My Story
This is the story of how I found my way back to myself and why I now do this work.
I grew up in Poland in the 1980s behind the Iron Curtain in a family traumatised by disconnection and war.
My grandparents' generation didn't know how to articulate what had happened to them, and together with my parents were living out Carl Jung's famous maxim I have spent my own life trying to learn from: "until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate." My childhood was shaped by unpredictable adults: an abusive stepfather and a mother whose own wounds spilled into criticism and control. I learnt early to scan for danger, to freeze my emotions, to make myself small and compliant. To take care of others, and abandon myself. My dad, my one safe adult, lived hours away and I saw him only twice a month, but his postcards, each one a small joke, became my most treasured collection.
I went to University to study pharmacy so I could join the family business, and got a taste for extreme sports when I joined the mountaineering club (I also got into high performance sailing, paragliding and diving). We explored caves in the Polish mountains and took trips to Picos de Europa in the north of Spain.
The calmness you feel when you enter a dark cave and attach yourself to the rope, knowing you'll be sliding down into darkness on your own and nobody is going to help you, might be awe-inspiring, but felt weirdly familiar to me at the time. The rope is a hundred meters long and you can only see about four meters below you because of the feeble carbide light. It was a feeling of absolute exposure and submission to the power of nature.
After I graduated with my Master's degree, I started working with my grandmother in her pharmacy. It was a great opportunity but the atmosphere was oppressively secretive. I had to be compliant and she was controlling. To escape and to keep myself sane, I joined an archaic singing group which had rehearsals one night a week. That was the shining light in my life at the time. An act of rebellion that kept me sane. Singing relies on understanding the power of breathing, and this led to an interest in breathwork and, in the process, the start of an exploration into the depths of my own psyche.
"Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate."
— Carl Jung
Breathwork has its roots in 5,000-year-old Eastern practices but the modern Western version evolved in the US in the 1960s. Psychiatrists had been experimenting with psychedelics to treat depression and were getting transformational results but when LSD was criminalised they needed alternative methods to achieve a similar impact. Research into ancient breathing techniques led to the use of breathwork in a modern setting with similarly powerful results.
Conscious connected breathwork accesses the subconscious part of your mind. I found it an extraordinary experience. I couldn't believe how powerful it was just breathing in a specific pattern. It allowed me to cry and process grief after years of living in a frozen state. It showed me the power of natural healing.
To escape my overbearing grandmother, when I was 27 I moved to the UK. I got a room in a shared house and had a social life with lots of laughter and fun. I went to learn to dance the Salsa and began dating a man I met there, and we soon got married. My life began to happen. That's how it felt. I was young and it was exciting to be in a new country, away from the family drama.
I went to University to study pharmacy so I could join the family business, and got a taste for extreme sports when I joined the mountaineering club (I also got into high performance sailing, paragliding and diving). We explored caves in the Polish mountains and took trips to Picos de Europa in the north of Spain.
The calmness you feel when you enter a dark cave and attach yourself to the rope, knowing you'll be sliding down into darkness on your own and nobody is going to help you, might be awe-inspiring, but felt weirdly familiar to me at the time. The rope is a hundred meters long and you can only see about four meters below you because of the feeble carbide light. It was a feeling of absolute exposure and submission to the power of nature.
After I graduated with my Master's degree, I started working with my grandmother in her pharmacy. It was a great opportunity but the atmosphere was oppressively secretive. I had to be compliant and she was controlling. To escape and to keep myself sane, I joined an archaic singing group which had rehearsals one night a week. That was the shining light in my life at the time. An act of rebellion that kept me sane. Singing relies on understanding the power of breathing, and this led to an interest in breathwork and, in the process, the start of an exploration into the depths of my own psyche.
My breathwork experience had made me curious about natural therapies, so while working as a pharmacist I did a three-year post-graduate diploma at the College of Naturopathic Medicine in London to learn about Naturopathic Nutrition and Naturopathy. After I completed that I left full-time employment and started up my own pharmaceutical quality compliance consultancy and my natural healing clinic. I began to bring together a way of working that integrated all the disciplines I had studied, including the power of breathwork.
It was fascinating to me how each approach - the Western pharmaceutical one, naturopathy, and ancient healing traditions like breathwork, shamanic practices, and psychedelic ceremonies with plant medicine like ayahuasca or Kambo that I would discover later - was kept in a different silo. It seemed obvious to me that they should be brought together under one therapeutic process. I didn't want to turn away from the rational Western medicinal knowledge I had studied; I wanted to find a way to harmonise it with natural and ancestral healing too.
