About Me & My Work
As an Intuitive Leadership and Peak Performance Coach, I work with leaders under pressure to restore clarity, presence, and sustainable performance.
I didn’t arrive at this work through theory or trend - it was forged through lived experience when everything I thought was stable disappeared overnight.
I’d been an ICF certified coach for ten years and for fifteen I’d taught mindfulness meditation, energy healing and yoga, when overnight without warning my home and surrounding thousand buildings burnt down in a wildfire. We had a rough time getting out and some of our neighbors didn’t make it.
In the following months I went through four surgeries, a divorce (as lovingly as we could do it but challenging) and a much-loved parent’s diagnosis with a debilitating terminal illness. It wasn’t just my neighborhood that was in ashes. I had total burnout. Barely sleeping, I stopped working.
My life became a quest to recover because if I didn’t, I wouldn’t have much of a life. I devoured every article, book and practice I could find that could help. I tried new techniques and mixed protocols together like cocktails.
Jigsaw piece by piece, I started to see improvements.
One part of the puzzle was a groundbreaking technique that rearranged the neurology of my brain, restored my sleep and wiped clean the trauma from the fire. It uncovered unconscious limiting beliefs that were keeping me stuck so I could change them. I spent a year getting trained and certified to an advanced level so I could use the technique with my clients.
Another piece was learning new energy work that cleared blocks and charged up my body like never before. And another was putting knowledge gleaned from hundreds of hours of research into strategic practices to regain a healthy nervous system and recover my exhausted adrenals.
I combined the most effective protocols into practical, repeatable steps. My leadership coaching and team trainings are the result: Keys to profound mental, emotional, physical and spiritual rejuvenation.
I share my full story below (5 minute read) to inspire you that whatever you’ve been through, true healing is possible.
My Story
I didn’t know why I couldn’t sleep. The PTSD I experienced after the fire, particularly the insomnia, was especially severe due to early trauma I’d blocked out until my late twenties.
As a teen and young adult, when I tried to go to bed, I would often get panic attacks. I’d run outside and walk around the streets of London for hours trying to get the adrenaline out of my system.
One night, when I knew someone had been murdered a few blocks away, I remember thinking ‘This isn’t logical – you’re safer in bed.’ But I didn’t feel safe.
Walking the streets at night, I was mugged and attacked three times. I was tired of making police reports. I was tired of not feeling safe.
And then one day, aged 27, a memory surfaced. In the memory, I was very small. It was during the night. A friend of my parents entered my bedroom and molested me. Shortly afterwards, another memory came back. This time I was 7. It was the morning after I’d been raped.
My parents hadn’t known that one of their friends was a pedophile.
As an adult, I came to understand that I hadn’t realize these terrifying ordeals only happened when that man stayed in the house. To my child’s mind, I thought they could happen any night. And to my undeveloped brain, if this scary thing was going to happen in my bed, I was going to make sure I was awake and alert for it.
So at a very young age, I had trained myself not to sleep.
After these revelations, I had some therapy, calmed my nervous system and developed good sleep hygiene. And for many years, I slept quite well. If I was going through a stressful time, I wasn’t the best sleeper but I told myself this was normal. Most of the time, I was okay.
After the fire, all that changed. It was such a shock having my life threatened and losing my home that once again, I felt unsafe. My nemesis Insomnia returned and nights became ordeals.
Because I’d lost everything (we’d been underinsured) and I had just gone through a divorce, I didn’t have financial reserves to take much time off work. I needed to recover fast.
I knew that ‘Neurons that fire together, wire together’ (Hobbs). This means that if you experience a frightening situation, particularly one that happens over and over, your brain will remember the circumstances around it in an attempt to warn you when those same circumstances happen again. It learns to trigger the same neural connections by fusing those things together.
The fire had triggered my early life trauma of not feeling safe in bed. The neurons that were firing together were SLEEP = UNSAFE.
And in an attempt to protect me, my brain was trying to stay vigilant and alert all the time.
But understanding this intellectually didn’t change it.
I had to find a technique that could intercept the neurons firing response and create a new circuit.
Through my tenacious research and soul’s guidance, I found it. And after experiencing the technique, I got trained and certified in it so I could help others.
I was still exhausted, but once I could sleep again, over time I was able to apply energy practices and other techniques to rebuild myself and my life.
