If you’ve seen my about page, you’ll already know a little about me but I wanted to use this opportunity to go a little deeper into who I am, what I’m really passionate about and how I came to do what I do.  And if you haven’t seen my about page, well here’s my story…

I’m Rachel and I am a qualified holistic health coach and Jing massage therapist. I’m a woman who wants to share my learnings and wisdom from my own journey. 

I’m a parent carer, I’m a wife, I’m a doggie and cat mama. I love to stand in the rain and listen to it lash it down on my head (yes you did read that correctly), I love being in nature, especially with my dog and I love eating food that I don’t have to cook or think about. The simple things really…

Holistic Health Coaching - Who I help

I help parents of teen daughters, teen girls themselves and those in chronic pain make their lives just as they want it… No more being told you can’t do something because of pain, no more feeling like you have to care for everyone else before yourself, no more chasing your own tail and never getting anything done.

Just for Teens

It was in the year of no going anywhere so 2020 for those of you who didn’t live through the pandemic or have amazingly short memories… and I wondered what I could do to help my teenage daughter and others like her. Everything she knew had stopped and we had just moved to a new area a few months before the first lockdown. Her mood plummeted, her behaviour changed overnight and she became volatile regularly saying things like ‘I don’t know what’s happening to me’, ‘I'm stupid, thick or an idiot’. For those first few weeks, life was difficult, very difficult and it got me thinking…

Oh I know.. I’ll design and develop a workshop just for teens to help them build resilience, lower their stress levels and give them back control of their own lives! Obviously!! 

I had always been passionate about working with teenagers ever since working in the NHS and wanted to do more to help them before they reached crisis point. 

I started looking into ways that gave her back some control, that didn’t rely on me constantly telling her what she could and couldn’t do. Instead allowing her the freedom to make her own decisions so she could be in charge. 

What a lightbulb moment! So I spent the next 6 months or so reading, working through a conscious parenting course by Dr Shefali and using all these ideas I had read about in practice with my own daughter and do you know what? It worked. Our relationship started to improve from being one that was fairly volatile to one that has grown from strength to strength. 

I now understand her and she understands me without one of us trying to undermine the other. I remember thinking “Wow this work is huge, I need to get it out there!” with no idea how or where…

Why I’m passionate about working with teen girls

Well here’s the answer… I don't want them to go through what I went through, at possibly the worst time of my life, the most impressionable years of my life. I was sexually abused by another teenager. 

I was made to feel shame, I was made to feel the one at fault. I was made to feel like the one to blame. 

Understandably it took away my whole world as I knew it so I hid the true me because I was scared, ashamed as to how I had let this happen to me. I went from someone who was confident and loving life to someone who hid every minute of every day. 

I was bullied at school, possibly as a result of the abuse. I hid myself from other people, I wore baggy clothes, I hid my shape, I hid my body. I didn’t want people to see me cos the more they saw of me, the more they wanted me, and that made me sick to the very core. To me, I didn’t realise I was any different to how I was before, to me my life was normal, to me it was just my life.

Giving teen girls a voice to believe in their power

This is why I'm so passionate about giving teen girls a voice so they can understand what works for them, what feeds their soul and what doesn't. 

I want to empower them so they can say NO, so this will set them up for life. I don’t want them to go through life believing what other people have said about them, I don’t want them to feel ashamed and at a loss as to who they are. I don’t want them to feel like they have to mask themselves just so they fit in, to feel that they need to put a label around their neck to fit in, for them to feel like they don't know who they are and they are scared. 

Instead, I want them to believe in their power to do what they want, to take back control of their lives and I want you as parents to feel like you can do the same through connection, respect and working in partnership.

Jing massage therapy

So that’s one part of my business, what about the other part - this Jing therapy for chronic pain? 

Well I guess it goes back to one of the stupidest things I’ve ever done - thinking I was clever choosing to put the Christmas decorations away in the loft rather than doing the washing up…and then falling out of said loft onto the ladder breaking 8 ribs all down one side in the process - oww! 

Cutting a long story short this resulted in being in pain on and off for the next 20 years or so without any success or improvement in pain levels. 

You name it, I’ve tried it - osteopathy, chiropractor, amatsu, bowen, physio, acupuncture, increasing levels of pain relief - most therapies would be able to manage my symptoms but none got to the core of the problem. Within days the pain started rising again and I knew I didn’t want to be in pain all the time so something had to change…

It was at this time that two of my clients told me about Jing method massage therapy and said that it would be perfect for my business so yup you guessed it… I started doing some digging yet again. 

I had always been fascinated about trigger points as I had used them with clients prior to knowing much about what they were and how they affect our pain levels. Omg, mind blown yet again! The amount of learning my brain has gone through in the past two years is huge but I am loving it! Anyway…I found out about the course and you could say I am living and breathing it. 

Not only am I working on my own chronic pain, but I’m also helping others to manage their pain levels and the most powerful bit? It’s giving them back control of their own lives. 

And how do I do this? Well, it’s a mix of self-care, stretching, trigger point work and heat and yup it gets to the core of the problem. No more masking the symptoms but actually getting to the root cause and giving the client (and me) back the control so they can do what they want to do without fear of being in pain.

You can find more information and links to book a consultation on my Jing massage therapy page.