Growing up with a curious mind, and an adventurous soul

I loved everything that lived at the edges of ordinary life.

I always knew I wanted to create something with feeling, with heart, and with energy.

What I didn’t know, back then, was that

I’d have to navigate the extraordinary to get there.

Way back in the early 00’s, I began on the ordinary path…education to employment to meetings about my pension. At 24, I thought I’d cracked it ~ I was working in London. Visual merchandising. It was extraordinary success, straight out of uni.

But there’s a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from running before you can walk.

It was reflexology that first offered an alternative language.

In 2005, at 24, despite my outward success and inner arrogance, I was out of touch with myself.

By 2009, just shy of 30, promotionally burnt out… but fascinated in a whole other world outside of the glitter of fashion.

Regular reflexology treatments had held me in my own body at a time when I didn’t know I needed holding.

So I began studying reflexology and anatomy and physiology alongside a full-time job ~ not because I planned to become a therapist. That wasn’t even a possibility back then. I just needed to understand the thing that had been quietly sustaining me for years.

I wanted to look behind the curtain.

This was 2010 ~ long before wellness became trendy.

When burnout was simply failure ~ I left my ordinary life of fashion for something wildly unfashionable.

Quietly, without a cheerleader, without a mentor, without a blueprint.

It was a long time before reflexology became something I could be proud of.

I never came to this work from a place of wealth or trend. I came from breadcrumbs.

This was a leap into financial instability that took years to feel anything other than frightening. Years of wondering whether I’d made a foolish, self-indulgent choice. Years of shaking off a particular kind of shame that comes with telling people you “rub feet” for a living, and watching their face wrinkle into confusion.

But with my curiosity for the edges ~ of ordinary life ~ I began to explore a life on the other side…

What I discovered was that reflexology is an art form.
That each foot arrives like a different instrument.
That learning to read one is nothing like reading another.

The skill isn’t in following a map ~ it’s in listening so carefully that the body tells you where to go.

Sixteen years later, my curiosity has only deepened.

In 2013, I had my daughter - and leaned into everything I’d been learning. Reflexology, acupuncture and osteopathy throughout my pregnancy, working with the body rather than against it.

By the time she started school in 2017, I had become quietly obsessed with the structure of the foot, podiatry, the relationship between what happens at ground level and everything that unfolds in our body above.

I started wearing Vivo barefoot shoes ~ those slightly alarming webbed gloves for feet ~ again, totally unfashionable, and distinctly remember the baffled looks from the other school gate mums.

I felt out of place and entirely in place at the same time.
Closer to the ground than I’d ever been.

I kept walking. Daily. Peeling the shoes off completely in summer to rewire my posture from the soles up. By 2021, I was hosting barefoot walks on the UK’s longest barefoot walking path at PAUS - guiding groups of women across meadowland and sensory trails, watching them feel the same thing I’d felt years earlier in that school playground.

And in between all of that, lockdown arrived - and cracked something open a little further.

In that unexpected void, I found astrology and Human Design. Once again, what began as personal curiosity became a profound study ~ and eventually, a calling. I came to understand that these weren’t separate interests sitting alongside my reflexology work. They were doing the same thing, just speaking different languages.

Reflexology maps the body through the feet ~ listening to over 70,000 reflex points that hold the body’s story.

Barefoot walking extends that conversation outward ~ feet on earth, nervous system softening, the body remembering what it feels like to be genuinely grounded rather than just coping.

Astrology maps your energy through time ~ revealing the rhythms, seasons and cycles that are uniquely yours.

Human Design maps your blueprint ~ how you’re wired to make decisions, where your energy flows freely, and where you’ve perhaps been living someone else’s design.

Four maps. One territory: you.

And then, 2024 something shifted into place ~ I gathered a group of women to take them on the first A Quiet Adventure retreat to Anglesey.
A women’s only retreat, small, no yoga, just private reflexology, salt water dips, long beach walks, good food and evenings that wind down slowly…story meditations to root us into place, to connect us to a strangely welcoming liminal land.

By 2026, Salt Circle began. Women gathering in Ely on Thursday evenings, with bowls of salt water to soothe tired soles {souls} and folk tales, written for the Fen landscape we actually live in. Stories set on the Fen, on the coast, in the old rhythms of the Moon. Not entertainment, something closer to remembering. Somewhere to reach more often than the winter Anglesey retreats.

My work has always been about offering attention, quiet art forms, all designed to take you somewhere magical, and help you feel comfortable in your own skin. Finally I’m beginning to feel more comfortable in mine.

I am a reflexologist, a folk tale creator and a walker of salt marshes and keeper of circles. With my eyes to the sky, my head in the stars, and always, my feet on the ground…

I’ll meet you on the other side of ordinary.

…wishing you an extraordinary adventure, wherever it may lead.

Jess x