Meet Soraya – intuitive guide on your path of restoring internal safety.
Hi, I’m Soraya. I’m a facilitator, healer, artist, and guide—and someone who has walked the long, winding path of healing from trauma (though I don’t always resonate with the word “survivor”).
You’ll often find me immersed in nature—whether in the forest, sailing the ocean, or high in the mountains where I hold intimate retreats. I work with people seeking a deeper connection to themselves, people yearning to live in the world, to feel the whole scope of human emotions. I use the tools of trauma sensitive yoga, somatic practices, self-inquiry, and simple, grounded living.
Our stories may be different but from my own experience of reclaiming me, I know that our journeys towards healing and integrating trauma are unique. There is no one size fits all. Having understood the threads - the Why, I needed to know how to switch off my responses - the How. This is the tapestry of healing that I offer to you.
To me, embodied yoga is not just movement—it’s a way of life. It helps me inhabit my body, understand my patterns, and peel back the layers of identity. Some traits I’ve inherited, others I’ve picked up like clothing I forgot I was wearing. Yoga helps me see what’s truly mine—and gently let go of what’s not.
My Philosophy
It’s been a long journey. But through the process of deep self-understanding, I’ve come to realise that with awareness comes choice. I now have the capacity to respond to life—not just react—whether I perceive something as positive or negative. And in that space of choice, my life begins to shift into one I actually want to live.
This is the heart of embodied healing for me: recognising the habitual patterns—not just in the mind, but in the way I hold my body. Tension, tightness, and even pain often come from unconscious ways of bracing against life. But as I’ve learned to inhabit my body fully, I’ve also learned that I can choose something different. I can soften. I can pause. I can listen.
Understanding, at a core level, that I always have choice—in thought, in movement, in emotion—has been nothing short of transformational. These moments of awareness, small as they may seem, are what I consider the stepping stones to consciousness.
This is the heart of my work: helping others reconnect with their bodies, regulate their nervous systems, and remember that they, too, have choice. Not just in their thoughts, but in how they live, breathe, move, and relate to the world around them.
These small moments of awareness—the ability to pause, breathe, feel—are, to me, the stepping stones to a more conscious, vibrant life.
My Journey with Yoga
I remember watching my mother practice yoga when I was a child—mimicking her shapes with fascination. When she passed away in my early twenties, yoga became a quiet way to remember her. It gave me a sense of connection when I was lost in grief, with no one to guide me through it. I craved normality in an abnormal world. Like many of us, I learned to suppress my emotions and carry on. Yoga—and embodied, barefoot dance—became my coping strategies.
My relationship with yoga has never been linear.
When I was pregnant, yoga offered a way to connect with my changing body and the life growing inside me. It was a practice of nurturing—my baby and myself.
Years later, I found myself in an emotionally abusive relationship. Life felt heavy and chaotic. My mat became a small, sacred refuge—a rectangle of peace where I could breathe and move freely.
But looking back, I now see how I was also using yoga to escape. I leaned on fast, flowing vinyasa practices to generate a kind of energetic high that would carry me through the day. I didn’t realise it then, but I was disassociating through my practice—using yoga to bypass the pain I wasn’t ready to face.
Spiritual bypassing, dressed up as wellness.
These experiences have deeply informed the way I now hold space. My work is rooted in trauma-informed, somatic practices that invite presence rather than escape. I believe in slowing down, feeling fully, and creating space for the truth of what is—because that’s where real transformation begins.
Back then I would never have described myself as suffering from complex post traumatic stress disorder (C_PTSD) I just got on with life. I now realise that I spent much of my life developing complex coping strategies to help me engage with life and hide my fear. For sure on the outside I was semi successful; Stage Designer, Silver Gilt Chelsea Garden Designer, mother of two boys, Yoga teacher....but I was trapped inside a cleverly built tower that separated me from the world and kept me safe. The stories that I told myself about my childhood and the people in it that made my traumatic childhood that included emotional and sexual abuse, palatable.
It wasn’t until I started to slow my practice down and really face with truthfulness, the reality of my life (with the help of my current partner). That my body started its process of releasing all the silt that had blocked sensitivity and my outer armour began to dissolve. Today my body has never felt more nuanced and soft and my mind connected to insight and clarity, this is though an everlasting inner journey.
After practicing yoga for over 3 decades, I am beginning to understand the real truth and meaning behind yoga, it is giving me a growing connection to myself and the tools to navigate situations in daily life with care, authenticity and spontaneity. My training (2021) in Trauma Sensitive Yoga has given me a true gift of interception (really feeling into my body) understanding the impact of choice making and non-coercive language (with myself and others).
The practice of yoga inspires me to be more open, real, compassionate, truthful, mindful and balanced every day. I don't always manage it in every situation but yoga allows me to get it wrong, pick myself up and try again. Yoga offers me the support, structure and foundation to reveal myself and show vulnerability without my armouring and masks.
To become authentically me and know why and when I am not.
This is why I facilitate healing through somatic yoga, I hope to inspire you to go on your own journey of self discovery and experience the relief and joy when you can just be you. To connect with others, to inspire and be inspired and to reveal, so that others can reveal themselves too.
Training & Experience
I’m a senior teacher and have been practicing yoga for over 30yrs, facilitating for 18yrs. I have taught thousands of regular classes, worked with hundred’s of people in both group classes and 1:1 settings, hosted workshops and retreats.
300hr Trauma Sensitive Yoga - Trauma Centre Trauma Sensitive Yoga (TCTSY)
200hr BWY & Yoga Alliance accredited Teacher Training - Yogacampus, London
200hr Yoga Alliance Kirtan Leader Training - Nikki Slade, London
100hr Tantric Journey Trauma Release Bodywork, London
Additional 200hrs+ hours yoga trainings including:
Yoga Nidra - Rod Stryker (Para Yoga)
Various trainings with Rod Stryker (Para Yoga)
Yin Yoga - Norman Blair
Relax & Renew Restorative Yoga - Judith Hanson Lasater
Pranayama - Judith Hanson Lasater
Experiential Anatomy - Judith Hanson Lasater
Sound Healing (Anne Malone)
Children & Teen Yoga - Jo Manuel (Special Yoga)
Pregnancy Yoga - Uma Dinsmore Tuli
Super Sleep (yoga for insomnia) - Lisa Sanfilipo
DPD Certificate
Fully Insured