About Eve

I first learned Transcendental Meditation in 1988 and then began my own dance with the practice—sometimes drawing closer, sometimes stepping away, but always finding myself returning to its steadying rhythm.

In the early 2000s a work opportunity sparked an unexpected adventure. This led our young family to relocate to New Zealand where I worked as a Strategic Advisor to Chief Executives across large government departments. I spent long hours in boardrooms with senior leaders—places where camaraderie was rare and any sense of wellbeing even more so.

Throughout it all, meditation remained a strong thread in my life. Over time, I began sharing simple meditation practices with colleagues during our lunch breaks. They told me they started to find more moments of calm, and greater clarity and resilience in their busy days.

 
 

 

A year or so later, I became seriously unwell.

In preparation for a gruelling two-year treatment schedule—including nine major surgeries and eight months of chemotherapy—I decided to strengthen my meditation practice and do a 10-day silent Vipassana retreat.

It was there I had a powerful insight: I wanted to train as a meditation teacher and take this wonderful practice into workplaces to help restore some balance and humanity in professional life.

That was over 13 years ago. Since returning to the UK, alongside completing a Master's degree and delivering complex change programmes as a Workplace Change Manager, I've earned many formal qualifications as a meditation teacher.

During this time I taught mindfulness and meditation in organisations including the British Red Cross, the Francis Crick Institute, Cancer Research UK, IOSH and BBC Radio Kent.
 

 

 
 

 

In 2019, just before I started leading weekly drop-in meditation sessions during lockdown, I was diagnosed with cancer for the third time.

It was early and treatable with surgery alone. Then in 2023 came another diagnosis—and this time I was told the cancer was metastatic and incurable.

Nearly three years later, following further surgery, radiotherapy and chemotherapy, and extensive investigation, that prognosis has recently changed. My medical team now understands my cancer history very differently: three separate primary cancers, with two separate local recurrences.

Instead of living with an incurable diagnosis, I am now expected to complete treatment and be discharged from oncology follow-up.

It is extraordinary news. And yet I've discovered that moving beyond cancer is not quite as simple as being handed your life back.

 Mindfulness meditation in Uckfield and UK

 

 

 

 

Recently I was talking with a friend, an actor who had just emerged from treatment and been given the all-clear. He described cancer as the biggest stage of his life: confronting mortality, losing a stone in weight, being examined and treated, surrounded by appointments and professionals, his body constantly watched and checked. And then, suddenly, he found himself back in what he called “pedestrian life”. He had imagined green fields. Instead, he felt strangely flat.

 

I now understand something of what he meant.

 

 

 

 

For me this shift has brought a whole sea of different emotions, feelings and insights.

For several years I was told that I had an interesting, complex, and unusual case, and was living with incurable cancer. Now, if all continues as planned, in around eighteen months I will take my final chemotherapy tablet and step away from regular oncology care.

Of course I am profoundly grateful. But there is something psychologically complex about being released from a system that has contained such a monumental period of your life.

I'm not there yet. I still take chemotherapy tablets every day, and they continue to take their toll. How I feel varies according to where I am in each treatment cycle, with an unpredictability that can make life difficult to navigate.

 
 

But I don't walk this terrain alone.

I have my meditation practice, developed and deepened over almost 40 years, and increasingly I have a community of people with whom I share these practices—many of them navigating their own experiences of cancer, uncertainty and change.

There are still days when I wonder if I'll ever feel entirely like the person I was before all this. Perhaps that isn't the point anymore.

 
 
 

Meditation has helped me discover that there is something steadier beneath the changing story of who I think I am.

It has helped me move from only thinking about my life, towards inhabiting it more fully—to feel my body, notice the world around me, meet fear when it comes, and remain connected to the joy that is still here.

Not every day. Not perfectly. But enough to know that beneath all that has changed, there remains something in me that has not been swept away.

I don't see myself returning to corporate work. Instead, I am committed to something that feels more deeply aligned with where I am now. I share these practices with people living with and beyond cancer—people navigating diagnosis, treatment, fatigue, anxiety, uncertainty, and the sometimes equally complicated experience of finding your way back into ordinary life.

I offer what I know not just from study but from living it.

It is a privilege to share these practices with others finding their own way through

 

 

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