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therapy so for 18 months all I had was touch. I cannot express deeply enough how this literally gave me my son. His entire prognosis changed before we even made it to any other therapist.

After 2 months of paediatric massage 3 times a day, I picked my child up and suddenly felt his arms reach around me and felt as he buried his little face in my neck and squeezed. He hugged me for the first time in his life. I waited nearly 3 years for that moment. At that point all we had was massage. From there he started to make small moments of eye contact and as his trust in me grew he started trying to tell me things, without words but he was trying to communicate with me and reach me. I believe massage was the bridge that let me come into his world a little and him come into mine. And there we found each other.

Over time I learnt co-regulation techniques, calming tools, learnt about the neurological function and working with the nervous system. The vast amount of therapy he has undergone has taught me more again and my innate need to research and expand on various techniques meant that I spent over a decade figuring out what works, why it works and how. All of that was poured into my son.

He is now fully verbal, in a mainstream high school, has made friends and is genuinely the most affectionate guy on the planet. While this is also the culmination of many other therapists' contributions when we did finally get there, as well as a myriad of support workers and teachers, I will always passionately advocate for touch therapy as I have seen and felt how it can create a bridge to truly meet one of the people you will ever love most in your life.

I am so incredibly passionate about working with other families and offering the years of experience I have expanding on how to work with a neurodivergent child incorporating not just massage but also co-regulation techniques, bodywork, regulating myself, working with his little sister as the sibling of a neurodivergent child, building a calm environment in the home and becoming the architect of our lives rather than being at the mercy of circumstances, environment and living in a state of reactivity to every meltdown or situation as it occurs. I bring this knowledge and experience to the work and having lived this, I can honestly say that having something that I can fall back on as a parent that is gentle, enjoyable, predictable and deeply connective literally changed our lives. I am passionate about passing the torch on to other parents with the same lived experience in any way that I can. And there are so many of us.

The same can be said of my work as a mother that had a baby with intense colic, experienced postnatal depression, at the time was with a partner that worked away. There just wasn't anywhere I could go to find support, knowledge, usable techniques or even feel seen. Parents of babies face a myriad of issues that requires not only a specific approach but they are also navigating a huge reinvention of who they are and often this comes with a complete lack of confidence and uncertainty.  

We no longer live in tribes and villages where parents are supported and surrounded by elders and community to help carry the load and raise children within a trusted collective. Women more than ever are feeling the lack of support as mothers, in a world where we are expected to be the entire village. We are expected to go to work but spend quality time with our children and be a partner, a friend, go to school meetings, stay fit, participate in our own self-care, take care of the appointments, the children’s extracurricular activities, their playdates, have a social life, have time to ourselves, the list continues. It’s not sustainable, it’s not healthy and it’s not what we are made for. We are made for connection. As a parent connecting with your children offers such a deeply personal source of happiness and we don’t always have the time anymore. I hope to provide a framework to parents that are specific to needs and challenges families are facing, even if that’s cultivating quality time with their kids because they simply don’t have the quantity of time, we can offer families support, tools and options that we currently just don’t get. Many parents fear they are losing their children to technology and need a way to keep their bond strong with their child, parents are working long hours to cover the cost of living and are looking for a way to use the time they have to spend with their child in a way that feels important, connective and offers quality over quantity.

The Village is here to offer parents tools and support from birth throughout childhood and has the ability to help guide parents through their journey as they and their child develop. We approach multiple systems in the body in order to have success in creating a positive home life and function in daily living. When we connect through the universal language of touch, we can bridge barriers and work with the body’s innate intelligence of healing itself.

The Village mission is to offer multiple tools to families all bought together in one place, through one service, that can truly make a difference to parents, their children and build connected family units to create a culture of support and unity in a world that has forgotten that it used to thrive in villages.

We are that Village.

Because it takes a village to raise a child, but it also takes a village to raise their parents.