In my mid-twenties, I left Sydney and moved to Italy.

I was officially there to attend the Università per Stranieri in Perugia.

Really, I was running away from a shitty relationship.

I wasn’t being treated well. I was indulging in unhealthy habits, allowing myself to be disrespected and living with an almost constant sense of self-hatred.

I picked myself apart in the mirror.

I had an eating disorder.

I knew I had to get away. I needed enough physical distance to sever the connection and begin healing my relationship with myself.

I moved to Perugia and began trying to create a new life and identity.

My flat became the place everyone wanted to come to. I would go to the markets and buy fresh produce, watch Italian cooking shows, of which there are sooo many, and cook for my fellow students.

Food was one of the ways I knew how to fit in and make friends as a shy, introverted and quite frankly insecure young woman.

I fed people, and they gathered in my home.

At the same time, I had put on a lot of weight. I was inflamed from Crohn’s and probably from the pressure of trying to construct an entirely new life while burying so much of what I felt.

My body did not feel like a safe place to be.

I didn’t listen to it and punished it for “letting me down.” I was so much in the victim mindset of “why me?”

Sicily

My parents came to visit me on the back of a trip they had taken, and together we travelled to Sicily.

We stayed in the most beautiful hotel in Taormina.

From my window, I could see Mount Etna.

She had not erupted in years, but smoke was billowing out of her. At night, in the darkness, I could see lava trickling from her apex.

I was mesmerised.

We weren’t allowed to go onto Etna because she was erupting, so I could only watch her from the outside.

Being on the outside looking in was familiar to me.

It is how I had felt for much of my life. I still experience it sometimes now. Less with people who understand energy work and the spiritual world. More with those who consider themselves “normal” and have no frame of reference for the way I experience life.

Back then, I didn’t think about any of this.

I didn’t look at Etna and decide her eruption represented what I was going through. I didn’t connect the lava moving through her with the inflammation moving through my body.

I simply watched.

Much of that trip to Sicily exists in fragments in my memory.

Mount Etna outside the window remains vivid.

My body was demanding my attention

It was hot, and I developed flat, red welts across my thighs and abdomen.

At first, I thought they were related to the humidity.

They were hideously itchy. Itch is torture. When I sweated, the welts stung, and they drove me mad. I couldn’t sleep.

I was embarrassed by how they looked. I didn’t want to go to the beach because people would see them.

My bowel control was also so poor that I couldn’t get out and explore very much.

I was in Italy, trying to build a new life, and my body was restricting how I lived, still.

Looking back now, I can see that I was burying my emotions and ignoring what my body needed.

I did not feel safe. My nervous system was fried, although I didn’t have that language at the time.

I continued to push myself, and quite frankly I wallowed in self-pity.

What my body needed was trust, safety and listening.

I could not give it those things yet.

I was still in the mess

Living in Italy began a regeneration of sorts, although I was very much still in the mess before the resolution.

I became so sick that I had to return home to see my specialists. My body went deep into a Crohn’s flare, and I lost all the weight I had gained.

I did, however, shed the relationship I had gone there to leave.

Then I went further into my experience with Crohn’s.

That experience changed the course of my life.

Crohn’s showed me that I could find a way forward even when the medical system couldn’t find one with me. I learned to explore, draw on different forms of wisdom, listen deeply, follow my intuition and find the right support.

My gastroenterologist told me that what I ate would not make a difference.

That made absolutely no sense to me.

Crohn’s is a disease of the gastrointestinal tract. The gastrointestinal tract runs from the mouth to the anus. How could the food passing through it not be relevant?

So I kept asking questions.

I studied and tested.

I explored PT, holistic lifestyle coaching, counselling, yoga, functional nutrition, sound healing, low-tox living, energy work and essential oils.

I tried GAPS, the Specific Carbohydrate Diet, keto, fasting, juice fasting and carnivore.

I didn’t try all these different modalities because I wanted a long list of qualifications.

I was trying to get better.

Food, fasting and GAPS made the biggest difference for me.

I began having periods of better energy.

Then I became pregnant without trying, despite having been told at twenty that I had cysts all over my ovaries and would never become pregnant without IVF.

