Grace Robertson
Grace Robertson
Hello
I'm Grace.
Physiotherapist, Embodiment Coach, mum of two wonderful children and lover of this wild and beautiful world that we live in. I'm passionate about reconnecting people to their bodies and themselves.
We live in a world that is fast paced and celebrates the achieving, pushing, and endless to-do-lists over self care and listening to our bodies. It is so easy to become disconnected from our body and our true nature, and find ourselves living in constant stress and overwhelm. This pattern often plays out in the body as chronic tension, pain and general discontent with our lives. My goal is to support people to reconnect with their body and themselves, and nurture this relationship, to allow for easeful movement, happy bodies and joyful lives.
About Grace
I grew up in Fremantle, Western Australia. I completed a Masters of Physiotherapy in 2010 in Brisbane, before moving to Hobart in 2013 where I now live with my partner and 2 young children. I am an experienced practitioner who treats the whole body holistically, finding the driver or root of the injury, rather than just treating the symptoms. I have also completed specialised training in issues involving the rib cage (using the Thoracic Rings approach), headaches and TMJ (jaw injuries), as well as hip and pelvic pain (including pre and post-natal pelvic pain). Physiotherapy treatment with me combines hands on therapy (massage, dry needling and muscle energy techniques) with exercises to rebuild optimal movement patterns. I am passionate about empowering my patients with the tools they need to recover from injury and move with ease everyday.
At various stages of my life I myself have struggled with physical injuries that despite doing physiotherapy along with other therapies only partially improved, or would improve temporarily only to return after a short reprieve. I began to notice patterns in my own body that related to my emotional health and thought patterns. It wasn't until I looked at how I was showing up in my life; my beliefs, boundaries and my relationship to myself, that my physical symptoms improved significantly.
Our body and mind are not seperate. They are intrinsically connected by our nervous system, and if our nervous system is dis-regulated, and we are living with chronic stress or overwhelm, we move and hold our physical body differently. Our habitual postures change, our breathing pattern changes. We feel areas of tension through the body and we tend to move with more rigidity, i.e our biomechanics become non-optimal.
A few years ago after birthing my second baby and starting back at work I found myself completely overwhelmed and burnt out. I was juggling work and parenting and the juggle was not working for me. My body felt like it was falling apart. I had chronic back pain, neck tension and headaches, and this vague feeling of anxiety. Like something wasn’t quite right, but I couldn’t put my finger on what that was. I felt generally dissatisfied with everything and felt like I just couldn’t stop. I was over giving to everyone around me, but not saving anything for myself, and also, not feeling able to ask for what I wanted. I remember saying to my partner at one stage “I feel like I am floating around above my body, like I am completely disconnected from the earth”. I realised something had to change but I had no idea what that looked like or how to instigate that change.
I ended up quitting my job and started my own Physiotherapy business which has been such a joy and allowed me more space to prioritise my needs. I also started to notice patterns in my clients that I had seen in myself. I saw how stress and negative self beliefs were effecting their physical bodies and how disconnected some of them were from the physical sensations and internal felt senses of there own bodies. I needed a practice that would help my clients (and myself) reforge this connection with their bodies and change their self beliefs and mindsets. So I found Embodiment Coaching and became a certified Feminine Embodiment Coach through the School of Embodied Arts. I completely fell in love with the process of guiding people home to their bodies. I love teaching my clients how to use their internal sensations and intuition to navigate their lives. I also witnessed how this positively effected the physical sensations in their bodies - the tension, the pain, how their breathing and movement patterns changed, how their posture improved. And I experienced first hand the positive effects this practice had on my own body and my sense of self. For the first time in a long time I felt grounded and deeply connected to my body.
In addition to my physiotherapy business I now have a coaching business supporting my clients not only on the physical level, but also on an emotional, spiritual and mental level. The idea was to create a holistic approach to treating the body, to not only treat the physical body, but to work with the emotional, energetic, mental and spiritual bodies to make people feel safe, nurtured and whole as they are right now.
I look forward to seeing you in the clinic or online!