An intrinsic part of my healing journey was soul retrieval. I had to get to know the fragmented parts of myself that had felt shattered during those early traumatic experiences and love them. I had to bring into conscious awareness the beliefs I’d created to survive in that environment, realize they were no longer serving me and let them go.
How It Created a New Challenge
Years later, I learnt the early sexual trauma had created a different challenge.
For over a decade before the fire, I’d experienced pain in my abdomen for one to two weeks of every month. At times, it was so acute, I couldn’t move. Shortly before the fire, an investigative scan revealed a tennis ball size fibroid on the top of my uterus. The surgeon advised me to leave it, saying it was too risky to remove.
I could never say what caused another woman’s fibroid – these things are deeply personal. But for me, it was my body’s response to those early sexual assaults. It felt like a physical ball that held years of fear, grief and emotional pain. I wanted it gone.
I found a different surgeon and scheduled a consult. That meeting changed my life.
The nurse didn’t think the pain was caused by the fibroid but something called endometriosis. She said the only way to find out was through surgery. This surgeon knew how to safely remove the fibroid, as well as any endometriosis legions, and keep my organs intact.
She was right. Surgery showed I had it, as well as the more challenging adenomyosis. But a few weeks before the surgery was the fire. I barely registered the diagnosis and didn’t have the bandwidth to do research or make any lifestyle changes. I’d just lost my home.
The ensuing PTSD following the wildfire exacerbated the old symptoms and, months later, I found myself in pain. I asked if my surgeon would see me. He did and we scheduled a second surgery.
This time, I read every scientific journal and book I could find on the condition. It’s possible we’re born with it and many women have it who have never experienced sexual assault. Again, I couldn’t comment on another’s experience but for me, I felt the early trauma contributed to its development. As with most disease, inflammation plays a huge role, and a root cause of inflammation is acute stress.
The condition has been my greatest teacher.
I used to be addicted to adrenaline because releasing it made me feel alive. I was a Type-A who did four things at once and wore my badge of business as if it was an accolade.
Once I’d connected flair ups with stress of any kind, that changed.
I knew the pain was my body’s way of teaching me something. It was showing me how to live.
I made big changes. The person I was completely changed in the process.
I stopped rushing from thing to thing. I stopped confusing anxiety and excitement.
I got the endometriosis in remission and I was mostly pain free.
Despite practicing energy healing, I have no problem with surgery. Your body has created an illness and you can manifest its treatment in a variety of ways. You’ll always need to address underlying causes and make changes but be gentle with yourself as you go.
We’re all learning and growing and the greatest gift we can give ourselves, and anyone else, is compassion.
The Power of Love
In fact, one of the health condition’s greatest lessons has been learning self-compassion.
I used to be so hard on myself and so critical. One day, soon after the fire and surgery, all that changed.
My clothes had been destroyed in the fire so I’d gone to Nordstrom to buy new ones. I was just about to enter the changing room when I stopped.
Ever since I was fourteen, whenever I’d been in changing rooms under fluorescent lights, staring in the mirror I’d always found fault with some part of my body. As if criticizing myself would somehow mold me closer to perfection, which would make me lovable.
But this day was different. My post-surgery abdomen was badly bruised, covered in band-aids and swollen so that it stuck out five inches.
Could I be kind to myself instead?
I made a new pact. ‘We’re not going there. You’ve been through surgery. A divorce. Your house burnt down. We’re not going there.’
I went inside and looked at the imperfect, bandaged, scared human staring back.
I’d always felt I had value due to my accomplishments. I’d found it easier to be loving towards myself when I looked nice.
In that moment, I finally learnt to love myself for who I was. Not because of anything I’d achieved or owned. Not for having anything to be proud of because I had nothing. I learnt to love myself because I exist. I was still here, and I deserved love.
I had to lose everything to get there, but I discovered that life feels a whole lot lighter when you value yourself not for what you’ve achieved, how you look or what you own but for who you are.
What Really Is Love?
For two years my story ended there. But my beloved Dad’s health was deteriorating. He has Lewy Body Disease with Dementia and Parkinson’s. Sometimes he’s cognitive enough to know he’s dying; at other times he doesn’t know what’s happening or where he is.
As well as suffering the physical pain and disability of Parkinson’s, he is traumatized by hallucinations and the disease attacks the nervous system so he gets inconsolably upset. I flew back and forth to visit, at one point staying for months. I had never seen anyone suffering so much and I felt powerless.
