About Me

You can read elsewhere on this site about how much my work as a Life Celebrant means to me, and how proud I am to be a co-founder of an inclusive and values-led organisation like Agnostic Scotland.

So here’s some of the other stuff!

When I left school, I knew I wanted to study the arts, but also work towards something that felt purposeful in the real world and aligned with my values. I chose a drama degree, careful to find one where I could specialise in community theatre (which turned out to be a really great fit). I did quite a lot of storytelling work around that time, teaching youth theatre, and volunteering with the wonderful Lung Ha’s Theatre Company in Edinburgh. After my degree, I travelled, worked for a while in a psychiatric ward, and then as a community arts worker.

A few years later, I did my MA in Cultural Performance (don’t worry if your expression just went a bit blank there - it’s a fairly oblique course title!). The course was a partnership between Bristol Uni and Welfare State International (WSI), a grassroots-community-activist-arts company with which I was obsessed. And sure enough, it was the incredible Sue Gill of WSI and Dead Good Guides who led a module on Rites of Passage and Ceremony, thus training me as a celebrant and showing me what I wanted to be when I grew up.

I paused before pursuing celebrancy professionally; I felt I hadn’t experienced many of the milestones I’d be helping people mark (yet). But over the years, I gently built a practice by conducting ceremonies for family and friends, and then gradually launching my own business (initially as an independent celebrant). I did do some further training in celebrancy, but to be honest, none of this training wowed me (quite useful, actually, when it came to planning our own training at Agnostic Scotland). My practice was more informed by threads of my career elsewhere, and that incredible foundation offered by Sue in 2006.

During these years, I also worked for a local disability charity as a Development Co-ordinator, facilitating person-centred processes and gatherings with the mission of promoting community inclusion.

As well as being a celebrant, I am a yoga teacher. I love to hold nourishing, weekly community classes - it brings a beautiful balance to the “peak moment” work I do with ceremony. I am also a student of yoga, learning how to use the practices I love in a way that works with my ADHD brain, my family-life, and my shifting states throughout the seasons of the year.

I am a mum to two wonderful humans, who teach me more than anyone or anything I’ve encountered before. I am partner to an incredible man who is my polar opposite! We have been together over twenty years and have definitely built a yin-yang household. We have a lovely wee cat called Luna.

I love being creative; I crochet, soul collage and write poetry. I have a deep need to be in nature as often as I can; I enjoy walking and jogging outside and I’m learning to tend our wee garden in a way that works for local wildlife and our family.

I love trees. LOVE them. And geese. (I have a family of geese tattooed on my shoulder).

It is one of my favourite things in the world to meet a new person with whom I just click, and to dive straight past the surface stuff into the intricate content of our souls. If that can be combined with Big Laughter, I am in heaven.