Welcome, I’m Vanessa…
I’m someone who has been shaped by the body for many years. My journey began in the discipline of it. I’ve been a yoga student for 25 years, spending long hours in Ashtanga Mysore rooms, immersed in daily practice. I completed my yoga teacher training in 2010 and went on to co-found a yoga studio in Cape Town. In those years I was devoted to form, strength and structure. I believed the body could be refined into coherence through effort.
And then my body interrupted me…In 2014, after travelling to India, my health began to unravel and I became unwell. What followed was a long period of change. My digestion shifted, my skin flared, my hormones destabilised and my mental health wavered. The identity I had built around being strong and capable began to fracture.
Between 2014 and 2016 I went through an intense period where my life felt like it was breaking apart. That became the next threshold… During that time I worked with plant medicines including iboga, ayahuasca and mescaline, alongside breathwork and other therapeutic modalities, as ways of meeting what had been frozen within me.
At the same time, I was also working with a nutritionist and naturopath who supported me from a gut–brain health perspective, helping me stabilise my digestion and hormones while I navigated this period. The physiological support was just as important as the psychological and spiritual exploration, creating some grounding as deeper layers were opening.
It wasn’t just physical. It was existential…Looking back now, I can see that deeper cycles were also moving through my life at that time. Themes of control, vulnerability and restructuring were surfacing. I was being initiated into a different relationship with my body. Not mastery or control, but listening.
Through this process I began to understand that the body carries stories. Protective strategies and adaptations that often form in moments we barely remember from childhood. On my own path I had to process PTSD from three near-death experiences that had been held in my body since childhood. They were not simply memories. They were patterns living in my nervous system.I continued to participate in occasional ceremonies until around 2020, but over time I realised that what had been missing for me was integration.
Since then I’ve trained as a naturopath and nutritional therapist, studied the physiology of the nervous system, and completed training in somatic work and Compassionate Inquiry. Through that work I’ve come to understand much more clearly what integration actually means, and how the body needs safety and support to process what it carries. It was never about chasing experiences. It was about bringing the fragments back into coherence.
Astrology later became another language for understanding the process. Not as prediction, but as pattern recognition. It helped me see timing, repetition and the deeper cycles shaping my life. It offered context to the breakdown and gave shape to the path, bringing a sense of orientation to what once felt like chaos.
Over time these threads began to weave together. Body, trauma, plant medicine, nervous system and cycles. None of these strands stand alone for me. They inform how I see health, healing and the unfolding of a life.
This work continues to shape me as much as I shape it.