Qigong · Writing · One-to-One Accompaniment
For more than 25 years, I’ve been exploring how movement, breath, awareness and attention shape the way we experience life.
Qigong has been the constant thread, but so has working closely with people. Across classes, hospitals, organisations, workshops and one-to-one work, I’ve worked with more than 7,000 people — teaching, listening, questioning, sharing and learning alongside them.
Much of what I know has come from practice and study.
A great deal has also come from people.
Over the years, my work has gradually grown beyond teaching Qigong alone. Today it also includes writing and one-to-one accompaniment — different ways of exploring many of the same things: how we listen to ourselves, how we meet change, and how we live with a little more awareness and connection.
Shaped by practice. Shaped by life.
Qigong isn’t simply something I teach. It is my own daily practice, and it has accompanied me through many different chapters of life.
Like most people who have lived a little, my story includes love and loss, bereavement, difficult relationships, periods of uncertainty and significant change. I’ve also experienced major spinal surgery and learning to walk again, physical pain, stress, illness — and all the ordinary demands of being human.
Those experiences haven’t given me answers to somebody else’s life, but they have changed the way I meet people.
For five years, I also volunteered with the Pain Management Clinic at Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital, working alongside clinicians, clinical psychologists, senior physiotherapists, occupational therapists and patients themselves. I gave talks and devised and delivered programmes for people living with persistent pain.
My wider work has included organisations such as Parkinson’s UK, NRAS, Bentley Motors, Mondelez International and Naked Wines. It has been recognised with the Active Norfolk Activity in the Community Award, a Royal Nursing Awards nomination, and work presented at a British Heart Foundation conference.
I’m grateful for those experiences and recognitions.
But the thing that has shaped me most is still people.
What it’s like to work with me
I’m not here to fix you. I’m here to walk with you.
Whether I’m teaching Qigong or sitting with someone one-to-one, I begin with the person in front of me.
I bring experience and knowledge, but not a script for somebody else’s life.
I listen. I notice. I ask questions. I share what I know when it is useful, and I leave room for your own understanding to emerge.
One-to-one work may be conversational and reflective, or we may draw on Qigong, movement, meditation, breath and stillness where that feels useful.
Sometimes words help us understand something.
Sometimes the body has something to say too.
I don’t want to walk ahead and tell you where to go, or follow behind and simply agree.
I want to walk beside you.
And resonance matters — that sense that you feel able to speak openly, that something lands, and that the way we work together feels right.
The Life I Live, Beyond the Work
Away from my work, I maintain my own daily Qigong and meditation practice. I also enjoy time to think.
I’m naturally curious about people, nature and the strange business of being human. I write a lot — sometimes properly, sometimes just thoughts scribbled down before they disappear — and there is usually another book, reflection or idea quietly taking shape somewhere.
Nature has always mattered to me, and water most of all.
Deniz means “sea” in Turkish, and I seem to have lived up to my name. Paddleboarding, swimming in the sea, walking beside it or simply sitting and watching the water move — that is probably where I am happiest.
I value simple things too: cooking, good food, music, travelling, walking and quality time with my family. The older I get, the more I appreciate how meaningful it is simply to be fully present with the people we love.
I still love adventure. Walking the 150km Salkantay Trail to Machu Picchu remains one of those experiences that stripped life back to something wonderfully simple:
Breathe. Walk. Look around. Keep going.
Perhaps that combination of curiosity, movement, stillness and noticing is the thread running through most things I do.
I still rather like the word Somanaut:
an explorer of the inner landscape.
Books & Writing
Writing has become another way for me to explore many of the things that have shaped my teaching and my life — awareness, imagination, nature, movement and what it means to live well.
My books now range from the practical exploration of movement in Move Life Better, to the imagination and gentle mindfulness of Mr Frog’s Dream House, and the reflections on life, change and noticing found in the forthcoming My Hermit Crab Teacher.
They are very different books, written for very different readers, but each grows from the same curiosity: what helps us live with a little more awareness, connection and understanding?