Nothing in you is broken. Some of it is just held.

How I got here

Science and spirit are not opposites.

I trained as a scientist. My first degree was in genetics and cell biology, and I am currently completing my doctoral studies in natural medicine. For years I believed that what could not be measured could not be trusted — and that belief served me well, right up until it didn't.

The turn came at twenty-six — fifteen years into bulimia, and just as many years into asking the questions a body like mine eventually forces on you. Who are we? Who am I? Why are we here? And why do we get sick? I was living a full paradox at the time: dissolving and numbing myself with one hand, while the other reached, unmistakably, toward being alive. I'd landed on Koh Phangan, volunteering at a hostel by the ocean, dancing until sunrise at the house music parties on the beach. I remember telling the owner — an older, quirky, bald Australian who owned art galleries back in Melbourne — that I had to go back to reality soon. He laughed at what must have sounded like a ridiculous thing to say. "Irish," he said — that was my name there — "this is my reality." I didn't understand him yet. I would.

It's simple in hindsight, though it took me years to see it. I grew up in a home with no awareness of who we are, why we came, or what any of it is for. The result: alcoholic parents, unable to process the pain of their own lives — unheard, misunderstood, unseen, and unable to connect to their own joy, let alone nurture mine. A child can only do her best with that. I sought a sense of control I couldn't yet name, and it came out as bulimia — a way to shut my own joy down so I could stay connected to the people raising me. I've come to believe this is true for so many of the seekers and alchemists I now work with: bulimia is rarely about food. It's a pattern of control that shows up in people who are, underneath it, already reaching for something spiritual — for connection, for knowledge, for a self they can't yet see. Free mE® EFT was never, for me, a simple emotional release technique. It's what that reaching finally had somewhere to go.

Before I flew back to what I'd been calling reality, I went to a sound bath — lay down in a dome-shaped room with a circle of strangers, feeling every bit as awkward as you'd imagine. Thank god all we had to do was close our eyes and do nothing. As the sound filled the space, I felt tears rise up and stream down my face, with no story attached to them at all. What was this? I had shut my emotions down long before that day — long before, even, the years I lost my mother and my father, at nineteen and twenty, in the middle of those same fifteen years of bulimia and long before any of this awareness had begun. Why did I cry? What were these tears? For fifteen years I had lived by two beliefs I never once said out loud: that emotions don't matter, and that I don't matter. Koh Phangan didn't hand me the answer. It handed me the first honest question I'd asked in fifteen years.

What I found on the other side of that was not a contradiction. It was a completion. The body keeps a record. Emotion is energy in motion, and when that energy has nowhere to go, it does not disappear — it settles. Into patterns. Into beliefs about what you are allowed. Sometimes into the body itself.

I first came across tapping almost by accident, while training to work with autistic children — and I didn't yet understand what I'd found. Its power only landed later, through ThetaHealing, which I trained in and went on to teach as a certified instructor. It's built around one idea my scientific mind couldn't argue with: that we get sick, in part, because of what the subconscious mind believes. Belief expressing itself as biology. That was the door. By the time COVID hit, I was coaching fifty people at a time through online containers, watching this work move at a scale I hadn't expected — and it led me to the next piece: that a belief isn't a free-floating thought, it's held in place by emotion. Which meant that to actually change a belief, rather than just talk yourself out of it, you have to work with the feeling underneath it. That is the piece willpower and positive thinking were always missing.

From there the rest completed itself. Every person is carrying a story they've never fully told — full of emotion they were never allowed, or able, to feel. Free mE® EFT is how that story finally gets told: you feel what wasn't felt, take the lesson it came to teach, and set it down. Not erase what happened — set it down. And once that space is empty, you get to choose what goes into it next. A different story. A different emotion. A different life.

Science and spirituality are not separate. They are the dual wings that lift us into a life of true fulfilment.

Today I serve as Master mE Coach and Program Director at YU2SHINE's Empower-Me Academy, where I lead Free mE® EFT alongside the Abundant mE and Master mE programmes. I'm also a Certified Medical Intuitive, and I hold one-to-one packages helping people dissolve the emotional blocks behind disease — disease being, as I see it, dis-ease held somewhere in mind, body or spirit. My students are spread across the world — conscious entrepreneurs, healers, and professionals who are successful on paper and know that something underneath has never been addressed.

You are a being with free agency. But without awareness, it is remarkably easy to choose a smaller life by default — not because you decided to, but because nobody ever showed you how to choose otherwise. This work is where that begins.