Hello

Some years ago, I had one of those midlife moments of total unravelling. I found myself suddenly uprooted from all of my previous existence when divorce, traumatised teenagers, an empty nest, perimenopause, inability to secure long-term accommodation due to my ex’s unilateral financial decisions, death of my closest friend and serious health issues all piled into the space of a couple of years. I coped-not-coped through obsessive focus on my cross-cultural research and teaching.

 

At that time, my fieldwork took me to a First Nation reservation in North America, where my  extraordinary Citizen Cherokee host sized me up at a glance at 6am one morning and explained me and my personal imbalance through the lens of a First Nation worldview. On one completely wonderful, life-altering forest walk, she demonstrated how balancing all our ways of knowing, and having a proper, hands-on relationship with nature, was the key to healthy, happy living, especially at times of crisis. I will be forever grateful to her. 

 

Alongside my day job, I began to integrate my cross-cultural learnings on relationships with the natural world with other systems, and I developed the basis of a practice without cultural appropriation that I found really worked for me.

 

Then in recent years, two things happened. I grew increasingly uncomfortable with the environmental cost of my day job - particularly all the intercontinental travel - and I became increasingly focused on one question: how do we bring what nature-centred communities call our 'oldest knowledge’ - that is, the knowledge of how to be in mutual relationship with the natural world we co-evolved with - back into the everyday lives of people in industrialised societies who have lost touch with it?

 

That question led me to create Eden Rooted, which ethically combines indigenous wisdom, our deepest instincts, and modern science, to help 21st century humans, particularly midlife women, restore a real, working, loving, everyday relationship with nature, wherever we are.

 

I work with people, organisations and companies who are ready to listen and work differently - to nature, and to themselves.