As a child, I was a book-worm: I injured my back from carrying too many library books around in my school bag.

I read these inside The Body Shop, where I would go after school. My mother had opened a branch for Anita Roddick in Edinburgh, at a time when the products were still home-made. This was my introduction to the intersection of women, nature and the body, and I loved it.

However, when I was ten, we moved from Scotland to Australia. My mother closed her shop, and my life was turned upside down.

Feeling like an outsider in Australia, I buried myself in scholastic pursuits. Books and films saved me. At university I completed an Honours degree in English/Film studies (my thesis was about masculinity on screen). I believed I would go on to write books on film theory. 

However, on the day that I submitted my thesis, I fell ill. I remember crawling on my knees through the garden to get to my front door. I was struck down with vertigo so badly, I could barely walk for the following year.

No conventional doctor could figure out what was wrong with me, but eventually a Balinese healer came to my aid. He cured me with a set of acupuncture needles. 

We became friends, and over time he taught me how to re-inhabit my body, so that I was no longer seeing it as a 'brain taxi', but rather, to discover it as an integrated and highly intelligent energy system. 

He introduced me to Tibetan Buddhism, Tantric philosophy, meditation, dance, martial arts, vibrant expressions of aesthetics and beauty.... I woke up to why I was off-balance. I had been giving so much importance to the cerebral that I could no longer feel my feet. 

In the Jungian sense, I'd been living from the neck up in logos (left brain, the realm of logic and the rational) and was split off from my eros (right brain, psychic relatedness, intimacy, body, deep feeling). 

Over time I've come to see that this problem wasn't unique to me, even though I was an extreme case. It's the 'overstory' we're all living with to a greater or lesser extent, resulting in a widespread loss of empathy, joy, connection and true aliveness.

For 16 years I worked with literature and film festivals around the world. I love the live experience: the thrill of observing how narratives can move, influence and expand an audience's perceptions of life. 

As Steve Jobs said, "The most powerful person in the world is the storyteller. The storyteller sets the vision, values and agenda of an entire generation to come."

I've contributed to the programming, production and presenting of some iconic world events, including:

While living and working in Bali and India for more than a decade, I absorbed the many faces of the divine feminine, still actively worshipped and ubiquitous (even if patriarchal values are primary.)

The sacred feminine - expressed in sculpture, painting, dance, drama, mythology and more - seeped into my bones, expanding my sense of what the feminine is and can be, loosening internalized constrictions that I'd been blind to, inducing a more blissful state of being.