About me
I am a woman, an advocate, a global nomad, a healer. I have many cultural backgrounds and languages but none that I can call my own. My different religious, cultural, linguistic, professional and geographical backgrounds and history brought complexity to my identity, sense of belonging and path. For the longest they were all a source of restlessness and angst. Now they are the very source of my voice and impact in the world
I had the privilege of becoming a medical doctor, a psychiatrist and a psychotherapist. For the past 25 years I worked with different marginalised and privileged communities around the world. From the HIV and mentally ill homeless person in Harlem to the privileged rehab in London to the UN humanitarian worker in Rome to the refugee in Cape Town.
I train and supervise psychotherapists and humanitarians to become more powerful versions of themselves.
My life mission has always been to be there for others. What I didn't realise was how much trauma I was carrying, both my own and the cultures I was part of. For the longest time I believed I was surprisingly free of trauma soldiering through difficult life circumstances, a challenging profession and cancer. I was very proud of the way I was coping. I was engaged, making a difference, fighting for peace.
Everything was fine...until I crashed
My body forced me to start a journey I was not trained for in my medical and psychiatric training. Grief and trauma ('symptoms' in my vocabulary until then) had to become shared experiences to be integrated. It was only through that crack that I was able, in community, to deeply connect with and integrate my own personal and family history of trauma and migration and transform it into precise creative ACTION.
South Africa has been a cradle for my voice and action bringing together many different parts of me. All of them are now moving in the same direction and creating safe spaces in which women deeply and authentically attune and connect, midwifing meaningful action.
Over the past few years in South Africa I found, through the people on my path and the principals of Ubuntu, for which our personal wellbeing necessarily is achieved through our collective wellbeing, a true space of deeper integration of my internal world and my inter-connection to all the other elements on this planet.
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5 years ago I started a collaboration and a deep connection with the people of the Scalabrini Refugee Center in Cape Town. Together we built a Personal Development experiential journey for women refugees.
What we created was an 8 sessions process that allows women to connect to their emotions and a deep sense of themselves. Each session is an experiential journey through topics such as emotions, trauma and anxiety regulation, connection, conflict and anger, integration and change, skills and values and creating an action plan. Each facilitator brings their own specific energy and they have voice and power to bring their own perspective and culture to the process. I support and supervise the facilitators to help them lead from a place of deep embodied presence.
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Shingi West, Pascale Avenvuka Mbu-Letang, Silvia Matzviita created this program with me. Merciline and Patricia Vuvu continue to power it now with vitality and impact
I am deeply grateful for the impact you have on me.
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The facilitators, the staff and the women, all migrants have been a true inspiration in understanding how the process of migration forces us to connect to deeper layers of identity, belonging, resilience and creativity catalysing direct social action back into the community. Something I did not see in the western world. It is in witnessing the power of this deep authentic creative movement from presence to action that the idea for this project came to life.
I strongly believe that global transformation, in an ever polarizing world, has to start from personal integration of our own internal world and the intergenerational legacies we carry. Creating safe spaces for people to connect to their innate powerful legacy is my way of transforming my history with its expansions and contractions into transformative action.
