The Journey
I'm Rebecca Foley Askew and here you can learn more about the long journey I've been on over the past few decades and how I've found ways to bridge the mind and the body.
My first language was movement. As an only child, I spent a lot of time on my own, creating stories, songs, and dances as a way to entertain myself and learn how to communicate with others.
As a young adult, I studied dance not just as art, but as communication — how the body speaks when words fall short. That curiosity led me to earn a BA (Honours) in Dance and Communication focusing on the ways we communicate our stories through more than just words, but through art (both dance and song). I continued this study in completing an MA in Communication and Culture, exploring the ways language, emotion, and stories showed up in song. Even then, I was drawn to what lives beneath the surface — the unspoken, the embodied, the metaphorical.
From Movement to Meaning
The Scholar and the Systems
My love of research, human behaviour, and the ways we communicate with each other carried me into starting a PhD in Public Health, where I explored how the ways we communicate in existing structures and systems shape people’s well-being.
I was passionate, driven, and deeply curious — but I also witnessed the limits of intellect in spaces that didn’t make room for the human heart. I saw the way academia systematically tried to change who I was, the woman who cared too much, who felt things too deeply, who wanted to find a way to truly change the world, not just fall into the "publish or perish" trap.
Leaving academia wasn’t failure; it was a reclamation. It taught me that knowledge without embodiment lacks power — and compassion without systems awareness lacks direction.
After stepping away from academia, I entered the world of healthcare regulation and policy. For years, I worked to create safer, more ethical systems — writing policy, managing registration, and leading teams.
It gave me a front-row seat to how people navigate power, responsibility, and burnout. And it revealed something vital: even the most capable people can lose themselves in structures that ask them to care for everyone but themselves - because I found myself lost there too.
The Work of Care
The Reawakening
Motherhood cracked me open in ways I couldn’t have imagined.
It brought both profound love and deep reckoning — with identity, with body, with worth. I'd spent years in therapy, trying to think through my issues and experiences, but it wasn't until I connected with a therapist who truly encouraged me to feel things in my body that I really saw progress.
Around the same time, yoga teacher training became a lifeline back to myself. Through movement and breath, I began to listen differently — not to fix, but to feel. It was here that my intellectual understanding met embodiment. My healing stopped being theoretical.
Now, as a somatic coach and consultant, I bring all of it together — the research and regulation, the movement and motherhood, the strategy and the soul. My work sits at the intersection of what’s seen and unseen: helping ambitious women unwind the conditioning that keeps them small and remember the truth of who they are.
Because the path I’ve walked — from systems to self, from proving to presence — has taught me that real change is never just professional or personal. It’s elemental.
The Integration
You don’t need to be certain.
You don’t need a five-year plan.
You just need a willingness to listen to yourself again.
If you want a gentle place to start, join my email list for reflections, insights, and grounded guidance — no hype, no hustle.
Plus, you get free access to 4 free elemental themed meditations!
