Hello there! I’m Naomi and I love this wild world of ours and it’s living beings, so much. That is where I have to begin, because everything I care about and do comes from that love.

I truly believe that love and grief are two sides of the same coin. Grief became one of my earliest teachers when I lost my father as a child. Even though I would do almost anything to have had him live instead, I can now see how his loss became somewhat of a North Star that put me on the path to where I am now and gifted me a kind of openness that never really closed, a way of caring that felt vast and bodily and sometimes overwhelming, a sensitivity to what is fragile and what is so very precious about our time here.

  • I was born in Japan and split my my childhood between the opposite worlds of Tokyo, at the time and still is one of the densest populated city’s on our planet and the hills of southern Spain, moving between growing up mixed-race, belonging fully to neither one world nor the other, shaped how I understand identity as something relational, always being co-created and re-imagined.

    I began modelling as a teenager, and the fashion industry became my rough initiation into womanhood, my politicisation, my education in how bodies are ranked, judged and valued. When my body changed and no longer fit the industry's narrow standards, something in me that had been swallowing itself for years finally stopped. I began to speak, and in speaking, I discovered something I have returned to ever since: that what is named honestly begins to loosen its grip, that lived experience, when allowed to be seen, has an alchemical life force of its own because shame depends on silence and isolation.

    That discovery became a book, a practice, a way of life. My first book, Mixed Feelings, explored how digital environments were reshaping our relationships to our bodies, our sense of worth, our inner lives. My Substack, Tender Contributions, continues that thread, widening the personal into the collective. And my coaching practice, Soft Landing, is where the questions move off the page and become relational.

    I came to this work navigating my own depths: neurodivergence, chronic illness, perfectionism, moments of really deep depression and anxiety. After trying so many different healing modalities, what I learned is that the truest healing comes from self-acceptance and connection, from being seen for who we actually are, as we are. What most often blocks us from that love, from loving ourselves and feeling connected to love as a force, is fear and shame. Shame depends on silence and by naming what hurts honestly an alchemical process can takes over and allows it to dissolve in the light.

    As we have continued to step into this time of intersecting poly-crisis, of ecological unravelling, political rupture and collective grief arriving faster than we have language for it, I felt the call to go deeper, to live and dance with the questions I had been sitting with in my writing into something more embodied, more relational and more alive in the room.

    After years of immersing myself in different psycho-spiritual modalities and healing arts, I trained as a body-oriented coach, wanting a way to bring these questions into direct contact with people, into the body, into relationship. I had spent years using words as both performance and a shield, and something in me needed to find its way back to that deeper knowing that lives underneath all the noise.

    What moves me most about this work is that it asks nothing of us except presence, no fixing, no resolution, only the often undervalued but revolutionary act of just being with what is, and what I have found, again and again, is that loss, when it is truly met does not close life down but opens it, that tending to grief makes space for joy, for love, for the full aliveness that hardens and shrinks when we spend our lives looking away.

    We are already hard enough on ourselves, and that is what I am most curious about, what I want to make my life about, how we learn to hold the hard things with softer hands, how we invite more curiosity and connection into our lives, and how we feel a little less alone in this ever wild time in the world.

    I currently live in Milan, Italy with my partner. When I’m not working with my beloved clients or writing, I love to frolick in the Alps, travel to new places, read, sing in the shower, go for long walks and cook for my beloveds.

    Hope to meet you soon :)

We are living through times of coming apart, and what once felt certain doesn't always fit anymore. We are taught to rush that place, to fix it, to turn it into something productive. But I believe there is a kind of intelligence in the not knowing. Like soil before anything visible has broken through, something is at work beneath the surface.

I create spaces where we can sit together to feel into what is trying to emerge, loosen the grip of inherited expectations, and find a way of moving that actually fits our shape. Not built from a place of brokenness, but from something that feels more true to who we are.

  • My approach is relational, body-oriented and person-centred. I am interested in where the personal meets the collective, in learning to see what is ours to carry and what belongs to systems, stories and beliefs that have shaped us without us always realising it. Many of us are moving through deep inner change while the world itself is shifting, and we are often taught to experience these things privately, as though something is uniquely wrong with us, when in reality so many of us are feeling the same turbulence.

    Because if systems change requires anything, it requires new stories. About ourselves, about one another, and about what is possible.

    My work sits at the meeting point of coaching, writing and collective tending, and the question is the same whatever the form. Not how to fix what we are carrying, but how to finally let it be met.

  • ICF accredited coach trained at The Somatic School, including training in body-oriented group work

  • Ongoing monthly supervision to support ethical, reflective, and relational practice

  • Ongoing apprenticeship in grief tending with Sophy Banks

  • Training in Climate Grief Ritual work with the Climate Psychology Alliance

  • Studies in embodied somatic coaching through Coaches Rising

  • 300-hour Kundalini Yoga Teacher Training certification

  • Additional studies in Process-Oriented Psychology and Psychosynthesis, both of which continue to inform my thinking and practice

  • Ongoing learning through teachers, writers, facilitators, and relational spaces that continue to shape how I listen, work, and make meaning

Thank you to the many teachers, practitioners, and lineages that have shaped my path.

While I do not practice within any single tradition, my life and work have been deeply blessed by streams of wisdom. I give special thanks to Rachel Blackman, Sophy Banks, Francis Weller, Malidoma and Sobonfu Somé, and to the enduring words of bell hooks, Margaret Wheatly, Alice Walker, Grace Lee Boggs, and so many others whose presence continues to guide me.

To my mother Nel, whose everyday acts of generosity taught me what it means to live in service to life itself, and to my father, whose absence I would never have chosen, and whose passing continues to orient my life toward meaning, sensitivity, and purpose. I honour my grandmothers, whose lineage and love remain alive in my spiritual life, and give thanks to my siblings and my partner, whose steadiness and care make this work possible!

So grateful for my beloved clients, readers, friends, and mentors who walk alongside me, your encouragement, trust and reflections are the reason I am still here.

Finally, I offer gratitude to both the invisible and living world, to all the elements that support me, that ground, nourish, and sustain me, allowing me to not only do this work but to be alive in this wild world of ours!