About Gemma

You've probably felt it for a while.

That the map you've been given doesn't quite match the territory you're living in.

That the labels people use — for mental health, for how minds work, for what counts as intelligent, for what counts as normal — don't seem to account for you. That you've been trying, perhaps for years, to fit yourself into a framework that was never designed for someone like you.

You're not wrong about any of that.

"There is no neurotypical. There is an infinite number of combinations and possibilities."

— Caroline Myss

Howard Gardner spent decades making the same argument from a different direction — that intelligence isn't a single measurable thing on a narrow western scale, but a constellation of unique capacities expressed through symbol, sense, and experience. Jean Piaget said it perhaps most beautifully:

"Intelligence is what you use when you don't know what to do."

— Jean Piaget

Not what you score. What you do when the map runs out.

The world we are living in, as astrologer Lynn Bell has observed, is not the world we are in. The frameworks we use to understand human beings — in psychology, in medicine, in education — were built for a world that is already dissolving. And the people who feel that most acutely are often the ones who were always a little ahead of the map.

If that's you — you're in the right place.

— ✦ —
My story

My name is Gemma.

I'm an eccentric. An introvert. A former software developer and analyst. And before any of that — before the accident that changed everything — I was registered to train as a chef at Pru Leith. I find that almost impossible to imagine now. That version of me is like a story someone told me about a stranger.

At 18, I had a brain injury. I left hospital unable to walk properly, my words coming out jumbled, having to relearn cooking and daily tasks — the ordinary architecture of a life rebuilt from nothing. Every memory from before — gone. When a psychologist asked me what I couldn't remember, I told him: "Well, if I knew what I'd forgotten, I wouldn't have forgotten it, would I?" That made us both laugh. It also planted a question that has never left me: if you have no memories, no inherited story, no borrowed sense of self — who are you?

Years later, a separate and deeply difficult event brought PTSD. I know what it is to feel your body betray you, your mind to be somewhere else, and your car to be running down a hill because you forgot the handbrake — so you have to chase it, with jelly legs, in the middle of a panic attack.

My trauma psychologist said it simply: "Through all the adversity, you just kept walking."

That became the name. Don't Stop, Keep Going.

— ✦ —
Where it gets strange

But here's where my story gets strange — and where it starts to matter.

I hold an MSc in Applied Psychology. I've trained in CBT, ACT, NLP, Person-Centred approaches, addiction and trauma. That's the formal foundation. But it was never the whole picture, and I knew it.

The thinkers who really woke me up were not on any psychology syllabus. Oliver Sacks, whose case studies revealed the extraordinary strangeness of individual minds. Julian Jaynes, whose work on the bicameral mind upended assumptions about consciousness I didn't even know I was making. Michael Gazzaniga on the split brain. Richard Cytowic on synaesthesia. Alan Watts, whose gentle demolition of western assumptions about the self I return to again and again. Valerie V. Hunt on the human energy field. And Rupert Sheldrake, whose research on morphic resonance asked — quietly but insistently — whether mind might extend beyond the body entirely.

I'd just stepped outside a very small room that most people call reality. And I found I didn't want to go back in.

My first encounter with plant consciousness wasn't through a book. It was a mystical experience the way Carl Jung described (although at the time I did not know this) - a moment of knowing — brief, direct, arriving from somewhere else entirely. The information was simple: plants have senses. The moment my mind received it, it decided I had completely lost the plot. Of all the strange things my brain had produced over the years, this felt like the one that had finally gone over the rocket. I saw, in my mind's eye, a plant with an ear. I genuinely thought: this is it. This is the madness.

A few days — maybe weeks — later, curiosity crept in. I started looking. Then reading. Then reading everything I could find. And there it was: yes, plants have something like eyes. Something like ears. Something like muscles. The science, once you found it, was extraordinary.

But something else came with it — another thought, quieter and stranger: we are like plants. And we don't only have five senses. There is far more going on than we think.

At the time, I could find almost nothing on human senses beyond the standard five. It was only years later that concepts like interoception and proprioception began appearing in mainstream conversation — though I later discovered they had been known outside mainstream science since the 1800s, simply never popularised. The knowledge existed. It had just been left in a room that most people weren't looking in.

One of my favourite stories — and one I love to shock people with — involves a man called Cleve Backster. A CIA interrogation expert who, on a whim, attached his polygraph equipment to a plant. What followed was a series of experiments suggesting that plants respond not just to physical stimuli, but to intention, to threat, even to death occurring nearby. Backster's conclusion: don't commit a crime in a room with a plant. They notice. They remember. They can identify the right candidate.

I tell that story because it opens something. Because it asks: what if the boundaries we've drawn around intelligence, consciousness and connection are far smaller than what's actually here?

— ✦ —
Following the thread

Following the thread further.

That question led me to study Andean cosmology and mystical tradition with Joan Parisi Wilcox, whose 27 years with the Q'ero masters of Peru translated into teachings that are as rigorous as they are profound. I've also trained with Hans-Martin Beck, Ivan and Juan Nuñez del Prado, and Rama Flores — who remains my mentor and guide. I am part of two Paqo ayllus. I practice ecotherapy and permaculture. I live as close to the natural world as I can manage.

All of this — the science, the ancient wisdom, the personal catastrophes and the slow rebuilding — is what I bring into the room.

The Academic

MSc Applied Psychology (Merit), University of Liverpool · CBT · ACT · NLP · Counselling Diplomas · Addiction & PTSD· Keirsey Temperament Administration

The Humanistic

Person-Centred (Carl Jung) · Existential & Humanistic Coaching · Spritiual and Energetic Coaching · 8+ Years Practice

The Natural & Cosmic

Ecotherapy · Permaculture · Andean Mystical Arts (Joan Parisi Wilcox, Hans-Martin Beck, Ivan & Juan Nuñez del Prado, Rama Flores) · Two Paqo Ayllus

— ✦ —
The work

What I call this work is The Human Journey.

Not a programme. Not a protocol. A genuine, unhurried inquiry into you — your specific, irreducible, cosmically unique design. The parts of you that don't fit. The experiences that have shaped you. The fire underneath all of it that hasn't gone out, even when it should have.

I am looking for people who no longer want mental health to be the role they play. People who feel — or are beginning to feel — that their difference is not the problem. People who want to understand themselves at a depth that most conversations never reach.

I believe that if we continue to live by the beliefs and expectations of the past, we will continue to produce the same outcomes — individually and collectively. The wars. The disconnection. The quiet, grinding loss of human potential. But when a person changes at the level of who they actually are — that shifts something in the fabric of what comes next. Quietly. Not trendily. One human being at a time.

"If you are going through hell, keep going."

— Winston Churchill

I'm Gemma. MSc Applied Psychology. Transformational coach and mentor. Eccentric. Nature-dweller. Perpetual slow learner who has never once regretted following a strange idea to its conclusion.

If you've read this far and something in you is leaning forward — I'd love to talk.

Book Your Free Discovery Call