Meet Maria

I have travelled the sacred journey I write about.

Holistic counsellor, author, and guide for women in the dark passage between who they were and who they are becoming.

Maria Therase in the ocean at sunrise

I did not arrive at this work through a textbook. I arrived through loss — the kind that takes the floor out from under a life and asks whether you will go down with it, or down into it.

For years I was the capable one. The woman who held everyone. I had mothered without ever quite being met, and I had built a self out of being useful — until grief, and midlife, and the slow undoing of a life I had outgrown, made that self impossible to keep wearing.

What I found in the dark was not a breakdown. It was an initiation. The old myths call it the descent: the journey down into the underworld where everything inessential is stripped away, and what remains is sovereign, and yours.

The training behind the work

I came back up and went looking for language and lineage for what had happened to me. My training spans shamanic and transpersonal healing, sacred womb and ancestral work, somatic and depth practices. But the deepest credential I hold is the descent itself — and the women I have since walked back from it.

I work with the mother wound, the father wound, the heroine's journey, and sacred womb healing. I call the whole of it Divine Feminine Alchemy: the turning of inherited pain into sovereignty.

You do not need to be fixed. You need to be met at the depth where the real wound lives.

The sacred sites

This work is elemental for me, not abstract. I have sat on the red earth of Uluru, walked the caves of Mary Magdalene in the south of France, stood in the fire-light of Córdoba and the water-courts of the Alhambra, and come home each time to the ocean and escarpment of the New South Wales South Coast, where I live and write.

My memoir, Sacred Journey, tells this story in full — the loss, the love, and the long road home to myself.

Begin where you are

Two ways to start the work