We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Desirée Rega. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Desirée below.

Desirée, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today We’d love to have you retell us the story behind how you came up with the idea for your business, I think our audience would really enjoy hearing the backstory.

I kept seeing the same thing and I couldn’t unsee it.
Women being handed methods that weren’t working, such as therapy, medication, positive thinking, another wellness programme, and each time something didn’t shift, the conclusion they drew wasn’t “this approach is wrong”, but it was “something is wrong with me.” So they’d go around in circles, getting more disconnected from themselves with every attempt, until eventually they stopped believing there was a way out. Often medicated and alone in their own stories. No community around them, and no one asking about the root cause of it all. Only managing the symptoms appearing from it.
That’s what I kept seeing. And I couldn’t accept it.
I saw it most clearly working inside public healthcare. Behind every presenting health problem – every lifestyle issue, every chronic condition, every person struggling to change – there was always a trauma story living in the body. Always. And when we worked on that, the health problems started to shift too. You see, the body and the story are never separate. But the system wasn’t built for that kind of depth, it was built for efficiency. I kept being able to see exactly what someone needed and hitting the ceiling of what I was allowed to give them. Eventually I understood that if I wanted to do this work properly, I had to build the space myself.
Nobody in that world was offering anything complete. Nobody was looking at the childhood wounds that run adult lives in the background, the narratives installed so early inside the psyche that they feel like personality, the traumas the body carries long after the mind has filed them away, the symptoms that are the body trying to speak. These things were never being connected. Never being held together in one container or going deep enough to actually instigate a change.
I had the clinical psychology background. We were taught to work with the mind, with language, with cognition, and yet the people in front of me were carrying things that words alone couldn’t touch. But I also knew that understanding something intellectually changes little on its own. The women I was working with could explain their patterns fluently but couldn’t feel safe enough to get out of them. So I studied the nervous system and trauma architecture and landed on more somatic practices.
Training in Conscious Connected Breathwork changed everything for me. It was not only a transformative journey for myself, but what is magic about it is that the breath goes where words can’t, directly into the nervous system, into the places where we hold emotions, where we brace,to the parts still waiting for permission to release. This combined with somatic coaching, shadow work, childhood work and suddenly there was a way to work with the whole person. Not just the narratives and the behaviours, but with the entire body that had been living those.
What makes this so deep and real is that I’m not standing outside this work giving instructions, I’m in it. Continuously. I do my own shadow work, my own inner child work, my own breathwork practice. I live by the saying “you can only meet someone as deeply as they’ve met themselves”, because you can only take someone as far as you’ve gone yourself. This is a commitment I renew constantly. The depth I can hold for someone else is directly proportional to the depth I’m willing to go myself.
The first time I applied this method was when I was working as a SEN tutor in schools. Specifically, with a boy who was written off as unreachable, angry, shut down. What he needed was for someone to sit with him patiently enough that he finally felt safe to know himself and understand his emotions. Then he stopped lashing out and taking himself away from the situations that made him angry. And one day he was comfortable enough to admit when he’d made a mistake, without shame and without collapsing.
That moment ignited something in me I haven’t been able to switch off since. Nobody teaches us how the body communicates with us, how to navigate emotions without suppressing them.
I set out to solve a problem I couldn’t stop seeing and then the business followed.
What I offer is a container for the woman who has tried everything, who has been told the problem is her, who has been left alone in her own story. She’s not broken. Her body has just been trying to speak for years without anyone knowing how to listen.
I know how to listen. And I know because I’ve had to learn how to do it for myself first.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your background and context?

I work with women – and men who feel drawn to this kind of depth – who are done with approaches that haven’t worked.
Women who have tried therapy, coaching, mindset work, meditation apps, and still feel like they’re circling the same patterns, the same relationships, the same version of themselves they’ve been trying to leave behind for years. Women who can explain exactly why they are the way they are, and still can’t feel their way out of it. Women who have been told, implicitly or explicitly, that the problem is them.
It isn’t. The problem is that nobody has ever worked with all of them at once. And nobody has ever given their body a real chance to be heard.
I’m Desirée, a Somatic Coach and Conscious Connected Breathwork practitioner with a background in clinical psychology. I work online, one-to-one, with individuals ready to stop managing symptoms and start working with the root.
That’s what I built my practice around. A container that holds the somatic work, the shadow work, the childhood patterns, the nervous system, the breath. All connected, because they were never separate to begin with. Not everything is a mindset work. Sometimes we need to go deeper than that. And the women who find their way to me have usually already sensed that, even if they didn’t have the language for it yet.
What I offer practically: one-to-one online packages that combine somatic coaching – specifically working with shadow, childhood wounds, and the narratives that run your life – with Conscious Connected Breathwork, which works directly with the nervous system through the breath, reaching what talking never quite gets to. I also offer standalone breathwork sessions, group breathwork experiences, and I’m building towards retreats and day workshops for women who are ready to go deeper in community.
But before any of that there’s a discovery call. Or some people decide to book a single breathwork session. Something small. Something that asks nothing of you except to show up and see what this is about. Because the women who find their way to me are usually exhausted from trying, and the last thing they need is another big commitment before they’ve felt whether this is different. And they find out that it is different. Most people have spent their entire lives being asked what they think, what they remember, what they understand. Nobody has ever asked their body what it already knows.
What I hear most after the first session is “why wasn’t I told this ever before?” and “I feel hopeful for the first time in years”, or “I can’t wait to start”. Because for the first time, the body got to be involved. At that point, a door begins to open. And it opens sooner than most people expect.
What I’m most proud of it’s the women I have worked with.
The one who arrived not knowing who she was, convinced she had nothing to offer, and left knowing exactly who she is. The one who spent years in the depths of depression and is now running her own business. The one who never said no in her life and now holds a boundary without guilt, and without apologising afterwards. The one who had completely lost the connection to her own body and now listens to it as the most reliable compass she has. The one who used to fall apart in a storm and now moves through one with her nervous system flexible, her feet on the ground, herself still present.
These are not just small shifts, but a different life completely.
That’s what happens when someone finally gets to be seen in all of themselves, not as a collection of unlinked symptoms or stories, but as a whole person whose body, history, and nervous system are all part of the same thing.
This is the work I breathe. I keep learning, healing, being more myself too.
If you’ve been waiting for someone to work with the root rather than the symptom, to see you whole rather than in parts, and to finally give your body the chance to be heard, that’s exactly what this is.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

