My name is Sophie Rucker

For most of my life, I lived in my head.

I thought if I could just understand myself enough, think the right thoughts, read the right books, say the right affirmations I’d finally feel at peace.

But the truth was, I was exhausted.

I’d spent years achieving, fixing, helping, pushing. I knew how to hold it together for everyone else but not how to actually feel what was going on inside me.

Then life cracked me open.

When my mum died, something in me collapsed. But if I’m honest, it wasn’t the first time I’d felt that sense of collapse it was just the one I couldn’t ignore. There had been so many smaller deaths before it: the end of relationships I moulded myself to keep, the quiet burnout that came from working in spaces that rewarded performance over truth, the shame that came from thinking I had to be “strong” all the time.

Grief doesn’t just come from losing someone. It comes from losing parts of yourself along the way.

What I didn’t realise then was that my body had been carrying it all.

The tension, the holding, the pretending.

I didn’t know how to let go because I’d never been taught how to listen.

When I finally did (when I began to work with my body instead of against it) everything started to shift. It wasn’t instant or clean. It was messy, uncomfortable, and real but it was also the first time I felt truly alive.

That’s how I found Somatic Counselling — or maybe it found me. It became a way to make sense of the chaos without needing to control it. To bring compassion to the parts of me I’d spent years running from: the angry one, the ashamed one, the one who never felt good enough.

I realised something simple but it felt radical:

You don’t heal by becoming someone new. You heal by remembering who you were before the world told you to be someone else.

So now, this is the work I share.

For anyone who’s ever felt too much, too sensitive, lost or too tired of being “fine.”

For the ones who’ve held it all together for too long, for those who are finally ready to stop surviving and instead start feeling incredibly alive.

Your body knows what you need, you just have to learn how to listen.