photo credit: Elise Hurcombe

Hello, you are most warmly welcomed here.

I struggle to write about myself, so here is my humble attempt.

My name is mel and I'm a neurodiverse sensitive (or HSP for short). My sensitivities have helped me understand my need for connection and sanctuary. They continue to ask more of me as I build a faithful relationship of trust in the information my body provides me with. I'm practising championing the values and insights of my body and her needs.

I've spent most of my adult life as a movement practitioner and researcher investigating what moves us rather than how we move (I'm a big fan of the German choreographer Pina Bausch). I played with ways to challenge the conventions and expectations of public spaces and to bring the body and her awareness back into the room by crafting delicate, magical moments, and unexpected pauses of stillness.

I adore words. Language is the altar that illuminates the inherent value of the body and her stories. They shape a place made by the imagination, for the delight of the imagination. This is where the imagination truly belongs to herself, to this fertile ground.

I worked across the creative industries as a creative producer and interdisciplinary lecturer in arts and business in service to building sweeter connections and community alliances to celebrate the beauty in our differences.

"real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new lands but seeing with new eyes."

Marcel Proust

I discovered the Thinking Environment during my coaching training. I was hunting for a practice that offered more depth, space and connection. I was gasping for more stillness and aching to reconnect with my agency and the insights of my body, imagination and intuition. This elliptical system delivered the promise of no interruption in an urgent and restless world and honoured the expertise of the experiencer with rigour and grace.

My enquiry burns-brightly on and drives me to cultivate spaces of sanctuary for all who feel unhomed and unheard, to tempt what has been forgotten or unloved back into belonging.

This work has been crafted by my exquisite need and I hope it will honour yours too.

The ecology of practices that inform and ground my ethical approach, these pillars of care are:

Making Sanctuary : a space to acknowledge and foster the very real and overwhelming feelings that we are currently experiencing - our sorrow and our collective earth grief. This sacred space is informed and shaped by the grief and shadow work of Francis Weller and Catherine Liggett alongside the wisdom of Thomas Hübl, Tara Brach, Bayo Akomolafe and Tricia Hersey.

The Body : As a movement practitioner with over twenty-five years of experience investigating the intelligence of the body; authentic movement, Body Weather, improvisation and in writing (especially the female voice or Écriture féminine). My work has moved through environments as spaces of enquiry to challenge behavioural norms, to move in slowness and with care and to privilege hospitable kindness over economic growth.

The World Body : inherent somatic information and knowledge that co-creates the ecology of our mind-body, and how our bodies are grounded in and intimately connected with our earth-heart-body.

Imagination Thinking: I've worked with young people and adults across universities, schools, and workshops to weave muscular creativity and ethical imagination play that is spirited and focused, grounded and supple, divergent and generative, and to build trust in different intelligences.

Time to Think : grounded in the grace and courage of Nancy Kline's approach to liberate the inner, quieter voice, this practice gracefully co-creates a quality of thinking in partnership that enables innovative thinking processes to emerge from an informed, embodied place of courageous connection with oneself, unhindered and influenced.

Connection and Feeling With : Joanna Macy's extraordinary work, The Work that Reconnects, has imbued such value and commitment to connection and bold, hearty sharing. This body of work has influenced and informed how I engage with our difficult feelings in our global environmental crisis and to develop robust resilience, deep care and agencies of alliances in our shared grief.

Seeing, Sensing and Presencing : Otto Scharmer's Leading from the Emerging Future: from Ego-System to Eco-System Economies was a deep dive and committed practice as communities of enquiry. This work fosters the foundational capacity of deep listening anchored to practices that integrate and are informed by the head, heart and hand to respond to the need and the context. In relationship.

my training includes...

Thinking Environment Coaching training

Thinking Partnership training

Through the Door (Climate Psychology Alliance)

Climate Coaching, (AoEC)

Theory U (U-Lab: Leading from the Emerging Future, MIT)

The Work that Reconnects

ILM Coaching

A Masters of Arts

I am a member of...

the Time to Think faculty (The Thinking Environment)

the Climate Psychology Alliance (CPA)

the Climate Coaching Alliance (CCA)

and the Work That Reconnects network.