Many people think resilience is being strong, always bouncing back, or even knowing that everything will be okay.

For me, resilience looked like lying in the dark on my worst days, feeling completely caged, and unable to see a different way to live my life, unable to imagine things could feel different, but still kept going. There were days I couldn’t find a single reason to believe anything would change. Days I wanted to give up before I’d even started.
And yet. There was always something. A small, stubborn flame that refused to go out. I wouldn’t say hope exactly, but a faint whisper that said there is more to this life than this. I couldn’t prove it and I definitely couldn’t see it. It was just there.
I grew up in Italy, in a society that doesn’t leave much room for individual expression or opportunity. I carried years of loneliness, insecurity, and the deep-seated belief that things just wouldn’t work out for me, no matter what I did. That belief is heavy to carry, because it colours everything. It makes you hesitate before you even begin.

I ended up leaving Italy. I built a life in a country where nobody knew me. I found love, friendship, community – things I hadn’t dared to want too loudly before. I trained more, I studied, I did my own therapy, my own breathwork, my own shadow work. That little flame inside of my chest kept insisting there was something worth finding.
I am still finding it. That’s the most honest thing I can tell you about this work: the people who do it best are the ones still inside it.

I understand now that the resilience wasn’t in never falling. It was in the part of me that never fully believed the fall was the end of the story.
And that’s exactly why I can sit with a woman in her darkest place without needing her to be okay yet. I’m not frightened by the dark. I’ve lived there. I know it isn’t the end of the story, because it wasn’t the end of mine.

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

The lesson I had to unlearn was one I had deep inside of my beliefs.
That something was fundamentally wrong with me. Not a specific flaw, but a background hum that said: things won’t work out for you. Not really. Not the way they seem to for other people.
I spent years trying to “fix” it. Therapy, coaching, deep inner work. I was never someone who pretended they didn’t need support, but even while asking for help, that belief sat underneath everything like a floor I couldn’t see but kept standing on.
What I didn’t understand yet was where it came from.
Some deep, ingrained stories we carry, get passed down through generations. My parents carried it, as their parents did before them. What gets passed down in families isn’t just eye colour and bone structure. It’s the unfinished emotional business. The nervous systems that learned to brace and then taught the next generation to brace the same way, without anyone realising it was happening.
Science is now catching up to what many traditions have long understood: that trauma lives not just in memory but in the body, potentially across generations. The anxiety that feels so personal. The belief that you must earn your place in the world. These patterns often didn’t start with us.
When I began working somatically with the breath, with the nervous system, with the parts of me that had never been given space to complete their story, the background hum started to quiet. I believe I finally understood there was nothing broken to fix in me. There only was a nervous system that had learned to brace. A little girl who had learned to disappear. A woman who had been waiting for permission to take up space.
This made me realise that I wasn’t just healing myself but I was potentially breaking a chain running through generations. This work stopped being about fixing what was wrong with me and became about completing something much older than me.
The more I was shedding that weight, the more this allowed joy to appear into my life. Life became fuller. Lighter. I finally had enough room inside myself to hold all the range of emotions and still make space for pleasure, for laughter, for silliness, for the ordinary moments that used to pass me by because I was too busy bracing for what came next.
What this work actually gives you is yourself. A full, honest self. And the realisation that that old voice that was telling you that something is wrong with you is just the oldest story your body learned to embody. Stories can change. That’s the whole point.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.desireewellnesscoaching.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/desireewellnesscoaching/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61573692479228
• Other: Email: info@desireewellnesscoaching.com
  Calendly link to book a discovery call: https://calendly.com/desiree-wellnesscoaching/30min?back=1&month=2026-06

Image Credits

Seb Camm Creative (photographer and graphic designer)
https://www.instagram.com/sebcammcreative/