About Me
The real shift in my life started when I became a mother.
Like so many women, the transition into motherhood was not what I expected. My postnatal depression was severe, and at the time I didn’t yet understand how much my relationship with alcohol was beginning to affect my life as well.
I struggled for years with the weight of it all — the expectations of parenting, the identity shift, and the feeling that I had somehow become disconnected from the parts of myself that once brought me joy.
Before children, I knew how to care for myself. I had routines, interests, things that filled my cup.
Suddenly all of that felt very far away.
Looking back now, my mental health journey really began there. It has taken almost a decade of learning, rebuilding and unlearning to find my way back to myself.
Before my children even started school, I poured myself into building a Pilates studio from the ground up. In many ways it was a success — but the truth is, I drove myself straight into burnout without even realising it.
When COVID shut the studio down, the forced pause was terrifying at first. Everything I had built had suddenly stopped.
But it was also the first real moment I had to step back and ask myself some deeper questions.
Around that time I discovered Human Design and began learning that I had been operating in a way that wasn’t sustainable for me. I had been living in the energy of the late 2010s girlboss culture — pushing harder, doing more, constantly producing.
But as a Splenic Projector, I wasn’t designed for that pace.
Rest was not something that existed in my vocabulary at the time.
When the studio eventually reopened, I went straight back into the same patterns. Teaching seven classes a day, raising two young children, and still navigating depression and medication adjustments.
It was simply too much.
Slowly, and often painfully, I began rebuilding my life in a different way.
At the beginning of 2025, I finally admitted something to myself that I had avoided for a long time — alcohol had become a real problem in my life. I made the decision to get sober and begin doing the deeper work that I had been avoiding for years.
Around that same time, the opportunity arose to open Rise Studio in Berridale.
This time, I knew things had to be different.
Rise was never going to be about hustle or pushing people to exhaustion. I wanted to build something sustainable — not only for myself, but for the women who walk through the doors.
Because fitness has never just been about exercise for me.
It’s about mental health.
It’s about connection.
It’s about community.
It’s about creating spaces where women feel strong, supported and seen.
I believe deeply in the power of strength training and movement.
But I also know that physical strength is only part of the picture.
Mental health matters.
Daily habits matter.
Journaling, creativity, reflection — these things matter too.
Finding time to draw again.
To create.
To sit with my thoughts.
These are the things that have slowly helped bring me back into alignment with myself.
I’m not perfectly aligned every day. Far from it.
There are still moments where I drift. Moments where things feel heavy or overwhelming. Moments where I struggle.
But that’s part of being human.
And I wouldn’t change a single part of the journey that brought me here.
Because I truly believe those experiences didn’t happen to me.
They happened for me.
And now I feel called to share what I’ve learned with others.
Not because I have everything figured out — but because I know how powerful it can be when someone shares the truth of their story.
For me, happiness has never really been the goal.
Peace is the goal.
Contentment is the goal.
Calm is the goal.
Through Human Design, tarot, journaling, creativity and community, I’ve found tools that help bring me back to that place again and again.
And it feels like a privilege to now share those tools with others who may be searching for their way back too.
If this story speaks to something in you, I hope the spaces I’ve created can offer a place to pause, reconnect, and remember that there are always new ways forward.
Nikki x
Come home to yourself
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