Meet Jade: therapeutic bodywork and embodiment coaching in Putney, London
Sometimes we have been carrying, coping, bracing and pushing through for so long that it begins to feel normal.
We can lose touch with the signals of the body, with our own needs, and with the quieter sense of ourselves beneath all the doing.
Myofascial Release, therapeutic massage, embodiment coaching, yoga and Yoga Nidra are different doorways into this process of Re-membering: a return to greater ease, awareness and choice. Less pushing, proving and performing. More space to be, to listen, to receive, and to move through life from a place of greater presence and relationship with ourselves.
For much of my life, I was very good at carrying responsibility, responding to what was needed and finding a way through.
I was capable, resilient and accustomed to keeping going.
Eventually, my body began asking something different of me.
The questions that followed, about what we override, what we carry, why understanding something does not always change it, and what becomes possible when we slow down enough to listen, now sit at the heart of my work.
My path here
I studied and worked in law, including immigration and asylum, before spending many years in the Violence Against Women and Girls sector.
There, I supported women in the aftermath of sexual violence, advocating for and alongside them as they navigated the criminal justice process, while also working towards wider systemic change. I later moved into management and leadership while completing a Master’s in Woman and Child Abuse.
I became extremely good at functioning in demanding environments. A former manager once called me the “bounce-back queen”. I could burn out, recover, and return to being highly capable and effective again.
I remember a therapist asking me, What happens if one day you don’t bounce back?
At the time, the possibility seemed almost absurd.
Until eventually, I didn’t.
Repeated burnout developed into chronic fatigue and chronic pain, and I reached a point where I could no longer keep overriding what my body was telling me.
Talking therapy had helped me understand a great deal about myself and my patterns. But I began to recognise the gap between understanding something and actually being able to live differently.
What happens when we understand the pattern, but continue to live it anyway?
From pushing to listening
Yoga supported me through the latter years of that period and became an important part of how I began to slow down and step away from a way of working and living that had become unsustainable.
Bodywork supported me too, although for a long time I approached it much as I approached life: more pressure, more effort, something strong enough to help me keep going.
While completing my Master’s alongside full-time work, I was sometimes having deep-tissue massage every week, occasionally more than once a week, to manage the stress, pain and tension sufficiently to continue.
It gave me temporary relief, but I kept returning to the same pace and the same cycle.
Through Myofascial Release, I encountered another possibility.
Rather than trying to force the body to change, I experienced a slower kind of listening: inviting the body into safety, meeting what was there with attention rather than force, and allowing time for it to sense, respond and reorganise in its own way.
That shift, from overriding towards listening, resonated far beyond a treatment technique.
It now sits underneath the way I work, and increasingly, the way I try to live.
Returning through the body
Today, alongside my private practice, I work as a Body Therapist at Women & Girls Network, supporting women who have been affected by all forms of violence and abuse.
There is something significant for me about returning to an organisation where I once supported women through advocacy, emotional support and leadership, and now meeting them through the body.
Earlier in my career, much of my role involved helping women navigate systems and circumstances over which they often had very little control, while trying to preserve as much choice, agency and voice as possible within them.
Now the work can begin somewhere different: with the body that is theirs.
My years in the Violence Against Women and Girls sector, together with extensive specialist training and experience around trauma, sexual violence, power and control, consent, boundaries and bodily autonomy, profoundly shape how I meet people in this work.
They also taught me something about presence and listening long before I encountered those same principles through bodywork.
For some people, reconnecting with the body needs to happen very gradually. Feeling the body more fully, or allowing the nervous system to move out of a highly protective state, can itself feel overwhelming.
For others, the need may be much simpler: to stop for a while, receive care, enjoy touch, rest, or experience something being offered to them without anything being emotionally, practically or relationally required in return.
The doorway is different for each person.
That same orientation informs my wider practice, whether someone comes with chronic pain, tension, exhaustion, jaw clenching, difficulty switching off, a wish to be cared for, or simply the sense that they have lost touch with themselves somewhere amongst all the doing.
Re-membering to Be
Myofascial Release, therapeutic massage, Embodiment Coaching, yoga and Yoga Nidra are different doorways into the work I offer.
My growing work with Family Constellations extends that inquiry into the wider systems we belong to, including the ways family history, relationships and inherited patterns may shape us outside our conscious awareness. I am currently deepening my training in this work and organise Family Constellations workshops in London with Shavasti.
What connects these strands is a movement from automatic response towards greater awareness and choice.
When we slow down enough to perceive ourselves more clearly, we may begin to recognise what we are carrying, what we are overriding, and some of the personal, relational or systemic influences shaping how we move through life.
Awareness does not dictate what must change.
But it can create the possibility of choosing.
For me, that is part of Re-membering: returning to relationship with ourselves rather than living only from the patterns, demands and systems that have shaped us.
This is not a journey I stand outside of, neatly completed.
It is an inquiry I continue to live myself.
And it sits at the heart of the work I offer.