I am a play therapist by training, and in my previous work, I supported children and families with difficult stories. For years I worked in schools with vulnerable families, children who were in care or adopted, and school staff trying to make sense of the most challenging situations. Now, I facilitate circles of support and mindful creativity groups for women with chronic health conditions, with a focus on learning embodied safety, finding understanding company along the way, and exploring what it might mean to Live Well, Unwell.
I have danced my own long dance with pain and illness, which has led me along a path of radical self-acceptance, dismantling lifelong assumptions and structures.
My work seeks to empower women to reclaim their bodies and their health from the systems of dominance that damage us, with an awareness that healing ourselves is intimately tied to healing the earth, as the earth is damaged by those same systems.
The work is rooted in foundations of trauma-sensitive practice, embodied mindfulness, community, and the ‘Spiral of Living Well, Unwell’ which brings together threads of unconditional acceptance, radical self-care, mapping our own healing, creative expression, and finding purpose and belonging.
I also write, poetry and prose, and in my writing I ponder and play with questions of identity and belonging, health and wellness, connection to people and place, and the interplay between past and present. I love to find the connecting threads through life’s experiences and to map these out into coherent narratives that help us understand where we have been, who we are now and where we are going.
My poetry is inspired by nature and the Earth, by women and womanhood, by my ancestors and heritage. I have self-published a collection of poems, and a series of blessings following the Celtic seasonal festivals. I have been regularly published in the Earth Pathways Diary and won a commended in the 2017 Mothers’ Milk Books competition. I was commissioned to write a poem for use in the SPACES Gloucester project.
I live on the edge – amongst buzzards and skylarks, with long views over steep valleys to the big river, and land of my ancestors beyond. I am fascinated by the interplay of my Welsh and German heritage, by questions of identity and belonging. I love the sea, high hills, sunsets; stories, trees and fires.
Welcome, come on in…
Jenny
Of Owls and Ancestors 