deeper into the world of somatic practice, immersing myself in Continuum Movement and Body-Mind Centering®, the extraordinary work of Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, whose understanding of the body as a living, intelligent system has fundamentally shaped how I work and how I teach.
More recently I have trained in somatic therapy through The Centre for Healing and The Embody Lab, and I have completed a Graduate Certificate in Yoga Therapy through the Yoga Therapy Institute of Australia, a rigorous, clinically grounded training that bridges the ancient wisdom of yoga with contemporary therapeutic practice.
