meet rowena

“And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” Anais nin

… This has been my path, most especially in the past five years. I left a successful UK teaching career to coordinate volunteers on education programmes in Tanzania. From this, I became a freelance trainer, coordinator of a refugee education project in Northern France and I gained qualifications and experience in coaching and counselling skills.

I mentored, facilitated, coached, taught. I created Rowan Tree.

I followed my dharma. This is the work I am supposed to be doing. And what a privilege it is to do it.

I’ve also fallen into spirals of not knowing – ones that I wasn’t fully equipped to move out of on my own. I live with and manage anxiety and depression. I’ve felt that I had so many different ways to turn, and yet nowhere. I had so many options, too many options – how lucky, how empowering, how stuck, how frozen, how overwhelming.

So, I explored…

I started to engage with my inner critic, and to understand why she was there

I continued to engage in my own counseling

I read a plethora of books

I decided to ‘feel the fear and do it anyway’;

I pushed too hard, I didn’t push enough,

I fell over, I got back up

I started to work with a coach and a counsellor

I walked and camped, and ran and did yoga.

I engaged in nature and I came back into my body. I started to hear what it had been saying for so long.

I started recognizing what my gut was saying to me and then, another step further, I learned how to trust it and how to act on it.

…I started to understand the patterns in my behaviours

I gave myself kindness.

I started to understand and be at greater ease with that idea that all that has come before is part of bringing us to where we are now; that the learning is in the doing, it’s in the exploration, it’s in falling over that we learn how to get back up.

I decided not to be driven by a need to be the ‘good girl’

I started to create balance between valuing my cognitive and my somatic processes, and the interplay between them

I found that valuing both was the most powerful way that I could be in my thoughts and my emotions – and honour all of them for what they were

I wrote and I wrote – some for public consumption, some solely for myself

I learned to understand and love all of the different parts of me

I am an explorer: both of the tops of trees and of countries across the world.

I speak (rusty) Swahili and am learning Spanish

I am a runner, and am lucky enough to have experienced crossing the finish line of the London marathon and completed a challenge of 12 half marathons in a year.

I walk and I trek.

My absolute happy place, is swimming under water - and am an avid all-year-round sea swimmer!

I am a voracious reader and a lover of food

I’m converting my own campervan

Oh, and at the start of 2019, I went from having thick hair half-way down my back, to a number 2 buzzcut!