Emotions live in the body

There’s a thread that runs through everything I do today, but I didn’t start out looking for it.

Hi, I'm Sara, and in 2022, I took a gap year and quit the job that had me burnt out. I didn't have a clear plan, just a sense that something needed to shift and I needed to make space in my head and in my life. I began by walking 800km of the Camino de Santiago alone, a pilgrimage across Spain that has a way of stripping life down to its essentials. Walking day after day, I started to notice something I hadn’t paid attention to before: how deeply the body holds our experiences. Fatigue, relief, emotion, intuition, connection—they weren’t abstract anymore. They were physical. They were embodied.

I didn't know it yet, but the seed for my current life were planted there and then. That awareness stayed with me.

Not long after, I enrolled in a massage course. At first, it was simple curiosity—a desire to work with the body in a tangible way. But very quickly, it became something else. Through touch, I began to witness how tension, emotion, and memory are intertwined. The body wasn’t just something to relax; it was something to listen to. I started feeling people's bodies, people's emotions, people's armouring, but I didn't have a name for them yet.

That curiosity deepened into a more intentional exploration of the relationship between body and emotion. I found myself drawn to practices that didn’t separate physical wellbeing from emotional experience. I started reading booking like "the body keeps the score", "bodymind" and "when the body says no". The more I read, the more I wanted to know. That’s what led me to shiatsu.

Shiatsu is a form of Japanese bodywork rooted in traditional Chinese medicine. It works through touch—applying pressure along the body’s energy pathways, known as meridians—to support balance, release tension, and encourage the body’s natural capacity to regulate itself. But beyond technique, shiatsu is about presence. It’s about meeting the body where it is, and creating the conditions for it to soften, reorganize, and restore. It's about the nervous system and working with the fascia and breath to return the body to a state of expansion.

Through practicing shiatsu, something clicked for me: the importance of nervous system regulation.

So much of how we experience life—our stress, our relationships, our sense of safety—lives in the nervous system. And what I began to understand is that healing isn’t only about talking or thinking differently. It’s about creating moments where the body feels safe enough to shift. The moment we get in touch with those moments of safety, it becomes easier to notice when we're shifting away from safety and bring ourselves back.

This is where my work naturally evolved.

Shiatsu opened the door, but I wanted to go deeper into understanding the emotional and psychological layers of the body. That path led me to train as a somatic psychotherapist, where I continue to study how trauma, stress, and experience are held and processed through the body.

Today, everything I offer—whether it’s a shiatsu session, a workshop, or a shared ritual like tea—is rooted in this perspective.

An ongoing exploration of how small, intentional moments can support the nervous system, and gently bring us back into connection with ourselves and show up better in the world.