Helen: the woman with a foot in both camps.

Meet Helen

Helen is another member of staff who joined us during lockdown, to help us to cope with the massive influx of women seeking our support.

She only moved to Bognor Regis last year, but she’s known Julie and My Sisters’ House for a while longer.

Living in Worcestershire at the time, Helen had written a book – “The Magical Unfolding” – which grew out of the work she was doing with women, and blends her knowledge of both eastern and western wellness practices to offer a path to fulfilment. The book was published via crowdfunding, and an anonymous benefactor sponsored the cost of 50 copies to be donated to a women’s organisation. Someone online nominated My Sisters’ House, and before she knew it Helen was on her way to Bognor to speak at our International Women’s Day event.

That was back in 2019, and things have changed a bit for Helen since then – her marriage broke down, and the pandemic affected both her business and her pending house move. But it also gave her the chance to think about where she was heading, and “what choices I would make if I wasn’t scared.” Since she had always wanted to live near water, had family and friends in the area, and found a property overlooking the sea just as the first lockdown finished, she ended up in Bognor - where, she confesses, “I quietly hoped I would end up doing something for My Sisters’ House.”

Helen’s working life began in the NHS, following a degree in radiography and a further two years’ training in ultrasound. “I left home at the age of 18 and chose a vocational degree because it was practical and lucrative – it was definitely a ‘head over heart’ decision.” She loved working in A&E and learned a lot about people in the process, but her interests were developing in a different direction.

Over time, Helen had become interested in Chinese medicine. As a sonographer, she noticed that women who were trying alternative treatments alongside the traditional Western medicine were tending to make better progress. She did some research and decided to train in Shiatsu, which she describes as “a bit like acupuncture without needles.” She also trained in the “more subtle” Cranio-Sacral Therapy, which releases “kinks and sticking points” in the flow of cerebro-spinal fluid through the nervous system.

“I had a waiting list from day one,” Helen tells me, “because I worked with my colleagues in the NHS while training, and everyone kept referring their friends and colleagues to me – I became the ‘go-to’ person for all service sector staff locally.”

It was working one-to-one with so many women, and wanting to be able to help even more, that led to the book. “I could see that women were going through a very similar process in their journeys,” Helen says. She really believed in the key message that when we learn to connect into who we are and what we want, we live happier lives, true to ourselves - and she wanted to share that empowering message with as many women as possible.

Over the years, Helen says she has “embraced the concept of being open, and knowing there is so much more to the human system and capacity to feel than we will ever know.” She describes herself as having “one foot very firmly in the grounded real world of science, but one foot equally firmly in the other camp, which is open to everything,” and she talks about the many coincidences and examples of serendipity she has experienced through being open to the magic in life.

Like the joy of this job vacancy coming up at My Sisters’ House. “Although I wanted to work with MSH I thought it would be through financial support from my business. I never dreamt I would end up actually working at the Centre.” But it didn’t take long in the role for Helen to realise that her background made her ideally suited to the work – from the mentoring skills and mindfulness she uses in her alternative practice, to the unshockability that comes from years in the NHS, seeing the worst of what people can do to each other. Working as one of our “First Response” team, talking to women who have come to the Centre for the first time, Helen is brilliantly able to embody the calm that is so often needed in that moment.

And for Helen herself, not knowing many people locally, and being locked down so much since she moved to the area, it’s also been a “saving grace,” as she’s been welcomed into our MSH family with open (but not yet hugging, of course) arms.