Hello!

I’m Naomi and I love this wild tender world of ours and it’s living beings, so damn much!

That is where I have to begin, because everything I care about and do comes from that love. A love that has had to be chosen, again and again, through grief and displacement and the long education of being told, in ways both quiet and crushing, that certain bodies and certain ways of feeling take up too much room.

I lost my father when I was very young, and grief became one of my earliest teachers and put me on the path to where I am now. Not only sorrow, but 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 precious that has stayed with me my whole life. I did not have language for it then. I only knew that feeling deeply had become my way of knowing.

I was born in Tokyo and grew up between Japan and the southern hills of Spain, moving between cultures and languages, learning early how to read between the lines, how to track power without being explicitly taught what power was. 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 negotiated, rather than fixed or innate.

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 a life force of its own, that shame depends on silence and starts to dissolve in the light.

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.

As we have continued to step into this time of intersecting polycrisis, of ecological unravelling, political rupture and collective grief arriving faster than we have language for it, I felt the call to go deeper, to move the questions I had been sitting with in my writing into something more embodied, more relational, 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 shield, and something in me needed to find its way back to that deeper knowing that lives underneath the noise.

What I found, in myself and in the spaces I began to create with others, was that when we slow down enough to actually feel what is true, something loosens, and what loosens most is the belief that we are alone in our struggles.

What moves me most about this work is that it asks nothing of us except presence, no fixing, no resolution, only the revolutionary act of just being with what is, and what I have found, again and again, is that loss, when it is met rather than managed, 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 there is a kind of intelligence in the not knowing, and like soil before anything visible has broken through, something is quietly at work beneath the surface.

What I found, in myself and in the spaces I began to create with others, was that when we slow down enough to actually feel what is real, something loosens. And what loosens most is the belief that we are alone in it. Again and again, people arrive carrying what they have naturally assumed is a private failing, something uniquely, shamefully theirs, and again and again, the room reveals otherwise. So many of us are moving through the same grief, the same disconnection, the same longing for something more honest than the life we have been performing.

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 deeply relational. I am interested in the place 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. A part of my work is bringing people together in these moments of change, so we can remember that we are not alone, that what we are feeling inside ourselves is not separate from what is happening outside of us.

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

My work sits at the meeting point of writing, coaching and collective tending, and the north star is the same no matter the medium: to create the conditions for (re)connection with ourselves, with each other, with what is real, in a world that keeps asking us to pretend, harden and dissociate. Whether that inquiry arrives through writing, a one-to-one session, a retreat, a room full of people, or a newsletter landing in your inbox on a quiet morning, the question doesn't change. Only the form it takes. And the question is never how to fix what we are carrying, but how to finally let it be met.

At the root of all of it is a simple question: how do we learn to see ourselves anew, and listen to the call for change in a way that allows something more honest to emerge?

I do this work through writing, one-to-one coaching, mentorship, group spaces and tender facilitation.

My learning journey is ever ongoing — I am, at heart, a forever student.

My formal training is rooted in body-oriented and somatic approaches: I am an ICF accredited coach trained at The Somatic School, where I also trained in body-oriented group work. As mentioned above, grief has been a powerful area of ongoing study and devotion. I am currently in an ongoing apprenticeship in grief tending with Sophy Banks, and have trained in Climate Grief Ritual work with the Center for Climate Psychology. I have also studied embodied somatic coaching through Coaches Rising, and hold 300 hours of Kundalini Yoga teacher training.

Additional studies that have shaped my thinking include foundations in Process-Oriented Psychology and Psychosynthesis, both of which inform how I work, even if they are not formal qualifications. See below other teachers that have informed my work and practice.