The protocols I had at the time worked effectively to integrate pretty much any challenging emotion except for grief. And the grief overwhelmed me. One day, as I held my hands over my chest, trying to calm my heartache, I realized the area was physically hurting.
A scan revealed a breast tumor over 2 cm wide. My emotional heartache had created a physical counterpart.
A biopsy revealed the tumor was benign and a skilled surgeon removed it, leaving my breasts intact. But the emotional distress of dealing with it and my upset over what was happening with Dad exacerbated the old endometriosis symptoms and I had one final surgery.
Two weeks later, Dad collapsed and was taken to ER. We reluctantly realized we needed to get him into a home with full-time professional care.
I had always wanted him to be able to stay in his own house and I was devastated. My reaction swiftly triggered acute physical pain, leaving me panicked about the implications. That morning I had received internal photos from the surgery displaying my cauterized uterus for the third time. I couldn’t control what was happening with Dad but I also couldn’t seem to control how upset I felt about it, which resulted in pain.
I sat on my meditation cushion and asked ‘What am I not seeing? I don’t know how to do this. I can’t have another surgery, I just can’t.’
The guidance was clear: ‘You’re resisting’. I replied with my thoughts – ‘Yes! Because what’s happening with Dad is so awful.’ I heard back: ‘Then you will be in pain’.
I realized I’d spent months screaming at God/Spirit/Life that this shouldn’t be happening, that it was wrong. The guidance continued:
‘You don’t know what his soul’s journey is. You can’t see from your human perspective. He is receiving love, in his own way. Allow him to have his experience and accept it.’
I needed to stop fighting. I needed to find radical acceptance and within that, experience whatever emotions were present and release them. It wasn’t for me to judge that it shouldn’t be happening and take away Dad’s pain; I couldn’t anyway. My job was simply to allow, without judgment, and to love.
With understanding came acceptance - and the instant manifestation of acceptance is peace. As I found respect for his soul’s journey, my grief transformed to love.
I finally understood concepts I’d read about for decades. Everything we feel has to cycle through our body. Even if we think we’re projecting something out there, even if our anger is justified, our body experiences all of it and pays a price.
Through perceiving the situation from a higher level, two things happened. The first was that within two days, all my physical pain ceased and I have been pain free ever since. And secondly, I can speak with Dad and stay emotionally regulated. I don’t always find it easy, but I am able to hold space for him in neutrality, and he often tells me how much he appreciates the joy I bring to our time together.
There is a common misconception that if you care about people in distress, you’ll dive in the hole with them and feel what they do. But we can only contribute what we are. Finding peace and equilibrium within ourselves and sharing from that place is the only real way to be of service.
I’ve since developed powerful protocols for processing grief and anger that I share with my clients. We need to permit ourselves to feel these emotions fully so they can cycle through us and be released.
I later realized I had asked for more guidance that night but I was always being guided. In my grief, I just couldn’t hear it.
The Greater the Darkness, the Greater the Light
I never think about the long ago early life events now. I’m a completely different person. The soul draws lessons for its growth and I’m grateful for the journey because it’s made me who I am. I’ll probably always be more sensitive than other people but I’ve learnt to honor that and it makes me good at what I do. Sometimes the more we have experienced the darkness, the greater our appreciation of the light.
A new acupuncturist recently read my pulse and said – “Do you meditate? People who have long standing meditation practices have very deep pulses like you.”
The other day, someone told me I looked like I’d never had a day’s tension in my life and had spent every night sleeping soundly with a humidifier.
And to both I say – GREAT! True healing really is possible.
If you’re resourced and ready to dive deep, schedule a consult to work directly with me on clearing blocks, restoring energy and building personal power for aligned, sustainable success. For practical tools, tips, meditations and updates on workshops, classes and retreats, sign-up for my newsletter and follow me on social.
We are living in extraordinary times. It’s time to start living an extraordinary life.
To your health, wealth and JOY,
Millie x
Credentials
Master’s with Distinction from King’s College London with the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in Text & Performance.
BA (Hons.) degree from King’s College, University of London in English Language & Literature.
Solution Focused Coach training from Erickson Coaching International: Erickson Certified Professional Coach.
Associate Certified Coach credentialed by the International Coaching Federation.
Advanced Certified Rapid Rewire Method® Master Coach.
Advanced Training in Flash Technique Trauma Processing.
Two 200 hour Yoga Teaching certifications accredited by Yoga Alliance.
Reiki Energy Healing Master Teacher - Training practitioners in the Usui System of Natural Healing.