Heather’s life passions
A mother’s/wise woman’s CV
As a long term gardener, natural health care detective, maker of babies and keen observer of people and their ways,
I have always gone back to nature . .
As a child, in NZ school garden projects led me to the radishes. carrots, parsnips, beetroot, peas and corn – each year . . My father, as well as being a cadastral surveyor, was a market gardener (raspberries and strawberries). He worked incessantly. My parents always in the garden – growing all we ate as well. I tagged along . . .
1970’s After a full time set of interesting jobs, mingled with part time university study (always fascinated by how and what people think – anthropology was my first love), at the end of 1975, I boarded a plane to Australia (one way ticket, no passport needed) to see my grandmother in a Nambour nursing home.
Finding my match, I married a ‘hippy’. He had taken his life into his own hands. From being a horrendously afflicted ezcema /asthma baby /child/adult, and suffering a traumatic brain injury/near death experience as a teenager, he healed himself of many of his chronic and debilitating life catastrophes – through Ivengar yoga and following Victor ‘s book – ‘Survival Into the 21st Century’. Eating macrobiotically, following a lot of food fads, wheat grass enemas, growing all his own veggies and living on brown rice – I joined him a derelict banana shed in northern NSW. I accidentally conceived the first of the babies I had previously decided to never have. (My precocious teenage self had decreed that the state of the world would be totally over crowded – ) and went into being as little impact on the environment as I could be. 
Pregnancy instantly led me into working out how to NOT end up with a child as his dad had been. Natural living, eating and using what grew led me into naturopathy and thinking very differently. My own formal study began with an an acupuncture course with my 6 week old baby in tow. I hitch hiked (little financial resources) up and down to Brisbane from Mullumbimby. He was with me in class (being breastfed) for the first year.
1979 – Returning from a NZ excursion as a welcome rest from study with my nearly 2 year old, I started my own clinic, beginning as the only woman acupuncturist (and naturopath/body worker) in the centre of Brisbane city. I quickly was inundated with medically written off ‘hopeless’ cases – as all women’s business was. So much pain and suffering through the filters of all ARTHRITIS/ELDER BODY BREAKDOWNS/bleeding stomach and duodenal ulcer challenges – joints bent out of shape, back catastrophies (no easy keyhole surgeries or laproscopies) and no anti inflammatories – and of course – all gyne/ pregnancy and the blooming (pre IVF) fertility issues.
Maternity gave me a solid grounding in life experience. Three more children, born in three different decades (one massively brain injured via maternal vaccine sequelae) ensued. My innocent eternal searching led me into places no one goes – questing forever down the path of fixing what should never have been broken. Not only her – but all of my children, myself and the rest of the world as they come in to see me, often directed by the media footage that surrounded by efforts to lift Skye out of the horror she was left in – apparently waiting to die as a very compromised (toxoplasmosis) newborn.
1980’s – Always being a very brightly shining firebrand, I was asked to write a different acupuncture college. I brought in a class mate – as I knew I was to make more children and even I needed time out privately. Co designing and writing then teaching there whilst other children arrived. Concurrently as the only maternal specialist acupuncturist in Brisbane, I was writing the maternal and fertility teaching tools as they were not in existence. This is before IVF.
Adding into my therapeutic offerings, were Western herbal tinctures, vibrational essences, and many hands-on modalities. These filled out to my own Moving Blockages style of acupuncture. All of this came to a halt professionally when in 1986 found myself sidelined with a profoundly injured newborn.
Discovering neurological rehabilitation home based volunteer lead programes interspersed with my own heroic efforts to keep her alive (in the first year especially). No mean feat – she was expected to die. And be deaf, blind, massively cerebally palsied, epileptic and profoundly meantlly handicapped. ‘Expect nothing of her’/’learn to live each day as it comes’.
After each vaccination created ever more life and death dramas, I lived to help my daughter. I added in whatever MAY work – and every shift moved her slightly towards life and being with us. Autism – and shrieking all day and night – not fun for anyone. Especially not her. Reiki, Aura Soma, all forms of energy work that worked for her, I incorporated all that I had found into what I could then offer – returning eventually to assisting others in their desperate states. After her youngest brother was born.
1990’s – Saw me teaching acupuncture students, (rescuing the college I had written the curriculum for a decade before), as I also attended university to study what I had done for a decade – delivering adult education and vocational training. I was concurrently writing my own post graduate resources/programmes and teaching them. This was the time of the AIDS explosion. Me being the recipient of an unscreened blood transfusion back in the mid 80’s (when a cluster of newborn babies died of AIDS from this), I was one of the first in Australia tested. Although ‘negative’, I became an ardent follower of epidemiology. As an advanced acupuncture teacher, and mentor of healers, I was intrigued at this new way of viewing accelerated living/aging. An HIV/AIDS and Chinese medicine conference in San Francisco beckoned. As one of 3 from Australasia in attendance, I returned home to Brisbane to set up the first AIDS clinic. Easy to treat. Easily explained – we assist the body to heal itself. No virus can complete with good living. None.