After several years of marriage I discovered my husband was betraying me and we broke up. I realised I had completely abandoned myself in the relationship. All my emotions were once again bottled up. I had become the very person I had left my family to escape. I started psychotherapy soon after and my opening question was 'why did I choose this partner?' and in that moment I finally took responsibility for my life.
I began to try and make sense of the trauma within my family and myself using my evolving knowledge of healing from the Western, natural and ancestral traditions. To stop the cycle they and I were stuck within. Because I knew that if I could escape it, I would be able to help them break the cycle too.
I heard about ayahuasca from my mother. I resisted the medicine when I took it at first. I was just observing until it took me on an experience that showed exactly how my life felt at that moment. The toxicity of the relationship with my husband, the downward spiral I was on. I felt like I was locked in a cage and couldn't move. Sitting in the feeling of fear, of hopelessness, I felt detached from love. I realised I was the only one who could get myself out of the pattern that had led me to my prison.
'I cannot wait for a rescue mission to come and save me' I said to myself. 'It will never come.'
This was a crucial moment in my healing journey.
I had to take control of my life.
The next step of my healing journey was to face all the suppressed emotions stuck in my body. These manifest in each of us differently, but in my case by holding on to excess weight and thyroid autoimmunity (Hashimoto). I had learned by now that the only way is to keep going, to surrender to the process, to trust it even when I couldn't see where it led. I had to plough through the layers of grief and face what I had suppressed. I remembered all those times I went caving. It was time to delve into the deepest, darkest part of myself.
I enrolled in a two-year-long, shamanic course and worked with my shadow. It was a space where I could access traumatic moments of my life, understand triggers and transform the patterns which had ruled my decision making. According to Jung, our shadow is not just the bad parts of us, it's everything that we have been made unconscious of. What is rejected, denied and disowned. It's this aspect of the self that the ego cannot or will not identify with. Most of that shadow has golden qualities like creativity, sensuality, love and art. When we are shamed in our childhood for any expression, we learn to hide it and decide not to show it again. The culmination of the course was life recapitulation, which is from the Toltec tradition. It's a process of reviewing your entire life, every memory, relationship and any significant event you have experienced, to free the positive parts of yourself your shadow conceals. It's all done within a self-made wooden box with a hinged door. It symbolizes the tightness of our minds, the prisons we lock ourselves within. Building the box is part of the process. If you're not DIY minded, it can bring up lots of shadow material to the surface!
Today I am grateful for this intense and deep experience. I know that separation from love, this earthly one between humans and the one from the source of life itself, creates huge suffering.
I went to University to study pharmacy so I could join the family business, and got a taste for extreme sports when I joined the mountaineering club (I also got into high performance sailing, paragliding and diving). We explored caves in the Polish mountains and took trips to Picos de Europa in the north of Spain.
The calmness you feel when you enter a dark cave and attach yourself to the rope, knowing you'll be sliding down into darkness on your own and nobody is going to help you, might be awe-inspiring, but felt weirdly familiar to me at the time. The rope is a hundred meters long and you can only see about four meters below you because of the feeble carbide light. It was a feeling of absolute exposure and submission to the power of nature.
After I graduated with my Master's degree, I started working with my grandmother in her pharmacy. It was a great opportunity but the atmosphere was oppressively secretive. I had to be compliant and she was controlling. To escape and to keep myself sane, I joined an archaic singing group which had rehearsals one night a week. That was the shining light in my life at the time. An act of rebellion that kept me sane. Singing relies on understanding the power of breathing, and this led to an interest in breathwork and, in the process, the start of an exploration into the depths of my own psyche.
I came across Kambo during the shamanic training and took part in my first ceremony when someone I trusted explained how powerful it could be. Kambo is not a psychedelic medicine like ayahuasca, it is a secretion of a giant monkey frog which lives in the Amazonian forest. The secretion has been analysed by Western researchers and so far over a hundred different peptides have been identified.
The peptides in frog medicine enter the body through small burns on the skin and into the lymphatic system, where they have nearly instantaneous effects. It also works energetically, so it helps on a physical, emotional and spiritual level. I have now used Kambo multiple times and my Hashimoto symptoms have reduced by around 80% so far.
I have the lab tests to prove it.
