Hi, I’m Deborah!

 “I am lucky to be what I am!

Who I Am

I create gentle, grounded spaces where people can soften, reconnect, and remember who they are beneath everything they’ve carried. 

I am someone who has lived a full, questioning, deeply human life and who continues to meet it with curiosity, compassion, and courage.

I hold a quiet reverence for the complexity of being human: the way we can be strong and tender, certain and unsure, grounded and still reaching. I no longer need life to be simple or explained away. I trust lived experience, the body’s wisdom, and the slow remembering of who we are beneath the roles we’ve carried.

My life has shaped me, as all lives do. I have known rupture and repair, belonging and leaving, certainty and unravelling. These experiences have not hardened me; they have softened me. They’ve deepened my empathy and strengthened my commitment to living, and guiding others, from truth rather than fear.

I am a mother and a grandmother, roles that have stretched my heart and taught me humility, devotion, and fierce love. I am a partner and a friend who values intimacy, presence, and kindness. I am also someone who understands that no role, however meaningful, contains the whole of who we are.

Creativity has always been a quiet companion in my life. Words and images became places of refuge and expression long before they became visible to others. Writing and art remain ways I listen inwardly and speak outwardly, not to impress, but to connect.

Spiritually, I walk a path that honours both mystery and discernment. I am drawn to meaning without dogma, faith without fear, and a sense of the sacred that includes both science and soul. I trust that whatever animates life is not threatened by questions and that we are not required to have it all resolved to be worthy, loved, or whole.

Like most people who have lived deeply, I carry contradictions. I notice my inner critic and choose not to let her steer. I practise self-forgiveness again and again. I continue to learn how to live with more gentleness toward myself and invite others to do the same.

This is the ground from which Soulscape was born.

I don’t believe people need fixing. I believe they need space to breathe, to soften, to remember themselves. My work is about creating that space: grounded, compassionate, and deeply respectful of each person’s own inner wisdom.

If you’re here, you may already sense that something in you is ready to return home.

You’re welcome here.

How I Work

I work in a way that is gentle, collaborative, and deeply respectful of each person’s pace and inner world.

I don’t position myself as an authority over your experience. Instead, I act as a guide helping you tune back into your own body, nervous system, and inner wisdom.

My approach weaves together evidence-based therapeutic understanding with embodied practices, nervous-system regulation, reflective inquiry, and guided inner experiences. Nothing is forced. Nothing is rushed. You are always in choice.

I pay close attention to safety; emotional, psychological, and energetic. This means creating spaces where you don’t need to perform, explain yourself perfectly, or be “fixed.”

Whether we’re working one-to-one, in a group, or through guided practices, my intention is the same:

• to help you feel more at home in yourself
• more resourced in your body
• and more connected to what matters to you

This work isn’t about becoming someone better, it’s about coming back into relationship with yourself with kindness, honesty, and care. 

“What a liberation to realize that the ‘voice in my head’ is not who I am.
Who am I, then?
The one who sees that".
~ Eckhart Tolle
 

I grew up in a world where emotions were swallowed, where truth was dangerous, and where safety meant disappearing.

My childhood was marked by abuse within my family and within the religion I was raised in. In my early thirties, after my own children were harmed, the weight of everything I had survived collapsed inward. I fell into a suicidal depression and spent days in intensive care.

Later, there was language for what I had lived through:

• Religious Trauma Syndrome.
• Complex PTSD.

For much of my life, I could not feel beyond the surface of my skin. Numbness was not a flaw it was how I survived. Feeling nothing became the way I stayed alive.

And still… something inside me whispered "there is more".

So I rebuilt.

I left the religion that shaped my childhood. I left a marriage that no longer held life. I raised four children on my own. I put myself through university over six years, part-time, completing a Bachelor of Science with a major in Psychology.

Slowly, I reclaimed myself from the ruins.

Then something unexpected and deeply meaningful occurred.

One night, my Nana came to me in a dream. She spoke clearly and without hesitation “If you write your story, I will organise the editing and publishing.”

I woke with a certainty I could not ignore.

I wrote the memoir under a pseudonym, and in 2014 it was released into the world. That book went on to receive international recognition, but more importantly, it became a bridge between who I had been, and who I was becoming.

It marked the moment my story stopped being something I survived, and became something I could stand inside.

Over the past three decades, I’ve dedicated my life to understanding healing not only academically, but somatically, spiritually, and through lived experience.

My professional training spans trauma, nervous system regulation, and therapeutic practice, including clinical trauma hypnotherapy (with over 2,000 hours of training and international registration), alongside modalities such as EFT, CBT, ACT, DBT, motivational interviewing, Reiki, massage therapy, and extensive work in addiction, correctional, and community settings. I hold multiple diplomas and certifications and have completed over thirty specialised trainings in trauma-informed care.

But while my education gave me knowledge, life gave me wisdom.

For decades, I have walked alongside women and men carrying quiet, invisible pain and I hold a special reverence for women who give deeply but rarely receive; women who are tired of being strong; women who long to come home to themselves.

The healing of my own children.
The gradual return of my emotional life.
The rebuilding of my body through somatic work, breath, Reiki, women’s circles, nature, nervous system practices, and hypnotherapy this is what taught me how people actually heal.

In my fifties, creativity arrived as medicine. Art found me. Poetry came as a second language; intuitive, free form, and often shaped as haiku. Nature became a guide: mountains, birds, trees, oceans, and the quiet companionship of animals who taught me how to feel again.

A Course in Miracles introduced me to forgiveness not as a lofty ideal, but as a daily practice that softens fear, loosens judgment, and restores inner freedom. Learning to extend compassion toward myself and then naturally toward others changed the way I live and relate to the world.

Around the same time, I discovered the work of Dr. Joe Dispenza, which helped me understand transformation through both neuroscience and energy. Through meditation, I learned to surrender into stillness: beyond thought, beyond identity, the spacious field where change becomes possible. I learned to notice old fear-based patterns and inner critical voices without believing them, and to consciously choose a different way of being: grounded in presence, love, and possibility.

Together, these threads shape how I live, how I guide, and how I support others by helping people remember their own wisdom, their own capacity to heal, and their own unbreakable connection to what is sacred within them.

Now, at sixty, in my sixth decade, a powerful threshold year everything has come together.

I lead not from theory, but from lived experience, presence and walking alongside.

This is the place I meet you in.

That is why I created Soulscape:

• Return to Self: a sanctuary for women who have walked through fire
•  Midweek Melt:  a circle for healers and helpers who hold so much for others, and for those longing for a place where they can finally rest, melt, be seen, and return to themselves gently.

Soulscape is a calling, a culmination, a homecoming for me and for those who feel drawn to walk this path with me.

Everything that once broke me has now become the ground from which I help others rise.

And it has all been worth it.