I’m Jess, and I’ve accidentally spent almost two decades learning how to help people navigate change through movement and therapy

I say accidentally because that was never the intention.

I started out as a group exercise instructor and went on to become a Master Trainer and international fitness presenter, travelling to more than 20 countries to educate instructors and delivering workshops and presentations in the UK and globally.

I genuinely believe group exercise is a powerful and wonderful space.

There is an alchemy that happens in a room full of people moving together. Someone can walk in in one mood and leave in another. Someone can walk in feeling lonely and leave feeling connected. There are always shifts.

I still hold that deeply and dearly.

But I never quite fit the mould of what mainstream fitness considered a fitness professional should look like or sound like.

And by sound like, I mean what I would say in classes, how I would motivate people and what I wanted to educate them about.

I was always much more interested in shifting mindsets than shifting weight. I became passionate about challenging mainstream wellness messaging that is potentially harmful, extreme or elitist, and about creating approaches to movement, therapy and wellbeing that are compassionate, accessible and grounded in real life

That led me to become increasingly intentional about talking about movement as mind medicine and positioning myself as a fitness professional who prioritised mental health.

At the time, that was a fairly unusual perspective.

Then social media grew, and so did the conversation around movement and mental health which was great but also frightening.

Brilliant because these conversations were finally becoming mainstream.

Scary because I also watched people with very little training or professional qualification positioning themselves as experts in areas that I felt deserved much more care and integrity.

So I went back to university and trained as an integrative therapist.

Partly because I wanted to learn more (I'm a bit of a sucker for education and educating) but also because I wanted to make sure that the work I was doing was ethical and grounded in proper professional training.

At the time, I didn't actually intend to become a therapist.

My plan was to bring therapy into the fitness world.

But during my clinical training I realised what an extraordinary privilege it is to hold therapeutic space for someone.

The therapy room is like no other.

It's a pause in the messiness of life. A place to be witnessed without judgement. A place where you can show the parts of yourself that might feel too difficult, too complicated or too scary to show anywhere else.

So I began seeing therapy clients alongside my work in fitness.

And for a while, I kept the two worlds separate.

But I've come to realise that bringing those worlds together was always the point.

I don't believe in a wellness utopia.

I don't think there is a perfect routine, a perfect body or a perfect version of ourselves waiting on the other side of enough self-improvement.

I do believe that when we work with both the mind and the body, we can create more space to feel healthy, grounded and at home in ourselves.

My own life has given me plenty of experience of change

I've lived through grief, motherhood, illness and other significant transitions. And throughout some of the most turbulent periods of my life, I have repeatedly found my way back to two things:

movement and my therapeutic toolkit.

Over the years, I've refined both.

I've learned that movement can change how we feel, but that sometimes we need to understand what we're feeling before we can change anything at all.

I've learned that talking can be transformative, but that we don't live our lives as floating heads!

And I've learned that there is no single prescription for wellbeing that works for everyone.

I work with every client as an individual and honour the beauty of our individual stories.

But after almost two decades of experience, education and practice, I have accumulated a pretty robust toolkit of approaches, ideas and insights that I believe can be genuinely useful when life gets messy.

And that's what has brought me here.

I can now see that all those seemingly separate parts of my life-movement, therapy, education, mental health and lived experience - were actually building towards one integrated approach.

One that helps people navigate the messiness of being human, particularly when life has changed and, in turn, changed you.

That's the work I'm doing now.