Welcome, I’m Vanessa…

I’m a naturopath, but more than that, I’m someone who has been shaped by the body. I began in the discipline of it. Yoga teacher training in 2010. Ashtanga Mysore rooms. Long practices. Yin immersions. Co-founding a studio in Cape
Town. I was devoted to form, strength, structure. I believed the body could be refined into coherence through effort.

And then the body interrupted me…In 2014, after travelling in India, my body broke down and I became
unwell. What followed was a long unraveling. My digestion shifted. My skin flared. My hormones destabilised. My mental health wavered. The identity I had built around being strong and capable began to fracture.

It wasn’t just physical. It was existential…Around that time, deeper cycles were moving too. Themes of power, control, vulnerability and restructuring were surfacing in my life. I can see now that I was being initiated into a different relationship with the body. Not mastery. Not control. But listening. But over time, I realised I
was just as interested in what lives beneath the surface.

The body carries stories. Protective strategies. Adaptations formed in moments we barely remember. On my own path, I had to face PTSD from three near-death experiences that had been held in my body since childhood. They were not just memories. They were patterns in my nervous system. That became the next threshold…I worked with plant medicines, from Iboga to ayahuasca to mescaline, alongside breathwork and other therapeutic modalities, as ways of meeting what had been frozen in me. Later, I began to build on this with somatic tools, Compassionate Inquiry and IFS  work. The altered states and the grounded integration. 

It wasn’t about chasing experiences. It was about bringing the fragments back into coherence. Astrology then became another language for understanding the process. Not as prediction, but as pattern recognition. It helped me see timing,repetition and the deeper arcs shaping my life. It gave context to the breakdown. It gave shape to the path. It brought a sense of soul orientation to what had once felt like chaos. None of these threads stand alone for me. Body. Trauma. Plant medicine. Nervous system. Cycle. They began to weave together.

This work continues to shape me as much as I shape it.