MEET LALENA

HI, I'M LALENA ROSE

Mother of five teenage sons, writer, and guide working within the field of eco somatics and ecological belonging — a body-led approach to rooted presence, instinct, and lived relationship with the earth.

This work did not begin as a path or a method I planned to create. It emerged slowly through lived experience, through years of searching for ground within my own life, and through a growing understanding that the nervous system does not develop in isolation. It is shaped through relationship — with other people, environment, rhythm, stress, place, and the wider conditions we live within. Over time, the body organises itself around what it has known. Patterns of tension, protection, responsiveness, disconnection, or vigilance are not random. They are part of how the body has learned to adapt through experience.

Over time, I began to notice that a lot of healing work focuses primarily on the relational layers of the nervous system — the places shaped through attachment, safety, and human connection. While these layers are essential, I became increasingly drawn towards approaches that recognised the deeper ecological foundations beneath them: the more ancient layers of the body and nervous system that orient through rhythm, instinct, movement, and relationship with the wider living world.

It is often here that the body begins to access a deeper sense of rootedness, vitality, resourcing, and embodied belonging alongside the more familiar work of regulation.

My approach

Whether through sessions, workshops, gatherings, or programmes, my approach is relational, intuitive, and responsive. There is no fixed structure applied to everyone. Instead, we work with what is present in the moment through sensation, movement, breath, awareness, touch-based practices, and the body’s own rhythms and responses. The work unfolds gradually, allowing the nervous system to move at a pace that feels possible and sustainable.

At times the process is quiet and subtle. At other times, deeper layers of experience begin to surface more clearly. What matters is that the work remains connected to lived experience rather than moving towards performance, catharsis, or imposed change.

Over time, the body often begins to settle into a different relationship with itself — one with greater steadiness, internal support, clarity, and connection to life.

QUALIFICATIONS

My work has been shaped through both lived experience and formal training over many years.

I hold certifications in Sacred Sexual Awakening and Healing, Primal Therapeutic Experiential Astrology, and the Fundamentals of Embodied Facilitation. More recently, my practitioner training in Eco Somatics brought many of these strands into a deeper coherence. It gave language and structure to something that had already been emerging through my own explorations, helping shape the framework for the work I now share.

writing

I am currently writing Unskinned, a memoir of my life.

It traces my early years in South Africa, my adolescence in the UK, and the years that followed as I moved through different environments, relationships, and identities. It follows the path I took into adulthood, the life I built, and the point at which it began to unravel.

The book moves through a series of lived experiences that shaped me — loss, displacement, addiction, motherhood, illness, and the moments that forced a deeper reckoning with myself and the life I was living.

Writing it has not been a linear process. It has taken time to come into a way of telling the story that feels true to the experience itself. Much of what is written comes from returning to the body, to memory, and to the details that were held there rather than in clear narrative.

Some parts have been difficult to revisit. Others have brought a different kind of clarity. What has remained constant is a commitment to staying close to what actually happened, without shaping it into something easier to hold.

Unskinned follows a movement through descent, threshold, and return. It documents what it is to lose a sense of ground, to move through periods of instability, and to come back into a more direct relationship with life.

It is a personal account, written from lived experience.

THE JOURNEY

I was born in South Africa in the early eighties, to a mother and father I would never meet, known only through fragments in adoption papers. At ten months old, I was adopted into an upper-class colonial South African family, joining my already adopted two-year-old brother. From the outside, my beginnings looked established and secure. There was structure, expectation, and a clear sense of how life was meant to be lived.

My early years unfolded within that environment, alongside constant movement. By the age of nine, I had lived in three different countries before returning to South Africa. By then, I had already learned how to adapt to different settings and different people. I became attentive to what was needed around me and learned how to meet it.

Alongside this, there was another layer to my childhood. I was deeply affected by the people who were part of our daily life in South Africa. The maids, the gardeners, the local people who held the manual roles within our society. The warmth, openness, and vitality I experienced through them left a strong imprint. There was a quality of connection in those relationships that I recognised early. I could feel the contrast between the life I was living and theirs. It stayed with me as a quiet awareness and a growing sense that I did not fully belong to either world.

I carried that with me into adolescence. When my mother died at sixteen, I moved to the UK to live with my father. The relationship broke down, and I left home at seventeen. Life opened quickly after that. I moved through different environments, forming relationships and shaping my identity as I went. There was a drive to create something stable and secure. At the same time, I could feel myself repeating early patterns. I was building a life while losing a sense of myself within it. I held a belief that if I made the right choices, met the right people, and did the right things, everything would eventually settle.

In my early twenties, I built a successful career in the creative industries. I worked hard and established a life that was moving forward. From the outside, it looked as though things were working. Yet the deeper sense of searching remained.

Over time, the structures I had built began to shift. Relationships changed. Direction became unclear. This period led into breakdown and drug addiction. Much of what I had relied on fell away. It marked the beginning of a different phase, one that required me to turn towards myself.

At twenty-eight, I gave birth to my first child. Two years later, I became pregnant with naturally conceived quadruplets. What followed was a period that stretched me beyond anything I had known. Life became immediate and demanding. It also brought me face to face with deeper truths about myself, my life, and my beginnings. My body became the place where everything surfaced. A series of intense experiences within a short space of time brought me to a point where I could no longer hold things together in the way I had before. I let go of control and began to listen more closely to what was there.

My path into healing began through necessity. My body was in pain. I was navigating illness and confusion, and I was faced with a choice about how I would continue. I began to explore what it meant to work with the body rather than against it. That process opened a different relationship with myself. I started to understand that my health, my patterns, and my experience were connected at a deeper level than I had previously recognised.

A defining moment came in January 2016. After returning to the doctor to ask if there were alternatives to the medications I had been prescribed for psoriasis and arthritis, I was told that cancerous cells had been found in my womb and that a hysterectomy was the recommended course of action. In that moment, something shifted. I felt a clear call to take responsibility for my body in a different way.

From there, I began to explore and apply new ways of living and relating to myself. As I did, my body began to respond. I felt more connected, more aware, and more present in my life. This experience led me into a deeper engagement with the feminine, with the body, and with the natural rhythms that had previously felt distant. It was both confronting and revealing. I began to understand the patterns I had lived inside of and the ways in which they had shaped my relationship with myself and the world.

This work unfolded over a number of years and became the foundation for how I now live. I trained in Sacred Sexual Awakening, Primal Therapeutic Experiential Astrology, and most recently Eco-Somatics.

Through this process, I came into a steadier relationship with my body and a clearer sense of myself. The need to constantly adapt began to soften. A different kind of grounding became available.

I now live in Wales with my children. Life is held in a different way here. There is a direct relationship with the land, with rhythm, and with the pace of life as it actually moves. I experience a sense of belonging that comes from being in relationship with where I am.

The work I offer comes directly from this ground. It is shaped through lived experience, through the body, and through years of staying with what is true. It is an extension of how I live, how I relate, and how I meet others.