From Systems to Sound: Trauma, Resistance, and Returning to the Body

Like many people leaving university in 2008, I entered the world of work through whatever paths were available rather than those that felt intentionally chosen. What I found was not direction, but systems, interlocking structures designed to manage people, risk, and distress.

I began working in homelessness, substance use, and frontline care. Over the years I moved through hostels, outreach services, needle exchange programmes, and harm reduction work. Early in my career, I worked in one of the first hostels in the UK to permit on-site injecting drug use as part of a harm reduction approach. This was a formative experience that shaped my understanding of risk, survival, and the complexity of meeting people where they are rather than where systems expect them to be.I was part of initiatives including Wedi Nos Wales, and worked during a pivotal time when naloxone training and distribution was being embedded into frontline services.  I was involved in the rollout of naloxone training and distribution across frontline services and communities. This included supporting the early development of street-based outreach prescribing and naloxone access pathways, some of the first of their kind in Wales at the time. It was work rooted in urgency, adaptation, and trying to respond to rapidly shifting drug trends in real time.

It was also a period of rapid change in substance use culture. The psychoactive substance ban had just come into effect, and almost immediately new synthetic drugs such as spice and MCAT began to emerge across the same populations we were working with. What became clear was how quickly policy shifts ripple into lived reality, how one system inevitably feeds another. Criminal justice, housing, health, social care, all interconnected, yet often operating in ways that unintentionally reinforce the same cycles they are trying to interrupt.

Over time, I began to see not only individual distress, but systemic repetition. Trauma being produced, contained, and then recycled through different services. People moving through structures that rarely addressed the root of what was happening. Care systems, at times, becoming containment systems. And containment, without transformation, becoming another layer of harm.

For over 16 years, I worked closely with people navigating addiction, trauma, poverty, and survival. It was deeply human, often raw, and at times overwhelming. I also began to notice something happening in myself; my capacity to stay open and empathetic was changing. I was becoming aware that if I remained in the same position without shifting something internally, I would no longer be able to offer people what they actually needed.

That awareness led me into working with young people in care, many of whom were living with developmental trauma. Here, I saw earlier patterns repeated in different form, adaptation, survival responses, dysregulation, and disconnection. Again, systems were present, but often unable to reach the depth of what was actually happening.

It became increasingly clear to me that trauma is not only psychological. It is embodied. It lives in the nervous system, in breath, in posture, in relational patterns, and in how we experience safety or threat in the world. Because of this, it cannot be fully resolved through cognitive or behavioural approaches alone. Something else was required.

Sound, and what came before it

My connection to sound did not begin in formal training. It began much earlier, through sound system culture and free parties, spaces where bass, rhythm, and collective experience shaped altered states of awareness. There was something about those environments that felt both chaotic and deeply coherent. Thousands of bodies held together through frequency, repetition, and shared rhythm. Even then, I was curious about what sound was doing not just socially, but physically and emotionally.

That curiosity stayed with me through years of frontline work, slowly becoming impossible to ignore. The nervous system responds to rhythm. To vibration. To repetition. To safety. Sound was not separate from healing; it was part of it.

This led me into Sacred Sound Healing.

My training was immersive and deeply personal, particularly at Lammas Earth Centre - The School of Natural Shamanism, where sound became something experienced rather than understood. Crystal bowls, gongs, drums, tools that bypassed language and moved directly into sensation, memory, and release.

Alongside this, I underwent a significant period of medicine woman training and initiation experiences that brought me into direct relationship with the elements, nature, and the body as a place of learning. One of the most formative of these was immersion in a freezing lake in February; naked, on my period, in silence, with the instruction to speak only through breath. This was not symbolic. It was embodied training in regulation and presence. A practice in staying centred regardless of discomfort or external intensity. A lesson in what it means to remain steady when everything around you is moving.

This work also included sleeping outdoors through the seasons, working with fire, ceremony, and learning how to hold space in direct relationship with land and weather. These experiences were not abstract teachings, they were lived, often challenging, and rooted in presence, endurance, and attentiveness. Through this, I began to understand ceremony not as performance, but as a way of marking time, transition, and human experience in relationship with nature.

Body, land, and belonging

Alongside sound, I trained in Ayurvedic Yoga Massage, a practice that combines deep tissue work, assisted stretching, and breath. Like sound, it works beyond narrative. It allows the body to express what has not been spoken, and supports the nervous system in returning to coherence.

As my practice deepened, so did my relationship to land and community. Community has always been central to my understanding of healing. In both street-based work and ceremonial spaces, I have seen how people regulate, survive, and transform in relationship with others. Whether in supported housing, outreach settings, or gathering around sound and fire, healing has rarely been an individual process. It is relational. It happens between people, within groups, and in shared space.

In more recent years, I made a significant transition from living in urban environments for over 20 years to moving off-grid in West Wales. This shift changed not only my environment, but my entire relationship with pace, rhythm, and community. Living closer to land has reinforced something I had long observed: that regulation is not only internal, but ecological. We are shaped by the spaces we inhabit.

Where I am now

Today, I work across multiple intersecting spaces. I am a Registered Manager with Ruskin Mill Trust in the Preseli Mountains, supporting young people within a 100-acre biodynamic farm setting. Alongside this, I am undertaking a Master’s degree in Music Therapy, continuing to integrate clinical understanding with embodied, experiential approaches to sound and trauma.

My work now sits at the intersection of systems and embodiment, structure and intuition, clinical practice and lived experience. At its core, I am still working with the same questions I began with many years ago:

• How do systems shape people and how do people heal within and beyond them?

• How do we move from containment to transformation?

• And how do we create spaces through sound, body, nature, and community, where people can return to themselves in a way that is safe, real, and sustainable?

Because ultimately, healing is not individual. It is relational. It is embodied. It is ecological. And it is something we remember together.