I no longer need painkillers during periods and I have only had one small cold sore flare up since my first Kambo treatment (they used to be a frequent occurrence on my lips and eyes). I also no longer crave unhealthy, sugary foods in the way I used to. My relationship with food has changed significantly. The day after Kambo, and the days after, I usually have a glow of energy, focus, improved mood, lightness in my body and a clear mind. I sleep better too. Kambo helps me with strengthening my relationship with my body. I listen to my body and honour what it needs.
Kambo has been so life changing for me that I decided to become a Kambo practitioner.
I was lucky to meet my first teacher offering a personalised, multi-modality approach to Kambo that went beyond the traditional application as practised by the jungle tribes.
However, I was curious about the roots of frog medicine, so I went to the Amazonian Forest in Peru to spend time with the Matsés (Ibama) tribe who have been working with this frog for centuries. I wanted to see and experience how the frog is treated and the medicine is extracted.
If the harvesting of the secretion from the frog was in any way distressing for the frog, I would not be comfortable working with it with clients. I lived with the Matsés and experienced the process of connecting with the frog and getting it from the jungle, which is very beautiful. The bond between the locals and the frog is ever-present and they communicate with it using sounds that make the frog willingly and repeatedly come to their hands.
It became clear to me as a result of the time I spent with the Matsés and my wide-ranging training across multiple approaches and healing philosophies that the people who live in the heart of the Amazonian forest and people who live in the West have very different medicinal needs. The people in the jungle live in a state of constant ceremony. They are not detached from the natural world in the way we are.
Applying the secretion is just a normal event that occurs in the heart of the village, with children, animals and villagers passing by. There is no trauma-informed approach and there are no safety protocols. It became apparent to me I would need to establish a completely different process to make it safe and appropriate for people in the West.
Today I work with Kambo assisted therapy alongside other modalities depending on what is appropriate for each client. The sessions draw on the unique combination of the Western, natural and ancestral skills and experiences I have brought together, and each session includes an extensive screening, interview, energy work, dietary advice, shadow work and then breathwork or Kambo if required. For all of my treatments I use the power of music and ceremony.
Very often we forget how important it is to pause for a moment, to be heard and seen.
Not to rush. Just to care by providing safety, positive intention, non-judgment and support.
This is the origin story of the work I do with my clients today. The links running through my life are obvious to me now. The foreshadowing of pushing myself at the top of mountains and in the depths of caves only to find the answers I was looking for inside myself. How my ancestors' suffering, disconnection and lack of knowledge about what to do to set themselves free directed me to make sense of my own issues through a combination of Western pharmacological expertise, natural healing and ancestral wisdom. And why the music and song that lay dormant in my heart for so long have re-emerged in the way I create safe spaces for my clients to heal within.
The journey I've been on doesn't mean I don't get triggered or I don't have difficulties in my life, and neither will going on your own journey prevent these things happening for you. But the guided self-inquiry in safety enabled me to face my issues more consciously and be more aware of how my behaviour influences others in a negative or positive way. And this is the space I will create and hold for you.
I went to University to study pharmacy so I could join the family business, and got a taste for extreme sports when I joined the mountaineering club (I also got into high performance sailing, paragliding and diving). We explored caves in the Polish mountains and took trips to Picos de Europa in the north of Spain.
The calmness you feel when you enter a dark cave and attach yourself to the rope, knowing you'll be sliding down into darkness on your own and nobody is going to help you, might be awe-inspiring, but felt weirdly familiar to me at the time. The rope is a hundred meters long and you can only see about four meters below you because of the feeble carbide light. It was a feeling of absolute exposure and submission to the power of nature.
After I graduated with my Master's degree, I started working with my grandmother in her pharmacy. It was a great opportunity but the atmosphere was oppressively secretive. I had to be compliant and she was controlling. To escape and to keep myself sane, I joined an archaic singing group which had rehearsals one night a week. That was the shining light in my life at the time. An act of rebellion that kept me sane. Singing relies on understanding the power of breathing, and this led to an interest in breathwork and, in the process, the start of an exploration into the depths of my own psyche.
I love sitting in ceremony when the medicine starts bringing to the surface everything that is ready to be seen, ready to be worked with. Healing happens when we allow ourselves to feel comfortable in those uncomfortable moments.
When we are safe and ready to face and welcome everything that occurs, to surrender to it rather than fight it, to let it pass through rather than hold on. Not to hold on to it, but let it pass through. To express it. And not identify with it. And in the process bring forth the person and the living role that you were always meant to be and to do.
If you are ready to take control of your life and resonate with my story and a healing approach that harmonises training from the Western, natural and ancestral traditions, then please get in touch. I would love to hear from you.