During my pregnancy, my Crohn’s went into remission.

Apparently with autoimmune diseases it’s about 50/50, 50% go into remission, 50% flare even worse.

It did show me that my body was capable of more than I had been told to expect.

My daughter changed how I saw my body

My daughter changed my relationship with my body.

From the time she was a baby, I would see her gazing at me.

I realised that I had watched my own mother pick her body apart for my entire life.

I had absorbed that way of seeing a woman’s body, and now my daughter was watching me.

I knew I had to clean up my self-perception.

I became healthier, more vital and physically strong. I worked with a psychologist named Rosie, who helped me understand how I had tried to adapt in order to find my way in the world.

Essential oils and energy work became the pinnacle of that healing.

I wasn’t “trying” to be the person who accepted herself in my head anymore.

I began to really love who I am and accept the path I took to get here. Including being grateful for having Crohn’s disease!

Etna came back

I did not make the connection between Etna’s eruption and that period of my life until the other day.

We were exploring the different aspects of my second mesa through guided processes, and Etna came through.

She wanted to be at the centre.

Afterwards, I listened to one of Maestra Jemma’s recordings and heard her speak about her own connection with Mount Etna.

I found that interesting. It's not the first "coincidence" that I've found between what's happening for me and what is suddenly in a live or prerecorded call.

Etna had come through in my own guided experience before I heard Jemma talk about her.

I am allowing Etna to be at the centre of my mesa without overthinking or overexplaining what she is doing there.

She told me that’s where she wants to be.

We will see how the relationship develops.

I can, however, see the alignment now.

Etna erupts. She alters the landscape. Volcanic material becomes part of rich and fertile soil. Life grows through the landscape she has reshaped.

When I stood before her in my twenties, I was attempting to leave one life and create another.

I was releasing a relationship that could not continue. One with someone else and, as it turns out, one with myself too!

My body was inflamed, my emotions were buried and the identity I had constructed was becoming impossible to sustain.

I was also beginning a regeneration I could not yet recognise.

I had to return home.

I had to become sicker.

I had to go further into my experience with Crohn’s.

I had to study and test what could help me heal.

Eventually, I built a completely different relationship with my body, my intuition and myself.

I became the best health advocate for my children.

And I became the healer I am now.

Why this makes me a better healer

When a woman understands her patterns intellectually but still does not feel differently inside herself, I get it.

I have been there.

I know what she butts up against.

I am also proof that the relationship she has with herself can change.

When insight has not created that change, we need to understand why.

Is something being held physically?

Energetically?

Ancestrally?

Are several layers involved?

My experience with Crohn’s created the need to search. Everything I studied, tested and integrated in response gave me the breadth I now bring to my work.

The women who work with me do not need to know which modality applies or where we should begin.

My responsibility is to listen, see how the different parts relate and recognise what she cannot yet see for herself.

Sometimes the body is asking for practical support.

Sometimes the nervous system does not feel safe. She cannot relax, even when she’s relaxing!

Sometimes an adaptation that once helped a woman survive has become the way she sees herself.

Sometimes the pattern began before her, within her family or ancestry.

And sometimes she already understands everything in her head and needs help bringing that understanding into her body and life.

The woman outside the window

I have been thinking about that young woman in Sicily.

She was looking at Etna through a hotel window, unable to approach because the mountain was erupting.

She was also standing outside herself, looking in.

She could see that her life needed to change. She did not yet know how to trust her body, feel safe within herself or listen to what she needed.

She had no idea that decades later, Etna would return and ask to sit at the centre of her mesa.

Perhaps Etna had been connected with me all along.

Perhaps the mesa is simply allowing me to recognise the relationship now.

I don’t need to decide yet.

I can allow her to be there and see what develops.

What I know is that the woman looking through that window did find a way.

She learned to listen.

She learned to trust herself.

She learned to love who she is and accept the path she took to get here.

And everything she studied, survived, tested and embodied became part of the medicine she now carries for other women.

If you understand your patterns in your head but still do not feel differently inside yourself, there may be another layer asking for your attention. My work helps us explore what is being held physically, energetically or ancestrally, and what you need to begin living differently.

You can explore working with me here.