Hello, I’m Emma...
I live and work at the House at the Edge of the Woods, where much of what I offer unfolds around the hearth, in the kitchen, at the table, and among the trees.
People come to work with me when something in them is shifting — grief, thresholds, belonging, unravelling, or a pull towards a life that feels more aligned, more rooted.
Earlier in my working life, I spent many years accompanying individuals and groups through change, conflict, grief, and transition. I trained in Family Constellations, trauma and neurobiology, psychotherapeutic counselling, mindfulness, and Nonviolent Communication, and held accreditation as a Professional Certified Coach with the International Coaching Federation and as a Certified Trainer with the Centre for Nonviolent Communication. I was also trained in Brené Brown’s work as a Certified Daring Way™ Facilitator, and worked internationally offering Compassionate Leadership training.
I no longer work within those professional frameworks. I let go of professional accreditations as a different shape of work began to claim me. Those years remain an important apprenticeship, shaping how I listen, how I stay with complexity, and how I attend to what is spoken and unspoken.
Over time, the work widened. I began to understand that healing and belonging are not individual projects, but relational ones — shaped by land, ancestry, community, and the times we are living in. That the work of becoming human is not self-improvement, but a communal act of remembering.
The work I offer now is rooted in ritual, craft, and community. It happens in the woods, by firelight, through shared meals, slow conversations, handmade practices, and ceremony. I work with people asking large and tender questions: how to live meaningfully in a time of endings, how to grieve what is being lost, how to belong more deeply to life.
This is not coaching in its old form. It is companionship, mentoring, and soul-work — practical, ancient, and deeply relational. It draws not only on training, but on decades of living, tending, and remembering what it means to be human in good relation with each other, with place, and with the unseen.
Root, Branch and Devotion
I am and have always been a hedge witch — a woman who lives at the edge and whose soul insists on a rooted relationship with place, ancestors, myth and magic. But it has taken a long time to get here, to the House at the Edge of the Woods and to living in such a way that my life and livelihood are aligned with what my being had for so long ached for.
For years I moved around relentlessly. Like most of us born in this part of the world, I was planted and grown in a culture that craves the fast road, the adventure, the explorer and the conqueror. The orientation of my life was seeker, searcher, itchy-footed and always looking for a better day, a better place, a better me.
And ten years ago my life turned upside down, and the journey here began.
How I got here…
1986–1989
Beginnings and Becoming
Resourceful, I left home young and learned resilience through upheaval — early years marked by rebellion, independence, and the discovery of self-reliance. I became a mother at 18yrs old and began exploring healing and self-development, starting a vegetarian catering business and training in counselling and massage.
1990–1997
Motherhood and Awakening
I raised two children while navigating heartbreak, marriage, and divorce. I travelled to India to live with my brother at Solitude Farm, met teachers at the Sri Ramana Ashram, and began seeking spiritual depth through Krishnamurti and Nisargadatta. These were my first glimpses of peace and curiosity about inner life.
2001–2006
Service and Recovery
I worked with young people excluded from school and re-discovered a passion for social change and compassion in action. I founded PACE (Portsmouth Arts & Community Education), trained as a life coach and careers advisor, and entered a 12-step recovery program that became a turning point toward peace and self-kindness.
2008–2014
Professional Grounding & Expansion
PACE merged with a larger charity, leading major community projects. I discovered Nonviolent Communication (NVC), mindfulness, and Brené Brown’s research on vulnerability. I became a certified coach and trainer, joined international programs, and taught Coaching for Transformation and Brené’s curriculum on shame and vulnerability, The Daring Way™️.
2015–2016
Loss and Deep Initiation
I cared for and accompanied my husband, Richard, through illness and death. This was not my first but certainly my most formative apprenticeship in dying, grief, and the endurance of love — learning things I did not seek to learn, and skills that cannot be taught outside lived experience.
This period marked the beginning of my work in accompanying others through endings. It reshaped my understanding of responsibility, devotion, and what it means to stay close when there is no fixing to be done. Alongside this, I completed my training as a certified Nonviolent Communication trainer and co-founded Returnings, a grief gathering in Wales, before returning to live in the UK.
Broken-hearted and dishevelled, I found my way to myth. I began studying with Martin Shaw and joined the School of Myth. The stories saved my life — not by rescuing me, but by giving shape, language, and ground beneath my feet again.
After time spent in India, uncertain where — or whether — I belonged, I returned to the UK to visit Richard’s grave. On the drive, I passed a sign advertising woodland for sale. I stopped, submitted, and bought eleven acres of ancient woodland, and moved back to England. What followed was a slow re-rooting: learning to coppice, plant, tend, and listen, and finding land that became both teacher and companion.
2017–2025
Rooting and Stewardship
I gathered a community of good-hearted people to work the land with me, to grieve, feast, tend and practice some kind of raggedy village making. From here I founded woodland- and community-based projects exploring grief, myth, belonging, and care for place.
I enrolled in the Orphan Wisdom School and became a student of Stephen Jenkinson, to whom I remain deeply grateful. His teaching asked much of me — an obligation to grief, to endings, and to the fierce love of life that loss demands. I was gathered, challenged, and changed by that work, and it continues to inform how I live, work and accompany others through death and transition.
Alongside this, I convened study groups devoted to the writings of Martín Prechtel, whose beautiful language has profoundly shaped my understanding of culture-making, devotion, and what it means to remain human in broken times.
I later brought into being the House at the Edge of the Woods and began tending gardens and a small food forest alongside the woodland. These places are now held for community — for gatherings, for grief, and for handmade ritual around weddings and funerals. I buried my father and several close friends in these years, and continued to walk alongside others through death, marriage, and life transitions.
More recently, I began re-studying embodied healing practices, this time with Kimberley Ann Johnson (Mothering the Bones). As my work became increasingly rooted in lived experience, land, and relationship, I chose to release formal professional certifications and continue through place-based, relational forms of accompaniment.