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I was thrown back into my informal maternal university course 27 years ago. This time – as a single mum from the inception of his life, with an interesting flee back to NZ , and an unscheduled C section. Returning to Australia , leaving my daughter behind, his brother sent to his own father in Perth, I reestablished the life I had left. Setting up a very busy clinic followed. Fertility, high risk pregnancy, AIDS and all ‘hard cases’ were my subjects. When no one cold help was when I was called in.
The multi modality. multi dimensional skills I had accumulated were channeled into my contributing back to my profession in key note speaking at conferences in Australia and New Zealand, presenting at acupuncture symposium, advocating for better pregnancy outcomes and birthing practices, and in writing journal articles.
2000’s – Whilst gardening on an acre behind Maleny, working in my clinic 3 days a week in Brisbane allowed me the space to create the patient manuals. Books, the posters and a meditation CD – now a set of MP3 tracks.
Selling up and leaving Australia (ostensibly forever), I traveled around my homeland with my new husband, settling in on the West Coast of the South Island (where we are now). I wrote What Dads Can Do. Instead of marketing this aspect of my life’s work – I found myself bungeed back to Brisbane to rescue my two younger sons. Back to maternity.
Returning to finish my teaching degree, I started on the track of totally transforming the world of birthing advocacy – one mum at a time. I had developed a unique blend of what worked – assisting the return of easy pregnancies and delightful birthing and bonded mums and bubs – beyond into easy maternity. I created the ‘What Dads Can Do’ body of work.
2010’s .
Clinic boomed
My online presence began in earnest. Writing articles and books, I was on a creative path.
My international teaching picked up speed. 
Belly work from the Maya traditions beckoned . .
I raced through the Arvigo hoops, becoming a Self Care teacher, relishing the opportunity to inspire and empower the women who sought their own healing path. What I learned? Heartful hands came into their own. I reconnected back to what I had been doing originally in clinic as taught to me by my acupuncture lecturer.
More body work – as we live in the residue of all we have lived through. Undoing this differently, I loved working in the desperate /’too hard’/ ‘hopeless’ realms again. Before the advent of IVF I was the only practitioner in Brisbane city with a multi modality approach. Taught by a chiropractor – himself the first fertility practitioner in the city – I knew uterine positioning was key. Helping women conceive naturally . . . couples becoming families, there is a string of grandchildren who would not have been without my ministrations.
2016 – Knowing that there was more I found Dr Jennifer Mercier, Chicago. I paid a visit and learned so much more returning home, integrating the moves, offering Mercier style work here .
Taking the adhesion breaking, freedom further amalgamating my life long passion of freeing STUCK – to create living energy again.
2017 – The Life Alignment Centre – a clinic AND healing centre.
Healing garden (spiritual bathing and lustre bowls)
Dedicated perineal steaming room/wombspace
Onto founding my own teaching space.
Heather’s Healing Academy.
I developed my own Living Ligaments – the Gentling Way. This respects the facts – we are blocked as self preservation stops us from feeling. Life residue builds us a cage of beliefs solidified into pain – we are imprisoned.
Decades of working on my own and on others, = students, patients and mentoring international seekers of their own freedom – has shown me. 
RIGHT:
Feb 2018 – teaching to natural birth workers and advocates at Deb Davies San Diego Push
LEFT – Invited presenter at the Rothenberg Acupuncture Symposium 2018.
2018 Paris – World Acupuncture Day –
on stage teaching
Online – eLotus suite of trainings (from 2012)
Private teaching – NZ – Lyttleton at home (Atarau) In the south of France
In Australia 
Heather’s Foundation – Moving Blockages – The Gentling Way
Basic tenets
1 – Structure determines function
2 – Energy follows thought
3 – The body remembers everything that has ever happened to it
4 – Flows must flow
5 – The body heals itself
Incorporating all I had collected over the world
with decades of hands-on heartful service.
Called The Gentling Way – we help those who to date have been forcefully treated as bits – not as holistic multi modality transformative energy body mechanics would.
My fertility observation – the law of diminishing returns applies.
We MUST undo why sex is not making babies – as easily as it did when I began working in this area in 1979. So many wanted me to terminate their accidental additions!
With the tsunami of couples too ill to be naturally pregnant – IVF is failing.
As with farmers who do not start with the best stud – sperm quality and general life residue is not making for better babies.
As a gardener – I know that nutrients/ingredients and hydration/circulation matter.
We must always follow nature.
My own style
Never an acupuncturist only as I always connected with my heartful hands and inquiring mind
2018:
A new chapter . . .
On a personal note . .
Aging happens
Times change
Grandma!
Meet Oscar and his own dad and his mum (me) at the same age he was then. 3 years later – Alice
2020 – world shifted – gone home
Gardening beckoned
My NZ hideaway . .
And healing sanctuary (for me to heal/collate all I had done above)
Time to smell my own
Roses . .
(A fragrant selection for every room)
As a tenderer of gardens babies and people, I can highly recommend coming home – back to life . .
And see how we can help you love yourself better!
Start with breathing in love and breathing out love
Breathing in peace and breathing out peace!
Declutter
Reset
Restore
Call +61 452 407 667 for a chat to see what suits/
fits you and your life better
Short intensives available
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Online courses