I am Kristiāna Daugava. Born in Riga, Latvia — on the banks of the river that shares my name. I have brought my practice from London to Lyon 6e, where the Alps meet the Mediterranean, and I look forward to serving people in this part of the world.

I am a certified psychosomatic therapist, qualified through the Psychosomatic Therapy College in Australia — a nationally recognised qualification in the psychosomatic study of how chronic stress and suppressed emotion manifest in the physical body. In practice since 2016.

I didn't find this work through ambition or curiosity. I found it through two things: my mother's illness and a longing to connect to my own soul.

She was ill. And something in me knew — before I had the words for it — that what was happening in her body wasn't coming from outside. It was the accumulated weight of years of stress, relentless work, no rest. The body eventually speaks what the mind carries in silence.

I began to research. The nervous system. The brain. The relationship between prolonged stress and physical illness. Everything confirmed what I had already felt intuitively. And when I discovered psychosomatic therapy — the formal study of exactly this — I knew I had found my answers.

The course didn't just teach me. It changed me. Layer by layer, something shifted. I came out the other side a different person.

For most of my life I had swung between extremes. Very high — electric, luminous, full. And very low — depressed, unable to find ground. I never knew the middle. I didn't know it was possible.

It was the psychosomatic therapy training, and my first ten-day silent meditation retreat, that introduced me to something I had never experienced before: steadiness. Not the managed steadiness of someone holding themselves together. The natural steadiness that arrives when the nervous system finally feels safe.

I've held six-figure roles under relentless pressure. I've sat in boardrooms delivering what was expected — while something inside was quietly unravelling. I've known burnout not as a concept but as a physical collapse. I've known what it is to feel your emotions swing so far in both directions that you stop trusting yourself. And I've known the darkest version of that place — where the pressure accumulates for so long, and the pain runs so deep, that you stop being able to see a way forward.

What carried me through was not a programme. In my darkest moments, it was a quiet knowing — that it was not my time yet. That there was still more for me to do, and to become.

And the slow, humbling discovery that the emotions I had been managing, suppressing and outrunning were not my enemies. They were messages, held in the body, waiting to be heard. I had understood this through study. But it was sitting in silence — observing the breath and the sensations in the body — that made it real. Any emotion that hasn't been allowed to complete its cycle lives in the tissue. Grief. Sadness. Loss. Even joy. When we finally turn toward them — when we simply feel them — they begin to release. Because feeling is healing. To feel again, fully, is how the body and mind finally let go.

I lost all of my elders before I turned 36 — a grief that lives in the body long after the mind has tried to move on. I have known depression profound enough to make life feel impossible.

I tell you this not for sympathy. But because I want you to know: I am not guiding you through territory I have read about. I am guiding you through territory I have crossed.

Seven countries. Three continents. And now — France. Living between the mountains and the sea has always been my dream. The French language, culture and food have been inexplicably close to my heart for as long as I can remember.

What I was searching for was a life lived close to my own soul. This work, this place, this practice. This is it.